Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Good in the Beginning, Good in the Middle, Good in the End -Zen Teacher Jomon

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Good in the Beginning, Good in the Middle, Good in the End -Zen Teacher Jomon · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: 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. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for being here.
• 0:19
  Let's take refuge together. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha. You don't have to know what that means, you don't have to say it, but it's a beautiful thing to take refuge, at least just take refuge in this practice, in this moment, in this being together.
• 1:04
  Good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. This is how the Buddhist teachings are often described in the Pali Canon. Good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. The Buddha also encouraged us not to just take his word for anything, but to see for ourselves. To see for ourselves whether the teachings are true.
• 1:50
  So maybe you can already weigh in on this claim. Are they good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end? What has experience so far? So I hope to hear a little bit about that tonight from you. Also, those of you on Zoom too.
• 2:06
  I'm talking to you. So I want to talk tonight about the arc of practice, the arc of a life of practice, the arc that in many ways mirrors the arc of a sashin, a silent retreat, and even the arc of a single sitting period. That way we can all draw on our own experiences, whether you've been at this for decades or whether this is your first time here. And even aside from a meditation practice or Zen practice or Buddhist practice, we all know something about commitment, about staying with something, about going deeper, and about weathering challenges, whether that's in a career, in relationships, in a health situation, in an aging human body. So I started Zen practice in earnest, when I was about 33.
• 3:18
  What I found was a pool of depth in Zen Buddhism that I suspected might be a deep well of discovery for a long time, for a lifetime. And, that seems to be panning out. The practice continues to be alive and sustaining and mysterious and challenging. For these twenty plus years of practice, I have stayed with the same teachers all this time. I've stayed with the same practice community all this time.
• 4:02
  And through some ups and downs for sure. And not everyone can do that, for a variety of reasons. But if you can, I think there is some good fortune to be had in that? I've had the good fortune to enjoy a long term relationship with my teachers. I have watched them reach their fortieth and fiftieth years of practice, witnessed and benefited from their continued commitment, growth, and maturation in the Dharma.
• 4:40
  What's it like to return to the cushion again and again for fifty years? What's it like to return to the cushion ever? What's a single sitting period like? Is it always the same? No.
• 5:03
  We have to acknowledge that it's always different. That's our job to see what is new and to see through a story that tells you, that wants to insist, oh, it's just the same or I'm stuck. That's impossible, actually. Of course, there are patterns, there are habits of the mind. Yes.
• 5:32
  What's it like when you first sit down to practice? Maybe mind swirling, rumination, carrying the rest of the day into the room, onto the cushion. What about in the middle? Is there a settling? Is there a quieting?
• 5:54
  Or is there a sense of, is it over yet? Has the timekeeper fallen asleep over there? Did I forget to set my alarm on my phone? Or maybe really falling in love with the breath or the practice. Losing yourself.
• 6:14
  Losing track of time. It can go lots of ways. We might be tempted to say one is a good practice or one is a bad practice. Is that true? Is there such a thing?
• 6:37
  All that does is just reveals that we're carrying around some standards for such a judgment to compare some kind of goal, how we're maybe holding that. What are we measuring our experience against? This can be a great way to become very demoralized. But we can also let go of some goal for how we should feel. I think that's often a big part of the goal that we might cling to.
• 7:16
  If I don't feel better, then it's bad. Feel like let that go. What if we let that go and instead just let an aspiration fuel our practice? So with an aspiration to just meet our life with clarity and kindness, or to sit with curiosity, with willingness, with openness to whatever arises, just returning to our anchor, you can't miss. You can't miss them.
• 7:54
  Letting go of the outcome. Letting go of some idea of progress. That will take care of itself. In any sitting period, we at some point will very likely encounter one or more or all of the five hindrances. Grasping, aversion, restlessness, sleepiness, or skeptical doubt.
• 8:37
  And maybe you recognize one of those as your personal favorite. In the arc of a sitting period here or on a retreat, we get to look at these very closely. Smell their breath. If we attend session often or sit at home with regularity, we can get very clear about our patterns that have been running in the background all this time. And when we start to see them, and see them not as fixed traits, not reify them as I, me, or mine, or not tell ourselves or tell others the story, well, that's just how I am.
• 9:29
  If we don't do that, if we see them for just what they are, it's just habits, well then we can work with them. And what we do on the cushion can have direct effects on how we conduct our lives as well. It's so tempting though to compare our practice to the pictures on the internet. Bliss, relaxation, ease, waterfalls, beaches. When we're sitting here in this church basement stewing about an interaction at work or worrying about our aging parents or our preteen children or the funny noise in the car, we might think, I am terrible at this.
