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Prayer and Zen -Chozen, Roshi · 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
  Chozen: Morning, everyone. Thank you for gathering today to practice together. This is manifestation of one of the three treasures, sangha. And thank you to anyone who is online for joining us, too. It widens the field of, we hope, positive influence out of this room.
• 1:02
  So I'm going to talk today about something that we almost never talk about in Zen practice, which is prayer. We talk about karma, we talk about the stream of the uncountable forces of cause and effect that determine our life, most of them not in our control, and we find out like in the last few weeks there have been some unusual and violent weather systems where, you know, one part of the country it's 75 degrees and another part it's hailstones this big. So as much as we would like to control the weather, we can't. So most of the forces of cause and effect that are impinging on us all the time, we don't have control over. And we don't usually admit that, that the forces that move our life are out of our control until we get sick.
• 2:10
  So I had a bad cold a few days ago and as a physician when people came in complaining of colds I would think, Oh, just a cold! And then when I get a cold I'm like, Medicine should learn how to cure this, this is terrible. So we're not even in control of the viruses that give us colds. Forces like the wind, the rain, tornadoes, the snowpack, the drunken driver on the road, the various viruses that are floating around all the time in the air we breathe, the growth of abnormal cells that we call cancer in a hidden place in our body, or the whims of our hormonal system or the whims of our government. You know, we have so little control when we actually admit that, when we actually look at all the forces that impinge on us.
• 3:08
  And maybe that's why our mind darts around so much, which you realize, of course, when you're sitting quietly in meditation. Why it goes to the past, trying to change something that cannot be changed, the past. The past can't be changed, but how we hold the past can be changed. Our attitude towards the past can be changed, especially when we realize that everything that happened in the past led us to be here now together. Everything was the path.
• 3:46
  And perhaps that's why the mind continually darts into the future, because we have a subconscious realization that no matter how much we plan for the future, trying to plan a safe path forward, the future will be different from our plans. Just think of booking a flight a month ago or two months ago, Oh yeah, I'm going go to Florida, it's going take this long, I'll have a layover. And now you might have an eight hour wait at the airport before you can even get on, or you might not get on. So our mind knows that it can't control most of the forces of cause and effect that impact our lives, but it keeps trying to assert control through thinking, through ceaseless thinking. And that's a discovery that we make when we sit down and meditate.
• 4:39
  There are ways we can influence the stream of karma. So we do courses on the precepts and we talk all the time about living by the precepts as a way to join our thoughts and actions with a stream of beneficial karmic forces. So, prayer might be a way to affect the stream of karma in a beneficial way. So let's just think about prayer. Think about, do you pray?
• 5:18
  Just close your eyes for a minute and think, Do I pray, and if so, what kind of prayer? What do I pray about or for? So I actually have no idea about anyone here except Dor, about what anybody else prays for. I do know that Dor does the baruka sometimes, yes. So what is that prayer about?
• 6:17
  guest1: Yeah, and I think one, it's about gratitude. It's really, again, coming to be grateful for all the elements that are in our lives and whether it's the wine and or like the juice or whatever we're putting the fruit and like that we get to eat and also our hands in it like wine or juice. We're gonna do that without our involvement with Finished Fruit. Mhmm. The process and and the bread and the like the amount of work and the amount of people it took to have that as well.
• 7:05
  Like, you know, you dip it in salt for this one too. So, again, it's just this weekly reminder of of gratitude and kind of like what we do here with the ancestors. It's like, this is something that's been passed down from ancestor to ancestor to ancestor. So again, it's this recognition of the ancestral lineage. And then through that again, it's like gratitude and like acknowledgement of lineage is where it opens up the field of reverence and connection with the oneness.
• 7:50
  Chozen: So, gratitude, prayer of gratitude, and then prayer of reverence. So, Bruh Hathoy Adonai is, Blessed art thou God, King of the universe, right? So that's a reverential prayer. In a similar way, when we bow down at the end of the day or time of practice, we're not bowing down to a stone idol it's a prayer of reverence. So thanksgiving and prayer of reverence.
