one tiny bird

September 29th, 2020 - 3 Comments

We are doing the best we can in the middle of this fire. Whether or not you are a quarter-mile away from a wildfire, you too are in the middle of a fire.

We all feel the heat of samsara, this ignorant, angry, greedy world that we live in, and it is too much to bear. It is too much to bear.

What do we do when everything is out of control? When the world is crumbling into ash and rubble? When we feel the urgent need to flee, even from what was once secure: our homes and, perhaps, our country? To answer that, let’s remember the story of one tiny bird trying to save his forest home from flames. He, too, is doing the best he can.

“The Hummingbird and the Forest Fire” dharma talk
Photo by Victor Sauca on Unsplash

Karen Maezen Miller · The Hummingbird And The Forest Fire

by no means useless

September 1st, 2020 - 10 Comments

Not seeming to protect
The paddy field,
Scarecrow standing
On the hillside –
By no means useless.
— Dogen

This is a time of despair. During the Democratic convention, I felt such a sense of buoyance and belonging. I felt as if I had a community, a real live community! And it was huge. But after the last week of lies, corruption, fear, fury, and hate, I no longer feel as if I have a country or any place in it. I’m afraid.

Why aren’t things getting better? Are all my actions, all my words, all my efforts in vain? Why can’t good things happen? Why won’t people do the right thing?

I found this poem by accident, which is how we find everything. While we’re looking for something we want, we find something we need. It was in the last line, by no means useless, that I found encouragement.

Don’t you ever wonder if all your efforts are useless? That you won’t make a difference? That your hope, faith, and good intentions are for naught? That there’s no point?

I sometimes like to examine where I’m at, or where the world is at, compared to the world the old masters lived in. We might think, for instance, that life is so much harder for us, the world so much more evil—and that this ancient practice originated in a simpler time, a better day. But that assumption, like most assumptions, is wrong.

Even as the world seems to be falling apart, there’s a reason to believe in the promise of life, goodness, and supreme usefulness. There’s a reason to be here, now.

By ourselves and for ourselves, we accomplish nothing. These times are terrible, and we are afraid. But this practice is by no means useless. Because open your eyes and look! The Dharma never dies.

“By No Means Useless” dharma talk
Photo by Kiril Dobrev on Unsplash

Karen Maezen Miller · By No Means Useless

they didn’t see

January 23rd, 2019 - 5 Comments

If you don’t see the Way,
you don’t see it even as you walk on it.
—Identity of Relative and Absolute

Over the last 20-plus years, I’ve heard my teacher tell a lot of stories. Actually, I’ve heard him tell one or two stories a lot of times. One of them is about Maezumi Roshi visiting a psychiatric hospital.

A member of the sangha was having trouble, and she had ended up in psychiatric care. When Maezumi heard about the powerful drugs the doctors were giving her, he said, “We have to go get her.” So they went to the hospital. Maezumi was wearing his traveling robes. There were many times Maezumi wore Western clothes, so for this trip, he must have thought the robes were appropriate.

They were standing near the day room talking to the staff about a discharge. The room was full of patients. Some were visibly disturbed or aggressive. Maezumi just stood there, a funny little man in a weird get-up, and didn’t say anything. One of the patients walked up to him carrying a chair. He signaled for Maezumi to sit down in it. Maezumi sat. Then the guy pulled up a chair and sat right next to him. And so did others. Soon Maezumi was sitting in a circle of psychiatric patients. Everyone was still and quiet, like it was nothing special.

When you walk the Way it is not near, it is not far
If you are deluded you are mountains and rivers away from it.

My teacher says that none of the staff or doctors even noticed what had happened.

“They didn’t see,” he would say everytime he told the story.

I used to wonder what it was that they didn’t see, and why. For awhile I thought he was saying that the whole event was come sort of glitch in the matrix, a hidden world on the other side of the space-time continuum. Zen students can be deluded by woo-woo like that.

“Oh,” I’d repeat, “they didn’t see!” still not seeing.

Not so long ago I realized what the doctors didn’t see: what was right in front of them. Reality. What most of us don’t see even as we walk on it.

In taking a seat and wearing robes, observe it for yourself later on. — Case 32, Book of Serenity

It used to be that if I was giving a talk or leading a workshop, I would put on a sleek J. Jill outfit and use a PowerPoint. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, or alarm anyone else, by doing anything Buddhist. I was an entertainer of sorts, and I was good at it. But entertainment doesn’t last. So I gave up trying to be popular and started going out in my robes to do what we do in Zen: sit. Instantly, it made everything easier. I didn’t have to make up what to say, and even strangers were consoled by it. I realized that it wasn’t me that made the difference, it was the robe.

In Zen, the teaching is said to be conveyed from teacher to student by “the robe and the bowl.”