• 10:27
  Welcome to skeptical doubt. That's all that is. That's all that is. That's not true. And it's just self making, making a story about me.
• 10:43
  Every meditator, every single person who has ever stuck with it, has had to go through, has had to grapple with, continues to work with these experiences, especially as we step toward retreat practice. I am still I still get nervous every time before a long retreat, week long silent retreat, still. It's I I feel like, if you ever watch one of the, like a horse race, you've got those horses that have to go into the gate, sometimes they're like, Oh my God, I couldn't possibly get in there. Like, this is their whole job on earth is to do that. And they're like, No.
• 11:32
  It feels like that sometimes. We know we're gonna be locked into something. We've willingly set ourselves up for this. The other metaphor that is much older than that and much more elegant is that of a snake in a bamboo tube. How else can a snake truly know itself unless it is touching the edges?
• 12:06
  We are a little constrained and in that way we can really feel our habits because there's something that they're bumping up against in that practice. And in that process, we reshape ourselves. We don't become someone else or something else. We still are you know, a snake is even more of its snake self. That's revealed.
• 12:34
  But those self habits become visible, become palpable. If you've ever heard Hogan Roshi talk about his very first session at Rochester Zen Center, it's a banger. It's a doozy. He was so miserable. He's 19 years old, and his first week long silent retreat.
• 12:55
  This is in 1969. And he was so miserable that he was praying that there would be a fire so that they would have to stop. And then it happened that there was a fire. Something had caught on fire because of, you know, paint and rags or something, and and some they put out the fire, moved anyway, they just kept going with on with the fishing. One of the buildings was on fire.
• 13:28
  They, you know, dealt with it. When we make room for these initial difficulties, the spaciousness that is already here, something is revealed to us. Maybe our bodies relax a little bit eventually. The arc of a retreat allows for that. Or even the arc of a sitting period.
• 14:01
  Maybe our breath deepens and slows for a little bit. Maybe we find rest, refreshment, clarity, or a refuge. We might leave here and meet our next encounter with another person with a little more spaciousness and allowing a little more room, a little more curiosity, a larger view, a slightly warmer heart. Or we might just catch ourselves cussing at someone in traffic again, of a sudden, the habits may be deep. So with more experience of sitting, have more chances and more time to really notice our tendencies of judging, to look into that, to take it apart, to see how very optional it is.
• 14:52
  The more periods of meditation that we do, we'll see more variation. We'll know for ourselves that sometimes it's like this, and sometimes it's like that, and it's okay, And we don't have to make a big conclusion about it. And we might even start to taste the fruits of practice. And this may be very exciting. It can be sudden and gradual insights.
• 15:25
  We might start to see the benefits and and want more, which is a lovely and lively aspect of our practice life. Sometimes it inspires us to practice like our hair is on fire, and we can only put it out with practice. And the fire of these benefits touch on something deeply generous in us, and we very much want to share them. There's a I meant to bring it. There's a section in John Cabot Zinn's book, Wherever You Go, There You Are.
• 16:04
  And he basically advises us not to talk about meditation with other people for a while when you first get started. There's this tendency towards being quite zealous where we wanna just, you know what you need to do. You need to come and meditate. That's what you need right now. And he really says, it's best to just sit with that for a little while.
• 16:29
  It's a natural tendency. It's kind of a phase of practice where we just are like, ah, this is the answer to everything. But I've heard him say, and maybe in other places, Don't talk about it for maybe like ten years. Ten And then, I don't know where this quote came from. Someone said they thought they heard the Dalai Lama also say something like, Don't even evaluate your practice for ten years.
• 17:00
  And then maybe, you know, see about it and then wait ten more years to evaluate it again. So that's an arc of practice, isn't it? Ten years. It may be that we find out for ourselves that the teachings are in fact good. That they are good for us, and they are good for everyone around us, not because we're getting people to do it, but we're better for the people around us.
• 17:34
  We're meeting them in a different way. That's what's good for other people. That's the way it's good for others. And that can be the foundation of faith. Not a blind faith, but a faith that comes from our direct experience.
• 17:52
  Or even from seeing the results of practice in other people. When we want what someone else seems to have, a sense of peace or a sense of wisdom or kindness. This arc of practice changes us if we let it or even if we don't intend for it to. Retreat practice can be something of a rite of passage. We don't have too many of those in our American culture really.
