Today is Sunday, December 18 2022. The topic for my teisho today is Zen, and religion. I got to thinking about this as a topic. Both sort of thinking about looking at the transition that people make, from the workshop, to practicing here at the center. And when we, when we give the workshop, we're not talking about any of the, or I'm not talking too much about any of the devotional aspects of Zen practice. We're really cutting to the heart of Zen of dropping ideas and concepts. And I always kind of feel concerned about people making that transition coming in here. And all of a sudden, we're doing prostrations and chanting and stuff about returning merit. And I think it can be a little bit of a barrier to entry. And I know for me, when I first came to the center, I was quite excited about Zen. But all the other aspects just seemed like annoyances to me that probably has to do with the kind of person I am not necessarily the greatest. But the other the other reason this sort of came up is because we're going into the, or when we're in the middle of the Christmas season. And there's part of that season, which is actually pretty wonderful. It's not the not the part that has to do with buying everybody the right present and going to office parties. But there is there's I just remember as a child being so taken with the whole idea of goodwill, goodwill to men, and, and maybe there was more, more of that in the airwaves when I was a kid than there is today. Today, it's pretty commercialized some people actually call it the war on Christmas. Oh, the commercialization. I read a great thing. And it's this. The war on Christmas cannot end until Christmas stops it's illegal occupation of November. Anyway
Zen practice and Buddhism arose from within Buddhism. But we teach Roshi, Kapleau, Bowden Roshi. All of us have always taught that it can be practiced by followers of any religion, or followers of no religion. So we have the whole question is is Zen a religion and people have different answers. So I want to go first to somebody in our line. Yamuna Roshi, if you've read the three pillars of Zen, you've read, if you read it, you've read his enlightenment account. It's quite remarkable. He he already had met Philip Kaplow there in Japan, and I think part of perhaps the trigger for his Kensho was Roshi Kapleau has total obsession with the idea of coming to awakening. And I remember in the in the book, he says, Tell him, tell him it's totally worth it. I can't remember exactly how he put it, but you had to pretty moving account. Anyway. He later became a teacher and in fact, the head of the Sunbow line of Zen, which is the line starting with her to Roshi and through Yasutani Roshi and then the next successor was Yamuna, Yamuna Roshi.
So I found an article entitled izannah religion and here's his answer. Zen is not a religion. This is a position I have continuously maintained to say that Zen is not a religion is to say that the Buddha way is not a religion. However, religious concepts and variably are intertwined with such words as Zen or the Buddha way. Most people have no problem with the statement that Zen is not a religion, but I think that there are many who have some trouble with the statement, that the Buddha way is not a religion. Course by the Buddha way, we could also say Buddhism, probably Buddha way is a better way of putting it the Buddha Tao.
Why is Zen not a religion? Why is the Buddha way not a religion? Well, he goes into the question of what a religion is, and he says, I will use the definition, a definition which seems to be represented representative, this is from something called the koji and I have no idea what that is. But the definition of this religion means activities and faith in a God or some kind of sacred being, which is differentiated from other worldly beings. And it also refers to those related structures. In other words, Yama says, fundamental to establishing religion is to recognize a being that transcends the power of nature and of human beings. And from that one can say that religion involves faith in that transcendent being an activities based on that faith. But then what is in as I am always saying, Zan is experientially finding one's true self, and the effort to personalize that True Self which was found. think another way of putting personalize that true self is to integrate into one's life what one has seen. He says, Put very simply, Zen is the pursuit and clarification of one's true self. It is no exaggeration to say that that is Zen in its entirety. The object of Zen is in the final analysis, the self, and nothing else except the self. It should be clear, then, that religion which begins from recognition of a transcendent being that transcends the self and Zen are totally different entities.
goes on to say, why is it that the terms den Buddha Buddha away, are associated in common thinking with religion are a part of religion? I think it is because the true self which has been found, the real self, is so far separated from the illusory self, which had been seen as the self up to then I think that's a good analysis. What we're, even though what we're looking for, what we're heading towards, is something that's right here already. It's not not in any way, not here. What we believe about ordinary life, our delusion, about our lives, is such a different world, than the true world than our true self. It's easy to see those two as separate. It's one of the real challenges of Zen practice, even after coming to awakening, to realize it isn't anything special. It's not anything that somewhere else. It's not something that's waiting for us in the future. It's true Self that is no self. It's right here and right now. He says, the fact that the whole universe all that is and the self are exactly one in the same is something too far removed from what one had thought about the self up to then. For those who have not found the true self, and that as the greater part of all humanity, cannot conceive this experience in any other way than that of the self as some kind of completely transcendent being. And thus this would enter the realm of religion.
