Gutei's Finger @ Byron Street up the hill in El Paso

Last week after services we talked about the koan "Gutei's Finger." I've always been fascinated by the story, having first read it sometime in the 60s. (What the hell? The guy cut off the monk's finger!) I came across the story in my first copy (I've had maybe six of the years) of Sensaki's and Reps' translation of Zen Flesh / Zen Bones. It's the fifth koan in their version of the Mumonkon, The Gateless Gate, used by Rinzai teachers to test their students. The book is a staple in bookstores, you can buy it on-line and it's even available free on-line with a little search. Of course, as a publisher, I suggest you follow the first or second path.

Now that I've spent time being with the story, I'm hearing reverberations of it in most everything I read. For instance,...

"This is the practice of dying to the self."
--Charlotte Joko Beck

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GUTEI’S ONE FINGERED ZEN

Gutei raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A boy attendant began to imitate him in this way. When anyone asked the boy what his master had preached about, the boy would raise his finger.

Gutei heard about the boy's mischief. He seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and ran away. Gutei called and stopped him. When the boy turned his head to Gutei, Gutei raised up his own finger. In that instant the boy was enlightened.

When Gutei was about to pass from this world he gathered his monks around him. "I attained my finger-Zen," he said, "from my teacher Tenryu, and in my whole life I could not exhaust it." Then he passed away.

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[Oh, it's Monday morning. I'll paste a recent commentary from my teacher Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi, the founder of Clear Mind Zen. The commentary also rings with the understanding of Gutei's Finger. I recommend you follow Daiho's blog or write him directly and ask that he put you on his e-mailing list.]  

Master Dogen taught that to study the Way is to study the self.  This study is the act of burning away the construction we call self, allowing the pieces to fall away, and supporting what remains as that which was not born and that which will not die:  our true nature.  This is the universality of everything, the Great Breath, not one, not two, just this.

How do we “get there”?  Simple, we get out of our own way.  We realize we are already there, that there is no there, and that the desire to get there, the imagining of a there in the first place, is all part of the delusion.

We practice stillness.  This is the practice of just coming and going, the practice of breathing in and breathing out, the practice of practice itself:  zanmai o zanmai.  The Samadhi that is the king of Samadhi.

Does raw land allow our plants to grow or do we need to till and otherwise care for the field?  Do we need to weed and water?  Do we need to fertilize?  For our crop to be plentiful and strong, we need to do these things.  Just so, Zen.  We cannot expect to open the self to allow our True Nature to emerge without study.  Right understanding requires a plow, hands, fertilizer, water, sun, and a willingness to set about the work itself. 

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Oh, not to forget, yes, we will be sitting this Tuesday night same time (7pm), same place (4425 Byron) doing the same old thing--sitting in the silence until the bell rings. Come join us.

LOGO FOR BOTH SIDES NO SIDES ZEN COMMUNITY

Thanks to artist Polly Perez for our new logo. Last Friday (the very last moment) in preparing for Zazenkai and the Jukai Ceremonies of Kathryn Soku Shin Masaryk and Mike Inmo Dretsch, I realized I needed some sort of image for their certificates. I wrote Polly around 10am, wondering if she could come up with something quick. She accepted the challenge. She works half-day on Fridays, so she spent some time thinking about it and in a little less than two hours that afternoon she had accomplished the above. I was delighted.

By the way, I put photographs from the Jukai ceremonies on our Facebook page, and I'll be writing something here about the ceremonies when I get the time. I hope you are all well, and I thank you for your practice.

--Bobby Kankin Byrd

Merry Christmas, Zensters on Both Sides, No Sides, All Sides

The day after Christmas. So to practice we sit in the mornings and the evenings and maybe in-between. The practice of zazen informs our daily life. Going to work, eating breakfast, washing the dishes, saying hello to the people that cross our path.

If you’ve been raised in our culture, our civilization—aka, Western, the Judeo-Christian, American, whatever you want to call it—then you’ve been touched in one way or another by the story of Jesus who was born in Bethlehem and who 30-something years later was crucified in Jerusalem. It doesn’t matter if you’re an agnostic, Christian, Jew, Native American, atheist, Buddhist, something else or none of the above, the story of Jesus has entered into your thinking and understanding. It’s simply part of the language of who you are. So how do we, as practitioners of Zen, think about the story? Instead of ignoring it (or worse, mocking it) or, on the other extreme, accepting it as truth with no questions asked, my belief is that we should work to understand it. Like we work to understand all the many stories in the Buddhist and Zen traditions. The principle elements of the story of Jesus are found in so many stories of the Buddha and Zen Masters—human birth, practice, teaching, death and resurrection.

