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Life As Pilgrimage: Old Woman of Mount Wutai - Kisei 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.
• 0:24
  kisei: So for the summer, for the Dharma talks and discussion, I'm going to be going through this book, The Hidden Lamp. And I thought we could do it as a kind of summer read if you're interested. So you can obtain a copy of this audiobook or regular book. It's called The Stories from 25 Centuries of Awakened Women. And you don't have to do that.
• 0:59
  I chose 15 koans and I spread them out over the course of the summer. So the stories in this book, they're short. It's a koan, so this is a collection of koans from the women's lineage in the Buddhist tradition, including Zen Zen's a part of that larger tradition. And so they're teaching stories, their interactions. In them, we get to meet the early women ancestors.
• 1:31
  Also with each story, so each story is a chapter, and there's a commentary offered by contemporary Buddhist teachers who are also getting to meet some of the contemporary Buddhist teachers of the time. The book itself has a 100 koans, and so we're just gonna be focusing on 15 of them, one each week. And, you know, you can participate in in whatever way. You can just come, and I'll read the koan every week, and I'll offer a short dharma talk. And then we'll talk about the the koan.
• 2:12
  And one of the nice things about this book is at the end of the commentary, there are a couple of reflection questions. So I'll pause at those questions in the group, and we can have a little discussion about them. So let's begin with the koan itself. I chose the first koan in the collection for the opening for this first week that we meet in summer. And the story is yes, there is a list of the chosen koans, and I'll put that in the chat at the end.
• 2:53
  So the first one is The Old Woman of Mount Wutai, and I'll read the koan now. And when you hear a koan, maybe you've already read it, maybe you've read it several times, Maybe you've heard it. This koan in particular is in the Book of Serenity, and I think it's in the Mumang Khan as well. It's definitely in the Book of Serenity. So you may have heard a different translation or this translation, but listening to it fresh and just seeing what aspects of the koan, if any, touch you, stir you, make you uncomfortable, make you curious.
• 3:37
  Yeah, I feel like the koans can meet us in our everyday life and show us something perhaps about some question that we have or an aspect of our life maybe where we feel stuck or some kind of inner conflict around. And also koans can meet us in our deeper spiritual questions or on the path and sometimes not make any sense, but for some reason a particular line just just sticks out at us or we we wanna kinda carry it around or we can't help but carry it around. So here's the story. An old woman lived on the road to Mount Wutai. A monk on pilgrimage asked her, which is the way to Mount Wutai?
• 4:31
  The old woman said, right straight ahead. The monk took a few steps and she said, he's a good monk, but off he goes just like the others. Monks came one after another. They'd ask the same question and receive the same answer. Later, a monk told master Jashu or Joshu what had happened and Joshu said, I'll go and investigate that old woman myself.
• 5:05
  The next day Joshu went to the old woman and asked, which is the way to Mount Wutai? Right straight ahead, she replied. Zhou Shu took a few steps. The old woman said, he's a good monk, but off he goes just like the others. Zhou Shu returned to the monastery and told the monks, I have checked out the old woman of Mount Wutai for you.
• 5:34
  So that's the case. That's that's the koan. And we're starting out with a story which is about many things, but some of the themes we have here are pilgrimage, path, encounters with strange, wise people, Direction. So Mount Wutai is a famous pilgrimage site to this day in China. It was said, the legend was that Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of wisdom, dwelled on Mount Wutai.
• 6:21
  And the stories from other Kowans talk about Mount Wutai as very difficult. It was like a treacherous journey, but people took it. And there were actually monasteries on Mount Wutai which people would be able to study in, live in for a time, or do retreat in. And there are many stories throughout their tradition of people having encounters with Manjushri when they visited Mount Wutai. So it had this kind of mystic feeling to it of going on pilgrimage to Mount Wutai was like going on pilgrimage to have an encounter with the Bodhisattva of wisdom.
• 7:12
  So we also have in this koan the practice of pilgrimage. What is pilgrimage? Have any of you ever gone on pilgrimage? In Chosen Roshi's book on Jizo, she talks about a pilgrimage, and she defines pilgrimage as taking a long journey to a sacred place as an act of devotion. Taking a long journey to a sacred place as an act of devotion.
• 7:54
  And so that is a practice throughout spiritual traditions where people visit the sacred places of their tradition. And in another way, and Chosen talks about this in her her book on Gizo, and I'll read some of that. Well, pilgrimage is our life. And I feel like this is a particularly good metaphor for those of us who are practicing outside of a monastery, outside of a traditional, like, venue or container of practice. You know, we're moving around.