• 18:35
  There's people who've written about this apparently. Zaz and Kai, any sort of retreat, if you make up your mind, I'm going to go and sit meditation for most of a whole day. That's something that you can really notice how it is for you before, during, after. And session for sure, a week long silent retreat, definitely a rite of passage. Jukai, taking the 16 Bodhisattva precepts or the five precepts, wearing the Wagesa, wearing the rakusu, joining something, being part of something.
• 19:22
  This is a rite of passage. We step over the threshold of something into something else. We take that step voluntarily. And in that process, the group supports us through the difficulties that will inevitably arise when we take a step like that. Now that's not to say that every community is right for everybody or every practice is right for everybody.
• 19:55
  It's important not to leave your discernment at the door. Sometimes it's skillful to look around or see what else is out there for sure. But if you feel like you found a good enough place of practice, then there's something really beautiful about that. There's a lot of potential there in your commitment, in your stepping forward. So in the middle of a sit, the middle of a retreat, the middle of a practice life, there can be all kinds of obstacles.
• 20:36
  I mean, I'll just place the obstacles there in the middle. Why not? Disillusionment, doubt in yourself and others and the practice, disappointment, maybe the teacher falls off the pedestal, our own flaws become quite apparent perhaps, our same old issues come up on the cushion. There were times that I would just wipe out during a week long silent retreat, usually on about Thursday. And it just happened over and over and over, time after time after time.
• 21:17
  And I felt like I kind of finally reframed it. It was sort of like, you know those Olympic athletes that have to train to do some really hard thing that most of the time probably what they're doing is trying to do it and falling down. It felt like that a little bit like, well, how else can I do this? How else can I work with this? This thing that keeps coming up.
• 21:45
  But I could at least appreciate the fact that I kept showing up, that I kept meeting it. Sometimes, something called the dark night of the soul happens in our practice where we really have to question why we're doing what we're doing in terms of our spiritual practice. We may not get the same charge out of it that we once did when our hair was on fire. There's something called acedia, that's an old, Christian term, and it's basically spiritual dryness or boredom, but even more so, Where there's just no more, yeah, no more juice in the practice or in the community. It's like wandering through a desert.
• 22:43
  And do we keep going? Do we keep going even when it feels like that? We might be asking, are we there yet? Have we reached enlightenment yet? Is there such a thing?
• 22:52
  Is that possible? Or are we enjoying the view? Can we turn our mind to the subtle beauty of a desert? Hogan Roshi often says that one way to gauge our practice is to ask ourselves, what good is it if it's not there for you at two or three in the morning and you're really struggling with something? So there's these moments of commitment, these moments of decision to keep going, to deepen commitment to making a choice.
• 23:52
  Any long term relationship does not happen without weathering some difficulties and hanging in there to them. So if we think about this practice being good in the end, I'm not sure what that would be. What is the end? There is no end. It's the circle really, sort of like the end so, beginningless, endless.
• 24:15
  We just keep going. We keep beginning all the time. There is, of course, a settling in, a maturation, a point at which I can't imagine not practicing. I can't imagine what that would even be. But a long term relationship is choosing every day to stay and prioritizing the relationship, putting energy into it.
• 24:44
  And so we can do that with our Zen practice or our Dharma practice too. Choosing our Zen practice every day also daily, weekly, retreat. We can be with our be our relationship with practice like like an old married couple. The quiet ease of their togetherness if you've seen couples like that. Or at least the ones who still enjoy each other and make each other laugh sometimes.
• 25:28
  I found it to be really quite lovely to make a commitment to a teacher, to a community, to settle down. I feel grateful that I had the opportunity for that, to meet with my teacher once a week for Sans and for decades, attend retreats with them, and allow that relationship to happen organically. And now there are just so many podcasts and Zoom options and books and so many teachers, it's easy to get lost in it all or to draw from so many things. I'm not saying don't do that, But the possibility for depth, it may be quieter, it may be more subtle, it may ask a little more from us to show up and keep showing up. That's a little different from a podcast relationship.
• 26:44
  Time quickly passes. At some point, you can look back and say, wow, I've been practicing for twenty years, forty years, fifty years. Just keep showing up. Just keep going. When we take good care of our practice, it takes care of us.
• 27:04
  So I'd love to hear, thank you, from maybe those of you who have had some practice. I see there's something in the chat. It's a it's a cartoon. I'm not sure what that's about. Would anybody like to speak to their experience of whether you find the practice good in the middle or good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end of a sitting period, of a retreat, of a of the arc of your years of practice.
• 27:41
  Some of you have some years. What's been your experience? And and to answer that question, only you can answer that question. You And can't get it wrong. Jen.
• 28:03
  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.