Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Awakening Faith and Letting It Be - Kisei Costenbader, Sensei

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Awakening Faith and Letting It Be - Kisei Costenbader, 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.
• 0:27
  Kisei: So for the summer read, we're going through the book, The Hidden Lamp, and I've selected about 15 koans that we'll look at throughout the summer. And this one is case I think, yeah, 15, which is the woman lets it be, or I've just been calling it let it be. So some koans read more like a story, and this one definitely has that aspect. So I'll read it, and then I'll get I'll share a few words, and then we'll open it up for discussion. This is from China between the eighth and ninth centuries.
• 1:17
  Master Langhe Huizhu had a woman disciple who came to him for instruction. The master told her to examine the saying, let it be. He said that if she faithfully used this sentence as a scythe, she would cut down illusions and reap enlightenment. The woman followed his instructions faithfully. One day, her house burned down, and she said, let it be.
• 1:53
  Another day, her son fell into the water, and when a bystander ran to tell her, she answered, let it be. One day, she started to make fried cakes for dinner as her husband lit the fire. She prepared the batter and heated the oil, then poured a spoonful of batter into the hot oil. When she heard the sizzling sound, she was immediately enlightened. She threw the pan to the ground and jumped up and down, clapping her hands and laughing.
• 2:31
  Her husband shouted at her, what are you doing? Have you gone mad? She answered, let it be. Then she went to Huizhu, and he confirmed that she had indeed harvested the holy fruit. So a lot happened in that story.
• 2:57
  You know, with koans like this that are more of a story, often we can still find some keywords keywords, sometimes images. So there might have been aspects of this story that resonated with you that maybe were, like, the particulars of this woman's life and her situation, and that's one of the reasons that we're going through this Koan collection is that we're talking about real people. Their lives are kind of, like, shoved into a few paragraphs, so we don't know a whole lot about them, But each person's situation is unique, and sometimes aspects of the particular of somebody's life or situation or the story that gets recorded has meaning to us, makes sense, resonates on some level. So that's one aspect of the koan or and and of all of these koans is noticing that when there's a resonance or maybe there's something that feels like a teaching that's just part of the embodiment of the koan, like the clapping and laughing when something falls to the ground. That one just stuck out to me as I read it this time.
• 4:23
  But some of the, like, key aspects of the koan that I wrote down were was the word faithfully, which is repeated twice. So the teacher gives her the koan, and it's mentioned he said that if she faithfully used this sentence. And then later, just a sentence later, we hear that she faithfully used that sentence, that phrase, let it be. So we have faithfully, and then we have this phrase, let it be. This koan to me, it reads a lot like the koan moo, especially in its function.
• 5:17
  So when you work with the koan mu, you let everything become mu. So that same instruction of, like, use mu like a sword or a knife, just cutting through the discursive mind. But it's more than that. It's like all images, all sounds, all the circumstances of your life, your thoughts about those circumstances, the feelings about those circumstances become moo, moo, moo, moo. And part of that is you're letting yourself be simplified by a moo.
• 6:04
  Instead of letting the mind just kind of wander into its habitual places of worry, judge judgment, misperception, self criticism, planning, you replace thoughts with moo. And it you know, that practice does not make sense to the rational mind. Why would we do that? But the the point of it is is it's it's like we're cutting away or seeing through all the things that obscure us from our awakened nature, from the truth of non separation, from oneness, from Buddha, from the Buddha that we are, which just means our awakened nature. And so moo becomes this aid for helping us see the habitual mind for what it is, and the habitual mind goes deep.
• 7:21
  We're not just talking about, you know, some habits that you picked up that you'd like to change that will help you, like, feel better, which is, you know, beautiful, and and that can happen in our dharma practice. But but also just like this deep habit of believing that there's a separate self somewhere in here that's making all of our decisions, causing all of our movements, that's thinking all of our thoughts. And the feeling that comes with that of always being kind of on the outside of our lives. So moo is helping us see through all of that, and moo is just a word. My teacher used to say it's a word that doesn't mean anything.
