Category: Householder Zen

Layman P’ang 3

Jeff

This is the third of three talks I gave at our weeklong sesshin, held from August 24-30, 2025, at Providence Zen Center, a monastery. Our theme was “Chop Wood, Carry Water”: Everyday Form and Formation on the Householder Path. A recording follows the text, which is edited for clarity and conciseness.

This is Case 2 in The Sayings of Layman P’ang:

One day, Shih-t’ou said, “I’ve come to visit you. What have you been doing?” 

The Layman said, “If you’re asking what I do every day, there’s nothing to say about it.”

Shih-t’ou said, “What did you think you were doing before I asked you about it?”

The Layman made up a verse:

“What I do every day is nothing special.

I simply stumble around.

What I do is not thought out.

Where I go is unplanned.

No matter who tries to leave their mark,

The hills and dales are not impressed.

Collecting firewood and carrying water

Are prayers that reach the gods.”

Shih-t’ou approved saying, “So, are you going to wear black or white?”

The Layman said, “I will do whatever is best.”

It came to pass that he never shaved his head to join the sangha.

In this talk, my third and last for this sesshin, I aspire to seize at least one of two opportunities, where I perhaps have room for improvement. My other two talks were longer than usual . . . although, honestly, I am known to give long talks. This one may be just a tad shorter. I hope I don’t break that promise. The other opportunity: the past two talks were packed with a lot of points to follow. Well, I’m going to fall down big time on that front again!

What I’ve been thinking about since the second of the talks I gave is the moment when it came to pass that P’ang didn’t shave his head to join the sangha. He chose a householder’s life. When we meet him here, what words of encouragement might we be able to offer someone who is choosing that life? What words of encouragement might I be able to offer P’ang?

Somehow my response to that question began to come out in a series of tips or encouragements. I think this is probably because, as those are you who join us on Thursday nights know, Nick Patterson, when he it’s his turn to do reading, has for the last several months been reading three or four of Wumen’s 14 Cautions that come at the end of his compilation of the Mumonkan, The Gateless Gate. Wumen is offering cautions presumably for people who live in a monastery. I thought I might offer some encouragements for people who don’t. 

I’m not sure I was driving for 14, but I came up with 14. This is something like the alpha version, v0.1 of them. I’ll be continuing to think about them. And because there are 14 of these points, and because I’ve got just a little bit to say about some of them, well, that’s a lot. I encourage you just to listen and let them wash over you. If one thing I say jumps out and sticks with you—is meaningful to you somehow—we’ll be lucky. These eventually will be in writing on my blog, so there’s no need to try to remember it all.

These are not ready for prime time, so thanks for bearing with me as I test drive them with you. Maybe someday these will be in one of those to-be-written books I mentioned during my first talk. One book I want to write is about householder life on the Zen path; maybe I’ll put a more developed version of these points at the end as, I don’t know, Kōgen Roshi’s 14 encouragements or something. We’ll see.

There is no inside or outside

Don’t imagine you leave the world when you enter a monastery or that you enter the world when you leave one. 

To be in the world is to be of the world.

As Linji says, “There’s no Dharma outside to run after. There’s no Dharma within to obtain.”

There is no home leaving, ever.

Hide it in plain sight

As Dongshan says, “With practice hidden, function secretly, like a fool, like an idiot,”

As Shih-t’ou, who our beloved P’ang knew well, said “If you wish to speak ten times, keep quiet nine.”

All is sangha

By which I mean: Buddha is Dharma is Sangha.

Be the guest house of which Rumi writes. Welcome all.

There’s truly nothing worth begrudging, as Bodhidharma said.

Relate: Lead with the relational perspective

Those of you who’ve been in our Precepts study group this round, or in the past, or who have read Bernie Glassman’s book on the Precepts, Infinite Circle, know that, in Zen, we look at our Bodhisattva Precepts—our ethical precepts—from three different perspectives: the literal, the relational, and the Absolute. 

For our lives in the world, of the world, whether in a monastery or outside of one, the relational is in the lead. It’s where the rubber of the Absolute meets the road of the literal.

Non-killing is the first of the ten grave precepts. Let’s look at it:

The literal is don’t kill. Full stop.

The Absolute: nothing is born or dies. Non-killing.

The relational: If you’re a vegan and the cook doesn’t know it, don’t kill her joy, his joy, whether you choose to eat the beef stew or not.

Not too tight, not too loose

That’s the phrase a hidden Buddhist friend of mine—a certified, crusty, old, cheap Vermonter named Bob Bender, the elder brother of my close friend, Bill—repeats often. “Not too tight, not too loose.”

In other words, seek the middle way.

Make space

This universe is the altar. This planet is the wisdom seat.

Clear a place for yourself; a little place at home to sit. Make a simple altar at which to dedicate your practice and your life.

Make time, and mark time

Make time a time to sit each day; time for group practice; time for sesshin—all as your circumstances permit.

Mark time: holidays like Bohdi Day, the Buddha’s birthday, and Obon. Holidays from your birth tradition if you have one and they’re still meaningful to you.

In Zen monasteries in Japan, they have endless regular and special rites and rituals and religious holidays. In householder life, especially as our cultures mixed and secularized, we can feel adrift in time.

So find ways to mark time, including over the course of a day: waking time, mealtimes, bedtime. We can mark these with little gathas. Like our simple meal gatha, which I say to myself at every meal: We receive this food in gratitude to all beings who helped to bring it to our table, and vow to respond in turn to those in need with wisdom and compassion.

Be time, by which I mean be present and give your presence. Give your genuine attention to other people. There is no greater gift you can give them, and yourself.

Everybody here is keeping time during sesshin: Matt and Libby and Paul and Cheryl—each of us in different ways. You have given me a real gift. Over the last couple of days, I’ve mostly not been wearing my watch, which I realized was making me mildly anxious. I don’t need it. Dropping the watch has helped me be time.

Make a mark

We can’t help but make a mark, whether we intend to or not.

Some of you know I practiced Zen archery years ago with Kanjuro Shibata Sensei XX, one of my first teachers. He was the imperial bowmaker of Japan. He stood in a long line, as the 20th of Japan’s Imperial bow makers.

Most of the shooting one does is inside a kyudojo room where there are hay bales, each covered with a white sheet. You stand a few yards from a hay bale and shoot into it. Far more arrows are shot into hay bales than circular targets far away.

As you can imagine, those sheets get poked full of holes. Everything you do in kyudo is ritualized, like what we do here. There is a ritual way to pull the arrow out of the hay bale. You pull it out slowly, twisting it. And the last thing you do, before you return to where you stand and prepare to take another shot, is to put your finger at the tip of the arrow and touch the arrow tip to the hole you have made. This gesture acknowledges you’ve made a mark. We can’t help but make a mark.

How do we make a mark through our householder existence? By not sparing the dharma assets. Develop and share your talents. Master some craft to life craft, to self-craft: teaching, cooking, poetry, medicine, hospitality, physical therapy. In other words, like Pierre, Maurice Sendak’s character, who I loved—and if you don’t know this reference, check it out: Care.

But as you make your mark, be gentle, and leave no trace. Don’t forget: The hills and dales are not impressed. 

All is precious, but don’t be too precious

All these forms to which we attend in minute detail are only to help us have a good shared experience. They’re not for the sake of the forms themselves. We embrace them to give life a pleasing shape and texture and feeling when we’re practicing them, and to learn to give life a pleasing shape and texture and felling when we’re not.

So hold them with the light touch. Don’t force them if we are forcing others by forcing them. If we’re pooping the party.

It’s nothing personal

By which I mean two things:

First, enlightenment isn’t something we can get. Something we can have.

Second, don’t take that, or anything else, too personally.

Optimize for wholeness and integration

This also has two dimensions:

First, about our life choices. You probably will make less money if you walk the Zen path. We could all be working right now. It probably will influence choices you make about your livelihood and how you live; opportunities we don’t take up.

Still on this first dimension, don’t privilege the formal forms of our practice over the rest of your life. Find the right balance, like the surfer. For example, if you’re married, your marriage probably will suffer if you don’t leave sesshin to celebrate your spouse’s birthday, if it falls during the week of sesshin. I know this from personal experience with teachers who expected me to be at sesshin over my wife’s birthday year after year. Don’t ever practice with a teacher who wouldn’t let you leave sesshin for an evening to celebrate your partner’s or child’s birthday.

Second, optimize for wholeness and integration by exploring your shadows and welcoming what you meet there.

Okay, on to the last three encouragements. I have less to say about them.

Life is the teacher

Trust your experience.

A footnote on that is, if you invite somebody into a Zen teacher role in your life, make sure that is what they are teaching. Make sure that’s what they want for you. That they know life is your ultimate teacher.

Time passes swiftly, and opportunity is lost. Do not squander your life.

This is from our Evening Gatha, of course. Some of these aren’t very original.

Choose the long road, take it easy, and enjoy the ride

Sometimes swiftly, always slowly.

There is no short road. There are no shortcuts, either.

Layman P’ang 2

Jeff

This is the second of three talks I gave at our weeklong sesshin, held from August 24-30, 2025, at Providence Zen Center, a monastery. Our theme was “Chop Wood, Carry Water”: Everyday Form and Formation on the Householder Path. A recording follows the text, which is edited for clarity and conciseness.

This is Case 2 in The Sayings of Layman P’ang:

One day, Shih-t’ou said, “I’ve come to visit you. What have you been doing?” 

The Layman said, “If you’re asking what I do every day, there’s nothing to say about it.”

Shih-t’ou said, “What did you think you were doing before I asked you about it?”

The Layman made up a verse:

“What I do every day is nothing special.

I simply stumble around.

What I do is not thought out.

Where I go is unplanned.

No matter who tries to leave their mark,

The hills and dales are not impressed.

Collecting firewood and carrying water

Are prayers that reach the gods.”

Shih-t’ou approved saying, “So, are you going to wear black or white?”

The Layman said, “I will do whatever is best.”

It came to pass that he never shaved his head to join the sangha.

