New Online Orientation to Zen!

The full Online Orientation to Zen program is available on our website.


One of my primary motivators in developing the Victoria Zen Centre has been an effort to make Zen Practice accessible to as many people as possible.

For several years, I've been using technology to help with this. This blog, the Living Zen podcast, our eZendo,and I've connected with online communities around the world, through many websites and resources, I've even given talks at Kannonji, a virtual temple in Second Life.

Last year, we launched the Non-Residential Training Period, which gives practitioners all around the world an opportunity to engage with a formalized matrix of training components, and for those who are not connected with a Sangha formally, it is an opportunity to make relationship through forums, through Adobe connect and skype with others who are sharing the training period.

That said, there was still a huge hole as far as accessibility.

Many people who are exploring Buddhism and Zen find plenty of books and podcasts, and this often brings them to ask, "How do I get started?", or, "What do I do next?".

There are plenty of grainy "how to do Zen" videos, often with crummy sound quality, and also often with (usually asian) teachers who begin explaining the posture (starting with full lotus) and technique of Zen meditation.

Of course, this doesn't really help all that much, mostly because for many of the people that I have met over the years in North America (Zen Monks included), full-lotus isn't immediately possible, and it certainly isn't the place to start.

More than this though, it isn't the basic form of sitting that presents the challenge. It is the lack of guidance, not knowing how much to do, how often, and what kinds of challenges come up as a person develops a stable home Zen practice.

For the past 10 years or so here in Victoria, we've been running the Orientation to Zen Buddhist Practice course. The idea was that it would provide a bridge for people who were just starting out in Zen practice. It provides the information and background for the primary aspects of form that we use here at the Victoria Zen Centre, and it allows participants to gradually develop a strong and stable Zen practice. More than this, it provides an environment for participants to ask questions about their budding Zen practice.

It's easy to forget that at the beginning it's tough for a person to sit still and straight for even five minutes. Far too often I have seen newcomers tossed into a regular practice session at a Zen Centre, which often features multiple 30+ minute periods of zazen, without anything more than a quick "sit down and do your best". What a shame!

Based on our Orientation to Zen, I was inspired by the work and philosophy of Salman Khan of the Khan Academy to create resources, and use technologies that we already employ here at the Victoria Zen Centre to make it possible for anyone to access the information, resources, and support that is required to establish a thriving Zen practice, no matter where they are.

I hope that you will enjoy the Online Orientation to Zen Program and resources, and experience the powerful impact that a lifelong Zen practice can have in your life and relationships.

PAIN AND SUFFERING

Transcribed from a talk given Tuesday November 24, 2009. To hear the podcast of this talk, click HERE.

Eshu is giving a Dharma talk in the third sit. Radical! Ah, what a great opportunity! Thank you all for your patience. I sometimes am thinking, “Oh, Brad Warner was here last week, I’ve really got to say something good this week, really impress people, what am I going to talk about? No idea… and then all of a sudden, situations… circumstances arise, and like magic a talk is delivered. Mmm.

So tonight we have this situation where – you know, we say, “Oh, people should arrive at 6:45 so they can receive an orientation”…and then, a few minutes after seven, somebody arrived – Ah! What to do? We find our preferences rise up. And we say, “Damn, I was just starting to get into my sit and here comes a bloody newcomer, ah man, I have to go help this person. Aw.”

Practice is a really hard thing. We live in a culture that really encourages us to not spend time doing practices like this, to not spend any time looking within, looking at ourselves, looking at how we relate to the world around us. It encourages us and offers us all kinds of opportunities to distract ourselves, to make ourselves happy by grasping at other things. You know, “watch this” and “do that”, and “eat this” and “drink that”, and “smoke this”, and “screw that”, and it’ll all make you happy.

But sooner or later, for most of us – well for many of us, at least for some of us who have arrived here, it comes to a point that we say, “well maybe we ought to do something else. Maybe the resolution or the solution to our difficulties doesn't lie out there, doesn't rely on us grasping things that we take as being out there and trying to bring them inside.” We start to say, “Maybe I just need to look at why it is that I'm having difficulty”.

So when I see somebody come in the door, even if they're a little bit late, I jump up and I say, “Oh geez, here’s somebody who in spite of all the money and all the effort and all the myriad opportunities that are being thrown at them to pursue their happiness in external objects, here’s a person that's got up and made an effort to go and sit and look at the floor in the zendo for an evening”. So all the sort of ‘self’ stuff, all the “Oh, but I’m just sitting”, “Oh, how am I going to figure out what I’m going to talk about”, all “me”, kind of drops away. And I go “Oh, shit, I’ve got to go talk to that person and help them establish this practice”.