• 8:20
  Thank you. Anybody else? Do you pray, and if so, what stimulates you to pray, causes you to pray, and how do you pray. There's no right or wrong here, okay? It's just what you do.
• 8:38
  Sushin.
• 8:41
  guest 2: Okay. Before we eat, we often give any bit of our food. What is that offering? And when I do that, I say to myself, starvation not take hold, may starvation do anything but
• 9:15
  Chozen: the best or
• 9:16
  guest 2: something along those lines.
• 9:17
  guest 2: So that's a prayer, I believe.
• 9:20
  Chozen: It is. Do other people do that during karaoke? Just any kind of prayer like, May other people have an abundance of food like we do. Because we know there are people starving in many places in the world now. And you know, when I used to teach mindful eating for a weekend retreat, when we'd do this water tastes like heavenly nectar, the wash water that we wash our bowls with, and people would question that.
• 9:50
  They would say, Why do we say this water tastes like garbage water. But I would ask, So to whom in the world would this water be heavenly nectar? And there's all kinds of people in the world to whom this water would be heavenly nectar. And it has the fragrance and spices and flavors of what we've eaten. So it's like a little reprise of what we ate.
• 10:21
  Anybody else who prays? It redirects the karmic energy, yes. So instead of flowing in the direction of, I don't like this person, blah blah blah, you redirect it in terms of, May they have a beneficial life, or whatever you say. And that benefits you too, of course. Opens your heart.
• 11:34
  For all of us, for all of us we need to create new habit energy. And it's hard when we're as old as we are, right? When we're an adult, there's like so many years that have gone by where we have some bad habits we have to change bad habits of body, but those bad habits come from the mind. So, habits of the mind. Anybody else?
• 11:56
  Anything about how you pray? We have a couple of people over here.
• 12:21
  guest3: Yeah. Before bed, I like to offer the merit of the day's practice to right now, I've just been focusing on the people in my little pod
• 12:34
  Chozen: area. Mhmm.
• 12:35
  guest3: Because I'm not sort of, like, the head the
• 12:39
  guest 2: dorm. And so when I look
• 12:40
  guest3: to my right, there's a few people, and I wanna look to my
• 12:44
  Chozen: left. Mhmm.
• 12:45
  guest3: People. And I'm offering the merit to them and hoping that they rest well.
• 12:58
  guest 2: And I
• 12:59
  guest3: noticed that if there was any, like, conflicts throughout the day or, you know, anything like that. It sort of just dissolves away. And I've noticed that I feel a lot lighter and just so at ease, ready to
• 13:20
  guest 2: go to sleep.
• 13:23
  Chozen: We talk about giving away the merit of whatever happened during the day, and that's not easy. We like to hold on to the good stuff, right? But by giving it away, as you said, you feel lighter. It's like it doesn't really belong to you totally, and give it away. And I think maybe many of us prayed before we went to bed, and your parents come in and tuck you in and you had a little prayer.
• 13:51
  So that's a lovely way to end the day with some kind of prayer or wish, earnest wish. Thank you. Jennifer, did you have your hand up?
• 14:06
  guest4: When my kids is in pretty serious distress, I find myself praying that they don't want their life, that they see that it's temporary. I don't know exactly what I'm praying to, but it's just putting it out.
• 14:21
  Chozen: As an earnest wish for them, because you love them and you'd like their life to go well. So the people we love, often we might offer prayers for them and then expand it to the people in a category, right, or expand it to the dorm, which is very sweet. Now everybody who sleeps in his dorm knows that they are getting a little blessing at night, which is very sweet. Thank you. So we do chant here for people who are ill or dying, right?
• 15:02
  That's part of our normal service. Not that they be cured, but that they can remain serene in the midst of change, of illness, old age, and death, which is our wish for ourselves too. In other traditions this is called prayers of intercession. So I'm going to talk about now categories of prayer. Prayers of intercession.
