Written essays about Zen and our practice by members of our Sangha.
Aloneness
I don’t know if I made a decision to be Buddhist, it was a gradual accumulation of little events. I’ve been meditating for years, but I wasn’t doing it to be part of a “religion”. It was something I was doing to cope with stress. I had heard that it might help.
Now its purpose has changed. While it still changes the course of my days, it is calming and does help with stress, I am doing it as part of my Buddhist practice.
When I first came to the practice of Buddhism, I was swept up in the solitary nature of meditation. I waited for a time when I could be alone. I closed the door. I meditated every day, by myself.
But I wasn’t aware that I was engaged in a solitary activity, I was just doing it. It’s really the exercise of writing about it is turning me on to that reality. Now I see that was one part of the dynamic of meditation, and of my approach to Buddhism, I am flying solo: oneness.
As I write this, I feel silly, this is so obvious.
Meditation for me is probably what it is for many people: There is a battle going on. I have to force myself to focus. It might be distraction or just my ordinary flow of thought interfering with my ability to meditate.
Now that I’ve been doing it a while, it is still that way. Nothing has changed. The only difference is that I’m used to it. I expect to have that challenge.
Meditation doesn’t increase my sense of aloneness even though it is a solitary act. I am not aware of being by myself, because I am concentrating on the task.
Connectiveness
Dogen’s search for purity, traveling from Japan to China and going to the different temples, eventually finding the purity of Zazen.
And through readings in Zen Pathways and our Sunday gatherings, I have become aware that I was wrong, or rather incomplete in my understanding of what Buddhism is. I hadn’t considered the interconnectedness. And I started looking at what that meant to me. Especially my connection to the people in our Sangha.
On page 112 of Zen Pathways, “Nothing comes about or has its being on its own; everything is empty of ‘own-being’”. All things are interconnected, all inter-are. The term is xiang-ji which means mutually to be. In other words, it means that things that mean seen to be separate and even opposed to one another in fact mutually belong to one another.
p.88: the three Marks of Existence: 1. impermanence or incessant chance 2. no-self, egolessness 3. suffering or existence unease (duhkha).
p.112. When a loved one dies. It has been 10 years since our daughter Vita died. The interconnectedness, I am still connected to her. I talk about her at least once a day, or write about her in my journal. I still think about her and what she might be doing if she was still around.
I still feel grief, it hasn’t diminished. This week a friend of mine died. He had a form of brain cancer, and he knew he was dying. His long decline was similar to Vita’s, and I was living through two people’s experience, his and hers.
Written By Robert Anryu Brown
Nothing Different, Everything Different
Being on the Zen path feels, in many ways, like nothing different from how I lived before becoming part of the Sangha. And yet, at the very same time, everything feels different. I have always been a caring, loving, and compassionate person. Giving to others came naturally to me, often without thinking. Sometimes perhaps too naturally. I gave freely of myself, often to the point of exhaustion, and many times I was left wondering why I suffered so deeply when my intentions were kind and loving.
Before Zen, I was already searching without realizing it. I was already trying to understand suffering, connection, and the meaning behind the way we move through life. In many ways, I feel I have been “zening” all my life. But being consciously on the path is different. It is a mindful and steady opening of the eyes — and not only the eyes, but all the senses. A gradual awakening to how I perceive the world, how I react to it, and how suffering quietly forms within that process.
Zen has helped me become more aware of myself, not in a self-centered way, but in a deeply honest way. My senses have become sharper and more attuned to observing what arises within and around me. I have started to notice my attachments, my fears, my expectations, and also the moments of beauty and peace that were always present but often overlooked.
The path is not about becoming someone different. It is about becoming more awake to what already is. For me, Zen is learning to stay present with life exactly as it appears — even when it is uncomfortable, uncertain, painful, or incomplete. And within that staying, there are moments of peace. Not because suffering disappears, but because I am no longer constantly running from it. I am learning to sit with what is, to breathe with it, and to trust the unfolding of this life just as it is.
Written By Eva Suiren Herczegh
September 13th Dharma Sharing – Shōsen
I’d like to share with you some of my recent observations about the muck that keeps me from being happy. These troubled waters feel like a veil between me and reality and they can easily feel like they’re pulling me down.