Then he goes on to say how that's been sort of, strengthened by the tendency of Have those preaching Buddhism to look upon the Buddha as a transcendent being and to emphasize his sort of separate nature. There are a lot of schools of Buddhism where they're much more sort of in the, the line of a theistic religion.
He says it can be said that to be free of religion means the switch from faith, to the pursuit and discovery of the truth of existence. And the process in which Zen and natural science ceaselessly come closer and closer. In that sense, the mission of the Sunbow Zen, that's his school, the school is the de religion Ising of Zen. And he quotes koan, Roshi, who says Christians who do Zen can become better Christians, Muslims can become better Muslims. Well, I guess one could argue back that what Yamuna has done is set up a straw man, that by defining religion as a belief in something transcending the self transcending reality we've sort of Yeah, it's, it's, it's clear, that's not what Zen is. But there are other ways of looking at religion. And if we say religion is the belief that there's something more than the limited way that we think about our lives, that there is something that can be discovered that there is a reason to do the experiment of practice. Then I have no problem with saying that Zen is religion. And there are a lot of other teachers and writers who have said that. Gee, you cannot Roshi cannot. Ruth fuller Sasaki come to mind both of whom wrote stuff, talking about Zen as a religion. And even Yamuna, even though this school of Zen in which we're in has all kinds of what most people would call religious elements, there's chanting, there are Buddha figures on the altar. People do prostrations. We take the precepts.
But I think in all of that, the important thing is to distinguish between dogma between taking someone else's word for what reality is, what our true self is, and finding out for ourselves. It's really finding a way beyond words and concepts. And that's the, from the very beginning. That's the slogan of Zen Buddhism, going back to Bodhidharma. Many of you have heard these words, a special transmission beyond the scriptures, or beyond the sutras, no dependency on words and letters, pointing directly to the human mind, seeing into one's nature, and attaining Buddhahood. Course for a teaching beyond words and letters, Zen is probably produced more writing than any other school of Buddhism. And you have to you have to it's pointing to the moon. We all need instruction, we all need a little bit of a roadmap. But the problem is, of course, mistaking the finger for the moon as a natural human error, which I think everybody slips into from time to time.
We need to hear the news. That there's something more even though it's not something separate.
That what we're what we're immersed in our conventional world, the world of self and other world of getting and losing. It's an illusion. It's a persistent and unconscious habit of mind really baked in. And it's a prescription for suffering. Buddha diagnosed the human condition, the Four Noble Truths why life is suffering life is unsatisfactory, unreliable, and the reason second noble truth. It's because of our egoistic desires because of our grasping and rejecting. third noble truth, of course, is that there is a way out. And the fourth is just an elucidation, the eightfold path, which ends with the seventh and the eighth, mindfulness and concentration or Dianna, Sanskrit word for absorption, which is the word that was trans which which was pronounced as Chan or Zen. We are the absorption School of Buddhism.
But just as we need words. There are many other aspects of actual Zen practice, which we could call the leaves and branches. There are things that we do that are helpful, at least for most people. Chanting is one of them. Bowing is helpful. All things that help us forget ourselves, and lower the master of ego. In almost all Zen centers, you'll see these not in every one, not at all, you know, when Tony Packer was actually Roshi Kapleau is first Dharma successor, and he turned the center over to her. And she was so uncomfortable, probably due to her background, so uncomfortable with the trappings of Zen, that she basically started to cut them all back and ran into a tremendous resistance from the people who, who were very attached to them. And the center actually ended up splitting. And Tony went off the a lot of people know this, but maybe not everyone. Tony went off and established her own center. And many people went with Tony and other people stayed here. And then eventually, Bowden Roshi became the abbot of the of the center in 1986. And as far as I can tell, the relationship between Roshi Kapleau and Tony Packer remained a warm one, a friendly one. But their ways of teaching were just too different. And whether one is better than the other is really hard to say it kind of depends on the person. I've found over the years that a lot of these auxiliary practices are really helpful. And I see that and other people too, that a lot of people are really fond of it. It's a it's a reaffirmation, it's a way of bringing practice into the body, of manifesting it physically getting from the mat into our lives. But there's always there's always a bit of resistance. And you know, I'm, I'm a little bit of poster child for that. I avoided a lot of the more ceremonial aspects of life at the Zen Center for quite a number of years. But really, the real poster child is my wife, who was extremely troubled by all the devotional activities, because she had come out of a Baptist upbringing, and sort of seen into the hypocrisy and limitations of the Baptist Church that she was a part of. And when