• 15:25
  Intercession technically means you're standing between the person who's troubled and God and asking God or some power out there to help this person. So in the Buddhist tradition we're not asking God, you know, a certain like you're taught in Sunday school, it seems like there's a guy up there with a beard and hopefully a benevolent smile and some angels to do their bidding. But I like the Jewish tradition where you don't name God because God is much bigger than a guy or even a lady. So that would technically be called a prayer of intercession, but we don't have anybody between us and the person we're wishing, that they're able to be serene through all the troubles that a human life brings about. So let's look at some other different kinds of prayers.
• 16:32
  We have intercession, chanting for people that are ill or dying. And then traditionally in the Zen world you chant at forty nine days because like the person has gone through what you might call the bardo or the various stages before they're actually dead and being dispersed, and then at one year and two years and so on. So there is a kind of prayer which is, Give me what I want and take away what I don't want, like, Give me the strength to blah blah blah, or Please help Johnny stop smoking dope and goofing off in school so he can get better grades and get into college. Those of us who are parents know how that goes. So this kind of prayer is called petitionary or a supplication prayer.
• 17:21
  This usually isn't a part of Buddhist practice partly because we admit that we don't know what the appropriate path is for anybody. I mean, we can try to guide our children on a path, but there's no guarantee that's going to happen, and they may have to circle out and get in some trouble before they actually learn. This is the inefficiency of being a human being. You have to start all over again and learn what not to do and what to do. That's why I think the Tulku system in Tibetan Buddhism is brilliant, you know, just like you're reaching the end of your life and you just package up whatever goodness you've learned and a good way to behave and to be, and then you send it to a child that's being born.
• 18:13
  So there is a Reddit post about prayer and Buddhist practice, and some people wrote that while they might pray for mundane things, this is not seen as aligning with the core teachings of Buddhism. Because suffering is self created, individuals are the only ones that can stop it. And we know that, those of us who are parents or have good friends who've gotten into trouble, we know that we can't prevent this. We can guide, but it doesn't mean that the person is going to take our guidance. So we can pray for their serenity, eventual serenity or eventual peace, but we can't pray for specific things.
• 19:04
  So there are also prayers of gratitude Oh, back to specific things. So people over the years, since I've been teaching over the decades, people have come to me and said, Oh, I just want a boyfriend or I just want a girlfriend. Is it okay to pray for a boyfriend or a girlfriend? Be careful what you pray for, you need to be really specific or frame it in the right way, because you might get a boyfriend and that might be a big problem. And hopefully you'll learn from that.
• 19:41
  So you might say something like, If
• 19:45
  guest1: it
• 19:45
  Chozen: would benefit me and the rest of the world, I would like an appropriate partner to help me carry out my vows in the world, or something like that. But you have to leave in the if because it might not happen. So you have to be okay if it doesn't happen. And of course, even if we get a difficult partner or a relationship turns difficult, can learn from that, so that's okay too. So there are prayers of gratitude when we do get what we want.
• 20:20
  We give thanks for this delicious Thanksgiving turkey and the yams with marshmallows on top and the pumpkin pie with a cool whip on top that we are about to eat. I framed it this way because my mom was living in a retirement home South of Portland, and it was pretty much Christian based, and that irritated my mom even though she's Christian she felt it should be much broader. And so every evening at dinner somebody would offer a prayer, and it irritated her that it was always a Christian prayer. So when her time came, she did a prayer like this: We give thanks for the delicious turkey and for the meatloaf and for the gravy. And then they called her aside later and said, Your prayers are too long.
• 21:08
  So she got revenge by making them even longer and more specific. But this kind of prayer is called the prayer of thanksgiving, prayer of gratitude, prayer of thanksgiving, you mentioned, Nuh-uh. And we do bow to the Buddha, as I said, at the end of our chanting services, and we say one bow to the Buddha, usually we add, In gratitude for the teachings that lead to freedom, something like that. That this was offered, these discoveries of the Buddha about how to end our own suffering have been transmitted down through the generations for two thousand five hundred and sixty years and have come to us. So that's what our gratitude is, that they are accessible to us and we can use them directly to suffer less.