• 8:36
  We're, you know, we're on this long journey, you could say. Like, our life is that long journey. And, you know, from a particular perspective, anywhere we go, anyone we encounter is a sacred place. Like, what makes something sacred? That's something to ponder.
• 9:00
  Is it because, you know, some of the pilgrimage sites in the Buddhist tradition are places where the Buddha sat and taught and was born and died? And, you know, this person who was a wise, great, wise teacher is a place that we call sacred now because they walked there. But in the Zen tradition, we, you know, kinda demystify the founder, and we're like, well, we're all Buddhas. So perhaps everywhere you walk, where you were born, where you will die, where you teach or practice, that's a sacred place. And this is, you know, this is something for us, I think, really to ponder in our in our, what we call, lay lives.
• 9:55
  Like, what what makes something sacred? Is it the intention that we have behind the act? What makes a place sacred? You know, sometimes we feel the sacredness of a place perhaps because other people have done spiritual practice in that place. So I still feel this way when I go into churches.
• 10:28
  Like, there's a kind of like, oh, this place has been set aside specifically for spiritual practice. There's a kind of palpable silence or feeling of devotion. But I can feel that same way sometimes when I walk into a grocery store or down the street, and it's loud, and people don't there's no, like, car inspections here in Ohio, so there's, like mufflers that are sometimes really loud, but that can be sacred. So that's it, you know, that's an interesting inquiry for us. And then another word that Chosin had in her definition of pilgrimage is as an act of devotion.
• 11:18
  A long journey to a sacred place as an act of devotion. So that's something else to contemplate in this pilgrimage of our life. What are you devoted to? How do you express your devotion? Devotion mindfulness is a form of devotion.
• 11:38
  Attention is a form of devotion. Loving kindness, curiosity, vow, these are all expressions of devotion to our practice, to our life, to the path. And it's through that devotion that we come to see the sacredness of our morning tea, of any being that we encounter, everyone we encounter. Somebody wrote in the chat, everything is sacred. And what is it to really live that or to aspire to live that?
• 12:20
  So Jiso, I wanna talk a little bit about Jiso and read some from what Chosen wrote about pilgrimage and pilgrimage as our life. Jiso is the bodhisattva of great determination, fearlessness or courage, benevolence, optimism and vow, and was also considered to be a pilgrim. So a lot of the ways that Jizo is depicted is carrying a pilgrim staff, which is a long staff that had six rings. And the six rings represented the six realms. So there was this sense of Jizo being able like Jiso was a pilgrim that moved between the realms of existence as a bodhisattva, as a being that aspires to help beings in all the different realms of existence to find liberation and love and freedom.
• 13:23
  But he carried this pilgrim staff, and another aspect of the pilgrim staff is it would jingle. And so pilgrims would walk and with each step they would jingle their stuff and it would alert the animals that might be on the path that they were coming so that they didn't step on any insects or other small animals. So the tradition says. So Jizo Bodhisattva and people did carry these pilgrim staffs, and Jizo Bodhisattva is portrayed carrying a pilgrim staff and wearing pilgrim garb, and this is from Chosen. In the ancient Chinese caves of Tonghong and also in Korea, he is shown with his robe worn as a traveler would, draped over his head and shoulders for protection from the weather.
• 14:12
  Statues of Jizo are found at thousands of crossroads in Japan, from intersections of major highways to the divergence of dirt paths among rice paddies. His presence helps travelers choose the right direction. Jizo is the guardian not only of those who travel on the earthly plane, but also of those at crucial crossroads in the spiritual journey. As we consider these aspects of Jizo, we should assess our life honestly. Am I a pilgrim or more of a wanderer?
• 14:48
  So she makes this distinction between pilgrim and wanderer that I wanna continue what she says and then contemplate it together. There is a difference between a pilgrim and a wanderer. Buddhist teachings use wanderer to refer to someone who is lost in the rounds of suffering existence, transmigrating through the six worlds. As we move day by day, hour by hour, among states of ignorance and stupidity, irritation and anger, greediness, coveting and jealousy, pain and mental discomfort, we are like people wandering in a dense primal forest, unable to find a way out or even to climb above the trees to see if there is an edge to this tangling wilderness. We will do this until we realize here or are shown that there is a way out.
