Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / The Great Way and The Hundred Grass Tips - Jomon Martin, Zen Teacher

Transcript

The Great Way and The Hundred Grass Tips - Jomon Martin, Zen Teacher · 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.
• 0:26
  Jomon: Well, want to welcome everybody to Plum Blossom Zeno and to Ongo. For those of you who were here last week, we did a beautiful ceremony to begin this practice period, this period of time in which we are deepening our practice a little bit. There's a box here on the altar that is carrying all of our commitments that we've made that will span several weeks up until mid December. And so we're in week two, still fresh, plenty of momentum, not grueled away or flagging yet, I hope. Some of us have had a difficult start maybe.
• 1:18
  The monastery is also in Ongo, is currently in Sashin right now and practicing very deeply. Also focused on this text, the chant that we did, Affirming Faith in Mind. So I look forward to opening it up in the coming weeks and for today it makes sense to start at the beginning. The wonderful thing about this text is that there are dozens of translations of it and that is in many ways enough of a study to just hear and notice all the different ways that that translators have articulated this teaching. So I'll read a few different translations of the first few lines.
• 2:12
  The great way is not difficult for those who do not pick and choose. When preferences are cast aside the way stands clear and undisguised but even slight distinctions made set earth and heaven far apart. If you would clearly see the truth discard opinions pro and con. To founder in dislike and like is nothing but the mind's disease and not to see the ways deep truth disturbs the mind's essential peace. So that's the translation that we use in the chant, that's the first few lines.
• 2:47
  For this talk I decided to skip down and focus on this other part, The great way is without limit beyond the easy and the hard but those who hold to narrow views are fearful and irresolute. Their frantic haste just slows them down. I think that's the second page or thereabouts. Page 32 I think. Yeah, about three quarters of the way down on page 32 if you're interested.
• 3:15
  So I'll just read some of the translations of the beginning lines again since this is the beginning of our Ongo. This is by Chan teacher Sheng Yan. He did a series of retreats in the early 80s and there's a book about that that we're using for this text. His translation is, The supreme way is not difficult if only you do not pick and choose, neither love nor hate and you will clearly understand. Be off by a hair and you are as far from it as heaven from earth.
• 3:50
  If you want the way to appear be neither for nor against. For and against opposing each other this is the mind's disease. Another translation is by Zen scholar Chan and Zen scholar Andy Ferguson. And he used to lead pilgrimages to China and a few of us were able to go on one of those in 2008. So he wrote a really remarkable book on our Chinese ancestors in Zen.
• 4:28
  His translation of the beginning is, Attaining the way is not difficult, just avoid picking and choosing. If you have either aversion or not, I'm sorry, if you have neither aversion nor desire you'll thoroughly understand. A hair's bread's difference is the gap between heaven and earth. If you want it to come forth let there be no positive and negative for such comparisons are a sickness of the mind. And finally all around Renaissance person, Kaz Tanahashi, who is an accomplished calligraphy artist, an aikido master, a peace activist, and probably lots of other things, poet and translator.
• 5:14
  He and Joan Halifax translated this and the first few lines in their version is, The utmost way is not difficult. Just be free of preferences. Without attachment or aversion all becomes transparent. I love that. All becomes transparent.
• 5:32
  Isn't that wonderful? So Hogan Roshi at the beginning of the sashin in which we're focused on this chant, he said that the chant is so completely boring. This is the most boring chant. It's boring because it's just repeating the same thing over and over. And in a way, that's really true.
• 5:54
  That is exactly what it's doing. Just how many times do I have how many ways do I have to say it? And yet it is that relentlessness, that insistence, that emphatic repetitiveness that makes it so wonderful. Its message is apparently worth saying it 50 different ways. So this next line down the way a little bit that I'm just deciding to pull out.
• 6:25
  And the nice thing about this chant is as we chant it every Tuesday, and you're welcome to also chant it throughout the week, there are versions of the chant book available online and you can find this version of it. It may be that one of the lines just jumps out at you. It may be that one of the lines, either in an interesting way or a challenging way or a really what is that even pointing to kind of a way. And that may be a line or a couple of sentences that you want to carry around with you. So this one kind of jumped out a little bit.
• 7:03
  The great way is without limit, beyond the easy and the hard, but those who hold to narrow views are fearful and irresolute, their frantic haste just slows them down. And I'll go through and read those read these other three translations of this particular line just to give us that breadth of what it's saying. Sheng Yan, The great way is broad, neither easy nor difficult. With narrow views and doubts haste will slow you down. Attach to it and you lose the measure.
• 7:43
  The mind will enter a deviant path. Neither easy nor difficult. Andy Ferguson. The great Tao is vast with neither ease nor difficulty. If you have biased views and doubts and move too fast or slow grasping the world without measure then your mind has taken a wayward path.
