*This post is dedicated to two people:
1) The late Chan (Zen) scholar John McRae who introduced me to Shohaku Okumura for the first time in 1997.
2) My friend Bryce who reintroduced me to Shohaku in 2004.
These two people unintentionally changed my life and I am forever grateful to them.
On a Saturday morning in mid-February 2004, I was at the Indiana University Taijiquan club in the middle of an extra-challenging bout of push-hands (tui shou) with my friend Bryce. Somehow we got into a conversation as we sensed and pushed, finding each other’s un-rooted places/moments and exploiting them. I mentioned to Bryce that, in a few weeks, I’d be in New York to visit a famous Taijiquan Grandmaster; to do a workshop there. In addition to the workshop, I told him I intended to visit a few friends and also stop by the Chan center in Queens, founded by the Chan Master Shengyan. I told him I had visited that center back in 1999 and had a casual, but ‘enlightening’, talk with a young monk that had really moved me and, thus, planted another ‘seed’ of curiosity about Chan (Zen) Buddhism within me. Bryce said: “Well, I just go to the Zen center here.” I replied: “We’ve got a Zen center here??”
The next morning, it turned out, our local “Zen center“ was having a Parinirvana Day celebration. Of course, I had to attend. Having practiced in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition for about 8 years, at this point, I thought to bring a food offering for the altar. I was greeted by a happy female Sōtō priest when I arrived who promptly added my three oranges to a table containing the various savory and dessert dishes that were to be eaten at the potluck lunch following the Parinirvana lecture and service.
Kyōshin recently shared with me the aspect of his Shin saṃgha practice whereby people spontaneously express something about themselves, their understanding of Dharma, etc. in a group setting. I’ve never experienced that particular practice myself, but it inspired me to share something here that’s completely unpolished by me, but yet about my Dharma practice. Last fall, my wife was enrolled in an introductory ethnography class at the University of Michigan. For an early assignment, she chose to interview me about my relationship with Shohaku Okumura as a lay student. What follows is her pared down and edited transcript, yet I had no hand in refining or controlling this. It’s completely someone else’s distilled reflection of me, and what I spoke spontaneously over the course of a half-hour interview.
Shohaku Okumura, in addition to being someone I consider a spiritual teacher, is someone I consider a friend also. He’s someone who basically changed my perception of what Buddhist practice could be and how I could apply it to my life. I met him for the first time when I was a student taking a university class on Buddhism in the spring of 1997. He came as a visitor to give a talk one day on Soto Zen. I was moved by the way he described Soto Zen; there was a profound simplicity that seemed kind of boring on its surface, but it seemed like it contained a lot of depth.
Later, when I heard there was a Zen center in Bloomington I showed up one day. Actually, it was the Buddha’s parinirvana day, and I recognized Shohaku right away as this guy who had visited my class years ago. That day he explained the entire history and path of Buddhism in a one hour lecture. To me, it was this incredibly refined, distilled talk. And then the next morning when I showed up and saw him sitting in zazen, almost like an electric shock hit me when I saw his zazen posture. Something was kind of transmitted to me, just a certain feeling of awe and admiration at how he was just sitting there. And so then I was kind of intrigued by seeing his zazen practice and wanted to know more about that. I think within two days I was just kind of moved by the spirit of his practice, and the intellect of his practice, and decided that I wanted to go there every day that I could after that. And I went there just about every day from that point on.
I decided to become a Buddhist in that particular tradition. I’d already taken refuge in the Tibetan tradition, but I decided in 2004, shortly after meeting him, that I was impressed enough by Soto Zen that I wanted to take refuge and the Buddhist precepts in that tradition, and he became my preceptor. I feel like there’s a linkage there too because when you take the precepts in the Zen tradition you get the kechimyaku, which is basically like the lineage chart. It sort of shows you being added to this family tree of Buddhism. So in a way I feel like I’ve connected to him father to son, in the spiritual sense, within this greater family tree. You could also compare it to a trade, and I know he sometimes jokingly refers to Zen as Buddha’s family business. It’s almost the relationship an apprentice might have with a master craftsman, learning the craft for how to live your life according to the founder of Soto Zen, Dogen, and Shakyamuni Buddha, and the other teachers from the lineage. Basically crafting a life for yourself and a relationship between all people and all beings, while reflecting on and observing the spiritual traditions of that particular lineage.
As a teacher, Shohaku’s done a good job of showing me how to take something very archaic and seemingly very abstract and apply it to my life in a concrete way, something I don’t think I’d be able to do very easily on my own. I think it comes from his background as a translator and a Zen scholar, how he’s able to unravel texts and show how they can be useful and relevant to modern and everyday life. Every time he explains a fascicle of the Shobogenzo, or one of the foundational texts of Soto Zen, I see glimpses of how my life is put together, or how I construct my sense of self, or my relationships with other people. But we also have very casual conversations too, so in that sense I think he’s also very approachable as an older friend.
One term Shohaku uses that I really like, because I’ve always struggled with the concept of God, at least the idea of a personal God, is the term “network of interdependent origination.” I think it’s probably a translation from the Sanskrit. It sounds very technical. That might not be the thing you call out when you’re afraid or feel a sense of gratitude for the mystery of this universe and how it’s working in your life. But I really like, on an intellectual level, what that says about the nature of our reality.
