The Daily Zen Teisho: Recent Episodes
Daily Zen
Daily Zen has been a contemplative haven for online visitors since 1998 offering a unique blend of Eastern quotes for each day of the year, Zen-inspired e-cards, and a meditation room where at any moment a visitor may be meditating with any one of our companion Wayfarers each day. The Journal, called On the Way, is published once a month and this podcast has been created to turn those Journals into an auditory experience allowing listeners to contemplate its ideas in another way.
Whether we think of ourselves as average, superior, or inferior students, we all share zazen as a practice, and probably for most of us we don't think of our “level” as students at all.
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Each teacher of the Way has their own style to help students break through stubborn attachments and confusion. Each master exemplifies approaches that sometimes are easy to digest and other times pull the rug out from under us. Ajahn Chah has a more gentle and matter-of-fact style using ordinary language and examples that are easy to relate to.
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We can learn something from every teacher we meet through the journals. Some may be difficult to understand because their style seems archaic or the translator’s choice of words may lead to some confusion, but there are kernels of wisdom in every piece.
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For those of us who entered the doorway of Zen through “just sitting,” koan practice has always seemed a bit mysterious. Not that there isn’t a technique involved in sitting meditation but concentrating on a certain phrase or word is not part of that approach.
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Many of us have longed at one time or another to retreat to a hermitage in the mountain wilds, to follow the way of the sages, thus shedding our distractions and focusing on a life of practice.
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Once again, the classic student and teacher dialogue we have all heard at one time or another. True teachers can be and should be, difficult to pin down an “answer” to questions that in reality wind up limiting us. What else, and how else could Huang Po answer?
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The essence of Taoism and Zen emanates from the same source, and many qualities of Taoist sages sound like what you could hear from a Zen master in China. At times the dividing lines seem quite blurry.
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One of the core teachings in Buddhism is that of “co-dependent origination,” that nothing exists independently; rather, everything exists on the condition that its existence relies on all other entities.
Here is a refreshing and direct expression of something many of us make into a very complicated and abstruse issue. Bankei brought Zen to ordinary, everyday people along with the monks and nuns that he taught.
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Ah, the patience of a good teacher resounds throughout this piece. The characters and their parts are timeless...we have all known challenging students who seem to push inappropriately, but like a highly skilled kendo master, Muso deftly answers questions that seem at times to cross the barrier of common courtesy.
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Zen teaching is filled with enlightenment stories and koans that sound like mental gymnastics to the beginner. At times one wonders the purpose of them, other than to illustrate how futile all our striving really is.
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There are many principles of Buddhism easily understood. For instance, any one of the Six Perfections sounds like reasonable aspirations. However, as in all spiritual traditions, there is the understanding of the householder versus the spiritual aspirant who hears another meaning.
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Over the years we have shared many teaching dialogues, most often in the format of an unknown student questioning a very well know Zen Master. This is one of the most unique dialogues we have, taken from Dogen’s own journal covering his years of study in China with Master Rujing.
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Now if that isn't confidence-inspiring, what is? Straightforward and to the point, with no added frills or special techniques, sit on your cushion or your bench and let each thought go.
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In ancient times not much was revealed about what the enlightenment experience consisted of. And since Zen is a teaching outside of words and letters, many were left to just sit.
Chinul was the founder of Korean Zen, and the piece above is a perfect introduction to his approach of sudden realization/gradual cultivation. Spiritual practice is full of paradoxes; to be able to hold such disparate ideas “together” is one challenge of training.
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Such openness! Such a “no one special” approach to sharing the most important moments of one’s life, makes this a most charming chapter from the volume of this master’s journey to freedom. Being closer to our own time, the language is easy to fall into step with and grasp.
As long as there's no stopping place, even in practice, where is the need for labeling what level of enlightenment is achieved? Who is doing all this achieving anyway? The hardest practice is real life without any teacher, group, or nourishing temple to remind you of what you're doing here.
While the mirror is a familiar image used in Zen, the Platform Sutra by Hui-neng is the most famous illustration of how widely differently this idea can be taken.
