Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Awakening Is Already Here - Shonin Ashton, Zen Teacher

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Awakening Is Already Here - Shonin Ashton, 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.
• 0:17
  Shonin: It's nice to be able to look people in the eyes. So welcome. This is still the ancient way sasheen. Yep. We've been thinking about fire.
• 0:39
  I I'm thinking about the simile of the of the goldsmith that has been brought up a couple times. And one of the things that popped into my mind when thinking about that was remembering there was a motivational speaker in the... Twenty years ago named Tony Robbins. Did any of you know who this guy is? He had a signature event that capped off his seminars where he would create this fire pit where it was like 12 to 15 feet long of hot coals and people would come to his event and face their fixed ideas of who they were and what they were capable of doing.
• 1:31
  And then as a a way, a demonstration of personal empowerment and to gain confidence, the retreat would end with them walking barefoot across the coals. Sound like sasheen? I mean, in some ways, you know, we're looking at the fixed views that we have and challenging them. And that creates confidence that in our ability to meet these ideas that we've held so firmly and to walk through them. The beautiful thing about Shonin though is in addition to walking over the burning hot coals, we get to then turn attention to the wondrousness of this life and we have an opportunity to really look and see what this life is about and this wonder that we are part of.
• 2:47
  So in Shonin... Thank you. In Shonin we get to really bump up against the fixed views. Can we really get up at 03:50? Can we sit the whole week?
• 3:05
  Can we chant the whole week? And the inner critic comes up, we get to listen to these voices telling us these things about ourselves and then maybe just start to recognize that we can turn from that toward the sound. Where are you now? The sound of the Buddha's name, or to feel the vibrations in the body. Sitting sitting zazen calms the mind.
• 3:45
  When the storm of thoughts begins to slow down, we have an opportunity to look below the surface of thought and see what's there to touch, to experience this essence of life, of who we are. Perhaps we ask a question. What am I? Perhaps we ask, what is this life? Or perhaps it's a wordless prayer.
• 4:20
  The last couple of talks, I have shared some stories, experiences of two people who have touched the essence, this wonder of what is. And then they've gone on to live lives not dictated by the whims of the thinking mind or by not swayed by whatever state they happen to be in, and they were challenged by grief and by loneliness and, you know, very intense human experiences. But they they looked and they found this foundation, this essence within themselves and within this life, and they went on to live a life. Today, I'd like to share with you another story from a book called In This Body, In This Lifetime. It's a book that was written about awakening stories of Japanese women.
• 5:47
  The... This... It was... The stories were collected around post World War two in Japan, so it was a difficult time there. And up until this time, really hadn't had the opportunity to deeply practice in the same way that men did in a monastic setting.
• 6:11
  And there was a woman, Susan Nagasawa, who had the opportunity to practice. She had the aspiration and circumstances occurred that she was able to practice. She actually practiced in a monastery where she was the only woman there. And she went on to found a place for women to practice the same intense and rewarding type of practice that we are practicing here. So the style of Zen that they practiced, that she introduced for her, the...
• 7:12
  Both the laywomen and the nuns who were there with her was to practice with the koan moo initially. So this this Koan, does a dog have Buddha nature? And then the response moo. And the student concentrates on this word moo, which which means no or nothingness, emptiness, as a way to cut through the thinking mind and as a way to point at awareness. This sounds kind of like the chanting the Buddha's name, doesn't it?
• 7:59
  So as students broke through this dualistic mind and had a taste of awareness, she would have them write down the experience they had. And these stories of women experience with the wonder, with their foundation, with vastness, were collected. And then just recently discovered again by some Western women who came and then put out again in this book. So I'd like to read to you a couple of those stories. The first one...
• 8:48
  The first one is written in the first person. It starts out, I'm a 60 year old gray haired woman. Do you believe... Maybe that's why I like this story. I get to be younger.
• 9:05
  I am a 60 year old gray haired woman. So this year in May, there was a sashin at the temple in the village. In the days before it, I'd been asked by the abbess of the temple to come and help make the bedding for everyone. So she was a worker woman who was doing housework for the Shonin. There was a person who also came to help and we had a lively conversation about Shonin and she encouraged me to join them.
• 9:37
  At that time, I could... I still couldn't imagine an old village woman like me doing zazen with all those people. But our conversation was so passionate that when I came back home, I remained taken by the idea. So she would have never had the opportunity to practice, but she felt it, and here it was. So she she learned Za Zen, she got a lesson, and then the the reverend said that even an uneducated or old person could practice wonderfully as long as they had trust.
• 10:18
  This changed her heart and she really she wanted to try. So she she came and sat in on a couple of the Za Zen sessions and she was so touched by this. When it ended she she wanted to do more. She wanted to sit a full sashin, and so she found out that there was one coming up. The long awaited sashin came.