The robe is the Dharma, or the teaching. The Dharma is as it is with nothing extra, nothing fabricated. It’s a powerful thing—what is—and it heals—when nothing is added to it—so maybe that’s why Maezumi wore his robe into the room where people were sick and suffering, their minds spinning in psychotic storms. It must have seemed like heaven to step into the quiet calm of his non-distracted presence, or samadhi. A passerby might have thought he was one more crazy person in a room of crazy people. And that would have been true too. Wherever he went, Maezumi left no trace of himself.

The robe was a signal that he was there to share the Dharma, pure presence, which shares itself when we don’t add our judgments to it.

The Great Way is not difficult;
it only avoids picking and choosing.
—Verses on the Faith Mind

I ran across a survey the other day asking “What is the greatest challenge Zen faces in the West today?” That’s a pretty common question among those who compare good versus bad, right versus wrong, past versus future. People have opinions. The truth, however, could not be clearer. The Way is not difficult. Reality is not hidden. There are no challenges to being present except the walls we erect by our judgmental mind, liking one thing and disliking another, cherishing our views of this or that.

It reminds me of Maezumi Roshi in the psychiatric ward. The doctors and nurses whizzing past, lost in their expertise, seeing only diagnoses and prognoses, cases and labels, in a room full of human beings just like them.

The more you talk and think about it,
The further astray you wander from the truth.
Stop talking and thinking
And there is nothing that you will not be able to know.

Beginner’s Mind One-Day Retreat
March 31, 2019
Hazy Moon Zen Center
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healing community

March 23rd, 2018 - 3 Comments

Thorndale, Texas by Adrienne Breaux

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them. — Matthew 18:20

I’ve had this verse on my mind since I spent time in the hospital. I wasn’t in the hospital being a patient, mind you, but rather being patient, cultivating one of the virtues required of us in difficult circumstances.

A friend was having major surgery, and I accompanied her into the hospital and sat beside her as she mended for a day or so after. Although I didn’t do anything while I was there, I learned some things.

I learned, for instance, that a hospital is its own country, with its own language, symbols, rituals and time, its own days and nights. The outside, with its calliope of circus distractions, doesn’t exist. The first day I just sat in a waiting room with strangers whiling away the time. I was alone until a family came up to me and asked if the empty seats nearby were taken. We shared the lengthening hours then, talking about weather and pets, bound by our communal experience of waiting and worry.

It is a beautiful thing to see how much you have in common with people you’ve never met and know nothing about. People you might not see again and would likely never recognize. The circumstance connects you in a clarifying way, and you can see beyond appearances, beyond what you might otherwise judge on face value.

I learned that even the most confident doctors can pray, and that their shoulders carry the weight of our urgent faith.

I saw that even after 12 hours on the job nurses still enter sick rooms with a smile and leave with a thank you.

I watched a phlebotomist take blood so gently, so tenderly, asking permission and making apology while causing no pain, all because, she said, “I put myself on the patient’s side.”

I learned that it is always possible to be kind, and that most people already are.

The hospital gave me hope, tremendous hope. Not hope in miracles, but hope in healing. The hope that we can turn this thing around, that we can begin to heal one another even if only by twos or threes, which is the really good news, because that means we can do it right now where we are with the first stranger passing by.

Life in community

I read one pastor’s take on this Bible verse and I really liked it. She said that the verse instructs us to live our spiritual lives in community, with others, where there is conflict and contention to be reconciled. It’s in our differences, you see, that grace is revealed, that we are rescued and redeemed from our self-interest and thus able to love a neighbor with equal devotion.

In Buddhism we call this sangha. It is honorable for its harmony, and it is everywhere.

What is killing our communities? I wondered about that this week when I read the story of the unrepentant Austin bomber, isolated and frustrated by his life living in a town reminiscent of one I once knew.

Reading that he was from Pflugerville, Texas, reminded me of Thorndale, Texas, just 30 miles northeast, where my mother’s people had lived. Both towns were founded by farmers in the late 19th century for the sake of common interests: to have a school and a church, a general store and a post office, a bank, a cemetery and a cotton gin. These were real communities that arose out of real needs, needs met by being shared among the many.

Thorndale hasn’t changed. Progress passed it by. But not so Pflugerville, where real estate developers arrived in the ’80s to remake it into an Austin suburb. A city of 60,000, Pflugerville is now rife with master-planned communities, neighborhoods of sameness secured by fences and gates, valued for what’s left out as much as what’s put in.

What does living in community mean any more? There’s no grace, no spiritual good when we make our community out of one ideology or income bracket, and Lord knows there’s no salvation to be found in Facebook, either. These days the word, community, is used for everything while meaning nothing.

I spent two days watching how it works in a hospital, and this is what I saw. We have to get real, people, to get better, and we have to do it together before it’s too late.

