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A Whole Forest Within You - Kisei Sensei · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  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.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: Good afternoon. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma, and I take refuge in Sangha. Are you afraid of this happiness? Are you afraid of this happiness?
• 0:47
  The dancing fields of Queen Anne's lace. The flickering golden leaves of the bamboo. The way the baby swallows peak their little white rimmed beaks over their nest and express their hunger in mouths wide open. I saw you smile as you lingered nearby, eyes fixed on their desire. Are you afraid of the ease?
• 1:26
  The ease of a mind that is so relaxed, it is no longer interested in its thoughts, at least for moments, like when resting at the bottom of the exhale or at the base of a cedar, or in sky's vast expanse. Are you afraid of the joy of living your life? A life that will surely include pain and loss and so many misunderstandings, but also connection and people. Silent Bodhisattvas that sing to you as the earth darkens and sit next to you as you remember how to feel. Are you afraid of the fear you contain?
• 2:32
  The knots in your stomach, that shiver, whimper, primal scream that wants to yell out in the quiet of the morning circle or in the dark hours of the night. Are you afraid of this tenderness? A heart as soft as a dahlia petal and a body as innocent as it is vulnerable that is aging, susceptible to disease, natural disaster, injury, that will die just like the cosmos dressed in magenta, like the mosquitoes, the cedar, and the oak, like the baby swallows and the distant hills. The sun, the moon, the stars, we're all dying. Just as we are discovering who we are.
• 3:40
  And what of contentment, equanimity, the openness of the heart mind, and all the teachings of the insentient that preach to you in their constancy, telling you, you are home, you are okay, You belong, and this is our shared life. Well, the Buddha, upon remembering the ease and contentment of sitting in the cool shade watching the golden fields blow in his mind. The Buddha asked himself, is this the path to awakening? We could ask ourselves as we sit in the meadow gazing at the straw, grass turned straw, or as we look into the sky or sit in the forest, is this the path to awakening? And the Buddha answered upon this reflection, yes.
• 5:04
  Yes. Yes. This way of ease, this way of nature, this satisfaction that is the absence of seeking satisfaction elsewhere. This is the path. You're doing it.
• 5:24
  We're doing it. And then the Buddha asked himself, well, am I afraid? Am I afraid of the happiness of just watching the golden grasses blow in the wind? Am I afraid of this contentment watching my fellow sashine participants walking in a circle? So beautiful.
• 5:56
  Am I afraid of this contentment? This contentment that we can come to know in Sashin. This happiness born of connection, a heart attending to its life, a heart attending to its life, born of meditation, of presence. Am I afraid of the happiness of living a spiritual life? A life dedicated to the bodhisattva vow?
• 6:39
  This question is an honest and deep inquiry. How does fear keep us from staying in present moment experience? Keep us from deepening in our meditation. Keep us from letting go of a hundred years and relaxing completely as Cherto says in the Grassroof Termitage. Keep us thinking that there's something else, there's some other practice, some other Sangha, some better teaching.
• 7:23
  Surely. Are we afraid of this happiness? This happiness of just being right where we are. Another way of asking this question is if we didn't believe our worries even for a moment, who would we be? What happens or what would happen if we gave up for a moment or maybe the rest of Sashin gave up thinking that there was something else that should be happening.
• 8:15
  And just let ourselves be in what is happening. Experience our life, this life, this life. That's in a way what Sashin is all about. It's helping us simplify, simplify so that we can experience what's actually right here and trust that this is the path. Because when you leave Sashin, what you have is this.
• 8:51
  Always this. You are always on the path. You can trust that. But we're getting to like immerse in it in this sustained way because we can get confused. There's always going to be another option.
• 9:13
  There's always gonna be something that the mind can worry about. There's always gonna be some uncertainty that we think we need to plan for. And there's always this. There's always this breath. There's always this soundscape.
• 9:39
  There's always this happiness that you're coming to know for yourself that isn't born from sensual desire. It isn't born from the conditions that we can chase after. It's born from you. It's your nature. It's our nature.
