This is day six of this June 2024 seven day sesshin. And I'm going to continue with reading from the collection of talks by Roshi Maureen Stewart from the book subtle sound and today I'm going to read from Chapter 27 titled, forgetting everything
forgetting everything
those two words can be easily misunderstood. Zen master Erdogan said that you know the self is to forget the self the self that can't be contained, can't be defined has no fixed identity this self that is vast, wide open doesn't fit in any box no borders or edges to it.
In Zen to forget, everything isn't about erasing ourselves, erasing our storehouse of of memories and knowledge that which we've developed over a lifetime and which we need in order to function. But it's about instead letting go of our habitual misuse of our discriminating mind. All the ways we place ourselves and others into fixed categories
we say to ourselves, I'm like this this is how I do things. As if we're static This is me
that is you you are not me forgetting is also about letting go of our control strategies, pursuing our desires, our ideas about how things and other people should or shouldn't be. We want things to be a certain way we want our surroundings to be just so the way we like it our day to day routines
and the people in our lives as well. We want to control it all. We want life to happen in an orderly fashion that suits our expectations and reduces uncertainty. And we impose this on ourselves and others. So goes beyond trying to make things just right for me to try to control other people's behavior as well.
Maria In Roshi says, in the ancient sutras, there are frequent references to training the wild ox. Perhaps an ox was used as a figure of speech because oxen were very precious in India. They still are. When I visited India, those huge formidable yet gentle creatures seem to take every take seem to take over every scene. The series of ox herding pictures used as a metaphor in Zen practice comes from this ancient tradition. And like so many metaphors, is a way of helping us to see a little bit more how clearly how close our true home is to us.
The 10 ox herding pictures are a series of illustrations that show stages of realization of our true home.
At our park, we have a bronze casting of them displayed in the link inside the main entrance store.
But although they symbolize stages, that doesn't mean it's linear. Doesn't mean that we just work our way through in a straight line. We can move in and out of the stages.
And what does it mean though, to train and ox? Ordinarily, we might see it as discipline, disciplining the Ox. Getting it to do what we want to fulfill our expectations, kind of like training a dog to sit or stay. But Zen training is altogether different. It's training to free ourselves from our conditioning, free ourselves from all the ways we try to manipulate and maneuver our lives. And it requires practice. Lots of practice.
She goes on in the first picture of the 10 ox herding pictures, the verse reads in part, wild grasses grow green. When the season comes. The flowers bloom in Mad profusion, day after day, longing for home and yet not knowing how tears flow and the kerchief is wet.
longing for home because you're not seeing things just as they are. You're not realizing you're already at home. It's only when we see through the filter of thoughts that we think something is wrong. Something is lacking
and when we drop that filter, we say oh, all along. Here it is.
She couldn't In use throughout history, and even in our time, Zen has a tendency to be rather elitist. Many books make it seem as though it's only for people of a certain kind. Only for those who can understand who can do very strenuous discipline. Teachers throughout the ages have felt that this is a pity. I certainly feel it's a pity that the wonderful essential practice of Zen should be denied somebody because they are not bright enough or not industrious enough, or not something else enough. And that's in part why we're urged not to over indulge in reading books about Zen. You run the risk of holding on to an image about what your practice should look and feel like based on something you read. Based on somebody else's experience. You might tell yourself, there's no way I can do that. By hearing this A cian. Here we are, we are doing it. Doing it right now. As long as we continue to bring our attention back to our practice. Each time we discover we've drifted into thoughts. We're doing the practice. And that's all that's needed to do it effectively just to do it.
Maureen Roshi goes on. We all have Buddha nature from the very beginning. So there is nobody who can be excluded by being put in some cubby hole some category of deficiency. There are no exceptions. Everybody can taste this Buddha nature. But sometimes very often in fact we wonder about it does it really exist
every now and then we allow self doubts to take over and that's a strategy of the ego wants to keep you in a box it wants to be in control it's feeling threatened by the work we're doing this week it'll even try to gaslight you telling you that it's all beings except for you
don't trust your thoughts trust Mo who? This?
Trust this 3000 year old teaching
she then says in the first ox herding picture, the person stands with a rope in hand and no ox in sight. A rope in hand, but no ox in sight. This is a depiction of the way we often feel. I'm supposed to tame this wild ox mind But where is it? All I have is the rope to hold it with. I don't have anything to hold. I don't know, what I'm supposed to attain. All I know is that I have to come to this point to this practice, because I feel there is something missing. I can't see it. I can't find it. I don't quite know what it is. But I know there is something missing is though, there is something I have forgotten. Something that has become covered up by so many other things in my life. So now, I have come to sit down quietly, and let go of all of these extraneous matters to forget everything.
