This is the talk I gave after my Denbo ceremony, in which I received Dharma transmission from my Zen teacher, Kevin Jiun Hunt, O.S.C.O., Roshi, and so became a Zen teacher myself.  I’ve also posted a few pictures.  The ceremony occurred on Saturday, November 10, 2018.  It was very traditional, except that it occurred at 2:00 p.m. and was attended by friends and family.  For reasons that are long outdated, these ceremonies have, for centuries, typically occurred privately, between teacher and student, at midnight.  A number of Zen streams in the West, including ours, recently have begun to open them, and to hold them at a much more agreeable time of day.  I’ve been given the Dharma name Kōgen, which means Light Source.

Gratitude is the first thing I want to express today.

Some time ago, I went looking for a new Zen teacher.  I couldn’t believe it when I found a Trappist monk and Zen teacher, all rolled into one, just a couple of towns over from where we were living at the time.  As you’ll hear in a moment, the Trappists were on the scene early in my travels through contemplative spiritual circles over the past 30 years.  So I was really excited to discover Fr. Kevin.  I wrote him a long, detailed email telling him all about my journey.  And, at this point, Fr. Kevin gave me the first of the many great teachings I’ve received from him:  He completely ignored my email!  I re-sent it a few days later, just in case he had missed it.  (Hint: He hadn’t missed it.)  He ignored it again.  That was my first dose of your wise, spare, direct, “no fuss” approach to spiritual guidance and friendship.  You’ve known just what nudges I’ve needed.  And, since our very first meeting, I’ve come to see just how genuinely you see me – and, I must say, being seen genuinely by other human beings is one of the most profound gifts any of us can receive.  From the start, you’ve accepted me without pretext or pretense, and you’ve always gently insisted that I accept myself the same way.  Thank you.

I eventually forwarded my email to Cindy, whose email address I’d also found on the Zendo’s website.  She responded right away, and very helpfully, encouraging me to come sit with the group!  And I’m glad I did!  That was another tremendous gift and teaching.  I so appreciate and admire your incredible openness, the sense of warm welcome you create, and your determination to make Zen accessible.  You have opened the door to this Zendo to our whole family.  Esther began Zen practice here, and you’ve even welcomed our kids and our dogs.  Thank you.

Tim and Sr. Madeline, thank you for being here today.  It means the world to me.  Thank for your friendship and the many wonderful teachings you’ve offered all of us.

I also want to acknowledge five other important teachers here.  First, my friend and Harvard Divinity School colleague, Charlie Hallisey.  He is one of the principal scholars of Buddhism at Harvard Divinity School, where I have done some part-time teaching the past few years, and he is one of the leading scholars of Buddhism globally.  Charlie has brought with him four distinguished Buddhist monastics from Asia – Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam – who are fellows at Harvard this year.  So this is not just an interfaith ceremony; it is an ecumenical ceremony within the Buddhist world.  It’s an honor to have all of you with us today.  Thank you.

I want to thank our Charlie (Norton) for serving as attendant today, and for all you do around this place. You are a rock.

We’re going to share a bit of food after this ceremony, and the best dishes – the ones we didn’t pick up at Whole Foods – were made by our very own Kathleen Bellicchi, who quite literally is the best cook I’ve ever met.  Kathleen, you so evidently pour your heart into everything you make, and your foods opens our hearts.  Thank you.

I want to thank my family, of course, Esther, Ellis and Carys.  For many years now, you’ve given me leave to sit for 25 minutes at a time at home, or for an evening, or sometimes two, away during the week, or for a day, or a weekend, or a week or more when I’ve been on retreat.  Walking this path runs against the main currents of our culture – and yet you always have been fully supportive of my commitment to traveling it.  Thank you.  I love you.  And, Ellis and Carys, thanks for participating in the ceremony.  Good job!

I also want to acknowledge and thank my parents and my two brothers.  They are not here today, much as they wanted to be.  They have been interested in and supportive of my meditation practice from the very start.