• 10:44
  With the morning bell, I jumped to my feet and sat at my assigned place. For the first two days, I was totally absorbed. By the third day, whatever I saw, whatever I heard was so precious that I had to suppress the impulse to break into a dance. I wonder what that would look like. Instead, I just sat more and more with all my might.
• 11:10
  The reverend Shudo was always telling me, if only you will come... Be completely honest. Follow the Roshi's instructions without fail and you will be able to awaken. So when going to Dokusan, this is like Sanzen, I was honest about how things were going and would always return empowered. However, when I held my hands as instructed, it felt like it was going so slowly and without realizing it, was clutching them into the fist.
• 11:40
  She was really trying so hard. And I kept forgetting myself and just kept shouting, Moo! They got to chant out loud at this. So the whole room was doing this. Then came the day of Bodhidharma whom I worship and the anniversary of the death of a previous abbot.
• 12:01
  So this woman had... It was a Buddhist country, of course, but she wasn't allowed to practice in this way. She had ritualistic practice at home. She probably had a home altar and she had offered incense. But...
• 12:17
  So she she was familiar with worship, but not sitting. But she resolved that without fail she would show them that she could do it, so she really tried. So sitting with all her might, suddenly she had an insight. I understood that myself, the Buddha, paper screens, dogs, cats, horses, fields, mountains, anything and everything was inside the circle. So she's she's visualizing the Enso, and she's imagining that her whole world and everyone she knows is there, and she's elated.
• 12:56
  She felt so grateful. So that night when she went to... Or the next day when she went into Shonin in her elation, she she told the Roshi about this joy and she was... Tears were falling down her face. And the Roshi scolded her and said, destroy this circle.
• 13:24
  Come back. Has that ever happened to you and Shonin? Destroy this circle and come back. She she was conceptually thinking about it. She wasn't there yet.
• 13:39
  But she took she took the advice. She went back and she forgot about herself. She thought she forgot about clenching her fists and she just chanted, Moo. The next day at 3PM, she hit the bell to go into Shonin once again. And when she started to take a few steps toward the room, she was hit from behind, whack, by the the stick.
• 14:14
  They use the stick in practice to wake people up to, if they're drowsy, they pop them on the back in this area a little bit to shock them. So she was going into Shonin and she felt it whack on her back, and she immediately shouted, Moo! And in that moment, that's what it took. Her mind opened and she broke through. So she went in to talk with the Viroshi and she was testing her to make sure to see, is this just another intellectual understanding or is this with your body and heart?
• 14:59
  Do you feel this? And she writes that she was able to easily answer all the various questions one after the other. She was so grateful she broke down crying. She understood Zha Zen then. She thought, Oh, I am Buddha.
• 15:16
  I am the great earth. The great earth is also Buddha. And here comes the details of her life. When cleaning the toilet, the toilet is Buddha. Excrement is Buddha.
• 15:30
  She saw that it wasn't just some lofty idea, but where this and life meet. And then she goes on, whatever I see, I'm so grateful for it that I can't help but put my hands together. I am truly an old peasant woman from a village, and I know nothing. But thanks to this abbess, I was able to realize that everything is one, and I am its origin. So that's just a very dramatic and dynamic story of touching this essence.
• 16:18
  The last time I was here, I told you a story about the Korean Zen master, Da Hong Shonin. She had a different story. She was a young child. She was in a household that was exiled from their home, forced to live in starvation conditions, felt the ire of her frustrated father and escaped to the forest, but was something in her sense that there was more to this life than just the suffering. She said, What was what was all there...
• 17:14
  Was this all there was to life? What was the point of an existence? Intuitively, sensed there was something more, but what was it? She spent days thinking, what is it? She wanted to see it.
• 17:28
  And then one day, it came to her. She knew. She felt it in her being so warm and wonderful, this this understanding that she called it Appa, Father. It was the inherent nature that she was in touch with, her true nature. She cried out, Dad, Appa, filled with joy knowing that this was her true parent.
• 17:58
  Years later, she said, if I hadn't been so young and educated, I might have called it Buddha nature or true nature, but all that I knew at that time was it was completely full in love, of full of love and warmth, I just called it daddy. And then I talked about Deepa Ma. She was the woman who had just such a tragic life, educated only through the fifth grade, married at 14, maybe 12, knew her husband for a week and then he left. And then two years later she goes to live with him. They are childless for ten years.
• 18:48
  She finally conceives and then within three years two of the three children are dead. And then her husband dead. She's left in a foreign country with her health in shambles and only this sense... And having been denied the ability to practice as well, saying you have to wait till you're older. And finally, she feels like I'll die if I don't practice.