This resonates so much with how many of us come to practice. Some of us just stumble into it, perhaps by reading a book, or hearing about somebody else's experience. And some are driven to it. By traumatic life events, illnesses loss and others by just general and persistent feeling of malaise unsatisfaction. Again, something's wrong. Something's missing. There's got to be more than this.
And yet our true home is not some special place that we have to go to. It's not often the distance. It really is. Wherever we are. In coming and going, we never leave home. We're sitting in it right now.
This is home.
Maureen Roshi says, the highest state of mind is to have forgotten everything. According to a Mahayana text. This doesn't mean to have forgotten our true nature, but to have forgotten all the things that impede us from deeply experiencing it. It's like the story about the teacher entertaining an airy erudite guest. As his the custom, the teacher offered him a cup of tea. But when he began pouring, he didn't stop. The cup was overflowing and the guest was in a state of real alarm, that the room was soon going to be inundated with tea. Please, please stop. He said. This cup is too full. The master said yes, the cup is too full. And by the way, so are you so it is with us. We need to empty out our concepts, our thoughts. Our opinions about this matter, we need to let it all go to be completely open. As if this is the very first time we have ever sat Indeed, every sitting is the first sitting
every day of sesshin is the first day
in our ordinary way of seeing, we can look at, say a flower. Or more specifically, when looking at a sunflower
we know what it is, we've seen them before. We say hey, that's a sunflower. And there's the discrimination right there. The recognition of the thing as separate from oneself, a label that reinforces it. There's the sunflower over there. And that discrimination comes from our conditioning. As I said, we've seen flowers, lots of them over the course of our life, we know what they are
we need to let go of our mental constructs our prior knowledge and really see the flower see it? As it is, see this
and not see the image we have of it based on concepts. We look at it directly. It's the first one we've ever seen. What is it?
Then Maureen Roshi asks, what do we remember when we lose our mental constructs? She says, we remember our couldn't connect connectedness to one another. We sense without saying a single word, our common source. We feel how deeply the season of cold is upon us how green the Evergreens are against the snow. We smell the difference in the incense as it changes from day to day. We taste our food. We experience the feeling of the floor under our feet, the quality of our chanting, it's all fresh, beautiful and alive. And for us sitting at Chapin Mill this month of June we feel the transition that's on your way from spring into summer. The lush greenery fluctuating temperatures
cool breeze in the Zendo the occasional rain shower
she goes on when que je Mu Nishitani who is a Buddhist scholar? When kg Nishitani was interviewed, in an issue of parabola magazine, devoted to the topic of memory and forgetting, he was asked, why we forget our true self, why we spend so much of our lives in forgetfulness? Or, as we might put it, why do we have to sit on the cushion or chair or bench over and over again? Professor Nishitani said that memory implies forgetting, we start from recognition that there is something lacking something forgotten. The question is, where does such a recognition come from? In Zen practice, we have what is called the great doubt. This, Nisha Tawny said, means that all knowledge, even philosophical knowledge must be held in doubt. Great doubt is a way of finding the truth, of forgetting, in order to remember for getting in order to remember the aim of such doubting is true, doubtless knowledge.
Through practice, were forgetting in order to remember our birthright our original mind that's pure, clean, spotless
nothing can alight on it.
Transparent
she says, each one of us sitting has something essential to do with everyone else's true nature. Part of what we have forgotten is this, the non differentiation between self and the world. When we stop making separations between self and everything around us, we realize this one great mind and this is why we are here. Everything in the world is in our being right here. Right now. In this Zen practice of ours, we must forget everything. When that forgetting is analyzed in a philosophical way, when we ask, what there is to forget what the true knowledge of our own nature is, we entangle ourselves further that kind of analysis is useless, give it up. We have to see really see from the state of forgetfulness.
One of the most beautiful books in the Christian tradition is the Cloud of Unknowing. In which we are told that in order to be what one is meant to be, certain things must be forgotten. Knowledge must be renounced. So it is for us. In order to experience this true nature. We must be willing to forget everything
Forget everything that can seem kind of scary I've got to completely forget everything including myself what will happen
will I lose a sense of having a body will my memory be wiped out? Will I forget the people in my life the people I love who matter to me
we've got to sit and not not knowing sit in that fear it's okay trust the process don't retreat. Don't use those kinds of questions as a strategy a strategy of the ego an excuse to back off an excuse to coast
practice is a risk taking process in some ways
gotta allow ourselves to venture into the unknown
and that requires trust.