when Roshi Kapleau wrote the book, Zen dawn in the West are done in the West, I think, and then it became later reissued Zen merging of East and West. He asked her to write up her objection, so I'm going to read that I'm sort of blowing her anonymity. I have I have gotten permission to do this. So I found the book and this section is called a letter and or apply religious Zahn. It turns me off. And this is the wrote the letter that that Chris row that Roshi Kapleau is request, says, Dear Roshi. This letter is the result of months of stewing about a problem that I had assumed would disappear on its own or that I could resolve somehow, but nothing seems to be happening. So I'm writing in hopes that you can shed some light on the subject. Basically, my problem is this. The whole religious aspect of Zen turns me off. I don't see what Buddhas and bodhisattvas the heavens and hells of Buddhist cosmology, the six realms of existence and all the other flowery Khan's conceptions of the sutras have to do with the pure and simple task of finding out who I am. Zen appealed to me in the first place, because it is so simple and direct, cutting through abstractions and fantasy for a clearer view of the truth. No baloney justice out of them. But since I've been at the center, there have been more and more ceremonies and chants, and I just can't get used to them. The whole time I am participating in a ceremony or chanting, it is very difficult to continue to do Zen, I feel as if I am in a movie about some exotic religious cult. I think a lot of other people feel this way too. And this gives our ceremonies a kind of stilted self conscious feeling. This was at a time when a lot of the ceremonies were being developed. You know, when I came to the Zen Center back in 1968, I can't remember that there was very much even in the way of chanting, it was it was basically sitting and teisho. And then gradually, I remember the first time I hadn't been at the center for a while and I came by and there was the Hungry Ghost offering happening at lunch. A lot of those things were brought in. And so it took a while for some of those to really get into the fabric of life at the center. And there was a self conscious tone to a lot of what we did. And that self consciousness can still arise in someone who's coming to some of these practices for the first time.
She says, bowing and prostrating before the Buddha in the Zendo also throws me it is meaningful for me to bow to you, my teacher, for whom I feel a deep respect and gratitude. It's also wonderful to be able to bow after each round of sitting to fellow fellow members of the Sangha. Zen help sustain mine. But I feel no direct, immediate relationship with a gilded statue on the altar. No sense of oneness, like I feel with you in the Sangha. The plate of cakes and fruit in the front of the Buddha always make me want to burst out laughing who eats them anyway? If we're all Buddha's, why not just pass them around the Zendo bad idea. If everything is Buddha, why not simply bow to each other or to a beautiful flower instead of a set statue that inevitably arousing arouses feelings of idol worship? You know, this was an obstacle for Roshi Kapleau When he went to Japan as well. And I think one of the teachers told him, he Roshi Kapleau said, ancient masters, you too, would spit on the Buddha. And I think it was hard to Roshi said, if you want to spit you spit. I prefer to bow. Actually, I've never had a problem personally with with prostrating before a Buddha figure, just because it's so inspiring. The just to see that posture, that state of mind made physical. It's like it I think, it triggers mirror neurons in our in us, we sort of feel that that lightness and serenity, equanimity compassion, it's, it's, you're looking at a great work of art really. But it is true for some people, it's a problem. Usually it goes away. But for some people, it may never completely recede. And so you're left with the problem of what do I do if some of these practices just don't feel quite right to me? Yeah, there's no easy answer to that. It's A it's kind of the whole question of how much ritual and devotional activities we have at the center is really a question of the greatest good for the greatest number. And my hope is that, even if it isn't something that speaks to you now, in your practice, you can recognize that it is supportive for your fellow practitioners. For others. It's not it's not just foolishness or play acting or self indulgence. It's really a way of expressing our gratitude for this path. And even if you only go with Zen, you go deeply, you'll find gratitude arises.
She says, towards the end of her her letter, a friend of mine once remarked, that the appealing thing about Zen Buddhism is that you can just take the Zen without the Buddhism. I asked her about this, and this was actually me. She said here at the center, at least this isn't so why is religious is unnecessary? And how can I stop viewing it as a distraction and a nuisance? And use it to find out who I am? Love, Carol. So till today, she was anonymous.
Roshi Kapleau, it's hard to answer that question. It really is a question of the individual. And in Roshi, his answer, he mentions how inspiring you know, some of the practices are the the atmosphere in temple night, when everybody's sitting in a, you know, up in the Buddha Hall with a large altar and the other altars that are set up. I was explaining to Chris on the way here that actually temple night has changed quite a bit than from what, what it was in the beginning. And the main thing that people do is just to sit it's like, it's like Yassa, in the most beautiful environment, you could think of Yassa or late night sitting.