Finally, I want to thank my friends, starting with the countless people I’ve had the good fortune to sit with all these years – both Zen and Christian Centering Prayer practitioners.  A handful of you are here today; many more are not.  I also want to acknowledge my close friends walking the contemplative path within other traditions, including Islam and Judaism.  I’ve been buoyed by the friendship of all of these fellow travelers.

Last, but not least, I’m grateful to my friends from different walks of life who have come to participate in this ceremony.  All the strands of my life feel woven together and of a piece at this point, and I want each of you to know you’re an important part of the whole.  Thank you.

__________

It’s traditional for a new teacher to give a talk, and I’m going to open this talk in one traditional way: with a koan.  For those of you who are less familiar with the Zen tradition, most koans are brief accounts of interactions between a teacher and a student, or between students, or between teachers, which have been recorded and bound together into collections that have been passed down to us through the centuries.  They’re sometimes used in a very distinctive way as a teaching tool when a student meets with a teacher, and they’re also often used to open a talk, like this one.

This is Case 7 in The Gateless Gate, which is one of those koan collections:

 

A monk said to Chao Chou, “I have just entered this monastery.  Please teach me.”

Chao Chou said, “Have you eaten your rice gruel?”

The monk said, “Yes, I have.”

Chao Chou said, “Wash your bowl.”

The monk understood.

 

I began meditating about 30 years ago, as I said earlier, in my mid-20s.  That was a very stressful time in my life, if also a good and exciting time in many ways.  I had just finished law school and begun my career in the intense legal profession at a firm in San Francisco.  (Several of my lawyer friends and colleagues are here today, including my first boss and mentor at that firm, Jeff Newman, who has remained a close friend ever since.  All of the lawyers here no doubt can remember the stressfulness of that transition from law student to lawyer.)  I also was living far away from my family for the first time.  And, most significantly, I was just beginning to touch, and open up to, and work through the pain and after-effects of witnessing a very close friend’s death in a mountain climbing accident 12 or 13 years earlier, when I was 15.

I signed up for a weekend introduction to meditation program at the Nyingma Institute, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and study center in Berkeley.  I was Catholic, and I had studied with the Jesuits, but I was totally unaware at this time of the rich tradition of contemplative prayer practice, of silent prayer, within Christianity.

I definitely signed up and showed up for that first meditation experience seeking refuge, though I doubt I would have or could have expressed it quite that way then.  Life just seemed out of joint, and I was looking for a route to someplace better.

My sitting practice was irregular for the first year or two, but that weekend definitely started me on this path.  A couple of years later, I took a sabbatical year, which I spent in Berlin, Germany, as the wall was being dismantled.  There, I read my first Zen book, by D.T. Suzuki, the towering Japanese Zen teacher and scholar who did so much to transport Zen to the West in the first half of the 20th century.  In this book, Suzuki praises several medieval Christian mystics.  At the time, I found this really surprising, for two reasons.  First, a Zen teacher was pointing to Christianity, my birth tradition.  What’s up with that?  Second, though I’d studied some theology by then, I’d never heard of these people.  Who were they?

I started reading about them, and then reading what they’d written.  When I returned to the States, heading home to Colorado, I connected with the Trappists – specifically, the Centering Prayer movement a number of them had launched to bring contemplative prayer out of the monasteries and into the wider Christian world.  I sat in those circles for several years, while also sitting with Buddhists.  I moved to Boston about 25 years ago for more graduate work, and I eventually situated myself for many years in a different local Zen community.  Little did I know at any of these waypoints that I’d eventually experience the Trappist and Zen streams brought together in the likes of Fr. Kevin.

__________

In the early days of this journey, I had a burning question I would ask of any teacher or senior student who would listen:  When can I stop sitting?

I had many different ways of asking this question, like:

• There will come a time when I don’t have to sit anymore, won’t there?
• So-and-so (the teacher) really doesn’t need to sit anymore, does he?

In retrospect, my question was a lot like the one with which Master Dogen, who carried Zen from China to Japan in the 13^th century, was preoccupied as a young monk.  His question was:  Why do we practice?  Or, to put it another way:  What’s the point of this?