You might want to watch a beautiful film, The Florida Project, about a community left on the fringe after Disney fashioned a make-believe world.

what happens on retreat

October 11th, 2017 - 2 Comments

Someday, I told myself, I was going to sit a long retreat. I signed up for ten days, but by the second day I wanted out. Midway through the sleepy dawn sitting, I slunk out of the meditation hall into what I thought would be the invisibility of my dorm room. I didn’t plan to stay away long. I would just take a short break from the aching effort of staying awake. I was a beginner, you know, doing my best, and I thought I deserved a little me time. It would be a while before I began to realize that, no matter what I’m doing, it’s all me time. A few minutes into my escape, the door opened and two staff members came in and convened an impromptu meeting right next to me as I lay mortified on my foam mattress, staring up at the ceiling. That woke me up! I couldn’t wait to get out of my getting out.

At no time during the next twenty years of practice have I ever fled a sitting period, although I’ve wanted to. Of course, there are many ways to flee discomfort and difficulty, and I’ve explored just about all of them unsuccessfully. The best place to practice is a place you don’t want to be, using the time you don’t think you have.

That morning I learned that resolving the great matter of life and death starts with the little matter of showing up. I showed up to the zendo every morning, every afternoon, and every evening. I showed up to sit in one spot, upright, and watched the light rise and fall overhead. I surrendered; I settled; I entered samadhi, which means I stopped running around in my head. As much. The time that followed wasn’t fast or slow. It wasn’t long or short. It didn’t come or go. When the retreat was over, I went home happy and excited, babbling about the discovery I had made.

“I know what a day is!” I said to my roommate at the time. He suspected I’d been off chasing unicorns and rainbows. “It is daylight, followed by darkness, followed by daylight!” He looked at me funny. Maybe these retreats weren’t such a good idea. I was trying to describe what I’d seen: a day has no beginning and no end. It goes on forever. Conditions change, that’s for sure. The light shifts and the breeze moves; the temperature goes up and down; people are born and they die; the pages on a calendar flip; the second hand sweeps; toenails grow and hair falls out; but time itself stands still. There is no greater joy than seeing through time, because then you’ve touched the leaf tip of eternity, which looks exactly like your backyard right now, overgrown with time.

Where else could it be but right here now?

***

Photos by Rick McCleary.

a healing summer

July 5th, 2015 - 1 Comment

During a three-month summer ango, or training period, a novice monk is selected to serve as the head trainee at the monastery. He or she will monitor the practice inside the meditation hall, acting as a model and mentor for those who join in. The monk maintains order, harmony, motivation, and discipline through the depth of his or her own samadhi, the non-distracted awareness that is the healing nature of meditation. Ango means “peaceful dwelling.”

A simple ceremony marks the beginning of the training period, when the student formally enters the temple to begin the term of service. The trainee and the teacher will commence a long stretch of silence sitting side by side in zazen, doing their work alone and together. The student will swim through a flood of fear and crawl over a mountain of doubt. The work will consume light and dark, days and nights on end. At first he will cherish nothing more than the thought of escape, but in time he will plant himself deep in the ground and give up the search. On the last day of training, the student will enter a place he has never been. It will be in the exact same place he’s never left, but the walls will be gone, a cramped and airless room transformed into a universe of living things. He will know perfectly well how to take good care of it.

But this is still the first day, and he has no idea where the path is leading.

Ceremonies in the zendo are orchestrated, the script ordained in the manner of a thousand students and a hundred teachers before. The student stands before the teacher and expresses humility and gratitude. He moves to make his bows, but the teacher waves him off. There is no need for formality between them, no show of rank. The two are fellow travelers, and they will make this trip as one.

With palms together, the student speaks the last public words that will pass between them until they reach the other side. The room is quiet. Nothing stirs. Paradise comes into view.

“California weather is peaceful and calm. May your days go well.”

May you enjoy peace and healing this summer.

In gassho,
Maezen

black friday zen

November 26th, 2010 - 3 Comments

Being and doing
may seem to be different
but they really are the same.
There is no such state as just being.
even for inanimate things.
See, here is a saucer,
but there is activity in it.
You know how matter exists.
Particles are in motion –
protons, electrons, neutrons –
and they hold things together.
They are active.
They are doing something.
It is energy.
We are living in that samadhi to begin with.

–Maezumi Roshi, Teaching of the Great Mountain

I am sometimes asked the difference between being and doing, or at least a question that implies a difference between being and doing, such as “How do you ever get anything done?” Here Maezumi Roshi answers that question so simply and clearly. Most of us imagine that being is to exist in a state of paralysis, disengaged and inert. Oh the trouble we create by trying to understand something to mean something else!

I create a good bit of trouble for myself trying to understand Maezumi, to listen and transcribe and convey his teaching, and he does it himself so well. I was unaware of this little book, Teaching of the Great Mountain. It is a series of talks, some of which I’m delighted to recall I was present for! What is different is that his words are arranged in verse form, and seeing them that way they are suddenly so simple.

I bring it to your bargain-hunting attention today because like most treasures, it is found in the junk bin. You can buy a used copy on Amazon for as little as $1.49. I suggest you buy all your wisdom that way: well-worn and low-priced. Then you have the rest of your money to be foolish with.

karen maezen miller

paradise in plain sight

Posts Tagged ‘samadhi’