Today I want to zero in on the final three lines of this case:

Shih-t’ou approved saying, “So are you going to wear black or white?

The Layman said, “I will do whatever is best.”

It came to pass that he never shaved his head to join the sangha. 

So what might Layman P’ang have been deliberating about at this moment he was considering leaving home; joining a monastery or living a hermit’s life? I’m not sure that, when we meet Shih-t’ou in this case, he even would have had a monastery yet. Ancient Zen masters were often named after the place they sat, like a certain mountain. If I’m not mistaken, Shih-t’ou means flat rock. He apparently just sat on top of a flat rock and eventually built his monastery at or near that spot. The flat rock was where people found him. 

P’ang is thinking about taking up this life himself. Why might he want to do that, we can ask? I can sort of relate to him at this moment in his journey. Probably like many of you, I have long had what we might call a contemplative orientation. When I was very young—probably before, certainly in, first grade—I did some things that were kind of weird for a little kid, I suppose. I created a little monk’s cell on the floor of my closet. I would go in there and shut the door, turn on a little light and read the Bible, and The Hardy Boys, and Maurice Sendak. It was a comfortable little place.

We lived in a suburb of Denver at the time. It was still developing. We lived in a track home community; we were the first occupants of our home there. And there was a lot of construction around us. I created a little shrine in a nearby construction site; a little cavity in the side of a large pile of dirt where I put some religious objects. I can’t remember what. I was raised Catholic, so probably a little Jesus statue or something. I’d go there periodically to pray.

Fast forward to my 20s and early 30s—so about the age when we meet P’ang in our story—and I was doing what P’ang did. I was traveling around meeting teachers. I learned to meditate in my mid-20s, though I think even that little kid was doing something we might call meditation. But formal meditation: Maybe I’d read about it and experimented with it earlier out of books. I certainly read a lot of contemplative literature and Dharma books when I was in college and graduate school. I took classes that were relevant to what we do here. But my first formal instruction in meditation was with Tibetan Buddhist teachers in Berkeley, California, when I was a young lawyer in working in San Francisco.

I lived in Berlin for a while after that, and I made the rounds in Germany and Europe meeting teachers and sitting with different groups. I read a lot of Dharma books there and I sort of began to settle down and mature into two primary forms of practice. Back then I was still centered in Catholicism, I suppose. I discovered the contemplative strain in Catholicism, and the Trappists specifically. I used to go on retreat to a Trappist monastery and to a Carmelite hermitage. I also began sitting with his Zen community led by Kanjuro Shibata Sensei XX, the imperial bowmaker of Japan—practicing Zen archery with him and sitting Zazen. 

I rarely went on a normal vacation for many years. All my vacation time—all the vacation time I could get, and many weekends, too—I would spend on retreat, often at monasteries. I was in the same kind of period of discernment as P’ang was when we meet him. I was considering entering a monastery.

Why didn’t I do it? Why did I even consider it? Why I considered it is clear, and I’ll get to that in a moment. Why I didn’t do it is less clear to me. Or is still becoming clear to me, even today. So why may P’ang or you or any of us consider taking up monastic life? Well, let me suggest some reasons. This is not an exhaustive list. 

As we experience when we’re here, on sesshin at a monastery, it’s a very structured life. Time is structured. Space is structured. Many of the decisions we must make on a day-to-day basis outside of a monastery are made for us. The forms, the norms, are very clear and regularized. We just follow them. We’re midway through sesshin, and we’re kind of in that groove now. What do we gain from that? What does it afford us?

All these forms are designed to support us in a particular way; to support our spiritual development, or what we might imagine to be spiritual development. They take away certain types of burdens from us. The burden of making a decision. The burden of endlessly negotiating things with others. They resolve conflicts in advance, if you will. There’s a Chinese proverb that I think is interesting: Like minds make peace. When we align our minds around a set of norms or behaviors, it tends to unify us and makes peace in a sense. 

What does this word “spiritual” mean anyway? Well, etymologically, it’s associated with breath. We can get metaphorical about that; the breath of God, breath of life. But it’s also about basic, physiological breath. Lots of words related to “spiritual” are really interesting too, like aspire. It’s no coincidence that in Zen practice, and lots of other spiritual practices, we focus on or regulate our breath in certain ways. In Zen practice, we just learn to breathe naturally.

These norms and routines in an environment like this make it easier just to live naturally in every way, including physiologically. To catch our breath. To breathe in a steady way. Steady breathing slows our heart rate; settles or calms our nervous system. That helps us find a kind of still point, and this tends to make it easier to to show up with ease and harmony—as we’ve been chanting about. If we can meet life that way, things tend to go better, and we tend to tune in to the frequency of life; to what life is always trying to offer us.

These are some of the opportunities that the structures and rhythms of monastic life offer. I think many of us come to a place like this, observe monastic life, and think of it as very rigorous and otherwise hard. But I want to turn that notion on its head. Many of us initially experience these sort of routines—the rigor and the forms— as hard and probably novice monks experience things that way. But from the perspective of a seasoned practitioner—and I know this from talking to people who have spent their whole life in a monastery, like my teacher, Kevin Hunt, who has been a monastic since his late teens and now is 93–one ultimately comes to experience that life as easier. It’s designed to remove challenges and burdens of life outside the monastery. I think it’s fair to say that Kevin sees life outside the monastery as harder.

Kevin’s Dharma heirs and those of his teacher, the Jesuit Bob Kennedy, are mostly householders. They have told me they see the kind of life we live as where the real action is at in this era. The future of practice. And in fact, Bob’s teacher, Bernie Glassman, who trained with Maezumi Roshi in more of a monastic model, eventually gave up the pretense of monasticism entirely to begin to tinker with and pioneer a new way of approaching and thinking about Zen practice that was more focused on householder life. I know from talking to people familiar with his thinking that Maezumi Roshi thought and dreamed about that, too, but felt constrained by the old norms and the expectations of the Soto authorities back in Japan. He felt constrained from taking any bold steps in that direction. Bernie waited until after Maezumi Roshi’s death to begin to take those steps.

So Why enter a monastery? Why consider entering a monastery? Well, maybe there are better and worse reasons for doing it. And maybe some of the worst reasons are, in a sense, inevitable for many who do enter a monastery. I think a lot of people probably enter to escape. And some likely enter because they imagine that, to be spiritual, to be holy, they need to do this. That it somehow will make them more spiritual or make them more holy.

Kevin’s example is interesting. I think he represents the best reason to enter a monastery. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be as close to God as he could be, and, for him, that meant living a monastic life. His orientation is theistic; an interesting brand of theism that is married with Zen. It was about intimacy from his perspective. His karma was such that monastic life was how he could feel closest to God.

I want to suggest—and I hope—that Layman P’ang chose not to shave his head to join the sangha out of a similar impulse. I sense he made the same kind of decision Kevin made, having explored these different options for living a whole bunch. I don’t know whether the Ten Ox Herding Pictures existed yet. Regardless, I think he understood that ultimate image of returning to the marketplace with empty hands. Somebody, you know, “in the world,” as we say, living life intimately.

So what’s lost when we enter a monastery? Well, certain types of freedom and choices. These days, Kevin really loves to leave the monastery. He usually wants to go to a restaurant and have a piece of red meat, which is served less in the monastery. He might even have a beer or a martini, not a common occurrence in his life generally. Most of us in this part of the world, who are insanely fortunate compared to most humans, almost have the opposite problem. We must make the choice not to over-indulge. Kevin is part of the Trappist order, which is the most hardcore of the monastic orders. People have very few possessions; they take a vow poverty. There are certain pleasurable experiences we take for granted that they don’t have.

Of course, something is gained by that. They strip away what is not essential, so they discover simple pleasure—like we have right here, now, if we notice the gentle breeze blowing through the Zendo. They experience how incredibly sweet a mandarin orange is if we’re not comparing it to sugar cookies and sodas. With our constant access to amplified pleasure, novelty is lost. We get to have new experiences all the time. Surprising new experiences; experiences that come out of the blue. Of course that happens in monasteries, too. It’s always happening everywhere, but we might not notice it if we’re compulsively seeking novelty and peak experiences all the time.

Our settling practices can help us encounter every moment as new. You’ve heard me say Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who said, “You can’t step in the same river twice,” got it completely wrong. I say you can’t step in the same river once. Everything’s always in flux and changing. Our settling practices can help us notice that experience and appreciate the novelty and the newness of every moment.

But there are some types of newness, like the concert I’ll see in October with one of my new favorite bands, that monastics probably aren’t going to have. Key relationships: they don’t have free access to family and friends. They don’t speak to them as regularly. They certainly don’t text with them 14 times a day, as we’re used to doing. 

What else is lost? Certain types of impact potential. This is what I think Kevin and Bob are getting at; why they think the kind of life we live is really where the action is today. It must be sort of hard at times to sit in a monastery with so much suffering in the world and only be able to pray; only be able to interact with the people who come visit. We have much more opportunity, and perhaps obligation, to intervene, as we’re called, and as we skillfully can, in situations where we can be helpful.

The last thing I’ll mention—and, again, this is not an exhaustive list—that you’re giving up by becoming a monatstic is many important training opportunities. As householders, we train amid intimate relationships with partners and family members. We train in a torrent of choice and change that they don’t experience. Their physical needs are met. They brew beer or make chocolates to help subsidize their material needs, but, in general, they can’t be fired from a job, and they mostly don’t have to deal with demands of unreasonable clients and bosses. They don’t have to meet those circumstances as practice opportunities as we do. All this is why many of them would say the life we live is a harder life. They mean it’s harder to practice amid all that. They know we have the same aspiration; the same breath, the same spirit—at least those of us who occasionally visit places like this and strike up relationships with people like them.

They know they have something to offer us, but we also, they see, have something to offer them. They know we’re seeking what they’re seeking; what brought them to the monastery. And they recognize that it is harder, in a way, to walk this path, in our form of life than it is in their life form, whatever they might have thought about that when they entered the monastery.