• 10:03
  I remember when Chozan Roshi was leading an inner critic retreat here, she had us all get into the voice of the inner critic and then she asked us as the inner critic. So she asked the inner critic, if you didn't criticize your person, so if you didn't criticize Kisei, what are you afraid would happen? Like what are you afraid would happen? Because it's often driven by fear, the inner critic. Probably always driven by fear.
• 10:37
  And somebody shouted out right away. He was like, well then I'd be average. Or boring. A few other ones came in. Boring, harmful to others, unenlightened.
• 11:00
  But who would you be if you let the inner critic's critiques fade into the background? Just for a meditation period, maybe for the rest of Sashin, Perhaps for the rest of your life. Try it out. Might as well try
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: it out
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: this lifetime. Next lifetime we can believe the inner critic. Similarly with conclusions about this Sensei, what if we just let those fade into the background? Let them drift like those, someone called them ground stars in the wind. And for the rest of Sensei took refuge in our sky like mind, our sky like awareness, which also is always with us.
• 11:58
  It's not dependent on great vow sky. This sky right here, this sky right here is your refuge, can be your refuge, really can be your refuge, you can live from the spaciousness of your own heart mind. And all those thoughts, all those criticisms, all those conclusions, they just come and go. Like the sensations in your fingers, like the sound of the birds, like the wind. Somebody asked me a couple weeks ago, Is all spiritual practice about supporting us in feeling safe enough to let go?
• 12:51
  I liked that. Safe in our own skin, safe in our own life no matter what the conditions. And that's part of what I found over the years in practicing and leading Grasses and Trees Sasheen. That sitting with a tree or a large stone or in the presence of of ferns or held in the embrace of the earth and sky. We can touch or presence or feel aspects of our experience that we habitually avoid, you know, probably due to our social conditioning.
• 13:37
  So sometimes people find that when they're doing those solo sit, solo, right, like with the whole forest, that there's a way in which they can drop a little deeper or turn towards something that maybe has a lot of emotional heaviness or discomfort That's harder to do in the presence of others in a Zendo. For some people, I found this to be true. And it doesn't always feel good. Deep wells of grief, despair, fear, emotional and physical discomforts that bubble up in the arms of nature. But it's part of the earth's medicine giving us permission to know ourselves a little bit more completely and not have to be afraid of our own experience.
• 14:43
  That's the healing balm of Sashin. We just become more intimate with who we are and what we contain. Like who we really are, like what is unchanging, we come to know that. We also come to know all that can move through us and we can feel it and don't need to be afraid of it. And, you know, this happens slow by slow, little by little.
• 15:12
  Oh, turning towards it and then withdrawing, turning towards over years of practice, over decades of practice. Well, I wanna share a koan from The Hidden Lamp which some of you know. The Hidden Lamp is a collection of stories from 25 centuries of awakened women. It's wonderful. It's koans and then contemporary women Dharma teachers are offering reflections on each of the koans.
• 15:49
  I haven't read the whole thing but I come back to this over over the last decade. I've come back to it a lot. So this one's called The Old Woman, Zhou Shu and the Tiger. The Old Woman, Zhou Shu and the Tiger. One day master Joshu was outside the monastery and he saw an old woman hoeing a field.
• 16:15
  He asked her, what would you do if suddenly you met a fierce tiger? She replied, nothing in this world frightens me. Nothing in this world frightens me. And turned back to her hoeing. Joshu roared like a tiger.
• 16:42
  She roared back. Joshu said, there's still this. Nothing in the world frightens me. What kind of state of mind is that? That in and of itself could be a mantra, a koan that we take around with us and as scary things happen nothing in the world frightens me both inner and outer experiences because they're all one anyway.
• 17:16
  But you know if these people saw a tiger on the road I bet their bodies would respond with fear. Mine did when a deer started walking right at me. I was practicing being in sky and then I was like, maybe I really am the sky and it's just gonna walk right through me. So it's not saying that fear doesn't arise, just that it doesn't frighten us. How much of our fear is actually fear of being afraid or fear of fear?
• 17:52
  How much do we try to manage and control our experience because we don't want to feel afraid or we don't wanna feel something because we think we won't be able to handle it or it will be uncomfortable in some way. And then when the thing happens because we can't control our experience that well, it's never as bad as we think it's gonna be. Usually not. Some some minds are very good at predicting. That's part of what we're training in in Sensei, not being afraid of our experience.