So what does it mean to be the son (or daughter) of God?

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So yes we will be sitting this Tuesday, 7pm, @ 4425 Byron at the Unitarian Sanctuary. On cold nights the front door may be shut but it’s not locked. You can see the lights through the stained-glass windows. We’ll be sitting inside, ringing the bell, lighting the candle and the incense, chanting and sitting and sipping at our tea. It happens like that every time. Strange, how it’s never the same. I hope to see you guys there if you can make it.

And Merry Christmas to you all. And please, like Jesus of Nazareth taught, respond to others, especially to those in need, with wisdom and kindness.

[P.S. The painting is by Pieter van Breugel the Elder, one of my all time favorite painters. He was one of the masters during the Flemish Renaissance, and he loved to mixed the profane and the sacred, humor and wisdom into his work.]

Photographs from Rohatsu Sesshin 2010

Boddhisattvas after Rohasu

Kathy, Alice & Suki before we got started

The altar atop the new floor completed right before the bell rang

Susan Hakushi Beckett

Taking the Three Refuges & receiving her Wagessa

The Altar for the Ceremonies

Heather Kishin Ogston

Taking the Three Refuges & receiving her Wagessa

David KoMyo Novotny and Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi

During the KaeSanbo Ceremony for KiShin

Kathy RyoGin Sorenson

Taking the Three Refuges & receiving her Wagessa

(Her husband John Shogi is taking her photo on the other side)

John Shoji Sorenson: Jukai Ceremony

Taking the 16 Vows

John Shoji Sorenson's Rakusu

Fresh with his Buddhist name & the date of the ceremony

Order of Clear Mind Zen Lineage of Priests

Beginning bottom right, clockwise:

Bonnie Bussho Hobbs, Celia Kajo,

Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi, Bobby KanKin Byrd, David KoMyo Novotny

Celebration afterwards @ the Village Inn down the street

Rohatsu Sesshin @ The Clear Mind Zen Temple in Las Cruces

The Bodhi Tree

Over the December 6th weekend I attended a sesshin at Clear Mind Zen Temple in Las Cruces. This end of the year sesshin celebrates Rohatsu, the Buddha’s Enlightenment. It’s the central stories in our practice. It goes something like this. Siddhartha Gautama, or Shakyamuni (whichever you prefer—I like Siddhartha because I read Herman Hesse’s novel when I was a teenager) had given up his life of asceticism. He had whittled down his daily intake of food to several grains of rice a day, and he must have understood that he was dying from lack of food. He didn’t want to die. That was not the point. So he had begun to eat again, to take the path we know as “the Middle Way.” His compatriots left him because they felt he had gone astray. But he didn’t turn away from his practice of zazen. Thus, he sat down under the Bo Tree (aka Bodhi Tree), a huge fig tree, and he vowed not return to the world of men until he had received Enlightenment. And so he sat and sat some more. Surely, he rose from time to time and did walking meditation beneath the huge tree with its heart shaped leaves. Surely he ate some rice and vegetables, something to keep his strength. Surely he had to go out into the woods and relieve himself. He was a man after all. But he always returned to the lotus posture of his zazen.

Zazen, as Dogen always reminds us, is action. 

Siddharta cupped his hands in the cosmic mudra and slipped into deep meditation. I don’t know how long this went on. But it was a long time. One morning before dawn cracked open the sky he looked up into the black sky in the southeast. There he saw the Morning Star and he received complete realization, complete enlightenment, nirvana. It has many names. The universe was exactly as it is. Nothing added. The shell of his self was empty and so was full.

My heart, thus knowing, thus seeing, was released from the fermentation of sensuality, released from the fermentation of becoming, released from the fermentation of ignorance. With release, there was the knowledge, ‘Released.’ I discerned that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’

There was nothing left for him to do. But he did not turn his back on the world of women and men. Instead, he returned as teacher. He went and found his friends who had left him and he told them about what he had become and the Four Noble Truths which concluded with the Eight-Fold Noble Path. These are our gateway toward our own realization. These are the foundation of the Buddha Way. Our practice.