Let me offer a little metaphor here that may be useful. What we’re doing in spiritual practice is a lot like surfing, as I understand it. Things are impermanent, always changing. Life, our experience, has a visible form, like the form of a wave, but don’t think that wave is stable or substantial. It’s ephemeral and it’s moving. What the expert surfer does is amazing, when you think about it. They learn to ride, to find their balance on top of, the crest of that wave. What they’re doing on the crest of that wave is falling a thousand times the second. Always adjusting, recovering to maintain their balance on the crest of impermanence. Getting to the point where you can do that is going to look really choppy. The first time the expert tried to do it, it didn’t look anything like they make it look now.

I think many monastics look at our lives, and they think, “Man, you’re out there in the big waves. Yeah, we’re maintaining our balance here in the monastery, but this is like skimboarding; what we’re doing. We’re in the shallow water. You’re in the deep end, where the big waves are.”

Their practice opportunities, are, in many ways, more manageable than many of ours, at least much of the time. In our householder lives, we are dealing with all sorts of challenges that are, well, genuinely challenging. Relationships are top of mind for me. Relationships with aging parents or aging partners or peers. Relationships with intimate partners whatever our ages. Monastics are intimate with one another, but not quite the same way many of us are intimate with somebody. Another person with whom we literally lie naked, and with whom we are naked spiritually and psychologically. That’s an extreme level of vulnerability. It’s as hard to manage as some of us might think maintaining silence all day long, every day of the year, is hard to manage.

 I mentioned work and having to deal with material reality and money and scarcity and abundance. Things are kept very level for them in a material sense. My family went through a period of economic vulnerability when I was in high school and early college. I didn’t know it at the time, because my parents insulated us from the details pretty well, but we had just $300 to our name as a family at one point. I am certain my parents, with three children, were worried in ways that monks seldom worry.

We also contend with difference more than monastics do. Different norms, expectations, perspectives, worldviews, moral codes. We just confront more difference than they do. People bring these things to monastic life, but, to some extent, they are normalized or suppressed. You hue to a common moral vision and code that is essentially imposed on you in a monastery. Christian monasteries have the Rule of St. Benedict. Many Buddhist monasteries have some version of the Vinaya. And you reconcile yourself to that somehow.

Also Distractions: I don’t think I need to say more about that.

And the last thing I’ll mention from our long list of greater challenges is risk. We all deal with risks that are more frequent and present and, well, risky. Many people who walk this path, and who might consider entering a monastery, are tuned towards introversion. But outside a monastery, we must meet new people all the time and compel ourselves to venture forth in ways that you just do not in a monastic environment. There are many other forms of risk in our lives: for one of us, who is commuting to this sesshin, driving here early in the morning with lots of people driving too fast on the road; driving away from here at night with poor eyesight. Monks drive, but less frequently.

This isn’t a comparison for purposes of declaring one life form good and another bad. It is a comparison for purposes of noting and being honest about what is different about the life we live and the life that, perhaps, the Buddha and some people in his era and since then have thought people need to live to express the best versions of themselves, leaving home supposedly to grow or meet life fully or seek truth.

I submit that, in this day and age, as we read in that lovely Judith Collin poem, or as Kevin Hunt and Bob Kennedy would say, the major turn of the Dharma wheel is about broadening our sense of sangha to include the kind of life we live. I submit that it is as hard as life here in a monastery; that looking at our lives from this monastic perspective, which we tend to think of as harder, there’s reason to think it is the other way around: that it’s harder to walk the Zen path “in the world,” so to speak.

It may be easier to cultivate attention in an environment like this, but this is not ultimately a practice about attention. It’s a practice about intention and action; about how we show up, how we meet the world. The quality of our attention and the capacity to maintain it is an important condition for consistently meeting the world as our best selves. But a lot of the world lies beyond the four walls of a place like this. And the rest of the world needs what has historically and traditionally been cultivated primarily in places like this to be brought beyond these four walls and out into the world.

That’s why we’re here for a time, ironically. To realize this more fully. That’s who we are. That’s why we’ll leave here on Saturday.

Layman P’ang 1

Jeff

This is the first of three talks I gave at our weeklong sesshin, held from August 24-30, 2025, at Providence Zen Center, a monastery. Our theme was “Chop Wood, Carry Water”: Everyday Form and Formation on the Householder Path. A recording follows the text, which is edited for clarity and conciseness.

During this sesshin, we are going to be exploring the theme of form and formation along the householder path of Zen. This is the reading we’ve chosen as our launchpad for exploring this theme. It’s the second story—one could call it a case, and I’ll say more about that in a minute—in The Sayings of Layman P’ang. It’s titled “Subtleties of Daily Life”:

One day, Shih-t’ou said, “I’ve come to visit you. What have you been doing?” 

The Layman said, “If you’re asking what I do every day, there’s nothing to say about it.”

Shih-t’ou said, “What did you think you were doing before I asked you about it?”

The Layman made up a verse:

“What I do every day is nothing special.

I simply stumble around.

What I do is not thought out.

Where I go is unplanned.

No matter who tries to leave their mark,

The hills and dales are not impressed.

Collecting firewood and carrying water

Are prayers that reach the gods.”

Shih-t’ou approved saying, “So, are you going to wear black or white?”

The Layman said, “I will do whatever is best.”

It came to pass that he never shaved his head to join the sangha.

This little book I’m reading from, The Sayings of Layman P’ang, which I expect many of you are familiar with, is a classic in China, even to this day. It’s one of the most revered texts in Chinese culture. It is a collection of sayings of Layman P’ang—about whom I’ll say more in a moment—but probably not all of them. We think there were more. These were collected within, let’s say, 10 years after his death. 

P’ang lived in the late 8th century and the early 9th century. He died, I think, in 808. And he made quite an impression on people. This little book is really our first collection of koans—of stories about teachers. P’ang became a teacher. I’ll say more about that in a minute, too.

This collection of anecdotes, of koans, about P’ang and his encounters with monastics, was compiled before the first compilations of koans that we’re familiar with. Even today in China, most people aren’t going to be very familiar with the koan collections centered on monastic Zen teachers. But they are still familiar with The Sayings of Layman P’ang.

So who was P’ang? He grew up the son of the governor, of a provincial governor, or—we’re not sure—maybe the son of an official who worked for a governor. That’s a little murky. But it’s safe to say he grew up in privilege. Likely with some affluence and access and education.

When we meet him in this story I’ve just read, which is the second story in the book—I’ll say a little bit about the first story in just a second—he’s probably in his 30s. He’s married. I guess we can’t know whether he’s had both of his kids, but he does eventually have two kids, a daughter and a son. 

And, apparently, he had been something of a scholar of Confucius thought. By the time we meet him, he’s probably wandered around quite a bit. We know he had encounters with Taoist teachers. So he’s steeped in Confucian thought and Taoist thought, which were the two big schools of thought in China that predated the emergence of Zen.

And when we meet P’ang, he’s meeting some of the earliest Zen teachers. Towering figures in the history of Zen. It is the heyday of Zen in China during P’ang’s life. He lives during the Tang dynasty, which was a time of real prosperity and cultural flourishing and relative peace and stability in the rocky history of ancient China. 

Shih-t’ou, the teacher he encounters in this story, is one of two towering figures who live in the area where P’ang is living. (Shih-t’ou authored the Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage, which we just read.) He is the Dharma Heir of Huineng, the sixth ancestor of Zen, who was himself a layman when he entered the monastery, and for some time after he became a teacher. The sixth ancestor made a sort of scandalous progression from kitchen boy who cleaned rice to head of a major monastery. Shih-t’ou is the person to whom we trace the Soto Zen school in which we practice.

P’ang will go on throughout this book to meet many other local Zen figures, including the teacher to whom we trace the Rinzai school of Zen. So he’s really making the rounds at the foundation and formation of the Zen tradition. He’s exploring the emergence of Zen as Zen is exploring itself, so to speak. He develops a close relationship with not only these two major teachers I’ve mentioned, Shih-t’ou and Ma-tsu, but another 15 or 20 more monastics who live in the area. 

When we meet P’ang early in this collection of sayings, in the story I read, the second case, it’s not his first encounter with Shih-t’ou. They have had at least one other meeting we know about. It is the subject of the first story in this collection. It’s a famous story. In that story, P’ang is visiting Shih-t’ou, who, at that time, probably lives as a hermit in the area in which P’ang lives. P’ang brings Shih-t’ou his genjokoan, his life koan. This is what genjokoan, which Dogen later writes about, means, by the way. Many of us walk around with a burning question, like “What’s the meaning of life?” Mine was “When can I stop sitting?” When can I stop practicing? That question ate at me for years, years ago. 

The genjokoan P’ang brings Shih-t’ou, the burning question P’ang asks him, is, “What about someone who has no connection with the 10,000 dharmas?” This is P’ang coming to a teacher and actually declaring something. I am a person who no longer has any connection to the 10,000 dharmas, to the 10,000 things, to the world of form. 

What does Shih-t’ou do? He covers P’ang’s mouth; silences him. And P’ang has a great realization.

So, in our case, the second case, Shih-t’ou is coming to check in on P’ang. He says, “I’ve come to visit you. What have you been doing?”

Well, you know, this is a Zen teacher. So, as always, this could either be an innocent question or a not so innocent question. Maybe he’s asking. “Hey, P’ang, I’m wondering: Are you still stuck in emptiness?” Or, has that realization you had in our last encounter really begun to sink in. Do you know, as we chant in the Heart Sutra, that form is exactly emptiness, and emptiness is exactly form? Do you know that as more than an idea? Do you know it in your bones? Do you know it so completely that you’ve forgotten it?

The Layman said, “If you’re asking what I do every day, there’s nothing to say about it.” That’s a promising response. It seems P’ang may be returning Shih-t’ou’s double meaning with a double meaning of his own. It seems perhaps P’ang realizes his ordinary life is validating and expressing the inexpressible. That he’s realized the 10,000 dharmas speak for themselves.