I often think of the great Tich nat Hahn calligraphy Daisho has on his wall: “No mud, no lotus.” I read in Buddhist literature that samsara is in fact nirvana. I chant the Identity of Sameness and Differences with great devotion. Still, I find it generally difficult, when I feel bogged down in the muck, to even consider that there is anything else than muck, let alone that the muck is the pure land!
As I was thinking of this talk, I thought of different forms of clutter and how they form like a story. The story of me becoming aware, at various moments in my life, of different types of obstacles that seem to obstruct reality. Reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it! This has been an important thread in my life. An important, and unsolved, struggle…
I don’t know if you find it easy to answer the question: “so how long have you been practicing?” I’m always hesitant. Part of the reason I don’t have a clear-cut answer is because it feels like the seeds were planted way before I actually tried to pretzel my legs on a square, black cushion and sit there with the intention of having no intentions!
In particular, I think of an experience I had when I was a kid. In my memory I was a kid, but I may have been a teen. I can picture very well where I was: standing on a gravel path, shaded by trees, looking out onto a clearing. I had recently learned that light has a measurable speed, that it takes time for light to get from one place to another. I remember, I was looking at the trees and the clearing in front of me, perhaps also the bugs buzzing in the air, and suddenly I realized: the world around me is always one step ahead because it took a split second for the image of that tree with its leaves rustling in the breeze to get to my eyes. What I felt in that moment was a terrible feeling of isolation and a deep sense of tragedy. I realized I’d never be able to see the world around me the way it really was in each present moment. I was out of sync. Back then, already, I was yearning for an uncluttered and direct perception of reality.
Then I thought: perhaps the only place I could logically be able to experience reality in its true present form would be in my mind. The tree out there was out of reach, but if I tried hard enough, couldn’t I somehow grasp the moment when the image of the tree reaches me – if I could just feel into the workings of my brain as it is receiving the images, I thought, wouldn’t I then be experiencing reality in its true unfolding, unmediated by sluggish speed of light? When I approached Zen practice, I know that question was on my mind.
The short answer to the question “so when did you start practicing” is that I’m a Covid Zen Buddhist, like there are Covid dogs and Covid babies, because I started “practicing” in 2020 when we were locked up in our homes wondering what do to with ourselves… but the seeds were there dormant, waiting to sprout. The experience I had as a kid that I just told you about often comes back to me as a signpost on the path, but in fact, who knows how long other seeds had been sitting there, waiting for the right time to shoot leaves and roots?
The realization that the speed of light made me tragically un-synced from what’s “actually going on out there” was just the beginning. Later in life, I became aware of the cognitive processes. I realized my image of the world had to be constructed in my mind, and that process too took time. Reality was getting further from reach!
Then, thanks to all that sitting and growing self awareness, I realized I’m always superimposing narratives, judgement, desires on everything I perceive. Cultural norms, marketing campaigns, opinions channeled by the media, things my mom told me, even just the names of things, reactions my dad had to this or that, ideas I got from my brother or from a friend I admired so much, all of these narratives and so many more keep popping up in my mind as I go through my day… And although they are of a different nature, they too make me feel isolated.
How can I actually experience the world as it is? Directly and… lovingly.
I promised I’d share my recent observations about the muck I live in. Lately, I’ve become particularly aware of the hampering effect of certain moods. I’m 55 now and I’m just starting to see them. Especially the darker, clutchy, puller-downers… Who knows when and how they started? My guess is probably before I could talk, which would be one reason that it has taken me so long to acknowledge their existence and verbalize them. A classic for me is the “freeze” mode of the classic “fight, flight, freeze” reactions to danger. When something is coming up that feels big – like the beginning of school – I freeze. And that feeling feeds a negative feedback loop that makes what’s coming feel ever more impossible to deal with. I freeze in fear, the freezing makes the task even more impossible, because the task feels insurmountable, I feel worthless, and this in turn makes it very difficult to shift into motion. A pretty clear illustration of samsara…
How is that nirvana? I honestly don’t know. Maybe I’ll have more to say about it next time.
What I do know is that “no mud, no lotus” can’t just be about overcoming adversity. It is tempting to remind myself that there is no growth without effort – I tell my students that every day! – that only through struggle can there be any real learning. It’s true. But that’s a narrative based on duality – and Hollywood’s most lucrative cliché!
When you walk the Way,
you draw no nearer, progress no farther.
Who fails to see this is mountains and rivers away.
“Practicing Zen” has helped me to see the muck. But I still tend to see it as muck… as something to work myself out of.
So, to be continued…