• 18:35
  It's really really quite profound to walk through the world with a kind of trust that whatever is happening you can be with it. You have the tools. You have the practice to meet it. You have the confidence that you can. So we're developing trust in Sensei that we can sit with all the mental, physical, emotional phenomena that arise during Sashin.
• 19:08
  That we can stay connected to our practice, that we can turn toward our practice, that we can creatively find ways of responding from our practice. It's why there's we say, Dharma gates are numberless, or we say, like, there's so many different kinds of practice because so many different states of mind and heart arise and we're all different. And so sometimes in the middle of doing concentration you switch to a more loving kindness practice to meet whatever is coming up, or you switch to an open awareness practice to respond to the conditions of your heart and mind. We're not meditation robots. We're alive, and so our practice gets to be alive.
• 19:55
  How wonderful. But we can find practice even when we're sick, even when we're hurting, even when we're bored, even when we're tired or hungry, even when as many of you have experienced mosquitoes are buzzing and landing on every open piece of skin even the parts that you thought were covered, even when the mind's saying we're failing or this isn't going right, Even when we have non ordinary states of consciousness arise in meditation, or we touch insights that really shake up our sense of self, sense of who we are or who we thought we were or who what we thought the world is. And this is a confidence that develops in practice. Chosin and Hogan often talk about long maturation. So we get like tastes of what's possible in Sashin or in our daily life practice.
• 21:04
  Openings can happen anytime or meeting the fear in us can happen anytime and then over time we learn to trust more and more like, oh practice can really meet me here. Oh, I can really rely on the Dharma. Oh, even this, even this. Confidence develops in practice and part of this confidence really comes from observing impermanence. So in this koan that I shared with Joshu and the old woman, Joshu started teaching when he himself was quite quite a senior, quite elder.
• 22:01
  The story says that he was in his seventies when his teacher died and so he was living with his teacher up until his teacher died and then he decided to go on pilgrimage and one of the things he said as he was leaving, so he's around 70, he said, if I meet girl of age seven who can teach me, I'll learn from her. And if I meet somebody who's my elder and I I feel like I could help or they ask me a question, I'll I'll teach them. So he had this kind of openness of heart, flexibility of heart to be both student and teacher to the young and old, student to the young and teacher to those who are elder than him if he was called on. So in this koan he is an elder and so is the woman who's hoeing in the garden. And I think that's an important part of this because these are two people, I'm assuming that the old woman is also a practitioner, but they both have had a lifetime worth of observing impermanence, a lifetime worth of losing people, seeing different states of mind come and go.
• 23:31
  So that's also part of what we're training in in Sashin and in in our dharma practice in general. We're training to notice that sensations arise, emotions arise, thoughts arise, and if we don't get all tangled up in our stories about them or our strategies to avoid them, if we keep our attention devoted to the steadiness of our practice returning when we get hooked, we observe we have the direct experience of impermanence. Sensations, thoughts, emotions, they all have a beginning, middle, and end. And we can we can know that. We can practice noticing that.
• 24:25
  And you have noticed that. Sometimes we need to be reminded because we get caught in whatever is happening now and we think it's gonna last forever. But to be able to notice throughout your life, throughout Sashin, throughout your practice, after you leave here, that whatever arises, thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And if we're really paying attention there's what in what something that we might call an experience like getting a mosquito bite. I had chosen says that when you practice your karma speeds up and I had this experience of like listening to some people like spraying the bug spray and I was like, oh, I haven't put on my net or used bug spray today.
• 25:17
  Guess the mosquitoes are today. Actually, of Sashin. That was my thought. All of Sashin. I guess the mosquitoes don't really like me.
• 25:25
  And then I was sitting right after I had that thought, like 10 mosquitoes. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna practice with this. Actually, I'm gonna practice with this as long as they don't land on my eyes. So they were landing on my forehead. And a mosquito bite has a beginning, middle, and end but it has like many beginnings, middles, and ends because it's like the landing and then the searching for a spot or just like the waiting, like maybe I'm not gonna bite you.