Shih-t’ou says. “What did you think you were doing before I asked you about it?” A joust to P’ang’s parry! This is a checking question. Shih-t’ou is saying, “That’s a nice response, P’ang, but I’m still wondering: Is it just for show? Is it just for me, or do you truly get it for yourself?”

The Layman made up a verse, “Truly, what I do every day is nothing special.” 
The ordinary is extraordinary. I’m not trying to put a second head on top of my head anymore. 

“I simply stumble around. What I do is not thought out. Where I go is unplanned.” What is this “I” that P’ang repeats three times? That I is now in its place. P’ang now experiences small mind as situated, at ease, and at rest in Big Mind. Small mind has given up its pretense of control, its control project. Even while I’m goal directed, I stumble around. Even as I chatter to myself, direct myself, what I do is not thought out. Even when I’m executing on my best laid plans, where I go is unplanned, P’ang is saying.

“No matter who tries to leave their mark, the hills and dales are not impressed.” I (Jeff) have for a long time planned to write, and have been working on writing, a couple of books. It’s gone much slower than I would like. And that bothered me a lot for a long time. It still bothers me, but not quite the same way as it once did. It used to bother me because I was so sure the world needs these books.

Don’t get me wrong, I think I’ve got something to say. If I do complete them, I hope they’ll be good books that people find useful. And yet, I realize and have come to accept, that if I do complete these books, and even if they’re best sellers, they don’t have the ultimacy, the extra ultimate importance, that I once invested in or imagined of and for them.

Last weekend, I was on sesshin with another community that I’m sort of loosely connected to. At one point on a break, I was sitting in the library of the retreat center, where this sesshin was happening. I looked over to my left, and I saw a book by someone I knew; one of my early teachers, the Trappist monk, Thomas Keating. I got up and I wandered along the bookshelf, which was quite long. At the other end of it I saw a book by another one of my teachers, the adult developmental psychologist, Robert Kegan. Keating is now dead. Kegan is alive but retired. 

I saw lots of books between these two, by people I don’t know. I had never heard of many of them, many of whom presumably are dead. Keating and Kegan and their books matter a lot to me. Yet, no matter who tries to leave their mark, the hills and dales are not ultimately impressed.

“Collecting firewood and carrying water are prayers that reach the gods.” Maybe you didn’t know that one of the most famous phrases in all of Zen originates from this householder, P’ang. It’s usually expressed as “chop wood, carry water,” and it’s been popularized in many ways, by many people. It’s been in the title of books. It’s in the lyrics of a Van Morrison tune.

Every day: sacred. Life as prayer. Our actions as prayer. What we do is continuous practice. And this is what our Zen practice is about. It’s about discovering ourselves, washing the dishes, as the universe’s meditation.

Shih-t’ou approved, saying, “So are you going to wear black or white?” No more checking questions. 

“Are you going to wear black or white?” In those days in China monks wore black and householders wore white. Notice I’m not saying priest and layperson. I won’t go off on that riff here. You’ve heard it from me many times before. But, you know, in those days, there was a kind of normativity around monasticism. The Buddha had given the example of leaving home as what it meant to step on the path of spiritual development. That’s a simplification and too hard a binary, of course, because there were householders who were respected members of the Buddha’s broader network, like Vamilikirti. But becoming a monk was thought to be extra special.

Apparently, P’ang has confided in Shih-t’ou that he thought about leaving home; becoming a monastic. Maybe Shih-t’ou, having seen the depth of P’ang’s insight and commitment, had raised that possibility. From our present-day perspective, that seems almost unthinkable. P’ang is married. He has kids or kids on the way. What? Really? Would he leave? Apparently, it was a live question for P’ang at this point in which we meet him on his journey.

The Layman said, “I will do whatever is best.” In other words, I’m still thinking about it. I’m still in a process of discernment. I’m not sure. What is my karma? What is my life to live? I don’t know. I don’t know yet. 

What do people imagine? What do people imagine today about leaving home and going to live in a monastery, or to live as a hermit? Did you think that’s what we need to do to be “spiritual”? To be holy, live a holy life. What was P’ang imagining?

“It came to pass that he never shaved his head to join the sangha” Well, as you know, in the Buddha’s day, and really throughout history, even to the present in most Buddhist streams in Asia, “sangha” means the community of monastics. But we use that word more broadly and think of ourselves, we householders, as part of the sangha. But that is not how people have primarily thought about it within mainstream Buddhism in cultures beyond the West.

In fact, Zen teachers in Japan—because in modern times they tend to spend very little time in training monasteries, and they live in local temples with their families, where and they eat meat and drink alcohol—are not regarded by monastics in other parts of Asia as real members of the sangha. Even the founder of the White Plum lineage in which we practice, Taizan Maezumi Roshi: he was, much revered by Tibetan teachers and Burmese teachers and Sri Lankan teachers, but, at events at which they all gathered and spoke to Buddhist practitioners, I understand Maezumi Roshi was not always, maybe not even most of the time, invited to sit up on the Diaz with these other teachers. Because the way Japanese teachers practice is not considered pure, or right, from their perspective. So they’re not really part of the sangha.

Okay, spoiler alert: I’ll tell you a little bit more about what comes after today’s story. P’ang continues to wander to meet Zen teachers and other monastics. He soon meets Ma-tsu, who I mentioned earlier, to whom we trace the Rinzai Zen stream. P’ang goes away at one point and lives with Ma-tsu for a year or two. But he eventually leaves. His karma became clear, his path became clear. It came to pass that he never shaved his head and joined the sangha.

To this day, even in the West, when you meet somebody who uses the word “priest” to identify themselves, what that really means traditionally is that they went through the ritual of Shuke Tokudo, which is the ceremony for entering a monastery. It’s about becoming a monk, not becoming a “priest”—historically, traditionally, anyway. They shave their head, and they take some vows, as they move into a monastery. The vows are pretty much the same vows we take at Jukai. 

P’ang decided not to shave his head and enter a monastery. It’s lucky for us that he didn’t, because his decision, his example, reverberates and resounds throughout history. He was eventually acknowledged as a teacher. He received transmission from Ma-tsu. So early on in Zen history, we see all the supposed rules being broken.

P’ang didn’t leave any successors as far as we know. But along the way, his wife and kids, it seems, became inspired to practice. The family took all their luxury goods at one point out into the middle of a lake, on a boat, and sunk the boat. They supported themselves from that point forward by weaving and selling baskets.

I really commend this book to you. Basically, it’s a bunch of stories in which P’ang goes around one-upping all the local monastics. Or, as the British would say, taking the piss out of them. It’s all very amusing, in addition to being very wise.

P’ang is quite something, and he needs to be centered more on the path that we walk, because his life is our life. He clearly appreciated his life in the world. And he provides encouragement to us. Singing in an a cappella group. Caring for a loved one with dementia. Taking kids off to college. These are prayers that reach the gods.

Let me close with a reading from our Sutra Book. The lovely poem by Judith Collin, titled The Layman’s Lament: 

Shame on you Shakyamuni for setting

the precedent 

of leaving home. 

Did you think it was not there – 

in your wife’s lovely face 

or your baby’s laughter? 

Did you think you had to go elsewhere 

to find it? 

Tsk, tsk. 

I am here to show you 

dear sir 

that you needn’t step 

even one sixteenth of an inch away – stay 

here – elbows dripping with soapy water 

stay here – spit up all over your chest 

stay here – steam rising in lazy curls from 

cream of wheat 

Poor Shakyamuni – sitting under the Bo tree 

miles away from home 

Venus shone all the while

Layman P’ang’s Dialogue with an Oxherd

Jeff

I gave this talk on August 6, 2025, at Full Moon Zen’s Sunrise Sit. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 49, Where the Path Leads, in The Sayings of Layman P’ang:

One day the Layman saw a young boy herding oxen and asked him, “Where does this path we’re following lead to?”

The boy said, “I don’t know where it goes.”

The Layman said, “Aren’t you herding the oxen?”

The boy said, “They live in these fields.”

The Layman said, “What time of day is it anyway?”

The boy said, “It’s time to take the oxen to pasture.”

The Layman laughed heartily.

Let’s take this wonderful story line-by-line.

One day the Layman saw a young boy herding oxen and asked him, “Where does this path we’re following lead to?”

P’ang is an acknowledged Zen master and his question is the sort of coy one you’d expect from a teacher. One of those questions that seems ordinary and innocent enough but is probing the depth of your insight (and your sense of humor). But is that really what’s happening here? P’ang is the trickster who knows all the holier-than-though monks in the region and takes great pleasure in one-upping them. I’m inclined to think he’s in unfamiliar territory, is innocently asking this young stranger for directions, and is about to get beaten at his own game.

The boy said, “I don’t know where it goes.”

The boy’s opening line reminds me of something my eldest, who’s now 20, said when he was four or five. Esther and I were in our bedroom and one of was griping about something a parent or sibling had done. As I walked out of the room, I said, “Well, you know what they say: You can’t choose your family.” 

We didn’t realize our son had been just outside listening the whole time. Without missing a beat, he lit up and exclaimed, “Yeah, and you can’t even choose yourself!”

Wisdom from the mouth of babes. Does anyone really know what this is, who we are, and where we’re going?

The Layman said, “Aren’t you herding the oxen?”

Now we begin to sense P’ang knows he’s bumbled into a trap and may have met his match. “Okay, little sage, so seemingly self-possessed, surely you imagine you’re in charge and leading the way here?”

P’ang’s second question is anything but innocent. It’s a joust to the boy’s parry. The boy is herding ox, but will he recognize and has he tamed the ox I’m talking about? 

Has he discovered his wandering small mind situated in and as Big Mind , as we see in Zen’s famous Ox Herding pictures? Has his small mind been weened of the illusion that it’s the center of the universe and locus of ultimate control?

The boy’s response?

The boy said, “They live in these fields.”

Touché!

There’s a footnote in the text which says, “The sense of this statement is that the oxen know where they are going.”