But in the end, each person sort of has to work it out for themselves. And a lot of times what happens is you start out like I did, or like Roshi Kapleau did. And you find that actually, you grow into it, that's something that you feel can be expressed in those ways. And some things are there are parts that still feel a little weird, and then well, that's okay. Chris told me a story of one of the ceremonies that had been we don't do it anymore, but it involved everybody in the Zendo, doing a circumambulation and coming up to the teacher who was standing facing the altar with a candle, and you would have your own candle, and when you came up, he would light your candle. And this was a little difficult for her. And so as she did it, she looked up at Roshi Kapleau. And he met her gaze, and shrugged. Which was the perfect response for her. And I think it helped her helped her feel okay. So I really haven't answered that question very well. But I just wanted to sort of bring it out in the open, because I think a lot of people feel like, I don't quite mesh with this. Does that mean I really should go somewhere else? And my answer is no. I mean, if you feel you need to go somewhere else, then sure. And there are other places but it's, it's hard to find a Sangha. Hard to find a Sangha. as healthy as this one in my, in my humble yet prejudiced opinion. What is always part of practice, whether you want to call it religious or not, is faith, even if that faith is just the willingness to do the experiment, to go beyond thought, and see what's there? What happens when we step out of the stream of concepts and ideas? It's scary. It can be frightening for the mind to fall silent. And yet that truly is the path to what we're aiming for. Ramana Maharshi said when there are thoughts, it As distraction, when there are no thoughts, it is meditation
so this whole question of this faith, the faith to to practice, I ran across something and Roshi files that I think is really, really helpful. And it's an interview with Norman Fischer, who was a Zen teacher, connected, I believe, with the San Francisco Zen Center, and Sharon Salzberg, who's another Dharma practitioner. And I just want to read a little bit from the interview. Because the title of the article is the question of faith in a non theistic religion. And the the interview was a follow up to a book that she had written, Faith colon, trusting your own deepest experience. So Norman Fischer says, In your book, you talk about the progression from bright faith, to verified faith to unwavering faith. I want to ask you how faith arises and how one kind of faith unfolds into another. And she says many Durmand, students can recall that period of bright faith, which is at first and intoxicating rush of falling in love, falling in love with a teacher or a teaching or falling in love with a brand new sense of possibility, which we feel previously when we've previously felt confined, or unworthy. And this, this is sort of the that, that excitement of coming into practice, and realizing how much is here. I also experienced it when I, when I went into AAA, back in 1990, they actually have a term for it there. It's called the pink cloud. And it usually doesn't last, you need to move beyond that giddy joy in the beginning to something more settled and rooted. But it is wonderful. And it is a place where many people start. Other people sort of don't even know why they're doing it. Somehow, rather, they're drawn to the practice. And some people are pulled, kicking and screaming into deep realization. Just all depends on the person. But as she said, this initial bright faith is incredibly exhilarating and wondrous, the first step, she says, This state has some similarities to blind faith. And if you're a skeptical type, you could view them as the same. Blind faith has that same kind of exhilaration and feeling of having a much larger sense of possibility. But blind faith implies that you can't question you can't examine, you can't investigate. Blind faith is the end of the road. While in Buddhist teaching bright faith is just the beginning. It's necessary and compelling, but it's still just a start through questioning, putting things into practice and examining them. And bright faith moves to the next stage verified faith, which relies less on external sources and more on our own experience. Verified faith comes from our own experience of the truth. The movement from bright faith to verified faith happens through putting something into practice and not just believing what we're told. It's about not being gullible about questioning everything. What is frightening about blind faith then is if there is no maturing into verified faith. That questioning part goes right back to the Buddha, who told his listeners don't accept anything? Just because I say so. Or because your whatever teacher tells you it's true. You detest it like you would test currency like a gold coin. Bite it, scrape it, cut it, find out if it's really gold. It is true that we can bring blind faith into Zen practice. We can imagine have ideas about what reality is have some kind of intellectual understanding and make that a thing. We can we can take the attitude that well Other people are more realized that I am. Whatever they say, I'm just going to have to accept. We can we can lose sight of our own potential. Don't do that. Don't do that. Believe in yourself. Give yourself a chance. Have faith in yourself faith in the practice. Some people that the obstacle is just there to habitually addicted to their own critical mind. They see the faults and others, they see the faults in themselves. A lot of progress in Zen practice is just that softening. But back to back to normal. And Sharon says, How does verified faith move to unwavering faith? And she says, Through constant deepening, it's like something seeping into your bones. If you've seen the power of love enough, for example, then you know, it's so deeply that it's something that becomes something that you don't need to refer to externally. You know, it's so very deeply
Norman says, Norman Fischer says, usually when people talk about faith, as you say, in the book, it's faith in something, faith in something outside of yourself. Buddhism proposes faith not in something outside of yourself, but faith in reality, and your own capacity to embrace it. That's the most important point. And none of us have that totally at the beginning. Remember, when I first met with Roshi Kapleau, he asked me what my aspiration was. And I said, I, I want to come to awakening. And then I immediately said, but maybe I'm just kidding myself. I don't recall that. He said, Oh, no, no, John, you're not. You just let that sit. Gradually, we realize, yeah, I can go this way. That's when blind faith, bright faith, whatever it is, begins to become verified faith, we begin to see the difference in our interactions, our ability to hold things more lightly. Enlightenment in the sense of just being lighter, not carrying around this burden of self. Not carrying it quite so heavily.
