A Teaching from our School Zen Master Zen Master Soeng Hyang (Bobby Rhodes)

I think it’s difficult to believe in yourself, to trust the process of Zen practice. When you first start practicing, often you feel worse. You start watching your brain and watching all your thoughts, and you think you’re getting worse, not better. So coming to this practice and staying, requires great faith, great courage, and a great question. You have to develop the ability to see your thinking, and it can be painful at times. It’s not an easy path. I was thinking about a story that I heard Zen Master Seung Sahn tell.

It’s about a sparrow. She lived in a large forest. This bird was very evolved: she never checked, held or made anything! She was always paying attention, and was so gregarious that she knew all the animals in the forest. She not only knew the animals, she also respected and loved them.

One day a very rapid, horrible fire started. It was a dry, windy day. The sparrow was of course paying attention, and she flew straight up. She used her intuition, saw a pond, filled her beak, flew over the fire and dropped the water. Over and over and over, this action of dropping one drop of water onto the forest fire. And then, finally, totally exhausted, she fell into the fire.

I love that story. So . . . who died? Did her efforts even help? If we think that way—life, death, the fire was put out, it wasn’t put out—that’s a big mistake. We all know this fire. We need to know the fire, the suffering, the pain. It’s impossible not to see it. But, again, we’re very smart, so we find all these ways to avoid looking at it. We have movies; we have books; we have all kinds of things to distract ourselves. Human beings are very smart, but intelligence will not show us the way. Only a strong vow and strong direction will bring us to knowing how to put out the fire.

What the Buddha Taught

We have a wonderful library here at Dharma Zen Center.  Small…but wonderful.  I pulled a book off called What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula, and found wonderful wisdom on meditation inside.  The following teaching is from the chapter " ‘Meditation’ or Mental Culture: Bhavana.”  This is just a taste.  I encourage you to explore further this book and chapter.

The Buddha’s Teaching, particularly his way of ‘meditation’ aims at producing a state of perfect mental health, equilibrium and tranquility.  It is unfortunate that hardly any other section of the Buddha’s teaching is so much misunderstood as ‘meditation’, both by Buddhists and non-Buddhists.  The moment the word ‘meditation’ is mentioned, one thinks of an escape from the daily activities of life; assuming a particular posture, like a statue in some cave or cell in a monastery, in some remote place cut off from society; and musing on, or being absorbed in, some kind of mystic or mysterious thought or trance.  True Buddhist meditation does not mean this kind of escape at all.

The most important discourse ever given by the Buddha on mental development (‘meditation’) is called the Satipatthana-sutta “The Setting Up of Mindfulness’ (No. 22 of the Digha-nikaya, or No. 10 of the Majjhima-nikaya)…The ways of ‘meditation’ given in this discourse are not cut off from life, not do they avoid life; on the contrary, they are concerned with our life, our daily activities, our sorrows and joys, our words and thoughts, our moral and intellectual occupations...”

You can purchase the book via Amazon here.

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Milarepa's Songs

Milarepa was a Tibetan Buddhist poet, hermit, and very enlightened man. When people came to him seeking help, often a song would spontaneously appear to him and he would teach by singing this wisdom.  These songs are compiled in “The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa.”  I have Volume 2 and, often will open the book up to a random page and see what’s there.  So I opened the book…and…
 
Saturday – “A bird knows when and where
To spread and close its wings.”

Let Your Universe Become Large

“Koan practice means pulling the rug out from under your thinking. When you do this, it becomes starkly clear that thinking has nothing to do with your true nature. Your true nature is before thinking. Kong-ans can't be approached with your thinking, they must be approached with your confidence. This means asking, "Do I believe in myself? Can I trust life's experience this very moment?" We may think that confidence is an encyclopedia salesperson ringing a doorbell, confident in what she's selling. This isn't confidence, this is selling yourself something, selling yourself an idea and making it so strong, you can't be open to the universe. True confidence is completely accepting your not-knowing. It's accepting that no one knows and understanding that this is okay. When you do this, your universe becomes bigger. But when you take one idea, formulate something, and become attached to it, your universe shrinks. So let your universe become large. Let your sitting be without boundaries, and a good answer will appear all by itself.”

—Zen Master Bon Haeng (Mark Houghton), a Zen Master in the Kwan Um School (Dharma Zen Center’s greater organization)
 
The full Teaching can be found at:
 https://kwanumzen.org/teaching-library/2002/04/01/let-your-universe-become-large

What is Love?

One evening, after a Dharma talk at the Cambridge Zen Center, a student asked Seung Sahn Soen Sa, “What is love?”
Soen-sa said, “I ask you, what is love?”
The student was silent.
Soen-sa said, “This is love.”
The student was still silent.
Soen-sa said, “You ask me:  I ask you. This is love.”

From Dropping Ashes on the Buddha – The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn, by Stephen Mitchell