Call and Response

Yes!

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Thank you again for bringing your presence to the meeting today. I'm gonna bring up a uh a Zen case, as I as I often do. This this case is from a collection called the the Gateless Gate. Interesting title, the Gateless Gate. And that that really is what we come into contact with in our practice of sitting meditation. We sit at the uh at the gate, the gate of awareness. And sometimes it can feel like there's a uh a barrier or a block or a gate between us and uh a deeper realization or a deeper peace or satisfaction that we would like to realize. But that's not a a gate where we can find any keyhole or handle to turn. It's hard to find that. It may feel that way, but it's hard to identify the gate. The title of this particular collection, um well, I'm not sure if it's helpful when it says it's a gateless gate. So there's no real block or real barrier here that's presented to us, although it may appear that way. Meditation in its slow, steady, daily, weekly, yearly practice is a wonderful art that helps dissolve the sense of separation that we may feel in life from others and the world around us. So I'll bring up the case, the case is uh case case seventeen from the Gateless Gate, the national master's three calls. Okay, so the national teacher called to his attendant three times, and three times his attendant responded and three times his attendant responded. The national teacher said, I thought I was standing alone with my back to you, but now I find that you are standing alone with your back to me. So here's our our Koan today, the national teacher whose name was let me see Kokushi. So the national teacher Kokushi called to his uh attendant. We still maintain that tradition in the Zen tradition now, as a um as an apprentice somewhat or as a student will train in the position of Jisha or our attendant, that's somebody who uh takes care of uh and supports the teacher. We we have that practice still uh yokoji, it's an old practice, and in many different walks of life, we we still uh follow something of an apprenticeship model. One person who is more accomplished or or senior in in a skill or an art teaches uh and instructs uh a pupil who works alongside them, learning what they can learn from that person until it's time for them to graduate or to or to or to uh move on as a as a teacher of themselves. And this is true in the Zen tradition. So we have the the teacher who's called the the national teacher of this time, and this is set in this is China, uh somewhere uh around the 700s AD, give or take uh 50 years or or a century. The national teacher, Kukushi, in this case, was a successor of the sixth ancestor of Zen Daikenno, who's one of the pivotal figures in the in the Zen tradition, uh who was uh an uneducated and uncultured uh person from the uh very far south of China, who who travelled north to practice Zen and became uh a successor in the Zen tradition, but then due to his uh um due to the prejudice in uh of the time, with him being from uh a southern part of China, which was considered um foreign territory, uh he wasn't accepted as as the teacher and had to uh hide himself in the mountains and practice for uh anonymously for many years until the political winds and the culture of the day shifted somewhat. And this set up a tradition in in Zen Buddhist practice, which still actually exists uh to this day in certain places of Japan, where someone who has apprenticed to the Dharma with a teacher and becomes independent and receives permission uh to teach or is acknowledged as a teacher, will first go into anonymity and obscurity for uh ten years before teaching. Uh to go go get a go to go get a a regular job and and disappear for a while. And this is done, uh it said also to remove any stink of zen. Which I I appreciate that, you know, to remove the identity of uh some some attainment or or accomplishment of being like I did it, look at me, I'm the teacher now. Alright, that's that's not what we want. And so people would literally go away in that case. There was uh one of the great teachers in the Narinzai Zen tradition, um Kanzen Egan. It said when his teacher was about to pass away, and he was a teacher of the emperor, national teacher means teacher of the emperor in China. So when Kanzan Egan's teacher was about to pass away, they said, Who is your successor going to be? And he said, Oh, there was somebody from some years back, Kanzan. Kanzan understands you should you should go find him. And nobody knew where Kanzan was. What had happened was he had taken on this practice of anonymity and he had gone far into the north, in in this case in Japan, and he worked as a peasant farmer for ten years in his and he was in his sixties when he began that work. Which um late medieval Japan peasant farmer would appear to be a tough gig to me, right? I mean that that that was not something easy to do. But he but he went off and did that in anonymity. And this will this will weave back to the thread that I wanted to bring up about uh what it is to really to be uh independent. You know, the the emperors um the people the emperor instructed to find Kanzan, eventually found him up in the north and brought him back to be the national teacher. This is a different national teacher, Kakushi here from centuries before in China, but also upon um realizing his his nature through realizing uh the truth of um the Buddha's enlightenment coming into alignment with reality, he too was someone who said, Okay, then um you know no need to um do anything fancy here. I will retire to the mountains and and live uh a simple life in a