To You (Zen & Zazen 91), June 17th 2024
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 16 июн 2024
- 30 minutes of silent sitting followed by a Zoom talk and discussion in English with Chinese translation. Sitting instructions: • Invitation to online z...
Todays topic:
Quotes from Sawaki Kodo Roshi, "To You":
What could be more boring than showing off your skills?
Skills are only relative: they’re not really worth anything.
What lies beyond your talents, that’s what matters.
When you look at heroes, East and West, past and present,
you can clearly see that the strong as well as the weak didn’t
do anything besides exhaust themselves and die in the end.
They all gave everything they had, wearing themselves out
for an illusion and accumulating bad karma.
All beings are blind to the dharma. And that doesn’t just go for
delinquents and gangsters. Children who are born blind to the
dharma are raised by blind parents, educated by blind teachers
and misled by politicians who are blind to the dharma. How
could anyone around here not be blind to the dharma?
Online "Zen and Zazen" every Monday from 20:00~20:50 Japanese time (12:00 in Central Europe during the winter, 13:00 during the summer), hosted by my friend Xuan:
xuan.yoga/zen-and-zazen/
Zoom link:
us02web.zoom.us/j/82680384333
Passcode: xuanyoga
Donations: sendaba.hatenablog.com/entry/...
Next Zen and Zazen class will be on June 24th.
#Dharma #Meditation #Dogen
🙏🏼
🙏🙏💡
Love these Kodo quotes, thank you. Kodo feels pretty harsh to me sometimes, although I guess it's tough love.
Essay alert....
I've been wondering lately how much of the suffering of "playing the game" is a natural human tendency, and how much is it conditioned by the world we are in. Particularly the competitive nature of capitalism or other forms of social organisation that encourage 'ranking' people rather than seeing the inherent nobility of every being.
In the Buddha's time there were huge influxes of people into cities. This meant less insulated and tight-knit communities, and less connection to particular natural environments. I've heard it argued that with this development, religious practices became less specific to localities and less grounded in the earth/ material world, and more "universal" in nature. Much of the world shifting to more 'ultimate' or monotheistic ideas of spirituality in response to the need to unify the diverse groups of people that gathered in cities. Maybe it also helped reconnect people with the sense of wholeness, connection and meaning that is harder to come by when you've been uprooted from the ways of living that (I'd argue) make that baseline more accessible to the human organism. That is, more deeply interconnected with the natural world and more concerned with the overall wellbeing of the group than individual advancement.
I don't want to over-idealise tribal or indigenous cultures, or overstate the 'naturalness' of "not playing the game". Obviously, 'playing the game' is a big part of human nature too, or greed hate and delusion wouldn't have been able to escalate so terrifically into all the crises we see playing out on a global scale today, to the extent that mass extinction seems quite possible.
It is hard to get people to really drop the game if they are afraid that doing so will make them socially and economically vulnerable. It's like being the first to lower your gun in a stand-off. You need to be pretty spiritually strong to accept that your material conditions may suffer badly on account of 'opting out' of the logic of competition. The more precarious your situation seems, the more under attack you feel by others, the more tempting it might be to hold on to your "gun", so to speak. I think naming this reality and pointing to tangible alternative ways of 'playing the game' while living in the world (bodhisattva style) could be a missing element. Maybe that sounds too political for some Buddhist tastes but I don't see a firm distinction between my practice and my 'politics' any more.
I don't know if Kodo is directing his criticism more to specific social classes than others (I'm interested in any insight yourself or others may have on the topic) but it feels important to me to get a sense of the context of the time. Especially if we accept that dukkha and 'game playing' are something with complex historical & cultural roots as well as a basic part of the psyche we all grapple with.
IMHO, to play the game is not to have a decent livelihood. To "play the game" is to accord undue importance to fleeting and ultimately illusory phenomena like your fame or wealth, meaning to get "stuck" in the aversion/attachment dichotomy. I can have a decent job with decent pay and still practice fully each moment - it's just harder to remember the practice every and each moment when your social context is not made for that purpose like being in a temple.
Regarding your point about how social conditioning might be the reason behin dukkha, there are people (like Shinzen Young) who argue that "enlightenment" would have been a natural development in hunter-gatherer tribes, simply because dealing with pain, impermanence and discomfort was the norm back then, so that they wouldnt even need a specific word for "enlightenment". However, I personally think aversion/attachment is just a natural, biological way to encounter the world, since you can see it in pretty much all forms of life (at least that I know of).
@@ErikDornes Thanks for your thoughtful response! I think I understand what you're saying, but it seems like I might have not communicated myself well in the first post.
I agree that people can and do practice deeply in all kinds of work, and wanting material security isn't the problem here. What I'm wondering about is whether or not socioeconomic precarity and feeling 'pitted against' other people for access to basic security makes it harder for people to let go of the kinds of aversion/ attachment that might seem necessary to 'get ahead'. For example, if I know I'm competing with a lot of people for a finite amount of jobs, I'm more likely to become obsessed over my relative abilities or social status to try and get an 'edge' over other people I might feel like letting go to that obsession and becoming more bodhisattva like will make it more likely that someone would 'get one over on me'.
Even if for people who aren't at immediate risk of homelessness or unemployment, we all see how society treats people at the bottom (although, some countries are tougher than others), which exacerbates our natural tendencies for aversion/attachment. I think Buddhism often emphasizes individual practice and responsibility, which is useful, but my current approach to the bodhisattva vows involves collectively addressing systemic causes of suffering as a community as well.
@@EC-nd3rr I think you are right in the sense that if you are hungry you are probably not going to have the time or presence of mind to notice the Dharma. This argument is somewhat akin to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. However, there will always be a game to be played, there will always be people competing with each other, there will always be sources of potential attachment, even if they become increasingly more "subtle".
All this being said, I feel that trying to have a community outreach is generally a good thing, though you've probably come across people who make that their whole identity, and become judgemental and confrontational with people who are not as involved as them - at least I certainly have. It's like I said: everything can become a source of clinging, and the bodhisattva path is more about the attitude behind the work than the work itself sometimes.
Erste