And this is really strange sometimes, I think, for people who sit with me, students of the Victoria Zen Centre, because I'm also the person that will close the door on a Zen student who’s five minutes late for a sit – “No, you can’t come in!” This is a different situation. And I hope – I don’t want to go on for too long about this but I hope for the members that you can understand…that you can grasp the difference in these two situations. One, the situation of a person who has committed to training, the other, a person who is curiously making their first step. Their first step to investigate what it is that brings us to suffer.

On the weekend during the zazenkai – once a month we have this crazy thing called zazenkai. It’s a one day intensive. We sit from six in the morning until five in the evening and the whole day is an immersion in formal Zen practice. And this weekend we had a guest teacher, Brad Warner. Brad spoke a little bit about anger and I wanted to bring up one particular aspect that he spoke about because I think it's something that goes far beyond anger. Anger, in my opinion, is – is one manifestation of suffering. Something that brings us to suffer. And what Brad was talking about is something that I think is really at the root of so much of how we suffer, whether it's anger or whether it's grief or whether it's self doubt.

Even – physical pain – which, you know, giving me the opportunity to speak in the third set provides an ample opportunity for us to experience this physical pain. And this is the gap that comes up between what we figure things ought to be like and our experience of them as they are. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the difference that we have between our experience of pain, difficulty, and what we can recognize as suffering.

Now the members – several of the members of the Victoria Zen Centre are headed towards sesshin. Sesshin is something that we do twice a year here in Victoria and it's a five-day intensive where we go from four in the morning until around nine-thirty at night. During this we have lots of opportunity to investigate pain and suffering. And usually when we talk about pain and suffering they’re synonymous, they’re the same thing. And what I want to talk about tonight is how we can understand them as being different, and that by clearly recognizing these two things – pain or discomfort, and suffering – as being not the same, as being different, I think it's an important window into practice.

Buddhism is focused at liberation from suffering. And I think that this is a really important thing to understand. Because when we come into Zen or Buddhism, we can think, “Oh, I’m going to be free from suffering, and that means that I'm never going to be uncomfortable again”, or “I'm never going to have anger again”, or “I'm never going to have grief again”, or “I’m never going to have self-doubt again”.

So I’d like to talk about this from a physical perspective, because it’s something – form, our bodies, are something that we can really look at quite easily. In our day-to-day activities we can understand, we can experience this, and we can experiment with it a little bit. When we’re sitting – you know, I think the most common places that we have pain is in our knees and in our back. And as we go through our lives we’ll have all kind – we’ll slam our fingers in doors, and all kinds of stuff. And when we do this what I want you to do is investigate that and look at the experience of it.

When pain arises in the body we become aware of it as a physical sensation. As the first sort of layer of awareness is just this general awareness, this sort of tingling experience. Just as when – if we close our eyes for a second, just sort of allow ourselves to relax, and then we suddenly pop our eyes open, the first thing that hits our eyes is light, color. And then there's layers that sort of pile on top of these experiences. We start to recognize shape, movement. We start to identify and name, compare, contrast. And then we start to judge, we start to discriminate between things.

And the same goes with physical sensation. When we first become aware of physical sensation there's no assessment, there is no comparison, there is not even a real clear identification of it. There’s just this awareness. Then as we start to investigate it more, as we start to think on it more, we begin to identify it– is that a tickle, or is that an ache? Is that an acute, sharp pain or is that a low frequency kind of a numbness that’s going on? We start to make these kinds of assessments.

And then beyond that we begin to judge. We begin to make value assessments. We begin to say “Pain. Oh, that’s pain. Pain is bad. I don't like pain”. And still we haven't entered into the round of suffering. This is just still this very physical experience, this experience of the faculty of form, physical sensation.

Suffering enters into it when we say, “This is what I'm experiencing and it should be otherwise”. We’re sitting there feeling pain in our legs and our expectation of the situation is that we should be comfortable, is that we should be free from difficulty, is that we should be at ease and away from pain. And the degree to which we fixate on that idea, that we fixate on that expectation, freedom from difficulty, freedom from pain – and its distance from our experience – is the degree to which we suffer.

And so it's the same when we are in a relationship, when we have a work situation, in our environment that we're in. If we're hot, we’re really hot. This is a great one if we're in a hot climate in California or something like that, it’s really hot. If your expectation is to be cool but you're hot, it's suffering, it’s miserable. “God, it’s humid, God, it’s hot, this is terrible”.