• 8:22
  And so that's interesting. You're repeating a meaningless word in your head, replacing all of your thoughts or all of the thoughts that aren't necessary because we have so many. The mind might think like, oh, this is very necessary, but oftentimes we think the same thought or thoughts over and over again, day in and day out. And so moo is kind of acting as, like, a broom, and it's, like, brushing away all those extra leaves that accumulate in the mind that we take as real, that we take as ourselves. So this koan, why I'm emphasizing this so much is that's basically what the teacher was inviting this woman who we don't know her name to do is to use the phrase let it be.
• 9:32
  Let it be. Let it be. To replace thoughts, to replace worry, to replace those habitual reactions and beliefs. Let it be. Let it be.
• 9:58
  So many practices do this. Like, a couple weeks ago, we were talking about listening practice. And in listening practice, you're not you don't even need to say anything. You're just reorienting the attention to sound, to the soundscape. And in that, you're letting the mind go quiet, or more accurately, we're starting to recognize the silence of capital m mind, big mind.
• 10:39
  The alive silence, spaciousness, awakeness of our fundamental nature. So, you know, we can do that with the the koan moo, with the phrase moo or let it be or or really any word. Love. I used to use love as my anchor word that I come back to or repeat when I noticed my mind going into all sorts of different realms of thought. Or also we can open to sound or the visual field.
• 11:28
  I was talking to somebody today, and he said, oh, when I really let my awareness just see, just see, it just opens up the, like, wonder of where woah. How is anything happening at all? And so all of the senses can do that, can help presence us, help us see that we're more than our thinking mind. So this is an all inclusive practice. It can sound like, oh, they're just, like, using this word phrase as a sword to, like, bypass what's actually happening.
• 12:16
  But what the intention is is to use that phrase as a way of presencing, waking us up to, hey. Hey. Hey. You're identified with that fear story again. You're starting to see through the eyes of fear.
• 12:35
  Wake up. And when we wake up, like, the fear might still be there, but we're aware from a different place than being completely merged in the fear and reacting from the fear or whatever the thought pattern is that we're hooked into temporarily. It could be a story around loneliness that causes us to forget or miss all the ways that we are actually connected because we're repeating the story. We're playing the memories and our awareness kind of contracts. Like, some people really experience it as a physical contraction around that storyline, and we feel it in our bodies and that becomes our reality.
• 13:32
  But this practice of let it be is like a wake up. Let the fear be the fear, but you're not the fear, or that's not the whole of who you are. The fear is included in this vast spacious field of awareness, and there's room for so much in this field. And that's all you. You're all of it, and none of it by itself is the whole of who you are.
• 14:10
  So this is the heart of what we call breakthrough koans. And in a way, they demand of us a deep faith, a deep faith in our Buddha nature, a deep faith in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, a deep faith in who we really are, who everyone is is Buddha, is awake, And and a faith that we can actually experientially realize this, that it's not just an intellectual exercise or something that we can think about and it makes us feel good. Oh, interconnection. You know, it does that. Just remember these teachings can be very uplifting and and can inspire faith.
• 15:12
  But, also, this faith is a faith to to really know it for ourselves, to to not only taste it, but to begin to live from it. The faith to really see this practice to its depths. You know, they use the analogy at the end of this koan where she has this realization, and having a realization or sometimes we call it Kensho in the Japanese tradition is getting a taste or a glimpse of our true nature. And her teacher confirms it by saying, like, you've tasted the fruit. You've tasted the fruit of this practice.