• 8:13
  That's a little gentler than a deviant path I think. And then Kaz Tanahashi and Joan Halifax, The great way is relaxed, neither easy nor difficult. Those with narrow views are filled with doubt, going in circles quickly or slowly. I like that too. The great way is relaxed.
• 8:39
  This line about neither easy nor difficult reminds me of one of my favorite Koan stories, Ling Zhao's Grass Tips, which I shared about early early on in our time together. For me Blade of Grass Zendo was in the running for a name for our group. I love Plum Blossoms Zendo, but blade of grass endo would have been cool too. So I'll share that story right now. Lehman Peng, who is one of our Chinese ancestors and not a priest, not a monk, but a family man and an accomplished Chan practitioner.
• 9:28
  He was sitting in his thatched cottage one day studying the sutras. Difficult, difficult, difficult he suddenly exclaimed. It's like trying to store 10 bushels of sesame seed in the top of a tree. It's like trying to store 10 bushels of sesame seed in the top of a tree. Now just imagine that, right?
• 9:52
  That would be messy. Easy, easy, easy, his wife, Le Womampang, answered. It's like touching your feet to the floor when you get out of bed. Easy, easy, easy. It's like touching your feet to the floor when you get out of bed.
• 10:12
  Something you don't even think about. You just do. The feeling, the solidity of the floor just right there. Nothing added. Easy, easy, easy.
• 10:26
  Neither difficult nor easy, said their daughter Ling Zhao. It's like the teachings of the ancestors shining on the 100 grass tips. Neither difficult nor easy. It's like the teachings of the ancestors shining on the 100 grass tips. So what is difficult about this practice, about the way?
• 10:59
  What is easy? And how can there be neither difficult nor easy? And which ones of these, which one of these are you most familiar with? Lehman Pong is trying to control all of life's myriad things. The separate things.
• 11:23
  Differentiating, discerning, this goes here, that goes there. And how these things tend not to participate in our schemes at all about where they should go or how they should go. Our bodies, our minds do not participate. They do not cooperate, let alone other people's bodies and minds, right? It's miraculous, in fact, how anything gets done in this world, really.
• 11:55
  And then Mrs. Peng, representing the undivided, the ease of oneness, no argument with anything, radical acceptance in the moment, the only moment there is just this. And this is in large part what we are practicing as we sit. We sit and experience the discomforts of our echoing karma, whatever that may be, the sensations of aging or illness, the habits of fatigue or tension or restlessness in the body. Our habits of mind that we might only become aware of in these moments of quiet.
• 12:51
  In this practice we're able to see them for what they are and and not turn away. We see them and we continue to sit with them as they arise, exist, and perhaps loosen a little bit. We do not distract. We do not go to the refrigerator for another spoonful of cookie dough. Although I don't know, maybe you Zoom people are doing that.
• 13:25
  We do not go on our phones and play another Wordle or look at Twitter or try to fix or improve our situation. We just sit here and experience it. And we let in that crack of daylight around some of our misguided views that we perhaps had no doubt about before. I mean if you just looked in here, peeked in here, would look like nothing's going on in here at all, right? There is a lot going on in here.
• 13:58
  It's everything. Everything is alive in here. Our practice of acceptance can sometimes also be misunderstood to be an avoidance stance, a habit of quietude in the face of difficult events or you know, a fleeing. But this practice of acceptance is meant only to be applied in this present moment. The next breath may be what informs us to act.
• 14:33
  How do we respond when a baby cries? Or when someone trips and falls? We act. We don't pretend like it's not happening. We act, we respond, we step forward, we take our differentiated hands with our differentiated fingers and we reach out to others situation calls for it.
• 15:01
  And the 100 grasses are a way of saying the 10,000 things or the myriad things that arise every moment. The things of this world. The dew drop on each tip of grass, this rare shining living moment. If you've ever seen that, which maybe you have, a morning with the grass damp from the dew and the sun hitting each drop and the rainbow of beauty that is offered to us in a moment like that. It's like, you know you could have a treasure chest full of diamonds or something and it wouldn't quite be as beautiful as that.
• 15:49
  And so the ancestors are just imploring us to look, to look at this offering, what is being offered here. And the commonness of grass, that's the other sense of the meaning of that symbol in our teachings, in our literature. This profound beauty in common dew drops on the grass. And so much of what the teaching at Great Vow Monastery is this allowing the teaching of nature. That is one of the ways that Great Vow operates.
• 16:32
  We'll be doing a field trip to Great Vowel next month which will be very sweet in November. We'll talk about that in a minute. But sitting in the pressure cooker of the Zendo hour after hour, day after day and then you walk out or you go to work practice outside or you take a cup of tea to just wander the perimeter and you can see the spider webs and the spiders doing their thing or the glittering moisture collecting on their webs or the deer staring right into your face wondering what you're doing in their garden. They really do kind of have attitude out there like The birds preparing to winter, their songs, their activity, the undulating bamboo branches, the vine maples turning orange, turning red, and the flowers going to seed. Everything is shouting the teachings.