With any spiritual discussion, there is always a point where you just can't understand because the very faculty trying to grasp it all is standing in the way. So what do you do at that point? Relax, sit back, and know that it is there for you somehow.
Most of us are well aware that the truth cannot be experienced by just reading sacred writings, however, lest we swing into extremes, as we are sometimes known to do, they still have their purpose. From the very first line though, the encouragement to “stainless learning” means … what exactly?
While the sutras are numerous and many have never been translated, what we do have access to can be challenging to understand. The lore surrounding the Lankavatara Sutra is that when Bodhidharma chose his successor Hui-k’o, he gave him a copy of the Lanka sutra and told him all he needed to know was in it.
Some of the Zen masters may sound harsh at times; their actions can seem confounding, but for some it takes a big message to break through the attachment to self. This truly is one of the biggest hurdles we encounter in practice, so subtle as to actually fool us into thinking “ah, now I really understand at last!”
What little we know of him sitting in front of the wall and not responding to Huike until he took extreme measures to show his sincerity indicates someone of profound depth and experience. When compared with other translations one wonders if the entirety of this is from him or later accruals.
As seemingly difficult as some passages above are to comprehend, the method elucidated is clear and the “goal” of training is set forth at the very beginning. Hung-jen was the fifth patriarch of Zen and the teacher Hui-neng studied with.
The vast number of sutras, many of which have not been translated, are overwhelming in considering where to begin. In Cave 17 of the Dunhuang caves more than 10,000 manuscripts have been discovered well preserved during 900 years in the dark, dry cave. Given the sheer enormity of the writings in Buddhism, it makes perfect sense to have someone attempt to essentialize the essence of the teachings for their students and future generations.
Each of Mahamati's questions requires time to absorb and appreciate the Buddha's response. In essence, they are the universal questions of life here and now, but the answers are addressed to a bodhisattva rather than a beginner practitioner. One can assume he is asking for the benefit of the practitioners present listening to the exchange.
Sometimes describing what something is relies more on describing what it is not. In Vedanta and Jnana yoga neti neti, not this, not that, is part of their meditative practice which helps to discard attachment to any number of places where a practitioner can get stuck thinking they've finally arrived, when indeed there is more ground to cover.
This sums up the crux of a meaningful koan for us today. How we get there is truly up to each one of us, and each person has their own unique pathway.
Right action is one principle of the Eightfold Noble path in Buddhism. These are inspiring guidelines for a life of practice, however, lest we leave it as only pertaining to actions of “goodness,” it may leave us wondering at times what exactly is the right action in certain circumstances.
In this chapter on practice, Chih I covers a tremendous amount of territory. With a simple name like stop-look Zen meditation, we are introduced to a short-hand view of this technique. The straightforward reasons for practice are all ones we can relate to, and perhaps a few are a bit surprising to consider as reasons to practice meditation.
We have all asked questions of a teacher and kept on asking without pausing to experience the answer. It is like having a greed for views where there is this insatiable drive to collect answers without discovering anything for oneself.
Here we have a reading that encourages us to raise this doubt mass. This term alone causes one to wonder what is this "doubt" they are talking about. Even exploring "What is it?" as a starting point is not a bad place to begin.
These are questions many practitioners also have asked when confronted with yet another initiation requiring the fulfillment of new vows. Or the thought of a complex visualization one is asked to engage in with meditation practice. With the many offshoots of Buddhism have appeared many new requirements, retreats, and prostrations.
There are difficulties that rely on the faithfulness of the translators themselves and then the emphasis contemporary schools place on different aspects of Buddhism that create the unique flavor of each school.
In times like these where anger, greed, and delusion seem to have total sway over people’s consciousness, it is quite a reach to feel sincerely that all beings are in the process of becoming buddhas. The ultimate stretch of our faith in the Way is just this. However, the process is right in our own laps.
The lovely paradox of right intention in practice....who is not mystified by Great Enlightenment? And yet we are advised, the more we seek it, the more illusive it becomes. So, out of the corner of our consciousness, we peek from time to time, wondering, even so, where, exactly, and when is this Great Enlightenment? The maxim we hear in practice "Great effort, no goal" approximates the attitude of right intention. What a generous discourse on Great Enlightenment Dogen shares with us!