um in a small temple. And so and that's what that's what he did. He retired and said that he lived with uh a practitioner, a friend, and they they did meditation and lived very simply. But eventually the um the previous national teacher had come in to pass on and and again needs to find a successor and says uh Kakushi is is the next the next person you should go find him. And he was asked to become the emperor's teacher, to which he said no, thank you very much, very politely, I'm sure, but declined to come to the capital and to be the emperor's teacher. It was said in those times in in China that you know we had certain mystical ways of uh doing things, and uh you could you could decline three times, but that was it. And and you were at risk of your life if you turned down uh somebody clearly as important as the emperor. So teachers of the day they'd be asked to do something and they'd say no, and then they'd go on the lamp, they they'd they'd go they'd go on the run to try and get away from having to take on the responsibility or get in the limelight of being the emperor's teacher. And but you know, he was found again and he's asked again, and on the third time he was asked, he had to he had to consent. And then it said that his uh his friend, his fellow practitioner, was uh so upset with him at accepting fame and glory that he said uh you and I are done talking. So that's some there's some there's some backstory, and then so the national teacher there, you know, he's uh becomes the emperor's teacher and he continues teaching. And he only has one successor eventually. Sometimes teachers will have, and Dharma teachers will have many, many successes. In our lineage, but I think Bernie Glassman, whose whose work I really appreciate and I bring up sometimes. I don't know, it's like I'm not actually sure, like 20 or 30 or something like that, successes. Other um My Zumi Roshi, my teacher's teacher had 12 successes. My attention, my teacher has five or so or six, including myself. Some people that then it's just one. The original standard of the day was um you would only um give approval to somebody who saw clear clearer than you did. And what a wonderful standard that is for apprentice, for teacher and apprentice. But the shadow of that is is most lineages who kept that system up went extinct. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Hard to say. Here, you know, the national teacher calls to his attendant, the tangan, calls out three times. And the the attendant responds three times. Yes. Tangan Yes. Tanger Yes. And at this, somewhat cryptically, the national teacher said, I thought I was standing alone with my back to you, but now I find you're standing alone with your back to me. Calling out this three times. What is what is going on here? Are you ever in the house where where somebody calls you? Sometimes my son will shout, dude, from like twelve feet away in the next room, you know. And I'll be yes, sounding a bit annoyed. They shouts again, I'm like, what? And then you know it gets ridiculous, and then like come in here and talk to me if you want, you know, but sometimes we'll do that. Sometimes we're called, you know, and then we and then we're and then we respond. There was uh one of my Zumi Roshi's teachers, Koryo Roshi, back in the early days of uh when these exotic teachers from eastern climb came to the western shores, yeah, and they, you know, were experimenting with uh meditation in the in the late 60s and the 70s out here and seeing what's going on. It said that they um they they connected him up a science experiment where they put some put some wires and electrodes on him so they could measure his responsiveness. And uh he rang a bell and there was a certain response, alpha waves or or what whatever that is, I know very little about it. So it was a bell and then there was response. And then he rang a bell again and then same response. And then they rang a bell again, same response. Now in our in the practice of our like everyday practice of our lives, we we always have the opportunity to look into presence to just being present. I have a good friend who is instrumental in my my education and my my my training in this in this area, who didn't know a lot about the collections of the teachers or have a lot of formal Dharma understanding, but he had really very much come into alignment with being present, just being present. And whenever we would talk, he would just say he would make a remark about what was currently happening, what was going on now, which I I found both frustrating, but then with some with some time and experience, very simple and and and a beautiful a beautiful teaching. You know, as as human beings we have this, I'm sure you do, I I do, or maybe it's just me, so raise your hand if it doesn't apply to you. But I I I I will find myself um drifting into the internal monologue of me. The the the commentary and the one that comments on the world, the the the narrator of all that is occurring in the inner world. And a lot of that is concerned even with um things that have occurred previously, things that are to come later perhaps. Building uh images of people and things which are only perhaps partially true, if that. We'll we'll live and practice or drift into and become identified with this um inner world which is really identified with the me project, the project of me. When we do so and now uh and we spend too much too much time in that in that arena of self, the idea of me that feels separate from the world that surrounds each one of us, then slowly and exorably we drift further and further out of sync with the way things actually are. We lose