Indeed. Let me read you a short passage about dealing with distractions in meditation that makes the boy’s point more explicitly. This is from a wonderful new book, Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism, by Bret Davis, an American Rinzai teacher and philosophy professor who has extensive practice experience in Japan. Drawing inspiration from Shunryu Suzuki, founder of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and the San Francisco Zen Center, Davis writes:

Another teaching Suzuki Roshi gives in this regard goes even deeper and wider. He says: If you want to control your mischievous mind, don’t try to control it. Don’t try to pin it down or confine it to a mental jail cell. Do the opposite and give it a wide-open space in which to roam. Using another vivid metaphor, he says: “To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” That wide-open pasture is an image for what he and other Zen masters call “Big Mind.” All the thoughts and distractions of our small minds take place within a wide-open and non-judgmental field of awareness.

The Layman said, “What time of day is it anyway?”

P’ang, still fancying himself the teacher, hasn’t yet admitted defeat. We get another checking question, but who’s checking whom?

The boy said, “It’s time to take the oxen to pasture.”

Enough of this stuff about emptiness, Old Man. Bye, now. The cows and I are hungry. It’s time to eat.

The Layman laughed heartily.

May we all learn not to take ourselves too seriously and come to laugh this cosmic laugh with Layman P’ang. 

Every Day is a Good Day

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Sunrise Sit today, the day before Thanksgiving. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 6 in the Blue Cliff Record:

Yunmen gave a teaching, saying, “I’m not asking you about before the fifteenth day of the month. Why not say a word about after the fifteenth day of the month?”

He answered himself, “Every day is a good day.”

The full moon is a metaphor for enlightenment in Zen. In the Chinese lunar calendar, the full moon appears mid-month, so the monks training with Yunmen would have heard him asking them what it’s like to be enlightened. 

They seem confounded, so Yunmen answers his own question, “Every day is a good day.” 

What does he mean? Is he taunting the monks by saying every day is a good day only after the full moon rises; only after one is enlightened? I don’t think so. 

I expect there was a long silence before Yunmen answered himself. He would have known the monks were thinking to themselves, “I have no idea what it’s like after the full moon. Why are you asking me? I can only imagine my life right now, before the full moon.” 

Living in close quarters with Yunmen, the monks also would have seen him getting sick, getting frustrated occasionally, sometimes forgetting things and making mistakes, after the full moon; after enlightenment.

I think Yunmen truly means every day is a good day, including the days before the full moon. These days when the monks think the moon is hidden and they lack enlightenment.

Yunmen’s question simultaneously meets the monks where they believe they’re at and contests their self-understanding. Yunmen is addressing seekers; people seeking enlightenment. They’re sure they don’t have it or haven’t yet found it. More than one of these seekers would have asked Yunmen, “What’s enlightenment like? I want to know. Tell me.”

Yunmen turns this question back at them. “You’re always telling me about your troubled lives before the full moon; before enlightenment,” he seems to be saying. “Tell me something about your life beyond the full moon, right here and now.”

But they’re dumbfounded. 

Yunmen’s question both confirms the monks’ belief that there’s a time before enlightenment and a time after it and challenges that belief. Yunmen implies they can describe the enlightenment experience and invites them to do so.

If Yunmen thinks they can describe life beyond the full moon, then perhaps it’s not the idealized life they imagine. Perhaps it’s still a life with troubles.

If only someone had just groaned about their splitting headache or the lukewarm tea.

Yunmen’s question divides time into before and after, but, as I’ve said, his response doesn’t differentiate between the days before the full moon and the days after it. No before. No after.

Troubled or untroubled. Our awareness attuned to the light that shines within or not. Grateful or not.

Every day is a good day.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Kyōgen’s “Man Up a Tree”: A Jukai Reflection on Lineage and the Precepts

Jeff

I gave this talk on April 8, 2023, as part of a Zazenkai preceding a Jukai ceremony in which three Zen students received the Zen Bodhisattva Precepts.

This is Case 5 in The Gateless Gate:

Master Kyōgen said, “It’s like a man up a tree, hanging from a branch by his mouth; his hands cannot grasp a branch, his feet won’t reach a bough. Suppose there is another person under the tree who asks him, “What is the meaning of Boddhidharma’s coming from the west?” If he does not respond, he goes against the wish of the questioner. If he answers, he will lose his life. At such time, how should he respond?

This is one of those koans that has stuck with me over the years. The image of this man up a tree is at once so odd and so relatable. He’s clenching a limb with his teeth, holding onto his life precariously. He must be panicked, painfully aware this is going to end poorly no matter what, even before someone else comes along seeking help.

How much longer could he hold on? Thirty seconds, maybe? A minute? Still, he hesitates to let go of the tree to face the inevitable; hesitates to respond to another soul appealing to him as a Bodhisattva.

I remember feeling so pained for the man up the tree the first time I read this koan. Anguished. I feel for him still. Of course, we are the person up the tree. Which of us hasn’t been stuck before, and felt it?

We’re going to celebrate Jukai this afternoon. Three of our friends here today—Eliot, Kent, and Rebecca—will take up the Bodhisattva Precepts, formally dedicating themselves to the Zen way of life.

This koan is perfect for today, because Jukai also is about a certain tree. During Jukai one receives a scroll tracing a lineage of Zen ancestors from Shakyamuni Buddha to oneself. This lineage traditionally is understood as a family tree—a new family tree. Many Asian cultures, including those of China and Japan, which sequentially formed the Zen tradition as we initially received it, place great emphasis on ancestry—upon one’s identification with and location within a community conceptualized in terms of kinship through time.

It can be a bit hard for us Westerners to fully imbibe what this means to many Asians even today, in all its complex valences that entail both benefit and burden. But for many this sense of lineage is deeply felt. Many people in parts of Asia still deeply appreciate and honor this attention to lineage. That’s not to say this strong identification with ancestral lineage doesn’t feel limiting and otherwise burdensome at times. For example, tensions between the old and the new, and between the individual and the community, are prominent themes in Chinese poetry, prose, and proverb throughout history.

In Jukai, as in rituals in other traditions in which one affirms one’s commitment to an intentional way of life, one receives a new name. This happened to me—and, I think, some others in this room—when I participated in the Catholic rite of Confirmation many years ago. Today, Eliot, Kent, and Rebecca each will receive a Dharma name. In Japan to this day, Zen monks, and likely also some non-monastics, actually change their name in the civil legal records after taking the precepts. This is no small matter in that cultural context. Symbolically and practically, they’re saying they’ve jumped from one family tree to another.

How do we make sense of all this today, from our cultural perspectives and for our purposes? How can and should we think about lineage when focusing so much on ancestry seems foreign and anachronistic to us; when the traditional lineage we depict in Zen draws attention to some people to the neglect of countless others; and when some of the people depicted were disappointing (or worse) in some ways, however insightful and helpful they may have been in other ways. Viewed from one angle, our Zen tree looks pretty gnarly, even rotten or hollow in places.

The people listed on the traditional scroll our Jukai participants will receive are mostly men, and almost all of these men were monks. Eliot, Kent, and Rebecca also will receive a chart tracing the lineage of some prominent women and non-monastic ancestors as a way to begin to acknowledge and honor the fact that this tree has long been sustained by a much more diverse community of people committed to the Zen way than has been formally recognized, including people like us living ordinary lives.

Some people listed on the traditional charts, whether in my White Plum lineage or other lineages, transgressed one of more of the Ten Grave Precepts in some grave way. Some did so repeatedly.

Perhaps a bit like the man in Kyogen’s koan, we find ourselves up a tree that we discover to be gnarly and rotten or hollow in some places. We find ourselves out on a limb. What a precarious position. Should we hold on? Can we hold on? What is there to hold onto? What will we be avoiding or neglecting if we continue to hold on by our teeth?

Perhaps the best place for the man in the tree to be at this time is exactly where he’s afraid to be—on the ground. Perhaps things won’t end as he fears if he lets go of the branch on which he’s found himself, and to which he’s clinging. With a view from the ground, balanced on his own two feet, perhaps he will be able to see the whole tree more clearly; discern and appreciate the parts that seem more solid and secure; get some distance from and perspective on the parts that seem less so.

Perhaps falling from the tree branch to which one has been clinging can be more like Alice’s experience falling down a rabbit hole (much as I hesitate to use that term in this age of social media-fueled partisanship). Down the rabbit hole, Alice became larger than other things at times. If we can think of our Zen lineage tree depicted on the traditional chart as something smaller, like a bonsai tree, our perspective on it may shift.

In the art of bonsai, we both take the tree as we find it and we actively shape the tree. We need to think of our Zen tree this way. We are not only shaped by it; we can shape it; we must shape it. Even now, Zen adepts across the globe are reshaping the Zen tradition in myriad ways, opening it to people who have been excluded or marginalized, altering old forms and creating new ones.

Our sangha has been questioning the traditional forms and structures for the past few years, as well it should. We are looking at how what we’ve received has shaped us and how we want to shape this tradition and our practice within it going forward. We’re becoming more like the bonsai artist than the man up the tree.

I’d like to mix metaphors for a moment as I wrap up this talk to touch on the other primary element of Jukai, the precepts themselves. I want to relate them to lineage and, as I do, try to refigure both. Instead of thinking of lineage only, or even primarily, in the traditional way—as a line traced through a succession of formally recognized teachers—I see it more fundamentally as Indra’s Net, another Buddhist metaphor. Indra’s Net includes each of us. We’re all jewels in this net.

It’s easy—too easy—to focus on the jewels in this image, but the rope that connects the jewels to one another is equally important. In fact, in a real net, the jewels, or nodes, are literally formed with the rope. Each jewel is a meeting of beginning-less rope; each jewel is constituted by encounter.

I see the ropes in Indra’s Net as the precepts. They’re what connects us; binds us; in a very real sense, forms and constitutes us. The precepts show us how to be in right relation with one another. How to manifest together as the clear, colorful, bright, and variously shaped jewels we are.

Conceived this way, as a net, our lineage chart doesn’t trace in a single, temporal line of successive generations of teachers. The lines, or ropes, of Indra’s Net extend and crisscross in all directions through space and time, connecting each of us. Each and every node in the net is the net’s center. Many centers, none of them primary.