Another expression I appreciate is myoho, or wondrous dharma. When I’m just kind of amazed at how incredible this life is, and how mysterious it is, I really appreciate the term wondrous dharma. It’s a term Shohaku’s used and I really enjoy it. It expresses this kind of paradox that we are completely alone in the world and completely individual and our experience is completely ours and, at the same time, we are completely interconnected with all other beings in the world. That, to me, is kind of the crux, the real core, of what I think of as wondrous dharma. It just seems like this strange, wondrous mystery that those two things are both one hundred percent true if you believe that.
Practicing Buddhism to me means just the way I live my life. Not necessarily even in the context of a zendo or meditation hall. It’s definitely informed by the formal practice of sitting on a cushion or observing precepts or studying the history of Buddhism and the lives of different teachers or events. But it really extends beyond those more formal lessons and practices to how I interact with my co-workers, how I operate as a manager in my job, the kind of husband I am, how I treat my cat and dog. Those teachings and those precepts, they provide something for me to reflect on at the end of each day. Have I really lived up to these goals I have for myself, or this ideal I have for myself, the bodhisattva path? How true have I been to my teacher, and these precepts, and this path I’m trying to lead?
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Seidō
Thanks very much for sharing this Seidō. If it is not too personal for this public forum it would be interesting to hear something about what you found when you saw your words and presentation of your path in the mirror of your wife’s interview.
the term wondrous dharma. It’s a term Shohaku’s used and I really enjoy it. It expresses this kind of paradox that we are completely alone in the world and completely individual and our experience is completely ours and, at the same time, we are completely interconnected with all other beings in the world …
Namuamidabutsu.
The first thing I noticed was how awkward I ‘sound’. I don’t even recall saying a few of those things quite that way, but maybe that’s exactly what I spoke. Honestly, right after my wife gave me her transcript, I felt kind of embarrassed about what was there.
Recently, I read an article in a newspaper that quoted a friend of mine at length. What impressed me about about reading this article was that even though it was full of awkward language, I noticed that I could almost hear his voice in what had been written down. That experience of reading my friend’s quoted speech and your description of the practice you’ve done with your Shin samgha inspired the post. I see the same kind of awkwardness in my recorded words above as I did in my friend’s newspaper interview. It was interesting to me, though, to see what my wife picked out from this interview–maybe less than 5 minutes’ worth of a half-hour talk.
Also, I notice myself echoing Shohaku a little in that trasncript. By the way, I should point out that when you read in any of Shohaku’s books “all other beings”, “together with all beings”, etc., he’s often using the English word “beings” for ‘dharmas’. So, ‘phenomena’ might be a more accurate translation. He likes how the word beings sounds, basically, but once we had a conversation after a lecture about what he really meant because he had referred to all composite, impermanent things as beings. He had held up a dry erase marker and called it and a few other inanimate objects beings. I realized the confusion that word might create for most native English-speaker’s since, typically, the term ‘being’ implies sentient or living being.
The last thing that strikes me about the post above is what a tiny sliver of someone’s existence you see in an interview like this; how incredibly limiting it is.
Thanks for sharing this Seido. One of the things that has been very helpful to me in the practice of communal speaking and listening in samgha is when other people notice and point out lacuna in our self-presentation; for instance the fact that we never mention a certain person such as a parent, or never discuss a certain sphere of our life. Similarly having others listen to us can also help uncover ingrained assumptions that we take as self-evident facts but may be anything but …
In terms of the talk you gave that your wife reported on … it got me thinking about how for me the most honest answers I could give to why I follow this path, why I go to the temple, are the most difficult to frame in words and perhaps therefore the most unsatisfying to others … in that sense the closer the match between what I say about Dharma, and what others would report me to have said, the more suspicious I am of what I have said! Jerry’s discussion of poetry seems apt here. Recently I have tried to use poetry and storytelling more in Dharma talks so as to try and convey the ‘feeling-sense’ of what I hope to share. Sometimes it feels like religious teaching passes on precise, well-crafted vessels that are increasingly empty of content!
Thanks for your reflection on my reflection. I suppose it would’ve been more interesting if the interviewer had been a complete stranger. My wife already had some sense of what aspects of my connection to this particular Zen samgha are important to me, which probably shaped her editing/selections.
Of course, my interview responses were full of the ‘tribal’ jargon of my particular samgha or American Zen culture at large. If I had been asked about something related to my profession, there would have been another collection of jargon. I see that when we overuse (or worse—sacralize) certain terms, whether its ‘network of interdependent origination’, ‘Other Power’, ‘zazen’, ‘nembutsu’, or whatever, we deaden language; make it hollow or even opaque… For people outside the ‘tribe’, especially. So, I appreciate what you (and Jerry) are suggesting about poetry. Poetry is the freshest use of language that we are capable of. A week or so ago, right after the death of Wisława Szymborska, I enjoyed this little passage I found in an article about her in the Guardian:
”In her Nobel speech, she spoke of the extraordinary nature of life, of how she would love to tell Ecclesiastes that ‘There’s nothing new under the sun’: that’s what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun’, and of how, ‘in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.”
Lovely and apposite quotation Seidō, namuamidabutsu.