All the harmful karma ever created by me since of old On account of my beginningless greed, hatred and ignorance Born of my body, speech and thought I now acknowledge openly and fully In the Purification gatha which opens our sutra service the “I” is salient and crucial. Let’s get it straight right away, in the first person, this
Upon his Awakening, the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni said, “Wonderful, wonderful, now I realize that all beings are buddha, only their ignorance and attachments prevent them from realizing this fact.” The term Buddha means “one who is awake,” and it is this experience that is the very heart of our Zen practice, in fact all Buddhist practice. So, if
There’s a saying in English “Practice makes perfect”, but in our Zen practice we actually drop ideas of perfection and non-perfection. We practice just to practice, without any gaining idea. I make this point because it’s so easy to get caught up in the emotion of “that was a good sitting” (pat on the back) and “why can’t I concentrate?!!
You were curious about Zen Buddhism so one day you turned up at an orientation. You liked the silence and the challenge of paying attention and so you came back. Soon it became a regular part of your life. You listened to podcasts, found some helpful apps and read widely about the Buddha’s enlightenment. You believed the best was yet
We’ve probably all heard the expression, “The great way is not difficult, it’s simply a matter of not picking and choosing.” The great Zhaozhou uttered these words, but he was not the first. In Verses on the Faith Mind (Xinxin Ming), the third Chinese ancestor, Sengcan writes, “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences,” and
The task of offering “encouraging words” got me thinking about discouragement. “Courage” is at the root of both terms, deriving in the first instance from Middle English corage which means “heart as the seat of feeling.” The Zen path, like any path, presents obstacles and the possibility then of losing heart, maybe abandoning the project. How to proceed when you
There is a ‘precious heart-to-heart connection sangha members experience’. SANGHA Gillian Coote, Roshi recently reminded us at the AGM: ‘In this time of increasingly virtual relationships, the importance of face-to-face communication in handing on the live coal of the Dharma, as Robert Aitken Roshi did, is ever-greater. Turning up for sangha events maintains these connections, not turning up erodes them. Sangha
At our recent samu at Gorricks Run, I asked Heath and Fleur (Nick and Jo’s children), whether trees breathed. They weren’t too sure, so we embarked on an experiment. We picked some leaves and put them in a glass of water, weighing them down with a little rock. We had to wait a few hours for a result, but there
It was war and the giants fell despatched by a scadgett, take this coupe and make of it a timber soup says the Forestry, so a yellow machine with a saw and a claw tracks its way to 41A, and the man inside with a job and a plan cuts the elders and shoves them, they’re pushovers, claws them into
Once again I find myself writing out of the experience of pilgrimage to Shikoku. Like sesshin, pilgrimage has the capacity to shake up our lives: as we drop the regular routines and the concerns of our everyday lives and entering into a sustained period of practice, we create space for necessary truths to emerge. Quite often these openings happen during