Many of the traditional forms we’ve inherited communicate these ideas poorly, but I choose to see them in this other way, too. This is part of the logic behind inviting people to create a personal lineage chart for Jukai. I also want to encourage anyone who has taken Jukai to have others in and beyond our sangha place a mark on the back of their rakusu, in addition to the inscription and stamp a teacher has made.

Each of us is an heir to and custodian of the gnarly, wonderful, living tree that is the Zen tradition. It needs constant shaping and tending. Let’s not relate to it like the man up the tree, clinging to it for dear life with our teeth. Let’s tend and shape it well together.

The Inner Vinaya

Jeff

I gave this talk on Saturday, June 18, 2022

This is from The Records of the Transmission of the Lamp:

            A monk asked Kyōgen, “What is the inner Vinaya?”

            “Wait until the venerable monk becomes a layman, then we’ll talk,” replied the master.

I came across this interesting exchange a few weeks ago, and I’ve been sitting with it since then.  It’s interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

One reason is the idea of the inner Vinaya.  The Vinaya is the long set of precepts and procedures that regulate Buddhist monastic life.  In most parts of the world up to the present day, the term sangha has referred exclusively to the community of Buddhist monastics.  Someone who does not live in a monastery—a layperson, we would call them today—is not part of the sangha and not subject to the Vinaya.

By the way, for purposes of everything I say in this talk, I’m counting most Zen priests in the West, and even most Japanese Zen temple monks, as “laypeople” in the strict sense in which I’m using that term here.  In most of the Buddhist world, the bounds of sangha are stark and clear: if you don’t live as a monastic, you’re not a member of the sangha.  Applying the Western word and concept of “priest” within Zen Buddhism is a modern thing; something that began to emerge in late medieval and early modern times as East met West and a clerical path outside monasteries and major temples began to emerge.  Throughout most of Zen’s history, and in most of the rest of the Buddhist world even today, there weren’t laypeople and priests, as those of us acquainted with Christianity think of them.  There were monks and non-monks.  Most Western Zen priests today live householder lives; they don’t live in a monastery or temple.  Even in Japan, almost all Zen clerics marry, eat meat, and drink.  They and their families mostly live in one of the 2,000 or so local temples—think of them a bit like neighborhood churches—but they are living lives that don’t look so different than those of the families nearby.  It’s an uncomfortable fact for these Japanese clerics that most monastics in other Buddhist sects throughout Asia do not regard them as part of the sangha, but as laypeople.  They may have left home symbolically, but they are still living and practicing at home—still living “in the world”—from a traditional Buddhist perspective.  In Japan today, most Zen clerics embrace pretty much the same vows the rest of us take in jukai and relate to them as we do.  And so, happily for them I submit, I intend everything I say here to apply equally to Zen priests.

There is some variation in the Vinaya across Buddhist sects and regions, but even the shortest versions have around 250 precepts.  In addition to prohibitions on marrying, eating meat, and drinking alcohol, many other activities that many people living ordinary lives must or do engage in regularly, like handling money, are prohibited.  

Many of us would experience life lived according to the Vinaya as rather oppressive, I suppose.  But the idea, or ideal, is that one will find liberation within these seeming constraints; discover boundlessness within boundaries.  Even so, it’s not hard to imagine that some monks might come to experience adherence to so many precepts regulating so many aspects of one’s daily life in a rather “check the box” sort of way.  One might eventually feel neither oppressed nor particularly liberated by these strictures.  One might just feel habituated to them, and one might begin to wonder, “What’s the point?”

I imagine the monk in the vignette I just read as having just this sort of experience.  His practice, including his faithful adherence to the monastic code, has begun to feel like a dead-end street.  He might initially have felt he was (or was becoming) holy by adhering to scores of precepts.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time in monasteries and become close to several longtime monks, and most of them have told me it’s common along the monastic path to regard oneself as holier-than-thou in this way.  But the monk in this story seems to be realizing that just conforming his visible conduct to the Vinaya code isn’t what it’s all about.  It’s about how one orients internally.  And so he brings his question about whether there is an inner Vinaya to his teacher.

The second reason this little vignette is interesting to me is Kyōgen’s response.   Kyōgen, who I regard as my Dharma namesake, was a Chinese teacher in the ninth century.  When he left home and entered a monastery, his teacher Isan gave him a version of the famous koan, “What is your original face before your parents were born?”  He was totally stumped by it.  He was a brainy, learned person, so he did what many brainy, learned people do when they’re stumped:  He started combing through books for an answer.  Not finding it, he burned all the books, left the monastery, and become a wanderer for some time.  He eventually settled near the neglected burial place and shrine of a famous teacher and spent his days keeping it and the surrounding area in shape.  He returned to everyday life, so to speak.  One day while weeding or sweeping, he sent a pebble flying into a stalk of bamboo and—pop!—he awakened.

How does Kyōgen respond to the monk’s question about the inner Vanaya?  “Wait until you’re a layman, then we’ll talk,” he says.  Not, when you’re a layman I’ll tell you.  When you’re a layman, you’ll truly know for yourself, and then we’ll have something to talk about.  You won’t find your answer confined in the four corners of this monastery anymore than you’ll find in confined in the four corners of a page in one of your books.  And any answer I could give you, Kyōgen is saying, would be no good.  It wouldn’t be your answer.

Kyōgen seems to be telling this monk that the monastic life is in some sense the  “easier” spiritual path, at least early on.  It’s like college, maybe, where some of us begin to take up a profession.  But he seems to be saying lay life is like graduate school and what follows it, where the matters become murkier and we can’t always rely on received, canonical ideas as reliably.  We constantly have to chart new ground.  Graduate school and beyond is where we truly achieve mastery of a subject, where we truly can internalize it.  In this case, of course, our subject is the Great Matter of Life and Death.  Kyōgen seems to be saying that we face our comprehensive exams daily, and over the arcs of our ordinary lives, in the world, where we encounter a much broader set of opportunities, challenges, and hardships than one encounters in a monastery.  

It’s not that monastics don’t experience conflict, are not tempted, and are insulated from their own greed, hatred, and ignorance.  Of course, not.  It’s just that they’re challenged and supported in the face of all that by a kind of personal and communal exoskeleton.  The Vinaya and all the routines associated with it is designed to heighten the monastic’s awareness of the myriad ways we can wander unproductively, even tragically, along the way and to nudge one toward awakening and right relations.  But at some point, and though it’s not guaranteed, it may dawn on a monk that mere compliance with the code—important as that is, especially with those precepts that cause grave harm if violated—is not all it’s about.  

This vignette is another example of a Buddhist monastic—in this case Kyōgen, who eventually rejoined the sangha—somewhat surprisingly holding up householder existence as a sort of “higher” ideal and paradigm for life on the Way (though I hesitate to speak of this in terms of higher and lower, because there truly is no North or South in the Way).  Other examples include the Vimalakirti Sutra; the Sixth Ancestor, Huineng; and Layman Pang.  Indeed, our tradition’s poetry and metaphors about the spiritual journey, like the Ox Herding series and The Five Ranks, often point and lead us back to life in the world.

The realm of the unregulated, or less regulated, may be where an inner sense of uprightness and an inner experience wholeness, of integration, is both especially important and even harder to achieve.  We Western Zen adapts, both so-called laypeople and priests-in-the-world, are part of a historical turn in Buddhism that has brought the Dharma more thoroughly into every corner of everyday life, where we are more than patrons who support cloistered monastics who pray for us as they seek spiritual attainment.  We are part of an exciting and important project, for Buddhism and for the world.

Buddha’s Birthday

Jeff

We acknowledged Hanamatsuri last Thursday, April 8: the Flower Festival in our Soto Zen stream, celebrating the birth of Shakyamuni Buddha.  Most spiritual traditions have a celebration of birth (and rebirth/renewal), and Zen is no different.  If we had been together physically, we would have celebrated in the traditional way, by circling a statue of baby Buddha surrounded by flowers, pouring sweet tea over it and chanting as we walk.  

Last Thursday, I just had baby Buddha pictured here nearby me as we sat together via Zoom.  

 
In the spirt of my recent talks about lay practice and home-leaving (without leaving home), here is a poem by Judith Collins about the 20-something Shakyamuni Buddha, his own baby, and home-leaving:


Shame on you Shakyamuni for setting

the precedent

of leaving home.

Did you think it was not there –

in your wife’s lovely face

or your baby’s laughter?

Did you think you had to go elsewhere

to find it?

Tsk, tsk.

I am here to show you

dear sir

that you needn’t step

even one sixteenth of an inch away – stay

here – elbows dripping with soapy water

stay here – spit up all over your chest

stay here – steam rising in lazy curls from

cream of wheat

Poor Shakyamuni – sitting under the Bo tree

miles away from home

Venus shone all the while

Women have long been unacknowledged for their historical dedication and contributions to the Zen tradition.  (I included “Ship of Compassion” is in our Sutra book, in part, because it is one of the relatively few, ancient verses we know was composed by a female Zen practitioner.)  Through the efforts of many women teachers and leaders today, this is beginning to change.  A recent San Francisco Zen Center program on this topic may be of interest, as may this book of new, “householder koans” by two senior women teachers in our White Plum lineage.

Impermanence, Interdependence, and Awakening: Reflections on Passage 3:2 of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki (Part 2)

Jeff

I gave this teisho during our Full Moon Zen Zazenkai on April 3, 2021.  A video follows the text.

Once, a certain nun asked:

            “Even lay women practice and study the buddha-dharma.  As for nuns, even though we have some faults, I feel there is no reason to say we go against the buddha-dharma.  What do you think?”