Anyway, I mostly got rather polite replies contesting the premise of my question.  But, I persisted – and I’m sure I became ever more annoying to these good people from whom I was insisting upon receiving an answer they never were going to give me.

I’d been told many times that I was free to stop sitting whenever I wanted to.  But what I really wanted to know, of course, was that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – that better place I was seeking – and that I was going to find it.  Convinced I didn’t have them already, I wanted the Keys to the Kingdom.  I wanted to know The Secret.

One day I asked one of these people my stale question yet again – Can I stop sitting someday? – and this time she just rolled her eyes and said, in a tone I can only describe as a mix of exasperation and sarcasm, “Sure, like when you die.”  And then she walked away.  That was a tremendous gift.  I resolved then and there to shut up and just keep sitting.

__________

I’ve always loved the koan with which I opened this talk.  It’s so simple, short, and truly, truly sweet.  Some people who are new to Zen, or who just encounter it casually, and even some people who have been at it for some time, assume there’s something esoteric about Zen.  If that’s your assumption, you might be inclined to think Chao Chou is being cagey when the teaching he offers the young monk in this koan is to ask whether he’s eaten breakfast and then to tell him to wash his bowl.

But, it’s not so.

Zen has no secrets.  Or, you could say, it’s all an open secret.  Zen points to the open secret that is this very life.  My life.  Your life. Our life together.  For those of us who are seeking, the answer we seek is hidden in plain sight.  And, we find what we’re seeking simply – simply! – by opening ourselves completely, giving ourselves fully, to this vital mystery that’s as plain as the nose on one’s face.  That is the nose on my face; on your face.

The young monk in this koan comes looking for guidance and reassurance, just as I did years ago. There’s genuine integrity in our seeking; in our innate conviction that wholeness is the natural order of things.

And, in fact, the universe is whole, we are whole, even when things seem broken.  Even when we feel lost and broken, as I was feeling years ago.

And Chao Chou’s response, his guidance, really couldn’t have been more straightforward and helpful: Just attend to the here-and-now.

The impulse that makes one curious about meditation; the person who shows up at our door seeking spiritual or physical nourishment; the dirty bowl in the sink:  This is it.  What we seek is manifest, right here, right now.

I love the way this koan ends.  Many koans end with a student experiencing realization, but that’s almost always expressed much more dramatically, like “Suddenly, he experienced great satori [great enlightenment]!” or “Hearing this [what the teacher said, of course], he experienced great realization.”

I like this formulation much better.  “The monk understood.”  Whatever the monk understood, and however deeply – whether he experienced great satori, or simply knew it was time to shut up and just keep sitting – it was enough.  Always enough.

__________

Like Dogen in his early days, perhaps like the young monk in this koan, I used to think there must be some end to this, some final goal or destination, and once we reach it, practice ceases.

But our practice, our life, which is the universe’s life and practice, begins long before one becomes a Zen practitioner, and it continues whether or not we meditate.  It continues as our meditating or not meditating.

This path is completely open-ended, completely boundless.  A path without boundaries.

And, so, we are always, already home.

The fact that many of us don’t yet reliably believe this – or, rather, don’t yet reliably experience this – is the main reason a tradition like Zen and its practices exist in the first place. “Belief” in the way we typically use that word, in a cognitive sense, isn’t really what it’s about.  Belief in that sense eventually begins to feel arid and hollow; it just won’t do.  What we really seek is knowing in our bones, beyond belief.

It’s all just like the young monk’s bowl.  So concrete, so tangible, so present – and, yet, it cannot, it will not, be reduced to, or contained by, our ideas about it.  Turn that bowl round and round in your hands as you wash it.  Just like this life we live, this path we walk:  What is it exactly?  Where does it begin?  Where does it end?

__________

I’m excited to continue this journey in this new role, helping support others in their journeys as best I can, as others have supported me so generously for so long.  I’ll continue to need your support, of course, and I’ll welcome it.  I’m also excited about some of the things we see emerging as Zen becomes more firmly planted in the West, including its turn toward social and environmental justice concerns and its deep encounters with other traditions, both religious and secular.  I also look forward to doing my part to contribute to these developments.