• 19:14
  She has this desire and the opportunity opens up for her. She goes and begins to meditate and wholeheartedly practice deepens. And for her, it was so simple. Something extraordinary happened. A simple moment.
• 19:40
  It was daytime. She was sitting on the floor practicing among a group of meditators, and an instantaneous transition took place so quiet and delicate that it seemed as if nothing happened at all. I did not know, she said, And yet, in her life, something had been profoundly and irrevocably changed. So different, the experiences of these women. So different, yet the same.
• 20:23
  This is how Dai Hong, Shonin describes it. This Buddha nature is your fundamental eternal life and is the foundation that encompasses the entire universe. However, most people don't realize this foundation is already within them. If you awaken to the Buddha nature that is in you, at that instant you become a Buddha. This Buddha nature is in every life, and every life is inherently Buddha.
• 21:02
  So different and yet the same. How could it be any other way? All these teachings come from different continents, different times, different personalities, different cultures and languages, but they all point to the same thing. They all say, Look within. This is in you.
• 21:32
  It's not somewhere else. See beyond the trap of this mind that tells you what to think, that has fixed ideas, this duality, the right and wrong, good and bad. Likes and dislikes, this small self. See beyond that and touch. Touch this wonder.
• 22:06
  Come to know it. Rest there, and then live from there. This week, we've been chanting the name of the Buddha, and experiences arise. For some, it's been a... An experience of being in the body in ways that they have never been before.
• 22:37
  For others, it feels fuzzy and muzzy, and they can't quite experience the sharpness that they're used to. Some people find it so helpful in settling in and other people are distracted by all the different sounds. As many of us as there are here are diff... There are that many different experiences. Yet our task is to stay with the experience of whatever arises, to work with that, to work with what arises.
• 23:21
  And in fact, what arises is the very help that we need to see through the delusion. Chanting, meditating stabilizes the mind. And then when it's time, we can direct attention to this stillness, perhaps with a question, perhaps with a sense of devotion or longing, a prayer, and rest there and look. The mind wanders and we return again and again. We are walking the ancient way.
• 24:16
  We are walking the ancient way. It's fun to hear these stories. You know? It's like, it's good to know that this is possible. It's fun to hear all the variety.
• 24:36
  Chosin Roshi told a story about her time at the Zen Center in Los Angeles. They had a library there, and Chosin... Or Hogan's teacher, Philip Koplow's book, The Three Pillars of Zen was in the library. And when you pulled the book out of the shelf and opened it, it fell to the page in the book that told the stories of everybody's enlightenment. This is a page that everyone wanted to look at.
• 25:07
  And, you know, of course, it's interesting and intriguing, but there's... You know, we have to be careful because the mind can get so fixated on, Yeah, I have to have it like Deepa Ma had it or it won't be real enlightenment. Or, What if I, you know, if I really pour my heart into chanting the Buddha's name but I don't have any explosive awareness where I know that I'm one with everyone. Know, then is that not me being a good enough zeni or, you know, like the inner critic has all this space to come in and make judgments and decide how things are. You think I'll be okay if I can just get enlightened.
• 26:03
  There are... There's a set of pictures. They come from the twelfth century that show this path to enlightenment. They're called the ox herding pictures. Perhaps some of you have seen them.
• 26:23
  And in this, it tells the story of us going from completely unaware to living Buddha nature in this world. It starts out where the ox symbolizes the mind, and then there's young ox herder. And in first picture, there's just the ox herder kind of looking around. They maybe... We maybe get the idea that there's something, but we're not even sure yet.
• 27:07
  In the next picture, we start to see, oh no, it's called seeing the traces. Like maybe we met someone who has something that we sense and we find out why are... What is it? And we find out they meditate and we think, maybe that could help. I want that.
• 27:27
  I want that. And the third picture is where the ox sitter actually sees the ox, just the back half of it. But, you know, this could be, like, for me, when I went to the first meditation instruction class at the temple in Portland, And at that time I was a chiropractor, and the next day I went to work and I was getting the hot packs out of the hydrocollator unit, which I have done a zillion times. But that particular time after the intro to meditation, I picked up the hot... I can't see it.
• 28:11
  I picked up the hot pack and it was... Something was different. I was like, oh, wow. It's it's different in here after that. I I've I've seen the ox.
• 28:23
  I'm gonna I'm gonna go look again. So something happened, something happened with you. What was it that caught you? You saw it. You wanted it.
• 28:34
  The next picture is catching the ox and in this picture there's just a ring through this giant powerful ox's nose and this kid's got a little rope and he's trying to get this ox to behave. This is we we first sit down and we realize, oh, this enlightenment thing might not be so easy as I thought. Right? The mind is crazy. So we have to tame we have to tame it.