            Dōgen admonished:

            “That is not the correct view.  Lay women might attain the Way as a result of practicing the buddha-dharma as they are.  However, no monk or nun attains it unless he or she has the mind of one who has left home.  This is not because the buddha-dharma discriminates between one person and another, but rather because the person doesn’t enter the dharma.  There must be a difference in the attitude of lay people and those who have left home.  A layman who has the mind of a monk or a nun who has left home will be released from samsara.  A monk or a nun who has the mind of a lay person has double faults.  Their attitudes should be quite different.  It is not that it is difficult to do, but to do it completely is difficult.  The practice of being released from samsara and attaining the Way seems to be sought by everyone, but those who accomplish it are few.  Life-and-death is the Great Matter; impermanence is swift.  Do not let your mind slacken.  If you abandon the world, you should abandon it completely.  I don’t think that the names provisionally used to distinguish monks and nuns from lay people are at all important.”

In my last talk, we looked at this passage in terms of the intention—the mindset and heart-set—Dōgen is encouraging all of us to have, monks and laypeople alike.  The nun to whom Dōgen was responding implies that she enjoys some special spiritual status merely because she lives in a monastery, wears religious garb, has shaven her head, prays frequently, and begs for her food.

Dōgen, as you’ll recall, is the 13th century founder of the Soto Zen school in Japan, and this nun presumably would have been living at his monastery.  The Zuimonki, the text in which we find this exchange, is a collection of brief talks and instructions Dōgen gave to the monks and nuns there.

Dōgen makes clear that one can do all the things the nun is doing in his monastery without having a genuine aspiration for the Way, and also that one can have a genuine aspiration for the Way without doing all of those things, or doing them all day, every day.  Attaining the Way is not about going through the motions.  It’s not performative. We attain nothing by doing the things Zen practitioners do—meditation, observing the precepts, and so on—unless we do them with the mindset and heart-set about which Dōgen speaks.  

In fact, that mindset and heart-set ultimately require that we drop the idea of attainment altogether.  We must drop our self-aggrandizement projects—our projects that are about elevating or enhancing the self—as well as our self-protection projects—our projects that are about avoiding things we believe dimmish the self.  This doesn’t mean we should abandon all personal wishes and projects, and that we shouldn’t protect them when they are threatened.  We can and should—we must—have our unique personal projects.  The world needs us—and what else would each of us be doing here, anyway?   It also doesn’t mean we can’t object to mistreatment.  

But we’re not seeking the Way if our projects are primarily about elevating or protecting the self; if our goal is to find a safe, exalted place for oneself, expecting to stay there forever.  That is a false notion of refuge.  

Dōgen’s monastery exists—and, yes, it still exists today—and other monasteries throughout the world exist, in part, because they are pressure cookers for exposing and dismantling our self-enhancement and self-protection projects, and for cutting through our delusion—our ignorance of the true nature of existence.  Monasteries are environments purpose-made to nurture, forge, test, and refine a genuine aspiration for the Way.  

Dōgen makes clear both that a genuine aspiration for the Way is the key ingredient of Zen practice—the yeast of our practice, if you will—and that we do not need to live in a monastery to have it.  Eight hundred years later, we’re finally seeing that notion spread widely through the Lay Zen movement, not unlike what happened during the Christian Reformation.  Whether we live in a monastery or an apartment building, however, a genuine aspiration for the Way is about a total shift in one’s disposition.

We focused on the “aspiration” half of the phrase “aspiration for the Way” in my last talk.  Today our focus is on the other half of this phrase:  “the Way.”  What are we aspiring for, or to?

Dōgen says, “[i]t is not that it is difficult to do, but to do it completely [is difficult].  The practice of being released from samsara and attaining the Way seems to be sought by everyone, but those who accomplish it are few.  Life-and-death is the Great Matter; impermanence is swift.  Do not let your mind slacken.  If you abandon the world, you should abandon it completely.”

The world Dōgen encourages us to abandon is not our physical environment or existence; it is not our present life circumstance.  Nor is Dōgen telling us that there is some ethereal, spiritual realm we can enter—that we can peel apart the fabric of existence and slip into another realm, like an actor walking through a slit in the green screen on a movie set that had made us think there was a mountain range in the background.  

It’s the Passover and Easter season, so I’ll borrow a biblical metaphor—this one from the Christian scriptures.  Dōgen is talking about Saint Paul’s experience reported in the Acts of the Apostles, where we read, “And immediately something like fish scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight, and he got up and was baptized”  (9:18).  In Zen, we would call this kenshō:  seeing into our own true nature; experiencing it firsthand.  An example from Jewish scripture might be Moses’s encounter with the burning bush.  Attaining the Way involves a radical reorientation and renewal of our experience of the world and of ourselves.  A disruption of our prior way of knowing and being.

Before this shift, we perceive and orient to experience as a subject in a realm full of objects; things and other beings.  It’s a wooden building block view of the world, in which other things and beings are instrumentalized for our own needs and purposes, even when our actions appear to be benevolent.   Everything else is a wooden toy block with a brightly-painted letter on it.  “A” for apple, “B” for bachelor’s degree, “C” for child, “J” for job, “S” for spouse, and so on.  We’re like an oversized infant grasping for some blocks and stacking them ever higher, all the more glory to me, while casting other blocks aside.  It’s a world of discrete objects and agents acting on one another.  Most everyone else also is orienting to the world in this way, of course.

This view isn’t wrong, exactly.  It’s one truth; it’s part of the truth.  We run into trouble, however, if it’s all we see.  In Buddhist thought, this view is regarded as the Lower Truth, or Lower Reality.  If the Lower Truth is our one-and-only-truth, we’re trapped in samsara—endless cycles of self-aggrandizing grasping for blocks and self-protective pushing blocks away, all of which just sustains and compounds needless suffering; our own and others’.

The Higher Truth is emptiness and its correlates: impermanence, interdependence, and no-self.  Nothing is fixed or permanent.  Everything is dependently co-arising; everything is comprised of and contingent upon everything else.  And so all concepts, like self and wooden block, subject and object, ultimately are empty.  

Dōgen is encouraging us to earnestly seek the Higher Truth; not as a philosophical idea, as it may seem I am presenting it here, but as our lived experience.  The Higher Truth is in our bones; it is our bones.  We must seek it there; know and feel it there.  “Don’t let your mind slacken,” Dōgen says.  Cultivate this aspiration.  Orient your whole life toward this.

By the way, one issue I have with the contemporary mindfulness movement is that it emphasizes attention much more than intention.  In personal and spiritual maturity, they are essentially the same thing.  Early in our journey, however, intention—our aspiration for the Way, having the mind and heart of a home-leaver—is the key thing.

We may get a sudden, powerful insight into our true nature, as Paul did.  Sometimes a transformative realization comes quickly.  But, as you’ve also heard me say many times before, even if one has such an experience, this knowing in one’s bones almost always develops slowly, over years of practice, if we maintain a genuine aspiration for the Way.  

As we absorb the Higher Truth, the fixed sense of subject and object we once had dissolves.  Apples are still apples, and children are still children, but now we see all in a new light, and we are much less likely to crassly instrumentalize other things and people, however subtly, and supposedly benevolently or justifiably, we had done so—though, sadly, we are not immune, as sexual misconduct and other improprieties by some contemporary Zen teachers remind us.

From the perspective of the Higher Truth, there is no Way to attain; or, put differently, we have already attained it and can’t drift from it. From the perspective of the Lower Truth, however, we can lose our way when our aspiration flags, or when we’re deluding ourselves about our aspiration for the Way and how we’re expressing it—and this sometimes happens even to seasoned practitioners. The aspiration to awaken Dōgen encourages us to develop is something he also would encourage us to continually maintain. 

Actually, to be fair both to the nun to whom Dōgen responded and to ourselves, most everyone who comes to Zen practice comes with gaining ideas—with self-aggrandizement and self-protection projects, however subtle, that they’re pursuing through practice.  In fact, one element of Shakyamuni Buddha’s brilliance as a teacher was to start from our experience of suffering.  That’s certainly where his journey began, according to traditional accounts of his life.  Who doesn’t suffer, and who doesn’t want to alleviate one’s own suffering?

Unlike many other religions or philosophies, however, Buddhism illuminates how our default ways of trying to escape our suffering—grasping for more of what we think will produce a personal paradise, pushing away what we think prevents us from getting there, relying on dogmatic beliefs, and so forth—tend not to provide lasting relief.  Zen offers a different, very practical path to walk.  It does so with awareness that we may set foot on that path with distorted ideas about how to end our suffering, and that we may continue to pursue these doomed projects for some time.

The Way to which we aspire is total realization of, and non-resistance to, the fundamental emptiness of all phenomena, including this self I’m always talking about.  But, again, attaining the Way—one phrase Dōgen uses for what we in the West have come to call enlightenment in Buddhism—is not about grasping this as an idea.  It’s ultimately more about forgetting it as an idea.  Enlightenment in this sense—Zen’s notion of enlightenment—has little to do with the Enlightenment in the modern West, which tends to elevate rational thought above all other ways of knowing and being.  Zen’s notion of enlightenment is not opposed to rational thought in the least, but it is much more expansive, and it is wisely conscious of the myriad ways over-reliance on discursive cognition can trip us up.

Knowing the Higher Truth in our bones is about realizing and living it in, and as, the Lower Truth.  In the world of things and beings.  Nirvana and samsara are one.  This is returning to the marketplace with open hands: the final image in The Ten Ox Herding pictures, which provide a visual metaphor for the spiritual journey in Zen.  We forget the Higher Truth, while living it as the Lower Truth.

To have a genuine aspiration for the Way is to have faith in, and orient to, the fundamental wholeness and integration of all things, oneself among them.  We are distinct, but we are not separate.  We and all phenomena are interpenetrating.  Interwoven.  Even these words imply too much separateness. 

A heart that has attained the Way may want some things “for itself,” so to speak, but this won’t be about self-aggrandizement or self-protection.  It’s about being at one with our own karma—another phrase we use for enlightenment.  Responding to the cries and joys of the world in ways that make good use of one’s wholesome interests, talents, and potential.