And you can also experience, you can practice this… breathing and letting go of our expectation, our assumption for things to be other than they our. Melting into the experience of heat. And we find that in a moment – and usually, only for a moment – the experience of suffering disappears. Haaaa [breathes out]. And then we separate again. We say, “But wait! I should be cool!” And the experience of that suffering comes up again.

And it’s the same with the physical body as we do zazen, as we're sitting for longer periods of time. If we practice, if we investigate this experience, we can find that as we let go of the expectation for things to be otherwise, as we let go of the anticipation of the bell, waiting for the period to end, we find that we can feel our legs, yeah, they’re sore. But that's it. There is no suffering attached.

We find that if we are in relationship and we can, even for a moment, let go of our expectation of what the other should be or should do or should say and just completely embraced or witness what it is that they’re doing or saying or being at that moment, then this suffering is diminished.

This is a difficult, difficult practice. It’s something that we engage in over and over again in formal Zen practice. We expect the bell to ring here, we expect so-and-so to walk there, and our practice is to investigate it, in the form of practice. Because what we find over and over again is that that expectation that we have, the way that we bind ourselves to an assumed or expected outcome, is not different inside formal practice as it is outside formal practice.

We have the opportunity to experience letting go into things as they are. The opportunity to embrace and become intimate with this moment as it is in our life. To let go of what things ought to be and for a moment experience our lives as they are. In doing so, to be free from suffering.

Having gained insight into this practice, having met with our expectations, having found ourselves stuck and attached to them and practicing haaaa [breathes out], just letting go, dissolving into things as they are, as we go forward into our lives we are encouraged and have some practical experiential basis to go forward into our relationships and into our work, and to do the same practice.

When we find ourselves getting tied up by what we expect, how we think things ought to be, we can remind ourselves, “Ah, this is no different. Breathe. Let go into it. Allow the suffering to drop away and to experience our lives just as they are”.

Yeah, OK [laughs]. Enough experiencing pain and suffering.

WHO ARE YOU?

Transcribed from a talk given Tuesday October 27, 2009. I started using Dragon Naturally Speaking for transcribing recorded talks, and it really is amazing.

If you would like to listen to this talk on a podcast, simply click the title of the post or you can click HERE.
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Who are you? Without opening your mouth... without referring to something else, some act that has happened in the past, right now, is there anybody that can answer this question, that can respond? Who are you? (Ven. Doshu strikes the ground) Ah...Doshu...that's one!

Each of us, when we're asked this question immediately we begin to think, "who am I?" I had an interesting experience as I was sitting just in the corner there, paying attention. The plant light was behind me, so in my field of vision was this black shape with big ears... "Me"... "this is "me" making the shadow". A few minutes into the sit, the light shut off and I disappeared.

Each of us, when we think of ourselves, take ourselves as being something that's fixed. Something that's solid. Something that's permanent. We buy the story that we tell ourselves. We grasp it entirely and cling onto it. Failing to recognize that this thing, this "I", this person that we identify ourselves as, is entirely dependent on everything else in this world.

Think about it. Is it possible to talk about who you are without reference, without talking about something else, something that's happened in the past, some direction that you're headed in the future, some relationship that you have? When we're looking for the self as an object, there is no way that we can find it.

What are we doing when we're sitting here practicing? People come for all kinds of different reasons. Things are getting stressful, things are, my mind is very busy, and maybe my doctor told me I needed to meditate or something like this. The practice that we're engaged in, in Zen meditation, is paying attention to this moment.

I often use this term "this moment" and I think that sometimes people take "this moment" as being a place, something that's fixed. But when I'm talking about this moment, I'm talking about something which is not solid, which is not a place. It's an activity. The activity of this moment, which is unfolding before us all the time, new. Which is being born, and dying, in each moment.

And so when we come to practice, we take it as "I" (being a solid fixed thing), coming to experience "this moment" (which is a solid fixed thing). So when I ask this question, "Who are you? Without opening your mouth, who are you?", there is no place for you to stand. There is nowhere for you to point. There is nowhere for you to look, except into the activity of this moment, into what it is that you're doing right now.

There is no "You" in the past, there is no "You" in the future. You have no life outside of the unfolding activity of this moment. So, if we look at things in two dimensions, if we look at things as being flat; subject-object, we can talk about this practice that we're engaged in as "ME" doing "SOMETHING". As this definite "I" engaging in an objective practice, "I'm sitting looking at the floor". This is a very simple, a very confused way of understanding what is taking place.