No matter how many years we have practiced, or if we are just discovering a way to practice, we can maintain beginner's mind. Beginner's mind is that state before we know too much, before we can explain principles to anyone else, where everything is fresh and unexplored and full of wonder.
Being a passive participant easily leads to a mindless outcome, and that is not the good kind of mindless we look at in practice.
How often in practice have we wondered how best to essentialize what we are studying? When one tries to “explain” what Buddhism or Zen is to someone, one can get tangled up in concepts that only serve to complicate the heart of the teaching.
Like so many of the early teachers of Zen and meditation, there is an outline of preparing oneself for meditation, but there is seldom too much direction about what exactly it IS you are entering into.
This selection takes us into deeper steps of preparation to sit with attention to breathing clearly spelled out. Rather than following the breath into the abdomen and back out, Chih I has us breathe into every pore and out to the periphery of our entire body.
No matter how many years we have practiced, or how many weeks, it is always refreshing to return to the beginning and look at meditation as if we are just being introduced to it. We can all benefit from a return to beginner’s mind.
At times when you read about what it takes to break through our illusions, it can feel a bit overwhelming. The intensity and steadfastness of the wise ones of old is humbling when we look clearly at our own efforts; one thing we must remember, though, is not to compare ourselves to others, but rather allow the stories to inspire us to go further.
I have often thought that the term Middle Way truly gives us a guideline for practice without a lot of extra expounding needed. Think about the sense of balance we have in certain activities – too far to either side can lead to a fall literally! So we do use this sense of balance in daily life.
It is quite a treasure to find a new piece in translation and one full of terms that seem to predate the usual ones we find in Buddhism and Zen. In bringing Buddhism to new lands, it only seems natural that the earlier understanding of the Way, Taoism in this case in China, would find a way to make sense of the new teachings as similar to their native teachings of the Way.
No matter who the teacher is we need to have a balance between what they say that is clearly delivered and what can tend to cloud things over a bit. To ascribe anything to nirvana is saying too much as it falls into “as soon as you try to explain things, the true meaning is lost.”
Wherever we find ourselves along the Way we can always find a handhold in these writings, however meager it may seem. No one can say what phrase, which practice, what sound in Nature may cause a sudden awakening which is in reality, just a beginning.
No matter how we approach meditation on the cushion or in life, there is this lingering sense of so much “self” still coloring so much of our realities.
As beginners, to find our centered posture in sitting meditation we move side to side slowly and then back and forth, naturally coming to know our center. With practice, those movements are dropped, and we are familiar with the centered posture. It is a technique we use at first and then can discard.
This is a classic exchange between one sincere student trying to finally get a grasp on what this One Mind is all about and how the experience of truly Being changes one's experience of the world.
Here is a refreshing and direct expression of something many of us make into a very complicated and abstruse issue. Bankei brought Zen to ordinary, everyday people along with the monks and nuns that he taught.
Po Shan gives us a few guidelines to help steer this wandering path we are on. For those who have never been given a koan or hua tou to investigate, how do you proceed?
This theme is one we return to repeatedly, that being the difference between thinking we understand versus having the direct experience.
In each reading, there will be a phrase, or several, which stand out for you. Sometimes they carry over into your meditation practice; sometimes they are like koans you can’t seem to let go of.
The simplicity and clarity of the commentary are delightful. In these lengthening nights, who can't appreciate the ability to stretch out our experience of time, and for those in the Southern hemisphere, who cannot feel the expansive days of summer?
The Platform Sutra is unique among the sutras which are considered to be the direct teachings of the Buddha.
To find a buddha, all you have to do is see your nature. Your nature is buddha. And the buddha is the person who’s free, free of plans, free of cares.
This piece contains some clear instructions on meditation. It is uncommon to find much direct advice given in ancient times. These instructions were given to monks training with him, and the basis of this treatise consists of questions and answers.