Norman Fischer asked, Can you say something about the interplay between faith in oneself and faith and another, whether that's in the form of a teacher, a transcendent God, or something else altogether? And she says, Sharon says, I often think of Buddhism as being like a transparency. We look at the Buddha as a human being, who exemplified boundless love and infinite wisdom. But when we look at the Buddha to see ourselves, but we really look at the Buddha to see ourselves because we're looking at a potential that exists within us. We also look at ourselves, not just to see ourselves, but to see all beings.
And she goes on to say that all of her teachers have the goal of seeing the students surpass them. The job of the teacher is really to be a friend, someone who helps you and not an authority to be very careful, because teacher can say I'm, you know, I'm no different from you. You're no different from me, but the student will come in with their own ideas. And sometimes the teacher has some of those ideas too. It's very hard in a relationship, a student teacher relationship, not to have a power dynamic. The teacher supposedly has the answers, student is coming for help.
It's far more common in other traditions, in the whole guru tradition, where the teacher is looked on as a manifestation of the Buddha. In our tradition, we still have if someone's a formal student and the teacher, there's a prostration that's made in Doakes on at the beginning of the private and instruction with with the teacher. But that prostration is in to the teaching really to the teacher as a representative of the teaching. And most people, including Carol, have no problem with that. If there is some respect there.
Norman Fischer says, it can be tricky because one could think that faith that is not in something or someone is really just self confidence. You seem to be saying, though, that it's not that you're confident in yourself, but that you see through yourself to something greater, in a way faith and self and faith and other might, in the end, collapse into the same thing. And Sharon Salzberg says, I think they would have to, whether you're starting with the other or you're starting with yourself, ultimately, it has to be about everybody. This truth is beyond self and other.
And then he gets into something that I really want to cover. So I'll move right along. He says, You take great care in the book to distinguish faith from belief. And you also talk about the relationship between faith and hope. Can you say more, say a bit more about these important distinctions. And she brings up here, the Brahma viharas. These are the so called divine abodes, loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. And she says in this in the teaching of the Brahma viharas, each one of these has qualities that are each one of these qualities, as a near and afar enemy. So as an example, she gives example of loving kindness or metta. And says, The near enemy of metta is over loving kindness is attachment. The Far enemy is cruelty. So you can sort of understand that the near enemy is something that's close, but not quite there. And with faith, she goes on to say the near enemy of faith is belief. You is taking something, some teaching or statement as true without finding out for oneself.
And then hope is even more of a problem. Hope in this case, she says means a kind of fixated hope. It's like when we say I have faith that everything will turn out all right tomorrow, which means according to the way we want it to turn out, that isn't faith at all, that is fixated hope, where we're dependent, attached and full of fear. We can't have that kind of fixation, without the accompany fear that the hope will happen, that what we hope will happen, might not happen. Think of course about the poem by TS Eliot. We have heard this before. I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing. There is yet faith. But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought for you're not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness, the dancing
the faith to find out faith to look
so what's wonderful about Zen practice, and really about about true Buddhism. So way, finding out the truth. It's not a belief, it's a practice. If you've looked at the homepage of the website, you'll see that's right there at the top
There's a koan where the teacher says to the student so the student where do you come from? on pilgrimage? What are you looking for? I don't know. Teacher says not knowing is most intimate. Roshi Kapleau used to say to go I know not where by a road I know not have we practice in the dark CSLs Elliot says the darkness shall become light in the stillness, dancing
all of us need all the help we can get
and that's what the center is for. Help people work on themselves and be of benefit to the whole world be of benefit to life