What we are asked in this activity of zazen, Zen meditation, is to let go into... to dissolve into the experience of the unfolding activity of this moment. The activity of sitting is not an objective activity that "you" are doing. This idea of "YOU" and "ACTIVITY" is a false one. Without you, where is the activity? Without the activity that's unfolding in this moment before you, without this practice of sitting, where are "you"?

These things that we call lives, are nothing other than the unfolding activity of this moment. Moment, after moment. These aren't discrete little frames, like a movie, but rather a flow, like a body of water... moving. There is no catching it back. There is no doing it over. There is only this moment as it unfolds. But, for most of us, as we go through our lives, we are constantly trying to fixate. We're constantly looking for a place to rest ourselves. Looking for a place to stop. Looking for a place to look around. Looking for a finish line, a place where we can put up our heels and rest.

As we engage in this activity of living, the activity of this moment we're constantly looking around for something else to do. Constantly distracted, constantly dissatisfied with this activity that's unfolding right before us. Right within us. Right through us. Not paying attention to this activity, we have expectations, we make assumptions, we think, "wouldn't it be wonderful IF", and all of this exists in the realm of our imagination. It isn't what's going on. It isn't what's unfolding right under our noses.

So this practice that we're engaged in, is not the practice of "me" coming to "sit" with a "bunch of other people". It's not the practice of "me" going to engage in some religion, or some spiritual practice. And it's certainly not "me" going to go and improve "myself" by engaging in this "practice".

"Buddha". This word "Buddha" means "the one who is awake". "Budh" - to wake up. This practice is not about adding something more into what it is that you've already got. It's not about grasping something that is outside of you.

Wake up! That's what this practice is!

Waking up to the dynamic activity of this moment that's unfolding, being born and dying, again, and again, and again. Not separate from us. It's not taking place so that "we" can "witness" it, but this very thing that we call a "self", together with the activity of this moment, is being born and dying over, and over, and over again. This isn't something that we have to grasp. It's not something that we have to find "out there". This activity is unfolding, always.

All we have to do is, for a moment, to let go of thinking about, for a moment, let go of this concept... this idea of of a "me", of a "myself", of an "I" that stands separate from this world, from this environment, from these people, this experience that I'm having. To let it drop away, and to experience at once, "I" and "all things" being born together. "I" and "all things" dissolving, dying into one... together.

Each activity that we engage in, in Zen practice, is aimed at this same realization, the same experience. Awakening. We begin with a practice which is the simplest thing that we can possibly come up with. Just sit.

We can look at sitting and say, "Boy, there's sure nothing going on there. Not much is happening there".

It's all happening there! What isn't happening as we sit?

What happens as we sit is that we're in a position where we can most easily drop away our fixation with self. Drop away our idea of "me" and "this experience". If we sit still, if we simply practice breathing, if we practice this activity of being born, and dying through the activity of our breath, this notion, this conviction that we have that we are separate from the activity of this moment, is able to drop away.

In the activity of walking it becomes a little bit more challenging, but, no different. If we get stuck on "me"; "am I doing it right?", we have this gap. "I'm" doing "something". But at once, if we let go of our fixation with ourselves, that separation drops away and we can experience what it is to be manifesting the activity of this moment, the activity of the cosmos, as walking.

Our practice isn't aimed, as I say every week, at being successful and accomplished Zen meditators. This is the training, Zen training, and its function is that as we go out into the world, as we go out and engage in our practice of being nurses, or artists, or musicians, or business people, or accountants, that as we engage in our work, as we engage in our play, as we engage in our relationships, and interactions with this world, we don't do this in a way in which "I" am "doing". Subject-object.

Dropping away this deluded concept of a separate self, we manifest the complete activity of this moment "as". As caring, as art, as music, as transaction, as calculation. There is no subject, there is no object. It is the manifestation of the activity of this universe.

Inevitably the self is born. Inevitably again we attach, we fixate to this idea of "I am", and we can look at what it is that has happened in the past. We can say, "Oh... that was good... Oh... that was beautiful... Oh... that was really a mess", but having had this experience of falling into, having had this experience of dropping away subject and object, when the self forms, we understand it for what it is. A concept. A reflective capacity of mind, and we don't take it as something being solid, and fixed, lasting, or permanent.

We don't take this idea of inside and outside, subject-object and distance between them, as being the nature of our experience. It is one pole, and the other is complete unification.

So, until I see you next time, I would really like everybody to really stop once in a while as we go through our day, as we're making music, as we're doing our work, as we're engaged in our studies, or making our art. Stop and ask, "In this moment who am I? Without opening my mouth, without making reference to the ghosts of the past, who am "I".