The pioneering Western Zen teacher, Robert Aitken, who died a few years ago, offered his typewriter as an example of what I’m getting at here.  Are he and the typewriter existing and paired in some ultimate, permanent sense?  No.  If you asked to borrow it, might he lend it to you?  Yes.  If you asked whether you could have it, however, the answer would be no.  Aitken Roshi kept his typewriter not out of a selfish, self-aggrandizing, self-protective impulse, but because he needed it to write books that spread the Dharma and helped others experience the liberation he had experienced.  Teaching Zen and writing Dharma books, he had attained the Way.  He was at one with his own karma.  

Being at one with our own karma may well feel good; if so, we should appreciate it.  But don’t think you personally will gain merit by virtue of being at one with your own karma.  We can’t know whether the nun in our text ultimately was at one with her karma living in Dōgen’s monastery, but the question she asks Dōgen is premised upon the assumption that she gains merit by living as a monastic.  

Attaining the Way is simply about leaving home to discover home.  As I said last time, across Buddhist regions, leaving home has meant going to live in a monastery, which traditional Buddhist cultures have regarded as the typical way to be “all in” on the path.  But Dōgen refigures the phrase in this text, showing us that it’s really about a shift in our disposition, not our residence.  Finding ourselves at home, and realizing we never left.  For millennia, this is what people have left their physical homes to live in monasteries in order to discover.  Isn’t it nice to know we can discover it right where we are?

Let me close by reading that key portion of our text again, and following it with another lovely quote I recently heard:

“It is not that it is difficult to do, but to do it completely [is difficult].  The practice of being released from samsara and attaining the Way seems to be sought by everyone, but those who accomplish it are few.  Life-and-death is the Great Matter; impermanence is swift.  Do not let your mind slacken.  If you abandon the world, you should abandon it completely.”

Impermanence is swift: faster than the speed of light.  Impermanence is light.  Impermanence is the solid ground of our being.  We should remain constantly mindful of our impermanence.  It sounds a bit macabre, perhaps, but this awareness brings the world to life.

We’re evoking mindfulness of our impermanence when we chant The Five Remembrances or the Evening Gatha.  Other traditions have similar practices.  To return again to Christianity, as tomorrow is Easter—Easter is an interesting word in the context of this talk, isn’t it?: Easter, from East, the direction from which the sun rises.  In Christianity, we have the ethic and practice of momento mori, which is a reminder of the inevitability of death.  

This word momento also is interesting.  Here, it means recalling, or recollecting, but it’s obviously also related to the word moment.  “Life-and-death,” all three of these words joined to one another by hyphens, “is the Great Matter,” capital G, capital M, Dōgen tells us.  We walk the knife’s edge of life-and-death in this present moment, whether we’re aware of it or not.  From the perspective of the Higher Truth, there is no birth and no death.  From the perspective of the Lower Truth, life and death are urgent, and very real.

The ethic and practice of momento mori actually originates in classical Greek thought.  One example of it in the Christian context would be medieval Christian monks keeping a human skull on their desks—often depicted in art with a worm crawling out of one eye socket.  Some modern social scientific studies demonstrate how these reminders of our mortality—awareness of which most of us unconsciously try to avoid most of the time—make people temporarily more tolerant of and compassionate toward people with a different worldview or identity; people outside one’s own reference group.  Imagine how the world might be if, rather than reflexively, unconsciously avoiding this awareness, it had seeped into the bone marrow of each and every one of us.

Here’s that final quote I promised:  I recently heard a historian who studies the reasons we wage war repeat something a female soldier had said about a sensation she and many other soldiers apparently experience.  This soldier said, “When you know you might die, everything is alive.  Every leaf matters.“

I hope none of us ever has to go to war to fully grasp our impermanence.  Zen practice invites us to realize it in the context of our everyday lives.  When we do, everything is alive, and we know we are that leaf, and that we matter, and how.

Aspiration for the Way: Reflections on Passage 3:2 of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki (Part 1)

Jeff

I gave this teisho during our Full Moon Zen regular weekly practice session on March 25, 2021. A video follows the text.

Once, a certain nun asked:

            “Even lay women practice and study the buddha-dharma.  As for nuns, even though we have some faults, I feel there is no reason to say we go against the buddha-dharma.  What do you think?”

            Dōgen admonished:

            “That is not the correct view.  Lay women might attain the Way as a result of practicing the buddha-dharma as they are.  However, no monk or nun attains it unless he or she has the mind of one who has left home.  This is not because the buddha-dharma discriminates between one person and another, but rather because the person doesn’t enter the dharma.  There must be a difference in the attitude of lay people and those who have left home.  A layman who has the mind of a monk or a nun who has left home will be released from samsara.  A monk or a nun who has the mind of a lay person has double faults.  Their attitudes should be quite different.  It is not that it is difficult to do, but to do it completely is difficult.  The practice of being released from samsara and attaining the Way seems to be sought by everyone, but those who accomplish it are few.  Life-and-death is the Great Matter; impermanence is swift.  Do not let your mind slacken.  If you abandon the world, you should abandon it completely.  I don’t think that the names provisionally used to distinguish monks and nuns from lay people are at all important.”

This reading comes from one of Dōgen’s lesser-known texts, Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki.  Dōgen, as you know, is the 13th century founder of the Sōtō Zen school in Japan.  He left us four texts.  This one is the first, at least in terms of when the material in it was produced during his teaching career. 

The names of all of Dōgen’s texts begin with Shōbōgenzō, which means “treasury of the true Dharma eye.”  It’s a reference to the transmission of the Dharma—the teachings; insight—between Shakyamuni Buddha and Mahākāśyapa, his first successor.  In a famous sermon, Shakyamuni simply held up a flower and twirled it.  Most people seemed confused, but Mahākāśyapa flashed a knowing smile.  In Zen lore, this is when Zen began: with that first, teacher-to-student transmission.

Zuimonki, the second word in the title of this Dōgen text, means something like “easy to understand,” or “simplified.”  One translation of the text goes by the title A Primer of Sōtō Zen.  It consists of short, straightforward talks Dōgen gave to monks, nuns and laypeople in the first few years after the creation of Eihiji, the monastery he founded in Japan.  

The passage I just read is remarkable in a couple of ways.  First, he’s addressing nuns:  female monastics.  There were women in Dōgen’s community, which, sadly, was radical at the time.  Second, Dōgen is correcting one of these monastics’ view regarding distinctions between monks and laypeople.  It’s this second remarkable aspect of this passage that I want to focus on tonight.

In Dōgen’s time—and long before, and long after, and even still, in some parts of the world today—to be a serious Zen practitioner, or Buddhist of any stripe, meant to be a monastic.  It was thought that you really couldn’t “attain the Way,” the phrase Dōgen uses here for enlightenment, unless you were a monastic. 

The nun in this passage is clearly starting from the premise that she occupies a higher spiritual status than a layperson, simply because she is a monastic.  This might appear arrogant to many of us today, but she was expressing a widely-held view at the time.  And, remember:  she’s at Dōgen’s monastery.  Dōgen himself also clearly thinks being a monk is the typical way to be “all in” on the Zen path, as he makes clear elsewhere in this text.  

But the nun’s question really goes beyond this point.  She essentially asks, “Even if we’re screwing up as monastics, maybe by breaking a few rules or not always practicing with great diligence, aren’t we better than laypeople simply because we live in this monastery?  We get spiritual brownie points because of the clothes we wear, because we beg for our meals, because we pray for others much of the day—just by going through the motions—don’t we?”

Dōgen makes clear that attaining the Way is not about that.  He says, “no monk or nun attains [the Way] unless he has the mind of one who has left home.”  Home-leaving refers superficially to leaving one’s home to enter a monastery, but Dōgen makes clear that physically moving your quarters is not really what home-leaving is about.  The word “monk”—from the word mono—implies a mind and heart that is focused on just one thing.  Focused upon, and completely centered in, the Way.  If you enter this monastery without that frame of mind and heart, without that intention and aspiration, you have not truly left home, Dōgen is saying.  In fact, he says, “A layman who has the mind of a monk or a nun who has left home will be released from samsara.”  

Being released from samsara and attaining the Way are the same thing, Dōgen makes clear later in the passage.  In classical Buddhism, samsara is the cycle of birth and death.  Viewed from the perspective of everyday awareness, before attaining the Way, it is the world of our suffering—the world people take up the path hoping, in some sense, to escape.  It is the world in which we are subject to the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion.  For our purposes here, their alternate translations may be more useful:  Greed is grasping for that which we desire; that which we think will enhance the self.  Aversion is pushing away that which we don’t want; that which we think will diminish the self.  Delusion is a specific sort of ignorance: not seeing the world as it is.

So what is attaining the Way, exactly?  Dōgen gives us a pointer.  “It is not that it is difficult to do, but to do it completely [is difficult].  The practice of being released from samsara and attaining the Way seems to be sought by everyone, but those who accomplish it are few.”  And here’s the key bit:  “Life-and-death is the Great Matter; impermanence is swift.  Do not let your mind slacken.  If you abandon the world”—if you leave home; if you give your heart to this—”you should abandon [the world] completely.”

The opposite of ignorance—of seeing oneself and the world in the wrong way, as a realm in which the goal is to find a safe, exalted place for oneself, expecting to stay there forever—is to see the world and one’s life as they are—impermanent—and to appreciate one’s life accordingly.  Dōgen makes clear it’s our mindset and heart-set that matter, not where we live, nor labels like monk and layperson.  

For Dōgen, aspiration for the Way is the key thing.  We all can and should have the mind and heart of a monastic, whether or not we live in a monastery.  To have the mind and heart of a monastic is to have a mind and a heart that is not divided; that is “all in.”  In other words, we must submit.  If we live in a monastery—and, I should add, if we’re a layperson and we go to a Zen center—and if we practice for, or expect, self-aggrandizement, we will not attain the Way.  It’s the nature of our practice to discover, our self-aggrandizement projects again, and again and again—they get more and more subtle, and barely perceptible.

We can’t serve two masters, as the saying goes.  We can’t attain the way with a mind and heart divided. Having the mind and heart Dōgen speaks of, or at least the deep desire to have this mind and heart, is what Zen practice is about.  Plain and simple.