Sid Bolotin gives us "Four Questions"

“I have four questions,” stated the man as he sat before his teacher.

“Proceed,” the teacher responded softly.

“Who am I?”

“Who do you think you are?” replied the teacher.

“Well, I’m me,” answered the man.

“And, just who is me?” asked the teacher.

“Me. I’m me. That’s who I am.”

“And, once again, who, or what is ‘me’?” continued the teacher.

“I don’t really know. That’s why I’m asking you. You’re my teacher.”

“Hmm,” replied the teacher, “I don’t know either. What’s your second question?”

Slightly taken aback, the man asked, “Where did I come from?”

“Where do you think you came from?” was the teacher’s quick response.

“I’m not sure…from my mother and father?” the man mumbled.

“Really?” retorted the teacher. “That simple? Your body parts did manifest from their physical joining. But where was the ‘you’, the ‘me’ that you claim to be before there was a body?”

“I don’t know. How could there be a ‘me’ before there was a physical body? Where would ‘me’ reside?”

“I don’t know,” the teacher said. “Next question?”

“Okay, let’s try this,” the man sighed. “Where am I going? What happens to ‘me’ when my body dies?”

“I don’t know. Fourth question?

The man sagged heavily in the chair and whispered, “Why? Why is this happening? Why all this birthing followed by its inevitable dying?”

The teacher gazed silently at his pupil, pressed his palms together in front of his chest, bowed his head, and announced, “I don’t know. God doesn’t answer ‘why’ questions.”

Resting blog...resting Buddha

Dear friends:

After almost a year of inactivity, the SPZG blog is back. I have been asked to take the helm, and I hope that I'll live up to the high standards that Evelyne "Koka" has established.

Gassho,

Jeff "Konrei" Minde

In honor of Rose Taishin Robins

With my hair almost on end and the eyes of the soul wide

open I am present,

without knowing it at all, in this unspeakable Paradise,

and I behold this secret,

this wide open secret which is there for everyone free,

and no one pays any attention.

O paradise of simplicity, self awareness

And self forgetfulness liberty, peace.

Thomas Merton

A book of Hours

A good balance between external things and inner development

"Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.

True peace with oneself and with the world around us can only be achieved through the development of mental peace.

.........

Material progress is of course important for human advancement. In Tibet, we paid much to little attention to technological and economic development, and today we realize that this was a mistake. At the same time, material development without spiritual development can also cause serious problems. In some countries too much attention is paid to external things and very little importance is given to inner development.

I believe both are important and must be developed side by side so as to achieve a good balance between them."

Excerpt from The Noble Lecture by the Dalai Lama 12/11/1989

To read the whole quotation in the excellent website Wisdom Quotes, click here

At some point in our life, usually when the sea is rough, we realize that we are not in control, that we are not the one steering the tiller, changing the sails, and certainly not blowing the wind -but we might have realized this before if we were lucky.


It is pretty frightening of course to come to grips with that revelation and all its implications.


What is there left to do?

I don’t see any other option than to accept, gracefully accept as Roshi Reb Anderson would put it, and trust.


‘Trust’ ?


Does that mean that we should trust that it will all get better because 'our ego is not in charge'?


No! Don’t let’s trust in anything ‘better’, we could easily be thrown overboard or the ship could very simply sink.

Let’s just be trust, and go beyond.

It might be the beginning of the realization that all is One, that we actually are the dreamer, the dream and the dreaming sailing together in the infinite Silence of nothingness...

Silence is Alone all the while the fury of the storm howls in the night.

- “Hold the tiller tight. Stay vigilant. … but remember: you are not in charge”

Koka


PS. "If you can’t become the ocean you’ll be seasick every day"

Leonard Cohen

Just a reminder that there is an extensive audio library of Dharma talks from various Zen teachers on the Houston Zen Center website http://www.houstonzen.org/.

You will also find there some recent digital talks of Reb Anderson Roshi on the precepts as well as some newer digital talks by him on the koan Baizhang and the Fox at http://rebtalks.proper.com/ .

Some older talks on precepts and jukai, and also on koans, are available on tape, at $10/tape, from the Green Gulch ino.

Please take advantage and enjoy these talks and their wisdom, while not forgetting that practice is at the core of our commitment:

"The Enlightened Way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it".

Koka

I hope you have enjoyed the blog this year and wish to thank those who contributed to it.

Please remember that I welcome your participation with texts, photos and advice. Just email me your suggestions or leave a little comment on the blog. You should know nevertheless that it is not always possible to include contributions covered by copyrights without the necessary permission.

I take this opportunity to send you my best wishes for a very happy and peaceful New Year, a year filled with strong determination, patience and good humor in your practice.

I look forward to receive your support in 2008.

Deep gassho,

Koka

Christmas

The gift of being pregnant with the unknown

and give birth to the ever unfolding revelation.


A call to nurture in secret what has been revealed.


A sharper readiness to leave things happen.

Trust the dark night

and the Mystery.


Koka

About dokusan - 'work in the room'

"Zen meetings have the simplest of forms: two people sitting on the floor, face inches from face, in a candlelit room. And yet that small room is a large field, containing the stars and the earthworms and poems and cities. In the vastness, the Chinese teacher Linji said, the true person has no rank; everyone and everything is perfectly equal, and completely themselves. Here we don't even have stories about what meetings are for. The world of how you think it ought to be and whether you're making a good impression is a ghost world; work in the room is sitting together in the real, where anything might be possible. Authority lies in the timeless moment itself: What is most real, most true, right here and right now?

"The teacher invites the meditator into this field, and the meditator's response is where the encounter begins. Every meetings is different--laughter, tears, sitting together in silence, banging about the room, songs sung and koans explored. Most often there is the deepest kind of conversation. I notice in myself that the feeling which arises naturally from this field is love."

Joan Sutherland, Roshi.

This is an excerpt from an essay on 'Dokusan' published in the 2004 winter edition of the Buddhadharma magazine. To read the whole essay in The Open Source's website, click here.


Joan Sutherland, Roshi, is the founder of The Open Source which is a collaborative network of NewZen communities and practitioners in the western United States.

The short summary below explains the focus of their practice and can be found on her website:

"Our practice has the power to reveal a Zen that is not bound to another time and a different place, a Zen that is native to us; we begin to recognize the ineffable in the images and metaphors of this time and place, arising out of our landscapes, our ancestral spirits, our poetries, our psyches, and our songs."

A great silence covered the blog this last month.

It just happened to be like that because I was traveling.
In rural India there was no easy access to computers, books, etc... I rested with the book of nature, and through warm smiles and friendly faces heard another kind of Dharma talk.

I wish I could share it all with you.

We all know it... there is no need to go to India for this... it is all here.

But in our busy lives do we really take the time to listen, and look?

Let's be honest.

To receive, our cup must be empty.

To hear and see, 'silence' must be practised, ... again and again, ...again and again...



"One needs two years to learn to speak, but a whole life to learn to be quiet...."

A Chinese proverb


I wish you all a renewed enthusiasm for zazen.

Koka