• 25:53
  I'm just gonna sit here for a while, Let you think that I might bite you. And then they're like, whatever. I didn't look it up so it's like this little needle goes into you. Think it's their mouth and the feeding time. And then there's this little liquid that like kinda when they dislodge I guess it's my blood.
• 26:16
  Maybe it's their spit, I don't know. So all of that is the beginning, middle, and then end. And then the the bite that may itch at some point also the itch will have a beginning, middle, and end. Whenever the itch arises it won't last forever. So, you know, that's an example that we all know because we're in the Sashin with mosquitoes.
• 26:43
  But that's true with anything in our experience. And when we're slowed down enough like we are in Sashin, we can really watch thoughts take form and dissolve. States of mind take form and dissolve. Even discomfort, if we really look at it, it doesn't it's not one thing. Like pain is not one thing, tension is not one thing.
• 27:09
  If we observe it and try to find it it's often a lot more fluid and intangible than the mind that's saying, pain pain pain, get up, move, this is bad, your leg's gonna fall off. If we like sink below that and just like, okay, what if I just for the next few breaths just felt these sensations? We see that there are many beginnings to the intensity of pain and then it dissolves and then there's a new sensation. So this can give us confidence. You know, I'm not saying just always sit through pain no matter what, but it can be interesting to study our experience a little bit more closely to to really check out, oh, does impermanence apply here too, and here, and here, and here, and here?
• 28:06
  You know, whatever's arising, can we see the the flowing nature of it? And then sometimes when we are really just with our practice, you might see that thoughts just they really just, we say sometimes they liberate themselves, they arise and pass without, maybe even without us really being aware of what they are saying. Our sensations do that too. The thing that a lot of us don't love about impermanence is that spiritual states and insights also have a beginning, middle, and end. They come and go.
• 28:50
  So we can familiarize ourselves with them as they arise. You may have during this sashin, we've been emphasizing noticing contentment, noticing ease or happiness, noticing the the joy of meditation. And you may have had experiences as you've been immersed in meditation that were pleasurable, that you really had a a taste of that contentment in a in a loud way or in a louder way. And then it it goes. Right?
• 29:24
  And then we're agitated again or something. But when we have when we like have proof in our own direct experience that something is possible, then it can become an inquiry, it can become part of our practice. Okay, I know contentment is part of my nature. Even when I'm agitated is there a part of me that is content or at ease or okay? What happens if I just try to tune into it?
• 29:57
  Or you may have had an insight into interconnection. Maybe and you know sometimes these direct experience insights happen in a kind of big way or they feel big in the moment. Like you're sitting and it just feels like the wind blew right through you. And it's like, wow, no separation. And then, you know, and then that experience fades but you know something now about interconnection, you know something about non separation and you can look for it in your direct experience.
• 30:36
  So you might be sitting, the mind might be agitated or the body is restless but you can still ask, oh, in this moment what's my experience of interconnection? And not trying to make the wind blow through you again. There are many ways to experience interconnection just like there are many ways that we'll experience contentment. It's not just one contentment forever. It's like, oh, the contentment right now is in my little toe, or in my spine, or is a visual experience of just resting the eyes in the space of the room.
• 31:18
  Or interconnection is also can be experienced as opening to the Sangha, opening to the forest, and just recognizing that we're all together, that we're supporting each other. And so similarly, sometimes during Sistin, people have experiences of silent mind or quieter mind. And that's something we also can keep that door open, keep that inquiry open in our practice. So even in the midst of activity when there is maybe a lot churning, oh is there silence here too? So that's part of what like the insights that we experience during Sashin, they're not gonna happen the same way, they are going to come and go but the truth of them is something that we can practice, is something that we can keep tuning into and that's how we keep the door open, the door to these insights.
• 32:25
  If we don't practice them then then it was just a cool experience that happened that maybe a few friends would understand and then it's gone. And but if we keep the door open, we keep inquiring into, oh, where's contentment now? Where's interconnection now? Then we have this whole, we see the many facets of the Dharma Gate of interconnection. The many facets of the Dharma Gate of contentment.
