Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / The Beauty Gate - Jogen Sensei

Transcript

The Beauty Gate - Jogen Sensei · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jomon: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:25
  Jogen: Tonight, I want to talk about the beauty gate. And I don't have an alternative word for beauty, so I'm sorry if you don't connect with it. What do you find beautiful? Where do you find beauty? What kind of phenomena breaks trance of thinking for you.
• 1:06
  What happens that's enough to disrupt the usual gauze of thought, memory, image, etcetera. What's interesting enough? What's bright enough? Soft enough? Strange enough, other enough to cut through internal dialogue trance being?
• 1:39
  What is that for you? Is there anything in the world that seems to flirt with you? You have every intention just to walk from point A to point B, and you can't help but be enchanted by the dog, the shiny spoke, the woman gardening, the Amazon truck. I don't know. What of the sensory world tugs on you? For
• 2:27
  somebody, it might be vintage trading cards or horseshoes. People collect some really weird stuff. What of the sensory world do you find pleasure in the fact that it happens? Now, if nothing, mostly never, there's some investigation about what that's about. But in a way, that's a different talk. When there
• 3:05
  is beauty happening, does it just penetrate through? Does it just grab you, awaken you, alert you, touch you? Is it effortless? Is it like you meet the world partway? Are you in a state of availability to it?
• 3:41
  I find for myself, once I pass through a particular period of grieving or sorrow, or kind of disillusionment, the kind of tenderizing effect of that on the other side of that, I feel like, oh, I'm having a time of availability that I don't often have. Do you make yourself available to it? Is there a way of being that makes you available to it? Beauty. And when it does find you, which can be the most fragile moment, do you linger?
• 4:38
  Have you lingered? Would you like to linger? Would you like to linger, but you have a very sensible part of yourself that says, That's not what really matters. That's not really important. I have a to do list.
• 5:02
  I'm a grown up. I'm glad you can laugh at that. Is it a brief moment before attention leaps to the next? We have mostly acquiesced to the proportion of lingering in beauty and pragmatic doing to be something like, you know, point 01% beauty, 99% pragmatic living. And we take that as maturity or sanity.
• 5:48
  Beauty pierces. Is there a brief moment before attention leaps to the next? Do you recognize what happened? Do you feel there's a cost of that? Is there a cause of that?
• 6:15
  Was it Blake who said eternity in a grain of sand? Blake. And some Zen master who said 10,000 worlds in an instant. So I simply want to be the voice that says, Beauty moments. Recognize, let it undo the vector of habit.
• 6:55
  Let shed you for moments at a time. So, you sit down and you're drinking your coffee and there is light playing on some leaves outside your window, and you don't go, Oh, isn't that nice? That moment that it flirts, you recognize that as an invitation to enter, to linger. I think it's important to think of a Zen practice as stitching meditation throughout your life. And I like the image of a stitch because a stitch is visible sometimes, not visible, visible, and yet the thread continues.
• 7:48
  There is this idea that we could be in continual meditation, and that is a useful idea. But this idea is that we intentionally stitch. We're in a readiness for the opportunities to luxuriate in the presence of the world. If you read, for example, the literature on the awakening experiences of many of the Zen ancestors, I've never come across a single one where they said, I was sitting in the temple following my breath. I didn't expect that to be funny, but It happened at the sight of a peach blossom, or Ichu was awakened at the sound of a crow or someone, the tea dripping on their leg.
• 8:59
  There was one master who stubbed their toe on a rock. Wow. Schadenfreude in here. Zen, as a stance of spiritual practice, is one where we have times where we foreground the world and we recede the self. That's what beauty presents.
• 9:39
  When I was a teenager, I would listen to Alice Coltrane and Farrow Saunders. There was a little bit of marijuana involved in this, but not enough to discount the insights. And I would just sit there and I go, Oh, I just discovered a new religion. You just stop and listen to records like this. I didn't know I was onto something.
• 10:08
  Zen practice, one of its modes, you know, maybe sometime I'll talk about the you can slice it as four or five modes of awakening. One of them is world foregrounding or self disappearing so there's just world. You might get a little taste of that when you're so absorbed in a piece of music or a bite of food, and there's just that. That foreground such that your narrative, you as a being that exists in time with problems, actually is not there. You break trance, but you don't even know you break trance.
• 10:53
  Why? Because it's just lemon. It's just rhythm. It's just the feeling of your lover's skin. So, most of our experiences, the attention alights for a moment on the sound of wind chimes, for example.
• 11:18
  And then the nature of the mind is to then move to the next thing. But what I'm suggesting here is that you shore up that attention that alights on the beauty that flirts with the intention to dwell, dwell within that chiming. Some of the deconditioning of Buddhist practice, at least I believe this is true of other mystical traditions, at least is we are unwinding our sense of a poverty of space and a poverty of time. There was a time when there was no such thing as a clock for most of human being. There was definitely a time where it wasn't on your wrist or it wasn't always on the wall.
• 12:35
  We benefit profoundly from technological culture, but we are also conditioned negatively by it. And we're conditioned to a horizontal pulse of being. It's always about the next. Life is a series of moments you glide over towards the next. So to work directly with the poverty of space and the poverty of time.
• 13:15
  It's a particular form of relaxation, I think. We very much like physical relaxation. I think of this or experience this as energetical relaxation. So perhaps the body is caught up in the pulse of forward momentum, but in a way our energy is also going with that, and we want relax both of them. So instead of moments being sharp, fleeting instants, they can really breathe wide.
• 13:59
  Who said time was an instant besides a clock? We relax our energy and then space is like, ah. You know that in the Prajnaparamita, the mother of the Buddha's wisdom sutras, One teaching that encompasses all of awakening is, ah. So one thing that luxuriating in beauty is is the practice of allowing oneself space, trusting space. It's a little bit like falling through the cracks, but you fall through the cracks to your benefit.
• 15:02
  Now, I am not talking about a duality between being and doing. A duality, attention, a polarity between doing versus non doing. Being, doing, doing, non doing. Thought makes this duality. It is not found in reality.
• 15:28
  I'm not saying stop doing and be more. What do you find beautiful? It doesn't have to be a spiritual thing. I'm the least spiritual person you could probably meet if you really knew. It doesn't have to be a spiritual thing at all.
• 15:58
  Sports cars. Well fried tofu. It's beautiful when it's well done. This would be redundant to be up here saying this, except for our context just doesn't say this. And it almost is something we think of, Oh yeah, the artists.
• 16:39
  Maybe a few generations ago, they'd go, That's what the Bohemians do. The artists linger in beauty. I'm a practical person at your peril. What breaks trance? What's interesting enough, bright enough, soft enough, strange enough, compelling enough to cut through internal dialogue trance being.
• 17:07
  This practice, at least, is not mind going perpendicular. Mind going head on to mind. So, to be alert to these dharma gates, to celebrate these dharma gates, and let that be part of the stitch through your day of this practice. Because one instant is ten thousand years and eternity is in a grain of sand, this practice is not about doing twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty minutes, twenty years. It has nothing to do with time, actually.
• 17:58
  Maybe we need twenty or thirty years to actually appreciate that. But the golden stitch. Okay. That's what I wanted to say tonight.
• 18:20
  Jomon: Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendust.org. Your support supports us.