Thank you. Thank you.

 

I gave this Dharma talk at the Greater Boston Zen Center on Tuesday, October 13, 2015.

 

Blue Cliff Record Case 77: Yunmen’s Sesame Rice Cake

 A monk asked Yunmen, What is the conversation that saves the buddhas and goes beyond the ancestors?”

Yunmen said, “Sesame rice cake.”

 

Tonight I want to take up a rather slippery topic:  Zen as religion.

We don’t spend much time in Zen circles engaging in theological reflection – at least not the sort of analytical reflection and discourse that’s common in other traditions.  We don’t concern ourselves too much with definitions and boundaries. It’s not a tradition that demands adherence to any particular beliefs.

There are ideas and principles practitioners through the ages have found useful, based upon their own practical experience with them, but there are no litmus test beliefs that define what it means to be a Zen practitioner.

(To be fair, we concern ourselves with definitions and boundaries some; for instance, in relation to authority within the community, as is true of any other organization, religious or secular.)

There are some western Zen practitioners who don’t think of themselves as practicing a religion.  I suppose it’s possible to view Zen as a sort of psychological system, as some western practitioners seem to do, though I think that’s a limited and limiting frame.

Scholars debate the defining characteristics of religion.  We won’t resolve that debate tonight.  But let me offer one element of one scholar’s working definition of religion as a launching pad for some things I want to say about Zen. Émile Durkheim, the great 19th century French sociologist, famously defined religion this way:

Since the idea of the sacred is always and everywhere separated from the idea of the profane in the thought of men, the mind irresistibly refuses to allow the two corresponding things to be confounded, or even put in contact with one another.

We see this sort of binary between profane and sacred, between the mundane and the other-worldly, defining religion in the work of other scholars, like Rudolf Otto, for instance.

It’s a fair point.  This is a key insight into much of what’s going on within many strains of most religions – including some strains of Buddhism, I believe – so it’s not surprising that this binary is considered by many to be a defining characteristic of religion.

I’m hedging, of course, when I say that this binary describes “much of what’s going on within many strains of most religions.”  There certainly are strains of most religions that resist the idea that there’s an impenetrable barrier between sacred and profane, as Durkheim imagined.

For example, one might say that Christianity was founded on a degree of resistance to this binary.  Dominant strains within the Greek philosophical tradition that held sway within the ancient world into which Jesus was born maintained that what is ultimately real is removed from this world.  Think: Plato and his forms.  Christianity upended that notion.  Here was God among us.

Of course, the Christian community found itself in schism at times over questions about the extent of this divine-mundane intermingling.  Some Christians really pushed the edge of that envelope along the way, like Meister Eckhart, the great 14^th century mystic.  It was orthodox to regard Jesus as the Son of God, of course, but Eckhart also said, “We are God’s sons and daughters, but we don’t realize it yet.”

That has a real resonance with how we sometimes talk about Buddha nature and enlightenment in Zen, as D.T. Suzuki and other Zen scholars have noted.  Of course, Eckhart was tried as a heretic by the Inquisition.  Fortunately for him, he managed to die before his verdict was pronounced.

Does this sacred and profane binary describe Zen?

Yes and no, I suppose.  But, more than most strains of most religions, I think not.

We have our notions of the absolute and the relative, of emptiness and form, yet we’re reminded again and again and again that they’re one and the same.

And, as we think and speak about the relative and the absolute – think and speak about them – they’re notions, of course.  Ideas.  Whatever God or the absolute or emptiness or the ultimately real is to you – well, I sincerely hope you experience it, or come to experience it, as something other than an idea.

The koan with which I opened this talk is typical of so many.  A student comes to a teacher and asks earnestly, “What’s it all about?”

A rice cake, Yunmen says.

In other cases, we hear it’s about . . .

. . . three pounds of flax

. . . a pail of water

. . . the oak tree in the courtyard

. . . even a dried piece of dung

Dung.  Excrement.