• 15:43
  What is the difference between a wanderer and a pilgrim? First, we must know that there is a path. We can transform despair and resignation to hope and joy if we know there is a path. The difference between a pilgrim and a wanderer is to know there is a path and to set out on it. We also need guides, both printed maps and also human guides.
• 16:14
  And then she goes on, A pilgrim carries only the essentials. Jizo had a robe and bowl, a staff and the dharma jewel. Nothing extra. What do we need to step out on the path of practice? Just the equipment we were born with.
• 16:31
  A body and a mind, actually a body that is breathing, body, breath and mind. That's all that's needed. The beauty of this is that it means you can practice anywhere, anytime. In line for the bank, in a traffic jam, rocking your child to sleep, just to align body, breath and mind. There you are.
• 16:54
  There is no longer such thing as waiting, only a gift of additional time to practice. Students ask, how do you find time for practice? There are two answers. First, my life makes me practice. I could not do what I do without practice.
• 17:11
  Second, I turn my awareness around. Instead of looking for time to practice and trying to expand it, I look for time that I am not practicing and try to shrink it. So that's one way, Chosen continues with that, of how she has practiced in her lay life before she lived at the monastery. She wrote this book before she founded the monastery. So she was a lay practitioner for most of her practice life before they founded the monastery, and she developed these practices called mindfulness practices, which were the practice of shrinking the time that she wasn't practicing.
• 17:56
  So And sometimes that would be like focusing on your feet, or she wrote a whole book of these, and we would do them every week at the monastery, looking at the sky, contemplating the color blue. She just had these little things that you encounter every day, and that would be, like, the container of your practice for that week. And you can explore, like, weaving practice into your daily life, having these little touchstones. So that's one way that she found to see the sacred in everything, to really bring that alive, to really be a a pilgrim, on a path in daily life when there is so much confusion and we are being pulled around in all these different directions. But on this journey in the koan, we encounter an old woman.
• 18:50
  The old woman will find her a lot in these koans over the next fifteen or so weeks. The old woman could represent crone wisdom. She's a kind of Jizo figure at the crossroads. And in her commentary, the person who wrote the commentary to this koan, she talks about how and she's just kind of imagining into, well, who is this woman? And she said, maybe she lived there her whole life.
• 19:24
  As a young woman, when people asked her, What's the way to Mount Wu Tai? She gave practical directions. I would turn left, go a few steps, and then turn right, and whatever it was, whichever direction they were facing. But as she got older and became an older woman, she started to give directions for one's life. There's another koan in our tradition that maybe comes from this one.
• 19:54
  There's a collection of 200 what we call miscellaneous koans, and they're not cases. They're usually not assigned to a teacher. You usually receive them just word-of-mouth through your teacher. And one of those from our lineage is, go straight on a mountain road with 99 curves. So it's a koan like what this old woman gave the monks.
• 20:24
  Yeah. Go straight ahead. Go straight ahead. Yeah. Yeah.
• 20:31
  I know it curves, but go straight ahead. Kron wisdom is like koan wisdom. It's about stepping out of our logical, rational, either or dualistic way of being and awakening to a more than rational awareness. I was recently reading, the fairy tale, The Maiden King, And in it, there's a young hero who has encounters with three Baba Yagas. And Baba Yaga is a kind of crone figure in fairy tales, especially that have, like, a a Russian kind of, lineage.
• 21:21
  And she lives in the depths of the forest, and when the, hero comes to her in this particular fairy tale, she asks, did you come here of your own free will or by compulsion? So this question is a question perhaps the old woman would ask. This pilgrimage, this healing journey, this spiritual quest, this life path that you're on? How did you get here? Are you wandering or are you a pilgrim?
• 22:00
  Maybe that's how Chosen would ask it. Are you wandering through the six realms and you just kind of showed up here or are you on a path? In the fairy tale, and I love this answer and I think this is such a good Zen answer. In the fairy tale, the hero answers, I came mostly of my free will and twice as much from compulsion. Or sometimes it's translated, I came 65% from my own free will and 80% by compulsion.
• 22:36
  So that so speaks to the truth of our human situation, right? Where here, our vows led us here. We're on this spiritual journey. We're on this spiritual path, and we're wandering around. We don't know what we're doing.