• 16:04
  And so that's, you know, that's part of what we're developing faith in, that we too can taste and know the fruits of this practice, the freedom, the ease that's possible, the spaciousness, the loving kindness, the compassion. And, you know, we've all tasted it to some extent, and that's how faith develops. We have these tastes, these moments of awakening, of awareness, And sometimes they're just, like, brief little glimpses that maybe happen in Zazen or outside of Zazen. Sometimes maybe they're quite transformative experiences. Can kind of rise up in in either of those fashions, but then the that's that's like the awakening of faith.
• 17:09
  We taste what's possible. My teachers still continue to say after fifty years of practice that this practice is endless, so there are more fruits we can continue to taste, to awaken to, to know, and to familiarize ourselves with. But that's part of the intention of these kinds of breakthrough koans where you're really intensively, like, just beginning to notice, like, oh, that is thought, and this is awareness. And when I'm in thought, I'm completely identified with often, the world of the thought, the body sensation of the thought. When I'm in awareness, thoughts are freed up to come and go.
• 18:06
  That's their nature. They're not solid. They're not the whole of who we are. We can't actually pin them down, and we can know that when we're on the awareness side. So that's part of this faith that is alluded to in this koan.
• 18:29
  And that's something, you know, for us to contemplate. We don't talk about faith that much, or at least I don't talk about faith that much, but it's it's an important aspect of practice. It's different than believing something because somebody else told you. Although, in a way, it has a little bit of that flavor because before we've experienced some of the fruits of practice, we have to trust that it's possible based on maybe other people's experience or the writings of the teachers. But that's and part of what the Buddha said is don't just take my word for it.
• 19:17
  Don't just have faith in a kind of blind way, but really know it for yourself. Try these teachings out for yourself. Meditate. Look into the nature of your mind, mind, and then see. So it's really a faith that's born through experience that we're talking about.
• 19:44
  And we all might have different ways to it. You know, in a way, what we're what we're talking about in the dharma is what we know most intimately to be true. Realization or awakening to our true nature isn't like we get something on the other side. It's actually seeing what's been here all along. So what we have faith in is is we have faith in us.
• 20:16
  Like, we have faith in our true nature. We have faith in something that we've known our whole entire lives that may have been covered over or we may not have known to pay attention to it, that can be such a an interesting opening in practice is just to begin to notice that we're aware and to get curious. Well, what is this awareness? Where does it come from? Has it always been here?
• 21:01
  Have we known this since we were born? Is it with us all the time? There's a recently published book called, in this body, in this life, and the one of the editors of the book was recently at the monastery and at Heart of Wisdom. I know her first name is Esso. And it's a book about an iconoclastic teacher during post World War two Japan, Nagasawa Sozen, a woman, dharma teacher, zen teacher, ordained woman.
• 22:03
  And the book is a compilation or a collection of 30 or more stories of her her students, her female disciples in this era of post World War two Japan writing about their awakening experiences. Just kind of a rare thing. Like, oftentimes, Zen teachers tell you, like, don't write it down. Like, don't try to collect your experiences. Just live from it now.
• 22:37
  Like, let that be faith. But for whatever reason, she had her students write down their experience. And, you know, this this was a particular era, hard to imagine era of what these women lived through during the war, during the devastation of the war, but they had a particular kind of faith, and that's the thing that's touched me in reading their stories. There's this kind of faith that they're throwing themselves into practice, that they really want to awaken, that they know it's possible to see their true nature, and they're helping each other. And and the mission, there's you know, in some of them, you get a little bit of flavor of, like, what's driving them.
• 23:35
  And in some of them, they're really speaking about, like, wanting to plant new seeds in the ground of their society, seeds of awakening, of dharma practice, of Buddha nature, you know, having lived through this, period of time that was really nationalistic and violent. And that's that's an interesting drive. I think sometimes for a lot of us, faith comes through a certain kind of suffering. That maybe we taste that which isn't suffering. You know, sometimes when things are just so bleak and so dark for so long, we we taste the ground.
• 24:41
  It's like we're so down that the light of awareness just shines through. Like, somehow, we're still alive. Somehow, something's still aware that isn't suffering, that isn't identified with this suffering. So that can happen for people. You know, Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie are good examples of that on a personal level.