touch with our environment, which is always new, which is always the first ring of the bell, which is always appearing as this in its multitude of colours and shapes and sounds that it becomes obscured and we drift out of alignment. And so we we practice and apply the salve of mindful present aware practices, of which meditation is such a uh primary primary practice. It really is medicine for the body-mind to be able to sit still, to be quiet, to stop chasing after objects of mind, to let go of story and commentary, and rather to feel directly, experience and touch directly that which is real, and that which is real always appears now, always appears with the sound of a bell, whether the bell struck once, twice, three times, ten times. You know, we ha of course have this impulse. We hear something, wow, that's interesting. We hear it again. That's not so interesting. We hear it a third time, okay, now I'm bored. Now I'm moving on to something something else. Right, same old, same old. And life, you know, for for me, life can have that that dulling down quality of um when when a lot of the days are some are similar to the previous day. Right? I find that living at a at a Zen center, it's like groundhog day, only Bill Murray is not here to brighten things, you know. So it's like a lot of the things that like are just happening pretty much the same as they happened yesterday, with the same schedule. We sometimes find that we have the same conversation sometimes about the same things, you know, and it can it can get it can get a little a little repetitive, right? And then we it start to start to get a little stale. And we also find that, do you not do we not find that about our own mind and our own patterns? Here I go again, with my same here I go again down the rabbit hole with the same same response, the same reaction to the to the same thing. And then we we're sort of in that place of uh of repeating. And if we find that that is occurring and it's dissatisfactory, then again it's time to apply uh it's time to apply practice, a salve of meditation, a salve of coming back into present awareness. And the direction on how to do so, of course, is is quite is quite clear at this point. We all understand how to how to uh be still and silent. What's more difficult is to really to put in the um the discipline of not allowing the mind or the self-identified mind to reach into the content that is appearing between the ears and to become uh entangled with it and to carry it forward. So we do that a lot throughout our day, and some of it is necessary to navigate the world as as a human being. None of this is wrong, it's just the way that we are. The human condition is just the human condition. Bad or good are judgments. You know, it's just really we are irrevocably the way that we are, but we see that aspects of um the human condition um cause dissatisfaction. Aspects of the human condition are dissatisfactory. And if we can identify those, the ways that we obscure what is really most immediate, what is always fresh and new, then we can come become much more alive in the present. But it really does require practice. The natural teacher in this case, you know, in calling out to his attendant and his tendon answers. So there's a call and a response. Very natural. The second time the teacher calls, the student in this case. The attendant, he knows something's afoot. He knows something's going on. It's like, did he not hear me? He's like right there, right? I mean, this is the attendant. He'd know if his uh if his hearing's gone on the fritz or there's some other thing going on. He knows it's not that kind of thing. He knows, uh oh, the my teacher's laying a snare here, laying a trap at my feet, you know? On on opening one of those bear traps and calling out, hey he replies yeah, hey. What does he do with his second response? Answers in the same way. Called a third time. Answers in the same way. You know, in my training with uh my study with with Tenshin Roshi, when he when he I met him in the in the in the UK, there weren't really any but I knew of um kind of solid Dharma teachers. Um there may have been some I didn't know about. Um there may have been some people living in little huts in the mountains or people living anonymously. You know, maybe I bumped into uh a Dharma master in the uh in the in the local library of a grocery store and didn't and walked right past them. Maybe it was that way. But I couldn't I couldn't find one, and this was uh sort of kind of pre-internet or or pretty or pretty close to it. And I remember I went on my you know, when I went on my first retreat, uh I was a little nervous because it was a very strange thing to do in my corner of uh United Kingdom. But a little more accepting and and more cosmopolitan in uh Southern California. You know, you can uh you can turn up here uh wrapped in a in a in a black robe and it's not too shocking. But in in in in the UK, that that that was a f that was not something people did, you know. You just look like uh kind of a Satanist or some kind of dark druid or something. So I remember going on my on my on my first retreat, and my my eldest brother uh gave gave me a ride there, and um he dropped me off and then he gave me this like little talk, and he's like, Look, if they turn out to be weird or they try and do something to you, you call me. And it scared the life out of me, you know. I said, I won't I don't think what? Like, and and I remember I had a a cell phone, and and I'm showing like I'm getting older here because this was like in the early days, not many people had cell phones, but I had kind of a business job at the time. So