Bowing to See True Nature

In the Kwan Um School of Zen we are supposed to perform at least 108 prostrations every morning. I say “at least” because we also have a tradition of performing extra prostrations, usually 500 or 1000, during times of distress. It is a great way to burn up extra karma. I believe that Zen Master Seung Sahn did 500 prostrations a day for most of his life as a monk, which perhaps accounts for his ceaseless and amazing energy.

I have done extra prostrations at various times and can attest to their amazing efficiency. I have never felt so alert or spacious so quickly, nor have I maintained that openness for so long. And I never even got the full benefit because I have bad knees, and they never let me do more than 270 a day. Even then, after a few months, I developed some kind of stress injury in my lower leg where the calf muscle joins the knee joint. When the pain started waking me up at night, I knew it was time to stop!

For a long time I couldn’t do any prostrations, and this became an excuse to cease morning practice altogether. But over the past two or three years, with a little determination and great patience, I have found that I can do 108 prostrations most mornings. It helps if I take a day or two off every week.

Recently I made a vow to do 108 prostrations every morning for 100 days. This has had a wonderful effect on my practice and life. My sitting practice is much deeper and my mind, even when I get up off the cushion, is noticeably calmer and more balanced. Unfortunately, it has begun to cause some problems with my feet and ankles, such that the first few prostrations are painful until I get warmed up, and my feet feel stiff and sore not only in the morning but at various times throughout the day.

The other morning I had to admit that I am giving myself another stress injury. If I don’t stop doing prostrations every day, I am going to have a serious problem. But how can I protect my feet and keep my vow? Easy: I’ve started doing standing bows, peppered with a prostration every ninth or tenth bow. The first day I was in kind of a hurry and was bowing quickly and somewhat carelessly. But somewhere around bow thirty or forty my mind suddenly slowed, and I began to pay attention to my bows. The standing bows are really no different from the full prostrations. This surprised—and delighted—me.

After only two days of this practice, I find that my feet are still sore when I first wake up, but my ankles don’t hurt at all. Maybe in a week or two I’ll be able to resume doing full prostrations—but only five days a week!

Deep Roots in Buddha's Garden

The last job I undertook before I left Sonoma Mountain Zen Center last Thursday was to clear the Buddha's Garden of the lemon balm, which someone had planted years ago and which had slowly overtaken many of the other plants. It was somewhat strenuous work, but deeply satisfying. The plants were tall and closely spaced, and the ground was soft from having been watered, and the plants came up easily with some, but not all of their roots intact. Lemon balm is deeply aromatic. As I worked my gloves took on a lovely citrus-y smell. It took me about an hour to clear the garden and another fifteen minutes to carry armsful of the weed to the composting bin--which happened to be exactly as much time as I had to give. Sally, the head gardener, was happy. It was a good beginning to her job of transforming the Buddha's Garden from a neglected to a loved space.

As I drove away I thought about the hard work she faces if she wants truly to control the lemon balm. For the plants I pulled up are not singular individuals but rather offshoots of a larger plant whose deep roots wind throughout the bed like a river from which many creeks flow. From time to time as I weeded I would touch that larger structure. I could feel its age and strength. Eventually, it will need to be dug out with great care and determination. Until then someone will have to go in and pull up lemon balm on a regular basis or it will re-take the entire bed. Even as I write this four days later I imagine that new shoots of the lemon balm have begun to appear.

Intensive practice--staying at a Zen Center or going on a retreat--is a little like weeding lemon balm. Sometimes the work goes smoothly. Other times the ground is hard or the weather extreme and the work is difficult, even painful. But at the end we can feel the results: a greater sense of mental ease and spaciousness, a new sense of joy and calm. How wonderful! But sooner or later, within hours or days, the deeper structure that gave rise to all the karma the retreat cleared away--the anger or sense of grievance or restlessness or boredom--gives rise to new karma, and our minds become crowded again with the exact same species of dissatisfaction that we worked so hard to eradicate during our intensive practice.

This is the great work of life and death. If we want to finish it then we have to find a way to dig out that deeply rooted karmic system that lies at the sub-stratum of the self. And that's why we promise to return, lifetime after lifetime, because those roots are deep and strong, and it takes a long time to discover where they lie and how best to remove them.