• 32:59
  And we come to know that all of these truths, these Dharma truths are something that's always present, like interconnection always present, the silence of mind's nature always present, isn't obstructed by the noise of the power plant or your thoughts. Sometimes it's helpful to get really quiet to to touch it, but once you do, then you you can start to have faith that it's always there. It's something you can tune into. I wanna read a few poems. They're from Joan Halifax's book, The Fruitful Darkness.
• 33:49
  She says, all is a circle within me. I am 10,000 winters old. I am as young as a newborn flower. I am a buffalo in its grave. I am a tree in bloom.
• 34:10
  All is a circle within me. I have seen the world through an eagle's eyes. I have seen it from a gopher's hole. I have seen the world on fire and the sky without a moon. All is a circle within me.
• 34:31
  I have gone into the earth and out again. I have gone to the edge of the sky. Now all is at peace within me. Now all has a place to come home. All is a circle within me.
• 34:50
  I am 10,000 winters old. I am as young as a newborn flower. I am a buffalo in its grave. I am a tree in bloom. All is a circle within me.
• 35:08
  I have seen the world through an eagle's eyes. I have seen it from a gopher's hole. I have seen the world on fire and the sky without a moon. All is a circle within me. I have gone into the earth and out again.
• 35:29
  I have gone to the edge of the sky. Now all is at peace within me. Now all has a place to come home. And then this is one of my favorite poems for this particular sashin. Because I spent the winter sleeping with a fish, there is a fin within me now.
• 36:01
  Because I spent the spring with an eagle in her nest, there is an egg within me now. Because I spent the summer with the buffalo, there is a bone within me now. Because I spent the autumn growing with one tall tree, There is a root within me now. So we could say that, about this sashimi because I spent a week with blackberries. There is a thorn or a fruit within me now.
• 36:42
  Because I spent an evening with the sky, there is spaciousness within me now. Because I spent a summer this is for the summer program people. Because I spent a summer falling in love with my breath, there is contentment within me now. Because I spent a lifetime devoted to awakening, the whole earth is within me now. So there's a truth to this and that's part of what I love in particular about this sashin is we spend hours, days with the bamboo, with and it's interesting.
• 37:31
  Right? We're drawn to often, I find, we're drawn to the being that has something to teach us. And so if you find yourself going back to the cedar, the cedar, the cedar, or the boulder, the boulder, the boulder, it's like, oh, that there's something about that being. I have spent many grasses and trees with the sky, and I feel like the sky is within me. And so, you know, this experience that you're having sitting with the earth, sitting with the rocks, sitting with the trees, they're they're in you.
• 38:14
  They won't leave you. You're learning from them. And one one of the things that's so beautiful about this is people come back, even not during sashin, they'll come back and they'll be like, can I go see my tree? And then the one tree doesn't know how many people think it's theirs. But it's it's beautiful.
• 38:40
  So it's it's like both ways. Like, we form this relationship with parts of the forest, parts of the meadow, parts of the monastery grounds. And Dogan has this beautiful quote in the Mountains and Waters Sutra, he says, mountains belong to the people who love them. And it's not like they belong, like you can't hold a mountain, you can't own a mountain just like you can't own the grave out trees. But they belong to you.
• 39:11
  You have a relationship. You're a part of them and they're a part of you. And they've offered you their teachings. They've sat with you. They've entered into your heart, and so they're part of you.
• 39:29
  And this is a beautiful aspect too of how Chosen Roshi would teach koans. She would really invite us to become become the tree, become the rock. And in some ways, if you can sit with a rock and maybe your mind is like, well I didn't really become the rock. But you're there's this intimacy that even if there was a sense of, well, I was just looking at the rock and nothing happened, so much was transmitted that your body knows, that your heart knows. Something was transmitted that the part of you that is like the rock saw and came alive a little bit.
• 40:29
  So you have a whole forest in you now. You have the great vast sky, the mountains, the distant mountains, the grasses, the swallows, all the flowers that blow in the wind, the wind. The whole earth is in you. It's a refuge. The teachings of the insentient beings don't stop when we leave the sasheen.
• 41:07
  They continue to work on us. They might show up in our dreams. Or when we sit, I noticed that after sitting with trees for many years, when I sit, a lot of the time I'm sitting like that beautiful maple tree out back just feeling my roots and my trunk and my awareness opening like branches in all directions.
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: 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.