• 25:14
  And I think these stories in in this body, in this life are examples of that on a collective level. People who really bore witness to extreme suffering. Another aspect of this koan reminds me of Chinese folktale that maybe many of you have heard. The first time I heard it, Mushin, who's another teacher in our lineage, was sharing it during a dharma talk. And it goes, once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away.
• 26:02
  That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, we're so sorry to hear your horse ran away. This is most unfortunate. The farmer said, maybe. The next day, the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it.
• 26:22
  And in the evening, everybody came back and said, oh, isn't that lucky? What a great turn of events. Now you have eight horses. The farmer again said, maybe. The following day, his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg.
• 26:46
  The neighbors then said, oh, dear. That's too bad. And the farmer responded, maybe. The next day, officers came around to enlist people in the army. They rejected his son because he had a broken leg.
• 27:05
  Again, all the neighbors came around and said, isn't that great? And, again, he said, maybe. It's a very similar phrase to let it be. Or Suzuki Roshi used to say, is it so? Is it so?
• 27:30
  It's a reminder that we don't have to come to conclusions after every event that takes place in our life. It helps us stay open to the mysterious causes and conditions, perhaps the joy that's within loss or the loss that's within joy. You know, it's a good mantra, either maybe or is it so or let it be, when reading the note news or when on social media or when there's a lot of voices inside side seemingly paralyzed in our own minds. Let it be can be an invitation just to step back, step back into the stillness, the silence, the spaciousness that we are, that mind is, the mind before thought, and to see the larger perspective. That doesn't mean we don't celebrate joy when there's joy or don't respond.
• 28:57
  And that's, I think, you know, something that we might have gotten a message from this koan. And I appreciated Tammy was the commentator to this koan, and and she said something like, you know, what if the son was actually a really good swimmer, and she wasn't worried about him at all? Or, you know, we don't know the whole full extent of the context. But the let it be is more of a teaching of, like, right here, right now, this is what's happening. The sun fell in the water.
• 29:47
  The house caught on fire. And sometimes when we you know, those are extreme, seemingly extreme examples, but sometimes when we let ourselves just presence, this is what's happening. We can presence what's happening inside ourselves. Oh, and I'm feeling angry, and there's grief. And that allows us to be with the experience that's happening instead of just starting to react from it.
• 30:20
  Like, oh, this shouldn't be happening, and I'm gonna run into the house that's on fire and try to put it out. Sometimes that is the right decision. You know? The the let it be or the, like, coming into acceptance just allows us to be more in our response. And sometimes when you know, I find when there's, like, more extreme circumstances like are referenced in the koan that we kind of already do that.
• 31:00
  And, you know, we hear stories of people being able to do things that if they thought about it, they wouldn't be able to do, lift a car to save a child, other seemingly heroic feats. But how do we apply this, like, in our just everyday lives to practice letting it be, to take a deep breath before we respond or act, to come back to ourselves when we get lost in other people's opinions about what we should be doing or the outrage of things that are happening that are out of our control. Another way that we practice letting it be is in Zazan. That's such a perfect instruction for Zazan practice. Because that like, in Zazan, we don't need to follow our thoughts.
• 32:28
  Like, it we're actually that container of Zazen is a place where we can experiment with, like, safely. What if I don't identify with every thought? Or when I do, what if I step back and come back to the breath and see, do thoughts really come and go? Is there space around them? What happens when I don't identify or push them away?
• 33:04
  Who am I? What am I? In a way, we're when we do zazen, we're practicing this. Of course, we get caught up in our thoughts. That's part of the practice too.
• 33:21
  Of course, we fantasize and daydream and plan what we're gonna do later on that day or reminisce, but also we practice noticing that and coming back to what's present, what's here, what's being experienced through the senses, to Buddha mind that's already awake.
• 34:11
  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.