Our tradition seems to be making a point of imploding distinctions between sacred and profane; of playfully poking fun at our tendency to make such distinctions; of using that tendency as a nudge toward realization – dangling the distinctions as cat nip.  Lovely story after lovely story like that.

From a theistic perspective, one might say Zen brings heaven and earth together, without obliterating either.  It’s relentless in this way.  It’s the religious equivalent of a supercollider.  A theological Large Hadron Collider.

From an atheistic scientific materialist perspective, one might say Zen brings the dead (the inert) to life.  In this day and age, it’s something of an antidote to the turn in philosophy that attempted to jettison metaphysics – yet still a place, in this day and age, many skeptics feel they can call home.

Tapping on a coffin (in a koan set at a funeral), one monk asked another, “Dead or alive?”  “I won’t say!  I won’t say!” replied the other.

Can this be contained in sacred or profane, heaven or earth, absolute or relative, dead or alive?

This/that mind is concerned with pulling Humpty Dumpty apart and putting him back together again.  That capacity is immensely, immensely useful.  And, even as we exercise that capacity in those situations where it’s useful, we can know in our bones that Humpty Dumpty is, fundamentally, everywhere and always, together in its distinctions.

That potential is one of Zen’s great invitations and gifts to us.

Is Zen religion?

Let me close with another story (also from a koan):

The Emperor Wu of Liang asked Bodhidarma – the 28th Buddhist patriarch, who brought Buddhism to China, where it mingled with Taoism and became Chan, eventually migrating to Japan, where it’s called Zen – “What is the highest meaning of the Holy Truth of Buddhism?”

“Empty – there’s no holy,” Bodhidharma replied.

No separation.

Stunned by this answer, the emperor asked, “Who are you facing me?”

“Don’t know,” was Bodhidharma’s response.

Is Zen religion?

Who are you facing me?

Who are we facing one another?

 

 

This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave on March 6, 2014 at the Boundless Way Temple in Worcester, Massachusetts, during the Boundless Way Zen meta-sangha’s three-week Ango retreat.  Audio recordings of this talk and others given by BoWZ teachers are posted here.

 

Emperor Wu of Liang invited Mahasattva Fu to lecture on the Diamond Sutra.  On the rostrum, Mhasattva Fu struck the lectern once with his stick and immediately climbed down.  The emperor was astounded.

 

Master Zhi asked, “Your Majesty, do you understand?”

 

“No, I do not.”

 

“Mahasattva Fu has finished the lecture.”

 

(Blue Cliff Record, Case 67)

 

I began looking for a koan to use as the launchpad for this talk about a week ago.

 

I poked around the koan territory I’ve been wandering in recently.  Not finding much inspiration there, I went back to the earliest koans in the miscellaneous collection and worked my way forward to where I’ve been wandering lately.  Still nothing, so I even peeked ahead of the koan I’ll next bring to dokusan.

 

No single koan lept out during this exercise, declaring, “Pick me.”  Hmm.

 

What did leap out, however, were two themes that seem to me to run through our whole koan curriculum, so I thought I’d make them the subject of my talk tonight.  I mainly want to talk about the second of these themes, but I need to touch on the first to set up the second.  I’ll come back to Mahasattva Fu’s lecture on the Diamond Sutra when I get there.

 

The first theme . . .

 

Surveying the koan curriculum brought home to me more than ever how it — and the Zen project writ large, I suppose — is, in part, about exploring our relationship with real and perceived constraints.

 

Many of our early koans seem to challenge one’s current perceptions of what’s possible, and so challenge us to take a closer look at what we experience as constraints.

 

Stop the sound of that distant temple bell.

 

Count the number of stars in the heavens.

 

Say something without moving your lips or tongue.

 

Some koans even use metaphors of physical entrapment.

 

You are at the bottom of a 200-foot dry well.  What do you do?

 

Many of us, perhaps most of us, come to Zen feeling trapped somehow.

 

Some part of me cut off from another part of myself.

 

A mind or spirit trapped in a body.

 

A solitary being cut off from the world I inhabit.

 

One being among many inhabiting a realm that can’t be all there is.

 

Some type of dualism.  Some version of heaven and earth, or heaven and hell.