• 29:02
  We have to train the mind. That's the next step. Training the mind to sit, becoming skillful in calming the mind, learning what works for us and what doesn't in what situations, and really just starting to gather and be able to sit with some degree of focus, concentration. The sixth picture which was my screensaver for a long time, I particularly like this one called Riding the Ox. It shows another guy, the little ox herder, is able to let go of the nose ring and actually sit on top of the ox.
• 29:47
  And he's sitting, he's not even looking where he's going. He's so relaxed that he can look off to the side and at the same time play what I think is a recorder. So life is good. It might be a flute, but I think it's a recorder. Life is good and there's some ease that's come into practice now.
• 30:15
  The mind is able to settle. We have an inkling of what this is like and there's ease. The next picture, the ox herder is just sitting in front of his house. The ox is gone. The ox is settled.
• 30:29
  The mind knows to settle. And then the following picture, the eighth one, is the Enso. The mind has dropped away, the body has dropped away, there's just this unity. Now, I was just like the lady, the old gray haired lady, the washer woman. I thought that that was the end.
• 30:58
  I was so shocked when I looked at the ox herding pictures for the first time and it didn't... Was eight was what I thought was gonna be 10. I had an idea of what this path was and what enlightenment would be and it stopped at the conceptualizing of oneness. But what happens? What happens next?
• 31:26
  There's two more pictures. In this ninth picture, there's no ox herder and there's no picture. There's just the house. There's this line, there's... Dogen, the twelfth century ancestor of ours, wrote in in a text called the Genjo Koan, to study the Buddha way is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self.
• 31:55
  To forget the self is to be enlightened by the 10,000 dharmas. To be... To forget the self is to be enlightened by everything. And in this ninth picture, there's no ox herder and there's no ox. There's just the world.
• 32:12
  They're just sitting. They are just that, enlightened by everything, the world, one. And then in the last picture, there's this happy jolly Buddha going out and into the marketplace, responding, meeting people, just responding to what is. It reminds me of the line, knowing what is, I respond to what is. So I'd like to end by sharing a little bit of, or a writing.
• 33:00
  Here's the book. Some writing of, Maizumi Roshi, Hogan and Shonin's Teacher. It's called do it over and over and over. He's... He he starts by by quoting this, passage from Dogen again.
• 33:28
  To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the 10,000 dharmas, and to be enlightened by the 10,000 dharmas is to free one's body and mind and the body and mind of others. That's that last picture of the ox herding picture. He says, Our practice is much more than acquiring some knowledge.
• 34:00
  Instead, the implication of practice is doing over and over and over and over. In a way, that's what we do in Zazen. Of course, Zazen is not just learning something over and over. As the Dogenzhi Dogenzhi says, it is realization itself. One thing.
• 34:31
  In other words, do not separate practice and realization. Do not separate this life and realization. We do not practice for the sake of realization. Realization is already here. That's what all of these people said when they saw this truth.
• 34:59
  Realization is already here. Each of us has some realization. One person more, one person less. You get what you get? When you do zazen day after day, time after time, moment after moment, you are manifesting yourself as that realization.
• 35:24
  This is a great teaching here. Repeat what you know by merging your life into what you know or what you have studied, and do this over and over again. This is where freedom is found. This is where confidence comes from. Dogan says, To study the Buddha way is to study oneself.
• 35:52
  How do we study ourselves? How do we practice ourselves? I say we, but it's always singular. My life, your life. The Buddhadharma, the one body is completely my life.
• 36:15
  But knowing is not enough. That's why the word learn or study is not quite sufficient. They do not convey the sense of over and over and over. In other words, minute by minute, how do we live our lives as the one body, the one life, no more or no less? Dogan says to study the self is to forget the self.
• 36:47
  When the Dharma and our life are separate, when I do not see my life as the one body, this is delusion. When I see they are together, this is enlightenment. How can you forget the self? To forget the self is to be enlightened by the 10,000 dharmas. To be enlightened is to be confirmed or verified by the 10,000 dharmas.
• 37:22
  Life is verified by itself. We are life. So when we practice or when we chant, just sit, just chant. This is oneness. Then being totally open, we're nothing other than all space and all time.
• 38:03
  For the most part, we're not just sitting, we're nursing delusions one after the other. There's this feeling that I am chanting, I am sitting. Instead, there's some kind of maneuvering. I... I'm taking this action.
• 38:30
  This is not something that is apart from who you are. Make your life the chant. Make your life the sitting. This is what your life is already. Such a life is totally open and full and not conscious of self.
• 38:59
  Each day we have here is precious. This this container is so rare. We have friends. We're taken care of. Food, a bed.
• 39:17
  It doesn't happen often. We have this chance to put aside the busyness of our lives and just look. There's wonder and awe and beauty here, to be felt and seen, take advantage of this opportunity to look deeply into this life.
• 39:57
  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.