I had my it's like I don't know if you've ever seen Wall Street by Oliver Stone, where Michael Douglas's character, Gordon Gecko, he's got a cell phone, and things like this with an aerial coming out the top, like a car aerial, you know, and he's talking to Charlie Sheen on the beach. It was like one of those cell phones, and I remember I kept it off and I kind of put it under my pillow, and that was my in case they turn out to be a weird cult, I can call my brother and he'll come, he'll come break me out, you know. Anyway, my worst fears were not real realized, but what I discovered in in my my teacher was someone who um clearly had something which I was clear about, something that I was not. Let me put it that way, had a clearer understanding of some principle which I felt in my heart was a truth of which I wasn't clear. You know, sometimes if we hear a good talk or read a quote that strikes us in poetry or a dharma book or something that's said, something will stir us where we see the truth of something in an utterance. We hear something from many different traditions or religions or from secular life, we'll hear something, someone says something, and it strikes us deeply. There's a truth that recognizes truth. You know, our deeper awareness, which may even be somewhat unrealized, recognizes itself in that in that phrase, in those words. And there's something there with my teacher where I ah, this I'm gonna study with this person. And so not too unlike the characters in this in this Koan, you know, that kind of brought me out here and continued to practice. But over the years of apprenticeship in meditation, we we really find our legs with it. Although they may be asleep at some times, right, through the long hours that we kind of put into it. But we we do this practice and it's something of an apprenticeship. We we work our way through, we look at how mind really functions, we look into the truth of of impermanence, the truth of how reality really is, using whatever lens of lineage or no lineage, of religion or no religion, whatever our affinity is in order to inquire deeply into this human existence. Everybody here is is that is a voyager or an explorer of the human condition. And through doing so we become we become accomplished. We become independent. We don't need to rely ultimately on a teacher or somebody to tell us what we ought to believe in or how we are to understand something. We don't need to become you know, be a rung down on the ladder to anybody else. We learn from people, we learn from teachers, we learn from our children, we learn from those around us. You know, teachers the teachings of life appear in many different forms, many of them unwelcome. But as as sincere practitioners, we learn. We learn and we refine, and then we become independent. We become accomplished. But not accomplished in a way that we need everybody to call us sir, or everybody to, you know, um bow when we walk past or or or or anything like that. But accomplished in being a very ordinary person, a completely ordinary human being, but one who is not deluded about life, an ordinary person who understands this. When we do so, when we become accomplished in this way, in the art of ordinariness, we find our place. We find our place. We find that it's always the right time. It's always the right place, it's always the right condition. Not write like right and wrong, but write as in it is correct because it is so. Each one of us is independent, and yet we practice together. Every one of us is completely ordinary. But that's an extraordinary thing. And our you know, the key really here in this coin is are we awake, aware, and alive in this present experience? Do we know our home? Again, if we're living in a different version of the world, you know, especially in this time now of competing narrative, of post-truth, of the decay of objective facts and and etc, etc. You know, so easy to fall into a into a an idea of a world, the way the world is or the way it ought to be. But as practitioners of presence, as if we consider ourselves Buddhist or spiritual practitioners, or however we decide to define or not define that, the real test is do we are we awake and alive now? Are we in accord with the way things are? When we are, then practice is really straightforward. Our name is called, we turn our head. And this doesn't mean that we need to live in this place where that bell rings ten times and every time it's the it's the first time. No, there is. There is the the first call, the second call and the third call are different. But in this koam the attendant knows he's being tested on something else. Are you alive now? Are you here? Are you here? Are you some or are you somewhere else? And that's our test too in meditation. So easy to knock it in autopilot and go somewhere else for twenty five or thirty minutes, rambling around in the uh thickets of the mind, you know, and not looking at a bit of doing a bit of this and doing a little bit of that. But meditation takes discipline and effort to return over and over and over and over again, to come back to the sound of a bell, to come back to being present. We need to ex I found I need to exercise that muscle to keep it strong. And when I do so I can respond appropriately to the changing conditions. I don't exercise that model over time. There's some regress who fall into an idea or a description of the world. And you don't even hear the third bell. At this point I should yeah, time is getting on. Please let me open it up for for any for any question, for any comment, anything that you would like to raise up, to share, or to ask, please uh please go ahead.