 

We’re sure there is someplace else we must get, something more to know.  There must be a secret passageway to a place beyond, and we sense that Zen might offer us a map to find it and the key to open the door once we get there.

 

The early part of the koan curriculum seems to meet us where we’re at in this regard, even as it begins to challenge us to see that the “something more” we’re looking for is just this.  The “someplace else” we’re seeking is right here, right now.

 

The heat is turned up progressively, of course, as we’re challenged in increasingly direct ways.  Like this zinger (from the Blue Cliff Record), for example:

 

A monk said to Dasui, “When the thousands of universes are altogether and utterly destroyed in the kalpa fire — I wonder whether this perishes or not.

 

“This perishes,” said Dasui.

           

“If so,” persisted the monk, “does it follow the other.”

           

“It follows the other,” said Dasui.

 

Tsssssss!

 

 

And so it goes, until we come to the end of the curriculum, where, among other things, we encounter the precepts as koans.  Perhaps by then koan practice, and sitting practice, and everyday life practice have helped us let go of some perceived constraints and helped us see constraints we must accept in a new light.

 

The open secret, of course, is that the freedom we seek is found in the realm of constraints, not someplace else.

 

There is a “through the looking glass” quality to grasping this open secret, to be sure.  As we desperately strain to peer through the glass, what’s on the other side appears faint and blurry.  Passing through, I find myself.

 

Same old me.

 

Relatively speaking, there seems to be something to get.  Absolutely, not so much.

 

And this brings me to the second theme that seems to run through the koans. . .

 

Perhaps it’s more of a conceit, or a device, than a theme.

 

Like the koan I ultimately chose for this talk, the set up for many koans is an exchange between a wise teacher and a seemingly less wise student.

 

Often there also is a supporting character who is in the know, like Master Zhi in today’s koan.  Or Mahakasyapa, the student — and the only person, we’re told — who broke into a smile in the sermon where the Buddha simply twirled a flower.

 

We might more or less consciously identify with Master Zhi or Mahakasyapa as we pass through one of these koans.  We, too, get it.

 

But I’m not talking about them.  I’m talking about the seeming stooges.  The characters who are portrayed as hapless.  The characters who just don’t seem to get it.

 

Sometimes that student is a prominent person, like Emperor Wu of Liang, who also appears in a handful of other koans.  These prominent folk tend to fare especially poorly, at least on first blush.

 

As I surveyed our koan curriculum looking for inspiration for this talk, I found myself really appreciating these characters, the supposed stooges.  Even inspired by them.

 

Here I was, wandering around, looking for inspiration and insight . . . and I find it in other people wandering around, looking for inspiration and insight.

 

This is where much of the action is in these koans — much of the insight, the invitation and potential for us — I think.

 

“Not knowing is most intimate,” we like to say.  “Only don’t know.”

 

But is there still a hint of special knowledge in our not knowing?

 

As long as we’re identifying mainly with Mahasattva Fu or Master Zhi, perhaps there is.

 

As long as we think we get something Emperor Wu doesn’t, perhaps there is.

 

We can settle into our not knowing, and this, importantly, may make us a bit less anxious in our approach to life; perhaps relatively free of certain questions with which Emperor Wu is wrestling.  Perhaps we’ve come to feel just a bit more at home with ourselves; a bit more at home in this vast universe.

 

Mahasattva Fu, Master Zhi and, yes, Emperor Wu — each of them, and all of them together, are presenting themselves with integrity.  And each is an aspect of who we ultimately are.

 

I really appreciate how Emperor Wu, or that seemingly clueless student in so many other koans, helps us see how easy it is slip into a frame of mind in which there’s something more to get, something special, and, by god, perhaps we’ve got it.

 

That frame of mind from which we may overlook our own haplessness and ignorance, and the opportunities presented by those features of life we experience as constraints, as barriers.

 

If, on the other hand, you happen to be someone who identifies with poor, picked upon Emperor Wu all too easily — well, good for you.

 

“Emperor Wu was astounded.”  What a wonderful response to this.

 

Not knowing is most intimate.