So this event was what we celebrated on December 8th. Around the world others were doing similar practice this week, many much more intensive than our own, others less intensive. Ours is a Householder Zen. Our practitioners come from their families and their lives for the time they can afford and they come to sit together. We had folks from California, Las Cruces and El Paso. It was a good solid group, 10 to 14, depending when you walked in the front door. We sat three periods Friday night, 14 periods Saturday, five periods Sunday. The bell was ringing; the candles and the incense were lit. We all had a place on the floor for our zabuton and our zafu, we all had a piece of the wall to stare at. Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi gave us teishos on Friday night and Sunday morning--good stuff to ferment during our practice. David Komyo Novotny was the sesshin leader, and he made sure that all was quiet and he marked the time. Celia Kajo was our Ino, although she got pulled away from time to time by her life duties. I was the Tenzo, the cook, and Katia SokuShin Masuryk was my assistant. We prepared and served the meals. Truly, an honor. Luckily I had recently re-read Master Dogen’s “Instructions to the Cook.” Essentially, how to be present in the activities of being a cook, how to respect and prepare the food, how to organize the life of the kitchen and how to organize one’s own mind to make the process meaningful. On Sunday three members took their first deep steps into their practice. The ceremony is called the KaeSanbo, or taking the Refuges in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. They receive their Buddhist names of Zen practice and their wagessa which they had sewn. They were Susan Hakushi Beckett of Las Cruces, a student of Kajo; Heather Kishin Ogston of California and a student of KoMyo; and Kathy RyoGin Sorenson, a student of Daiho Roshi's. John Shoji Sorenson took the Jukai vows and received his rakusu which he too had made. They were beautiful ceremonies for each, and the talks of the teachers and the recipients demonstrated the power of this practice. [Note: I'll post photographs of these ceremonies in a separate post and on our Facebook page.]

We worked and we sat. That’s what Zen is--zazen and sweeping the floor. Being who you are, discovering who you are, and looking up one morning and seeing the morning star or hearing the mockingbird atop the juniper tree.

And you experience the universe as it is.
It’s been there all along.
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
How can that be?

May we all sit strong in the New Year, may we all receive enlightenment together.



[Note: soon I will put up some photographs I took at the sesshin, so please check back later here or on our facebook page.]

Zen Fundamentalism: Just Sitting

This is a cool video--Master Gudo Wafu Nishijima showing us how to sit. The half-lotus, the full-lotus--it's a pleasure to watch the old man fold his legs into zazen. His discussion of the ears helped me remember my ears and my spine. And zazen, just sitting, is where we learn the first step along the Eightfold Noble Path: Right View. Indeed, Right View "is the beginning and the end of the path. It simply means to see and understand things as they are." Or as Nishijima might say, Zen is about the experience of reality.

Enjoy.

The Dana Paramita: The Act of Giving

We breathe in.
We breathe out.
We take from the universe.
We give to the universe.

The act of giving is Dana, the first Paramita, the first Perfection. Dana we discover is really a two-way street, receiving and giving, breathing in and breathing out.

I write this note to ask you all during this time of giving to remember our Zen Community, Both Sides / No Sides here straddled on the U.S./Mexico Border. We’ve been fortunate to have the use of the sanctuary at the El Paso Unitarian Community for our Tuesday evening services. For this opportunity we pay $100 a month. So far we’ve been able to pay each month, but for a few months we’ve had to wait a couple of weeks to gather enough funds for our payment. And to be honest our payments have fallen on the shoulders of several of our members who are with us every week. We have no reserves, and we will have expenses beyond the use of the UU sanctuary. I ask each of you to give as you are able. If you cannot attend our services and wish to give, please send a check to John Byrd @ 701 Texas Avenue, El Paso, TX 79901. On the memorandum line note that the check is to the Both Sides / No Sides Zen Community. John is our treasurer and keeps exact records of receipts and payments.

And oh yes, we will be sitting this Tuesday, the 14th, at 7pm @ 4425 Byron. And by the way, there are Six Paramitas, or Perfections—

Dana Paramita: Generosity, giving of oneself.
Sila Paramita: virtue, morality, discipline, proper conduct
Kshanti Paramita—patience, tolerance, acceptance
Virya Paramita—diligence, effort
Dhyana Paramita—concentration, contemplation
Prajna Paramita—wisdom, insight