• 17:29
  And that's true here too in the neighborhoods and in our homes and everywhere, everywhere. A different line in Affirming Faith and Mind says, just let go now of clinging mind and all things are just as they are. Just let go now of clinging mind and all things are just as they are. When we do that, we can see that everything is expounding the dharma. Is that easy or difficult?
• 18:14
  When it's just right here, when we're able to look. It's always right here. And what about this line, But those who hold to narrow views are fearful and irresolute. Their frantic haste just slows them down. If you're attached to anything you surely will go far astray.
• 18:42
  The great Tao is vast with neither ease nor difficulty. If you have biased views and doubts and move too fast or slow grasping the world without measure, then your mind has taken a wayward path. The great way is relaxed, neither easy nor difficult. Those with a narrow view are filled with doubt going in circles quickly or slowly. Now haven't we all experienced our own frantic haste slowing us down?
• 19:16
  I certainly have. And for me, it's when I'm trying to do too many things at once or I have an idea of my own extreme importance or my own, belief in whatever I'm doing. And this just never really goes well. I can look at my calendar and lament and feel overwhelmed but when I actually just take one thing at a time and just step into the thing that's in front of me in a particular moment, meeting each person, doing each thing wholeheartedly, it is actually a gift. There is no problem.
• 19:56
  I can't live next month right now. I mean, I can try, but that's the frantic haste. That's what that believe that's what that is. This is a gift right now. This.
• 20:12
  This little calendar box that I have, what is that? Zen teacher Norman Fisher, he's a nationally and internationally known teacher. I'm sure he has a very busy calendar and I've heard from one of his students that he just, think he has a Google Calendar and he just opens the calendar whatever that day is and whatever that hour is and he just does that next thing, whatever it is, whatever his calendar tells him to do, he just doesn't even think about what's next, he just does the thing that it tells him it's time to do. So there's another koan called the one who is not busy, which I hope to bring in here at some point. That's one of my favorites too.
• 20:56
  The one who is not busy. But our own narrow views, our limited views causing us fear or worry, Our biased views and doubts causing us fear and worry. I can also get very good at making up stories about people, places, and things. Maybe you can too. And then scare myself about them.
• 21:31
  So I was just at a conference for Zen teachers in Texas near Houston. We were about an hour out of Houston in this little bitty town in a rural retreat center. And a lot of the Zen teachers have a tradition that our elders on one of the nights, they go out to a bar and you know, have a couple beers or whatever. So off we went to this biker bar in the middle of, like, rural Texas. I was kind of hoping there would be a mechanical bull, but there was not one.
• 22:09
  I mean, that was one of my stories I had about a Texas bar. But I also had a lot of stories about who I thought would be in there and how I thought we would be received. And even when I saw the people, I made up stories about them or I assumed a lot of things about them and it turned out that one of the guys came up to our table and he had on a great big cowboy hat. He really did. And his name was TC.
• 22:39
  And he just wanted to he's like, took off his hat and shook everybody's hand and introduced himself by name and, you know, it was and we sat down and chatted with him for quite a while. And then we actually went back the next night because there was a the Mariners were playing, and they're still in it. Amazing. So and that night, that Saturday night, it was the most racially diverse place I've been in in a long time. Like, living here, it's an experience we do not have to have a third of the people black, a third of the people Latino, a third of the people white.
• 23:21
  Like, it was everybody was there. And and I did not that was not in my story. I mean, I just made up stuff about the people, the places, the things. Now I don't know what the political scene is there, but everybody was really just coexisting in there. A couple of our priests who graduated from Great Vow who are now starting a retreat center here in Washington outside of Battle Ground on Bells Mountain, Soten and Chennai.
• 24:03
  They have a four month old baby now and she's starting to recognize faces and starting to smile at people and it's really great to see that. It's so fun. She's in a really fun little age, but she does not have any idea about people's race or ethnicity or gender or age or their political views. She does not take cues from their hats or their ties or their garments. Everyone to her is just transparent.
• 24:34
  I mean, I think she totally recognizes her mom and dad, of course, but she takes each person one at a time. And she has no backlog of stories that she's been told or that she's telling herself about anybody. The utmost way is not difficult, just be free of preferences without attachment or aversion all becomes transparent. So everyone is transparent for her, just smiling faces. The great way is relaxed.
• 25:17
  And I have to remind myself of this too. Don't hold on to fixed views. Don't think that you know. Don't think that you're getting somewhere. Don't try to hurry an insight, don't hurry enlightenment, don't push your practice.
• 25:37
  We can let it unfold, we can let it ripen, we can just show up, we can do our best. That's okay to just show up and do our best. We are here to support each other in this endeavor to walk together and to become transparent together and become transparent with everything.
• 26:16
  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 zendest.org. Your support supports us.