Back in Berkeley

Today is my fourth day in Berkeley. I arrived on Thursday, played a little pool at the Broken Rack in Emeryville then headed over to the Empty Gate Zen Center for a retreat. The YMJJ started at 9:30 a.m. (we are in Berkeley after all). For the second time in as many months, I found myself wanting to leave almost as soon as the retreat had begun. Why, oh, why didn't I at least take the morning off to run around Berkeley and drink tea and buy stuff? Fortunately, that passed quickly (or at least what passes for quick at a retreat), and by Saturday morning I felt incredibly present. Or rather, I felt the presence of something that was neither inside nor outside what I think of as myself, and I found myself just letting that something carry me. The deep clarity of that long sustained moment wore off after a couple of hours, but I trust that it is (as the Soto Zen liturgy says), "not near and not far."

The highlight of Sunday was Margaret's arrival. We hung out at the Zen Center for a while, then went for a hot tub (Albany Hot Tub and Sauna, if you are ever in town), checked into our hotel (Rose Garden Inn), ate Ethiopian food, and went to a gay AA meeting. Now we lying on our bed watching the fire burn in the fireplace (yes, it's cool enough for a fire). Tomorrow we go to get our marriage license and buy rings.

Four Great Vows

In the Kwan Um School of Zen we recite the Four Great Vows once every morning before practice. Here at SMZC, we recite them three times at the end of evening practice. The phrasing in each case is quite similar but hardly identical. Here they are, with a third translation that I copied from an article by Ajahn Amaro ("Between Arhat and Bodhisattva: Finding the Perfect Balance," BuddhaDharma, Summer 2008 p 25):

Sentient Beings are numberless, we vow to save them all.
Sentient Beings are numberless, I vow to save them.
Living beings are numberless; I vow to save them all.

Delusions are endless, we vow to cut through them all.
Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to transcend them.
Afflications are endless; I vow to cut them off.

The teachings are infinite, we vow to learn them all.
The dharmas are boundless, I vow to embrace them.
Dharma-doors are numberless; I vow to study them all

The Buddha way is inconceivable, we vow to attain it.
The Buddha way is unsurpassable, I vow to attain it.
The Buddha way is unsurpassed; I vow to accomplish it.

Which one do you like?

Hot and Cold

We woke this morning to heavy fog that had saturated the trees and fell like heavy rain on the roof of the zendo. It was very cold and even though I wear a long robe and had on a long sleeved shirt I got colder and colder. Walking meditation--kinhin--was better and worse: better because I could move a little and rub my arms to try to warm them; worse because I had not worn socks and the floor was so cold.

During the second round of sitting I had to laugh at myself. Last week was incredibly hot and sitting, especially at night, was very uncomfortable. I am not an especially sweaty person but the sweat was rolling down my face and neck and shoulders. I hated it. So there I was this morning hating the cold and wishing I were warm.

As I told my new friend Vicki tonight, I must try to find the place where there is no hot or cold. She said, "where is that place, Christina." I hit the steering wheel and said "don't know." Vicki laughed and said, "when you find it, take me with you."

Free Time

Saturday afternoon from 1 p.m. till Monday morning at 5:15 a.m. is free time here at Sonoma Mountain Zen Center. I spent some of that time off the mountain. Yesterday I drove down to Petaluma to play pool at the local pool hall, "Bank Shots." One of the residents, Natalia, and one of the other guests, Sterling, rode with me, but were more interested in each other (I think) than playing pool, and they took off once we got to town. I warmed up as I usually do, shooting some straight pool. The table was tough one, with tight pockets and fast cloth, and I had to work to stay focused and get into stroke. After a while, the guy working the counter came over and asked if I wanted some competition. Oh yeah, I said. We played nine ball for about an hour. We were pretty evenly matched.

Today, I picked more blackberries (yum) and did my laundry (ho hum). Then I invited one of the residents, Susan, to go to Sebastopol and drink tea at a tea shop called "Infusions." Another resident, Mike, asked if he could catch a ride into Santa Rosa. After dropping him off at Starbucks, Susan and I had a lovely Second Flush Darjeeling and walked around a bit before heading back up.