• 22:04
  Or sometimes we say, We bow in humility, raising up our potential for greater wisdom and compassion, that's what this is. Originally it came in India from lifting up the feet of the guru people would bow at the feet of the guru and actually lift the guru's feet up. But here we're raising up our own potential for enlightenment, to live an enlightened life for greater wisdom and greater compassion, loving kindness, greater equanimity. Or we might be asking that our potential for living an awakened life be realized through our practice. So you could consider our entire chanting practice as a prayer of rejoicing and gratitude.
• 22:50
  So some of the chants that we do are like poems that have emerged from a person's experience of awakening, and they're not to be analyzed by the rational mind, they're just to be honored as poems and prayers of rejoicing and gratitude. Then there are also prayers of wonder how beautiful, how wonderful! And maybe, you know, like the buruka has many of these elements mixed in, right? And I love that it has salt because it's honoring the tears and the sweat that have gone into any human life, including the life of the people who brought this food to us. And so when we see something very, very beautiful, we might add a little prayer, May everyone be able to experience this beauty, this wonder.
• 23:51
  Sometimes at the monastery when we step outside of the cafeteria doors in the evening after dinner, we're just awestruck at the beauty of the sunset. We get to see a fairly big stretch of sky in all kinds of colors. And then we call out sunset alert so people don't miss it. In Christianity or Judaism this might be called prayers of adoration or devotion to the Creator or the creations of the Creator. So, same internal process: wonder, adoration, and gratitude.
• 24:30
  And then it's framed a little differently in different religions. Another kind of prayer in other traditions are prayers of confession and repentance. Our version is a monthly service called Fusatsu, which anyone can join in, excuse me, which anyone can join in in person or Do we do it online? Do we offer it online? No.
• 25:01
  We might think about that. In Vosatsa we bring to mind and heart the unskillful and hurtful things that we have said or done, and we acknowledge them, and then we let them go. This is very important. We acknowledge them fully, and then we let them go with a determination to free ourselves of the need to hurt others, as you alluded to, Tamra, to free ourselves of the need to hurt others or ourselves. This is important, the need to hurt others or ourselves.
• 25:39
  I'm talking inner critic when I say hurt ourselves. So this release isn't a denial of the harm that we've done, but it's very necessary because if we don't release, then we've just packed more in the garbage can of ingredients for the inner critic to do its harmful work. So we don't want it the image in my mind, because I'm very visual, is somebody carrying around this big black plastic garbage bag, and then everything they've done wrong, they stuff it into the garbage bag, and the load gets heavier and heavier. So Fusatsu isn't that. Fusatsu is acknowledging what we've done, and then releasing it and vowing not to do it again.
• 26:28
  So we do have prayers of confession and repentance. In Buddhism prayer could be experienced as a devotional practice. So the devotion to God that's expressed in the burucha or other Christian, Muslim, or Jewish prayers, has an element in Buddhism. So we actually have a lot of devotional practices aimed at cultivating the qualities that we assign to enlightened beings or great beings: compassion, wisdom, inner transformation. So our META or loving kindness practice is an example: May I be free from fear and anxiety.
• 27:14
  May I be at ease. May I be happy. So the May I be free from is removing the difficult things, the fear and anxiety that cause difficulty in our life. May I be at ease as a kind of balance, an easeful life as a balanced life, and then May I be happy? And I've said this many times, but I'll keep saying it, it isn't the kind of happiness in the advertisements where somebody is at the top of a roller coaster and there are fireworks in the back and they are drinking a coke.