• 22:57
  I came mostly by my vows, led me here tonight or wherever I go, and twice as much my wanderings. This is the way of things as human beings. We meet our lives as best we can through our vows, through our intention, through our practice, And so much of what happens is beyond our control. Sometimes we wander just from habit or just from not knowing what to do and find ourselves in strange, challenging, habitual, or even unfamiliar terrain. I was part of a theater group in my last few years of the monastery, and one of the teachers had us do this practice called aimless wandering as a practice of befriending uncertainty.
• 23:59
  And so it kind of turns the whole wandering thing around. It had a little bit more of a negative connotation in the way that Chosin was talking about it, but we're always invited in dharma to turn things around. And so it turns it around and it's like, well, wandering in and of itself is a practice, is a way of befriending uncertainty because that's the truth of things. Like, we can set out with these intentions, but it often doesn't go the way that we think it will. Or as we make an intention, Hogan would use this analogy a lot, like if we have the intention or the vow to build a bridge, then we'll encounter all the challenges that are involved in building a bridge.
• 24:46
  And so same too in our practice. If we have the intention to go on a pilgrimage or the intention to take mindfulness breaths every time we notice that anger is arising, we're going to encounter all the many challenges that come up with really setting that intention. And that's part of the path. Sometimes we think, Oh, I'm encountering these challenges. I must be doing it wrong, or maybe I need to change my intention.
• 25:20
  And sometimes that's true, but also challenge obstacles are part of the path. And that's one of the aspects of Jiso Bodhisattva where I think Jiso Bodhisattva is just like kind of side character in this koan, is the the Bodhisattva that we can call on when we encounter obstacles in our life. Jiso has this kind of courage and benevolence and fearlessness and determination for meeting obstacles, for meeting challenge. There's a line, and we would do this Jizo ceremony every month at the monastery on Jizo Day, which I think is it's kind of around this time. It's like the twenty second or the twenty third of every month.
• 26:11
  And there was a line from the chant that Chosin took from the Earth's store Bodhisattva Sutra, and he says, may I welcome everything that comes toward me with a warm and tender heart. May I welcome everything that comes toward me with a warm and tender heart. There's another koan in our tradition about pilgrimage that embraces this aspect of befriending uncertainty. The teacher asks a student who's on pilgrimage, where are you going? And the student says, I don't know.
• 26:57
  And the teacher replies, ah, not knowing is most intimate. So in those times when it feels like, oh, I'm not so clear on my intention right now or my vow or, you know, what's compelling me to do this thing. You know? It's like an opportunity to not know actually can bring us closer to what's real, closer to our life. Sometimes, our intentions or our ideas about how our life should be actually prevent us from the intimacy of our life itself just as it is and the sacredness of that.
• 27:48
  I was encouraged when I worked on koans with my teacher to see if there's a way that the koan can be boiled down into a single word or phrase. She would sometimes ask me, What is the essence of this koan in one word or in one phrase? So you might contemplate that, which word or phrase stood out? Sometimes it doesn't actually have to be a word or phrase from the koan, but it's kind of like your way of feeling into the essence. So it might be like not knowing is most intimate, even though that's not what was said here directly.
• 28:35
  But I want to read some from Nancy Brown's reflections on this koan because she studied with Zen master Seung San. And so when she was talking about this koan, said that at the end of every retreat and every letter that master Seung San, who English was not Master Seung Sahn's first language, and he was from Korea. So, the way he would end was, like, all one sentence, only go straight. Don't know. Try.
• 29:13
  Try. Try. For ten thousand years nonstop. Soon get enlightenment and save all beings from suffering. And she said, How do we go straight ahead don't know?
• 29:30
  How do we go straight ahead don't know? This question, this is from her commentary. This question, any sincere question in the moment of asking it, returns us to a mind that is before thinking. In this moment of asking, we and this universe are not split apart. How is it just now?
• 29:55
  What is the job of this moment? What a simple and portable practice. And so both her and Chosen are talking about how practice is portable. All we need is a body, a breath, a mind. That's the sacred pilgrimage right back here.
• 30:19
  I want leave us, as we move into the discussion, with a couple of questions that are the reflection questions of this koan. I brought up a lot and you might have your own reflections that you want to share, but here are two questions to either talk about now or to reflect on for the week. What is the point of spiritual seeking? What do you hope to find here? Have you ever overlooked the wise person right in front of you, clothed in a seemingly ordinary form?
• 31:06
  So what is the point of spiritual seeking? What do you hope to find there? And have you ever looked the wise person right in front of you, clothed in a seemingly ordinary form?
• 31:27
  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.