The Acrostic Jewel Mirror - Genzen Ed Cadman

The Acrostic Jewel Mirror - Genzen Ed Cadman - Talk Date: 03/29/26 - Suggested Donation $5 - Genzen Ed Cadman reflects on the Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, exploring how the teachings of “thusness” are passed intimately through Buddhas, ancestors, community, and creative expression. He shares his personal project of transforming the ancient poem into autobiographical acrostic poetry, weaving together Zen practice, family memories, and gratitude for those who have shaped his life.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

So why do we have the song of Julmir Samadhi in our chant book?

SPEAKER_01 0:14

It's next to the Heart Sutra, it's next to the Bodhisattva vows. Why is this so important? Why is it our something that we chant every month? Well, it's a poem from the Chinese founder of the Southern School of Zen. Conscience told us about this. This is Dongshan. And Dongshan lived between 807 and 869. So our one of our great Chinese ancestors, he was he was inspired by Win Ning, the sixth ancestor, um, who lived between 638 and 713. So Dongshan, and then he was um teacher to Kaoshan, and between the two of them there are said to be the founders of Soto Zheng. And it was for the honoring of those men and the search for what they were teaching it that guided our enlightened founder, Dogen Zhenji, to go to China and look for uh teachers that could tell him about what Kaodong and Dongshan had taught. So can you imagine being Dongshan in China in the year said he 850? What is he thinking of? Is he sitting around by his fire? Does he have uh pen and paper?

SPEAKER_02 2:08

Where does he get these images that he just chanted?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Um I like to imagine Dong Shan writing, letting the ground of his practice of Zen pour out in his images in order to understand himself, to understand what impermanence is and transience is, not to inspire generations two thousand years later. I don't think that was his intention, but we've certainly been honored to have his legacy and to chant it today, and to hear Kantian lead us through lines by lines by lines. Do you remember the discussion of the hexagrams and the ba-ba-wahwas and the um horse with the shankscone gray? Um I'm still trying to, I mean, I can identify kind of with the horse as a shankscan gray, but I don't think we're meant to uh fully grok the song of the jewel Mir Samadi. It's probably placed for us to chat once a month so that we can imbibe it, imbibe it, imbibe it.

SPEAKER_02 3:38

Penetrate it. So let's take a look at the first line.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

I asked um perhaps uh say were you to read it to us nice and loud.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

The teaching of thusness has been intimately communicated by Buddhas and the ancestors. Thank you. So let's let's break it down. The teaching. What comes to your mind when someone says the teaching? I mean, we don't have to answer out loud, but the teaching. Okay. The teaching of thusness?

SPEAKER_01 4:45

How does that enrich your thought of what the teaching is? The teaching of thusness. Haven't we been experiencing and practicing thusness today? Thus we've come here, thus we've let everything go.

SPEAKER_02 5:06

We're in a timeless space of being thusness.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

One way that Rinzai Master Um Lynchy would express thusness would be something like this.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

But the Soto school isn't so demonstrative. So the teaching of Thessus has been or is being intimately communicated. Intimately communicated. By Buddhas and ancestors.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

The teaching of Thessus has been intimately communicated by Buddhas and ancestors. Who are these Buddhas?

SPEAKER_02 6:25

Well, we know five of them we just talked about. We have uh Shakyamuni Buddha, but he had teachers before him that inspired him and her.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

So not only is it intimately communicated by Buddhas, but by ancestors.

SPEAKER_02 7:00

Now what is the definition of ancestors? Um let's just take a moment and think of who our ancestors are. What comes to mind?

SPEAKER_01 7:21

I I'm sure you're thinking of perhaps your parents, their parents. These maybe not be these maybe are not people who have been inspired by Buddhism like we are. My mother and father were inspired by Christianity. My mom was a um altar, was on the altar guild of the St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Wenatchee, and she was on the vestry, the board of directors for years. Every Thursday she'd go to the church and put fresh flowers on the altars. So I'd like to have us think about not only Buddhists, but our ancestors. How have our ancestors brought us here in this circle today? I think that's one of the things that this poem is talking about. So um I'd like to share a couple of items from ancestors I have. So here's my first rocksu given to me by a man I consider a Buddha, but also my ancestor, Genki Takabayashi.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

It's a good old worn rocksu.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