• 27:49
  It's not like that. It's just the simple happiness of I'm tired and I get to lie down in bed, or I'm thirsty and I get a drink of water. And here we take that water from the tap, and we're so lucky because we have pure water in the tap. Or I'm hungry and I get something to eat. So that's the kind of basic happiness that we would wish for everyone in the world, that if they're hungry they have food, if they're thirsty they have water, if they're tired they have a place to lie their body down.
• 28:30
  So we say, Then, may others be free from fear and anxiety. And it could be a certain person or it could be just general broadcast out, May others be free from fear and anxiety. And I think anxiety is pervasive in our culture, it's the pervasive form of fear. And now of course the news just makes us more and more anxious about wars and people suffering. Because the news now is transmitted through pictures and videos, it just makes it cuttingly real, the suffering that people are experiencing.
• 29:15
  So even in the children's program now, we're doing a little chant of loving kindness for ourselves, for others, and then for everyone. So we have a natural wish which may emerge as, May those in Gaza, Sudan, Iran, and Israel be at peace. But we also have to know realistically there are, what is it, 44, 74 wars going on, small or large, in the world at any given time. It's a wish, it's a hope, but we know that realistically from the beginning of human like beings there has been war and conflict. And probably that will never end because of our ignorance.
• 30:11
  But we can wish it. We can still wish it for ourselves and for others. One source says, Prayers are focused on benefiting all sentient beings rather than seeking personal favors in Buddhism. So again, not, I want this for me, but for I want everyone else. And I love saying this, this is from Thich Nhat Hanh, If we're a little bit more at peace, the whole world is a little bit more at peace.
• 30:50
  So that's what our practice is about. As we change for the better, we change the world. We change everybody we come in contact with, and then who they come in contact with, and so on. So sometimes we recite mantras. Does anybody here have a mantra practice?
• 31:12
  Yeah? Do you want to say anything about it or not?
• 31:18
  guest 2: You go ahead.
• 31:19
  Chozen: No, no. I am curious about your experience.
• 31:26
  guest 2: So I learned a kanon mantra, a kanzeyon mantra. It's very short. It goes on, auto, a r o, auto, rikia, rikia, sohaka. On, auto, rikia, sohaka. And that's just another addition to the field of karma devotion practice that I engage in whenever I remember.
• 31:55
  Chozen: When you remember? Yeah. I was gonna ask you, when do you do that mantra?
• 32:02
  guest 2: Sometimes when I'm tangled up in frustration or anxiety or just acute challenge just as a gesture towards softness and may all my experiences right now benefit me and others. So just in the face of difficulty or just like mind that does not want to stop, just inserts the ball of condoms, energy.
• 32:41
  Chozen: Yes. And do you chant it fast or slowly, or how do you do it?
• 32:48
  guest 2: It depends on the context, but kind of medium, fast, like a nice brisk walk, I would say. So
• 33:00
  Chozen: we don't talk a lot about mantra practice, but I do talk about it in the Jizo book. But mantra practice, as Onshin indicated, is a substitution, can function as a substitution for when our mind is not going down good paths. We can substitute a mantra. Substitution is good. It's like when you have a little child and they're crawling over to poke something metal into an outlet, you substitute, you grab them and you take them over and give them a crayon and a piece of paper, right?
• 33:34
  Something that is not harmful. And we have to do that with our little child mind that just keeps obsessing over things that are negative and harmful. And I'm talking again, inner critic. So when we find that's happening, that the mind is on a negative path, then to bring in a mantra and there are lots of different mantras people make up their own mantras sometimes too But there are mantras associated with many of the Bodhisattvas in Buddhism. Om Manipadme Om is also a Kanon mantra.
• 34:14
  And Om is said to be the sound that the universe makes, if you could hear it, Aum. So you are aligning yourself with the vibrations of the whole universe when you say Aum. And many mantras begin with Aum. So I actually recommend mantra practice. If you're troubled by a mind that keeps bringing up difficulty and is obsessing over it and won't let it go, mantra can be very powerful.