CHANGING SEASONS

Transcribed from a talk given September 2, 2008.


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The school of Zen that I was trained in is called, in Japanese, Nyorai Zen. Nyorai is the Japanese word for the Sanskrit tathāgata. This is a Sanskrit word that means “thus coming, thus going”. It is one of the titles of the historical Buddha, and it was the term that the historical Buddha himself used to refer to himself- “The one who has thus come, the one who has thus gone”. In Buddhism, we often talk about the investigation of this thing that we call self; this construct that we call “I am”. One fundamental principles of Buddhism or Zen is that it is our fixation, our obsession, our unquestioning acceptance of the permanent, lasting existence of a self that leads us to suffer.

Thus coming, and thus going. This moment that arises before us has as its content these two fundamental activities. Thus coming, and thus going. They are expressed in many different ways in Zen practice. We can talk about them as the activity of plus, and the activity of minus, the activity of birth, and the activity of death. As we go through our lives we have this tendency to continuously fixate one side or the other. We can talk about plus and minus, birth and death and past and future, inside and outside, unification and diversification. We’re always fixating on one side or the other. We always want to grasp on to one, or to judge one as being better and the other as being something to be avoided. We’re always running, and charging, and seeking one and trying to avoid the other.

I find September is a very interesting month, particularly the beginning of September because for many people, it can experientially demonstrates a moment...this moment...every moment...as holding both of these activities of plus and minus simultaneously. It is the end of summer...and so we’re sad to see it go. Simultaneously we are excited for the sparkling newness as of the fall season, the anticipation of what it has to offer.

Which do you fixate on? Which are you denying, avoiding?

For me, September second is always an interesting day, and this year, in particular, it is a very strong one in that it very much contains both of these aspects for me. Today at the Victoria Zen Centre we began the first day of a residential program for a student in the Zen Centre.

So we have a student living at the Victoria Zen Centre with myself and my family and this morning we began training. Also this morning was my son’s first day of grade three at school so a new routine and dropping him off to see his friends. September second is also the anniversary of my mother’s death when I was nine years old, so September second is this day where I can personally have this tendency to fixate or to want to block out certain aspects of this moment, certain aspects of what it is that I’m feeling or what it is that this moment gives rise to.

So in practice as we sit, as we awaken into this moment to become familiar, to embrace all that it has to offer, this practice is one of realizing the capacity of our minds, of our hearts to accept and to embrace this seeming paradox, tath-agata, tatha-agata, “thus coming and thus going”.

Our tendency is to always view these two directions, these two activities as in opposition, opposed to one another. We always have this desire or this habit of feeling like we always have to pick, choose, or judge one as being right or wrong. We always are opposing life and death, but it is birth and death that compose life. This moment, as I keep saying over and over again, has as it’s content all things and it’s important that as we practice, as we engage in simply sitting, bringing our body and our breath and our hearts and our minds into this moment that we embrace the completion of this moment which has as it’s content all things...the activity of plus, the activity of minus, the activity of birth, the activity of death, the in-breath and the out-breath. All of the things that you like, and want, and enjoy, and desire...and all the things that repel you...that you want to avoid, and that you want to get away from.

In this moment, as we practice together...let go. Let go of your judgement...let go of your choices...let go of your thinking mind...good this, and bad that. Simply embrace this moment just as it is. Complete. Whole. Just as it is, this very moment lacks nothing. Just as you are, you lack nothing.

Where is it that you need to go? What is it that you need to feel better? What is it that you think you’re lacking? Already in this moment...just as it is...there isn’t one thing lacking.

As we practice together in the Zendo...as we practice together in meditation...as we awaken to this moment...as we focus on our breath and open ourselves to this moment, we can, ourselves, experience the completion of this vast universe in this moment.

But what happens when we stand up, and we walk out into the world? For the most part we forget our own experience. We stick to old habit patterns of “I need this” and “I need to get rid of that”, of “I like this and I don’t like that”. We are beginning a new year and so I encourage all of you to remember this practice that we are doing right here and now. It’s something that can go with you wherever you go. It’s no further away from you than your breath. When you find yourself getting sucked into thinking “I like this”...”I don’t like that”...”I want this”... “I want to be away or rid of that”... simply return to your breath. Breathing in...breathing out. The activity of plus and minus. Tath-agata...tatha-agata. Thus coming, and thus going. If you’re able to remember this, if you’re able to connect with this practice as you go through your day to day lives, then you can say that you’re practicing Zen.

Registration for the October Introduction to Zen Meditation courses at the Victoria Zen Centre is underway. Visit our website for more information.