It was given to me in September of ninety-five. And um on the back, so how many looking around the room I'd see five, six, seven, eight people with rocksus? Um there's no English on the back of it, as many of yours has. I have three siblings, so she also made one for each sibling and the colors of their university. And so um this is holds to me, holds the bestness for my ancestor. And I have it on my bed at home. My mom passed away in uh 2002, and so I still feel her presence, especially when I see what she's made for me. And um sometimes I feel her like now when I wear this, like uh Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, who comes into our lives when we need support. And I imagine sometimes when I wake up in the morning and I'm filled with anxiety about what I have to do that day, like you gotta give a dharma talk, and you just found out the night before. I feel that Avalokiteshvara in the form of my mom and the form of my dad is touching me, offering me, um, laying their hands on, like like the Christian term, but so yeah, let me go back and look at some more notes now.

SPEAKER_02 12:24

So how do we intimately convey convey depths?

SPEAKER_01 12:31

I mean, we feel it, but when do we feel it the strongest?

SPEAKER_02 12:36

Well, quite possibly in settings like this when we're practicing together, we're holding our bodies in an ancient form, honoring our heritage of Buddhism, when we when we do king, when we do silent eating at retreats.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Um and also for me, I think the creativity. Look at the creativities on display just in this room. Look at the beautiful screens and the and the and the birdies, the crows that are in the trapped in the screen here. Those those were done by Nancy, one of our old students of Acho Jeff, our former teacher. How about this beautiful calligraphy that's here on the wall, or the Buddha statue, um, or the plate there? Um, somebody made these things out of thus, out of not wanting to get rich, but to to express the dharma through them. Look at our uh wonderful haunt that was created by Mark. And Mark worked a lot, a lot, a lot to get that up there. And and now we use it every day. And whoever is the taken, like today, Yuji Kori, I mean it's it's uh it's like a dance with something from existence. So in a sense, the song of the jewel Mir Samadhi is an ancient hon, a gift to us. Um and even though it's inscrutable, we chant it wonderfully today with our full energy.

SPEAKER_02 14:58

So I'd like to share with you a project that I'm working on to share with my uh ancestors, my basically my siblings, families.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

I have a sister who's 78. I'm 79. My birthday, my 80th birthday is coming up in September, and then I have two brothers. One is 70, one is 71, I think. They have kids and grandkids, and um, and they have this uncle of theirs that lives out in Seattle, and well, what you know, I know he likes baseball, but I've decided to um do a project to leave to my family. Um and and I just pass um I'll share this project with you a little bit just to let you know how wonderful it is to be creative with your thoughts.

SPEAKER_02 16:14

So let me find a little bookie. So I'm using a book that a Dharma brother gave me.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

Um Michael dies on lions. It's got it's got little crisscross lines here, so it's quite elegant, I think. And I decided to write my own song of the Jewel Mir Samadi in a in a very particular way. Um so I thought I would go through the whole poem line by line and break up the lines into phrases that had meaning. Um some of them are a little clunky, but still. You know, I used to be a middle school English teacher. So one of the ways I would introduce my students to poetry would be to assign them to write about, let's say, love or joy. Um I was inspired by William Blake when I was in college. Joy and woe are woven fine uh clothing for the soul divine. And so it's fun when you have your students writing about joy. But so I said, Well, let's write an acrostic poem. You take the J for joy, and that becomes the letter of the first line, and then the O becomes the letter of the second line, and the Y becomes the letter of the third line. Maybe that helps. Oh, jumping uh on you, but that gets the mind in a different space, and uh um it literally jumps out of this uh skin bag and into something more universal. So I have broken up the song of the jewel mirror samadhi into phrases, and I'm only two-thirds of the way through. But my goal, and here's a bunch of them, my goal is to finish this project by August, because we're we're having a my sister's arranged for the brothers and I to come to New Mexico where she lives and have early birthday. Well, so I I start with the first I started with the first uh sentence. The teaching of Thessmus has been intimately communicated by Buddhas and ancestors. So I broke it up into three, three poems, and so after I finished meditating, not every day, but this was 28th of April a year ago. I said, Well, yeah, I'm kind of in the mood. That's let's see what we got. And I I go ahead through the whole book and I put the put the phrases in first, and I don't switch around saying, No, I don't feel like writing about the feating, let's write about quiescently, or let's write about Baba. No, no, I just go with order. So, and then since I'm old and I've had older than my siblings, and I've had many adventures in life, tons of travels, I thought it'd be interesting to make these more autobiographical. So there's a bit of dharma, but there's a bit of my my life journey in it. And it's quite nonsensical, but um 15.