More marine Roshi continues. Here we are, rope in hand. moment after moment, conditions are changing. Things clear up. And then they become murky again. We get a glimpse of the ox. Maybe the ox pulls on the rope. We pull back. There are all kinds of confrontations. We see the tracks of the ox. Some are going east, some are going west. They start and they stop. The mind wanders off here. Then wanders off there. It comes to some state of quietness and then wanders off again. The mind is still undisciplined. But we begin to see the tracks. We see that there is some place within us. That is quiet, that is clear, uncluttered, peaceful, joyful, in the midst of everything. Even in the midst of thoughts. What brings us to see this most often it comes from our own Zen.
This is the process of practice that she's describing. Push and Pull, give and take even late in sesshin Dawn don't think even for a moment that just because you have some random thoughts coming up or just because you feel lost. in your practice, or you can't even remember it, or because you've gone down some rabbit hole. Don't think because you're feeling too tired that you can do qualities Zen. But the practice is gone. Just keep picking it up right there. As soon as you notice, pick it up again
keep it simple, keep it clean
and then she says, sometimes we read some Buddhist text, or some wonderful piece of poetry that touches us. That arouses something in us. We want to experience more of this. Meet many contemporary poets, give us a glimpse. Zen itself is such a poetic practice. Sometimes we meet a person who has some special kind of radiance that engages us. We wonder, where did that come from? How did this happen? Whenever I was with so in Roshi, who was her primary teacher, whenever I was with so in Roshi, I always felt how wonderful it was to be in such a joyful, luminous, almost childlike presence. Where did this come from? And as we got to know him, we discovered that it was through a great struggle of his own, that he came to have that quality. At one point, he contemplated suicide. Fortunately for us, he got out of that place, but some dark things in his life brought him this profound understanding. He had a deep realization of his own true nature and then gave it away to everybody so spontaneously, so joyfully, so clearly
can there's no feeling no thought, no anything that's outside our true nature. You can be a total screw up. For most depressed and anxious person in the world you could be a hot mess. And you're still a Buddha through and through
doesn't change who you are?
And then skipping ahead a bit, she says. So what do we remember? What do we forget? What about this matter of forgetting everything? Actually, we remember what is necessary for conducting our lives effectively. If we carried around all the other things that are not so necessary to remember, we would go crazy. Our intuitive minds make this distinction for us about what it is we need to remember and how much we can let go of while we are sitting Zen, sitting in such sheen, we can let go of everything. There's nothing we need to remember, except how to clean In the floor, how to wash the dishes, how to eat our food quietly as to the rest of all that extraneous stuff we carry around with us. We just let it go
everything's taken care of for us since A cian so we don't need to use our discriminating mind. Give yourself permission to put that stuff down. It'll be waiting for you after such sheen if you want to pick it up again
this is an amazing and rare opportunity to be fully present
don't waste it
keep working to the very end to the last bell and then keep working after that. practices on ending
she goes on, we worry as we get older about losing our memories. Some people do this that is I don't. I find I'm remembering too much. Or as Roshi often says memory is overrated. For some people, a life review seems to be important for their spiritual development a Life Review Is this necessary? Or is this a way of shoring up the ego a deep investigation of what has happened some crucial point or other may be helpful to our actions in the present. But to go over and over and over it seems a great waste of time and energy for some people obsessing about what happened and holding on to painful memories goes on for as long as 10 years or more. Let it go especially in such sheen why replay the past
why conjure up dramas about the future that may or may not happen more often than not they don't happen so it's all our imagination what good is that doing you? What good is it doing for anyone else to separate ourselves from this
Hola 11th century Tibetan master Milarepa said this my religion is not to deceive myself
make it your practice not to deceive yourself.
Then Maureen Roshi says we have this wonderful opera tunity to practice in our precious tradition, every activity is the practice of the Dharma with a simple and direct mind, we are engaged in this. And in doing this, we find the Buddha light right here in this very place to understand this is really to experience Zen. And then above all, remember that the foremost admonition of this practice from generation to generation from country to country, from culture to culture, is that we are doing this for the sake of all sentient beings, to have deep compassion for all beings, to extend this mind to radiate this Buddha light over the whole universe, this is our enlightment. The ox pulls on the rope and almost breaks it this ox mine needs strong discipline, strong training. That is what we are doing here. We all have pain, we all become tired, but we stay with it. Every single moment we sit together is precious. We are helping one another to see into our true nature. Our own true nature it's not just our own thing our own little pain, our own discipline our bodies minds and spirits are joined in this and we do this for the sake of all sentient beings. As our minds become clearer and more stable the ox becomes quieter in the last pictures, the stage of practice when our Buddha Nature our true self has appeared the ox has disappeared completely there is nothing there ever everything has been forgotten