• 34:51
  And if the mind is really agitated, can do it fast, like, Om Mani Padme, Om Mani Padme, or Om Kaka, Kabhi Sanma, Esoaka, Om Kaka. And then as the mind quiets down, it can become slower, And then it can become very slow, can be one syllable per breath, like,
• 35:18
  guest4: Ka,
• 35:22
  Chozen: Ka, like that. So try it out, it's a really interesting practice. When we were up at Larch Mountain we had a woman who later switched to Tibetan Buddhist practice, and she did a whole weekend of mantra practice, and she said after two days of doing mantra pretty much all the time that the mantra began doing her instead of her doing the mantra. The mantra just carried on with its own energy. She said, That was a wonderful shift, so you might try that.
• 35:59
  So we can say that the sutras are devotional practice, bowing is a devotional practice, offering incense we do the food offering when we remember the ancestors All those are devotional practices. And when I'm up there, if I'm doing the food offering, we offer tea and sweets in remembrance of Maisumi Roshi and Buddhadharma and other teachers. I always say in my mind, I hope you enjoy this. But here is a secret at the Zen Center in Los Angeles, the person who did the food offering, who prepared it and then cleaned it up, got to eat it. So that was a popular position because it was usually some little Manju sweet.
• 36:52
  So, somebody else has written, In Buddhism, there's the idea of being connected to reality in a very direct way. We don't see reality as something to be manipulated until we're happy. When we step back, when we're open, somehow reality communicates itself to us. If we open our hearts, we somehow feel connected to the universe and to others. So this is another kind of prayer: opening the heart and feeling connected to the universe and others.
• 37:24
  Sometimes we're inspired maybe by witnessing an act of kindness or by something that's beautiful, like a rainbow or flowers or any aspect of nature, and our heart opens and we feel uplifted. When the heart opens, we feel naturally connected to others and then to wider reality. And we could call this prayer faith or we could call it devotion. It's related to another type of prayer called listening or contemplative prayer. And I heard once, I can't remember now, but I heard a nun talking about this was an older nun that she did what we would call meditation in the morning.
• 38:11
  And the first period of meditation, which she said was about a half an hour and forty five minutes, she would reflect on what had happened, what was happening, and offer the kinds of prayers we've just talked about. But then, know, asking God for help and so on, but then she would spend the next half hour to forty five minutes just in we would call wide open awareness. And sometimes, what we call in Buddhism, something comes up which is not from our thinking mind, but is from that deep river of prajnaparamita, of wisdom beyond wisdom. Something floats up and we go, Oh yeah, of course, that's what's happening to that person, or That's what I should do. And in Christianity this nun said that sometimes God would speak to her, but not always.
• 39:15
  She could sit there for half an hour, forty five minutes, day after day, and there would be no response, but sometimes there was. And what she said, which I just love, is, God can't call in when the line is busy. So we might say prajnaparamita wisdom beyond wisdom can't bubble up through a thick cloud of thought, you know, the mud of our thoughts and emotions. We have to clear that away and then wisdom can arrive. So this is our version.
• 39:51
  Our version is sitting in silence and listening. And we just did a week long retreat on listening to sounds. And then we notice when we've collapsed the field of awareness and we're listening to the sound of our own thoughts again. And when we notice, then we can switch to listening to sounds, the sounds of the music of the universe. And we get respite from the churning thoughts in our mind which only create difficulty for us and others.
• 40:26
  So I encourage you to experiment with different forms of prayer. It's not a sin in Buddhism to do that. You don't have to confess it in the confessional. There are many types of prayer which are totally appropriate to our Buddhist practice. So try them out, mantra.
• 40:51
  The Buddha said, Don't believe anything just because I said it. I'm paraphrasing, he didn't say it that way, but that's basically what he said. Don't believe anything just because I said it. Why would you believe that? You have to try it out.
• 41:09
  You have to try it out and prove it for yourself, and then it is yours forever. So please try out prayer, if you'd like to, and see what happens. Thank you.
• 41:29
  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.