SPEAKER_02 20:23

That was so fascinating. I didn't really watch Richard Yonda. So the teaching of thus.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

There's a lot of autobiographical details here, so here we go. Thus we came here to East Winage, the ridges, each gleaming across the river, Shillan Street, Holy Clinic in the North End, Great Caesar's Ghost, Orion above Birch Mountain Forests, the city lights of Holden, of ice lakes, undulating trails for the sons of Katie Elder.

SPEAKER_02 21:36

Now here, nowhere, Edward, Edward, son and father, son and cousin. Business.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

Okay, so the next one is. Has been intimately communicated and then by Buddhas and ancestors. Would you like to hear hear these as well? You know, I I love the Neil Young song. Let me bore you with my story. Has been intimately communicated. I mean, I use two colors of ink, so the purpose I use purple on one side so that the phrase stands out, and then the black fills in the lines. Here has been, it's gonna start with an H, here at my desk in Seattle, been at this Edward's life of spirit ever since Englewood, New Jersey, in church sanctuary, now brought to this desk in this room of meditation and bicycle storage, the altar of the absolute and everything relative, Lynn, Hilary, Cousin Ed, yes, we write together. Cadfam on Mother Earth, Meander Meadows, Uluru, never, repeated five times, inching towards Christ's clarity, a youngster.

SPEAKER_02 23:36

Tell me, if I never if I ever need holding, will you dance with me?

SPEAKER_01 23:45

You recognize the allusion to Jackson Brown song. And then by Buddhas and ancestors, gonna start with a B.

SPEAKER_02 23:57

Born to understand, yearning, loving, resting.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Buddha mind understanding day by day, dear Lord, holding mom and father, ancestors, ancestors sitting here, bedside. And you place your hands now on my shoulders. Dearest, we are here. A minute ago, nearing Obstruction Pass, Cadman kids, Ed and MJ all singing music man tunes. Old Wells Fargo Wagon is a common. Or Gottis.

SPEAKER_02 24:49

Or wrestling with mantras soft on YouTube. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

So um why don't I jump to the very last one I did yesterday?

SPEAKER_02 25:07

And then uh I think we're we're doing well with the time. Well, the very last one is uh well uh the last two.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

Quiescently it shines bright. Yeah, so I had to look up the word quiescently, but I think it means kind of soft and clear. Feels like it's quiet. I don't know. Qiescently under so just one word poem, strictly cue. Qiescently under the greenwood tree, in the ashram of a lone pine, Edward discovers Birch Mountain, spring day hikes, coming home from Antieth's substitute teaching, Nurnberg quiesces, to hold you all those nights, lying by you in India.

SPEAKER_02 26:19

You so cozy. My Tara Bodhisattva.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

And then um the last one I wrote just uh the 28th. In It Shines Bright. So it shines bright. Let's just imagine you all are gonna write a poem right now. Okay, it's a part of the song of the Jew must be some money, but I think Dong Shan's okay with us thinking about it phrase by phrase. What comes to your mind when you when you think it shines bright?

SPEAKER_02 27:01

And what would your first line be? It's gotta start with an eye. In my case, I did I used in. So here we go. In East Widatchy, turning west across the sun is setting.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

At home on the deck of the condo, and the home of now long past Edward Sr. and Mary Jean, sunrise, sunset, baby Bimmy, raised in awe of his ancestors, grandpa's home on Orchard Avenue, the chickens, the horse, the orchard. I don't know if that's any near to what you would have written, but so all those guys are part of my thustness, our thustness, your ancestors. Oh, we know who our Buddhas are. Geki Takabayashi gave me this. Um my mother so did not um, but how about the person who's walking past us down the street?

SPEAKER_02 28:37

How are they part of our thasnas? So I think uh I would want to just make sure I've covered everything. Let's see.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

So are there any kind of last one second, one two-minute questions anybody might have about what we've been what I've been talking about today.

unknown 29:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

Okay, that's good. Oh no, okay, so let's just uh conclude with the um um closing of the Dharma talk champ.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

May our intention equally extend to every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's switch. I vow save them, delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to enter them, karma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them. Buddha's wave is unsurpassable, I vow to become.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

And then um Amy's gonna read the announcements.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

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