A fine day.

Desires Are Endless

Thursday, Sally asked me if I would pick some blackberries. There's a good sized patch on the southside of the garden, so I started there. The berries are many and many look ripe but so resisted my efforts to remove them that I knew they need more time. Nonetheless I spent several hours combing those bushes, and the vast patches down by the workshop and the pond, and I finally got about two and half pints.

What I like about work practice is how it lets you see your mind in action. So, for example, blackberries are even more finicky than raspberries--tug a little too hard at that fat purple berry, let your desire to fill that bowl quickly take charge, and you end up with bowlful of sour berries. I had to really see that desire (and taste it) before I could resist it.

The more I picked the more it seemed that the really ripe berries were just out of reach, high overhead and deep in the thorny patch, and I schemed and schemed to reach those only to discover, once again, that the blackberries are just not quite ripe, and only one in ten was ready to surrender to my hands.

About lunch time I myself surrendered--to the heat, the belly's hunger, the fact that July is not ripe for blackberries, and so I stopped trying to exceed my own reach and went back up to the house. I knocked at the kitchen door crying out, "special delivery for David." Someone came and took the berries from me. As I walked down the stairs I could hear the cooks exclaiming over their beauty and I felt a little pride appear. But I didn't grow them, I reminded myself, the sun and the rain and the earth and the air grew them, with a little help from the bees.

Ripening

Yesterday, David, the cook, handed me a small bowl and asked me to go pick raspberries. It took awhile for me to find enough ripe ones to fill the bowl about half-way, which was no problem really because the garden here is lovely and I enjoy picking berries: peering through the brambles, looking for that shade of red, taking the little berries between thumb and forefinger and pulling very very gently. The ripe ones just fall into your hand. As I walked around and around the row of bushes, I thought--probably for the hundredth time--that enlightenment must be just like that: when conditions are ripe, it simply appears. All of our effort is only to pay pay attention moment to moment.

This morning, I was weeding in the strip of ground between the raspberry patch and the kale patch. Inching my way down the row on my knees I discovered dozens and dozens if not hundreds of ripe berries.

When it cools down a bit, I'll go pick them.

Not in Kansas (for the time being)

I’ve come to California for three reasons. First, I am doing some intensive work with my psychotherapist, Naomi. We’ve been “meeting” on the phone for two years now, and it’s time for some face-to-face work. Second, I am here to deepen my practice. I’m staying at the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center, which is led by Kwan Roshi, a dharma heir of Suzuki Roshi and a good friend of Zen Master Seung Sahn. I’ll also sit a YMJJ down at the Empty Gate Zen Center in Berkeley, with Jeff Kitzes and his students. Last, I will be joined by Margaret on July 20th and on July 22nd we will be married.

As I write this I am aware of the dwindling resources on my computer’s battery and that I left the re-charger in Topeka. I can feel a breeze on my face through the open window and hear the rooster across the road crowing. A fine day on planet earth.

Tea and Tea Masters

There are a lot of stories from ancient China about tea masters doing dharma combat with—and besting—Zen Masters. Usually these tea masters are unassuming and diminutive older women and the Zen Masters are quite full of themselves, inadvertently exposing themselves to a devastating blow from the tea master’s mind sword. Here’s a modern and absolutely true story:

Once at a major Zen Center on the east coast of the United States, a Hong Kong woman set up her tea table in a corner of the kitchen and was enjoying tea with her students. An American Zen Master appeared and asked if he might join them. “Please be seated,” she said. Now this man fancied himself a teaist, and he began discoursing about tea. “Oh,” she said, “you must be a tea master. Please, I would like your opinion of these teas.” She offered him two cups. The American tasted each tea. He described the first one as smoky and imperfectly processed. The second tea, he said, was much superior with an aged, complex character. “Actually,” she said, “those are both the same tea.” The Zen Master began turning red. She gazed at him for a moment. “You are quite pretentious,” and returned to her conversation with her students.

Bird's Nest

There's a wonderful novel I was thinking about the other day, called Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin. It was published in the 1930s and is set in England and Germany about 800 years after the Nazis have won WW2. It's a horrible world. The Jews have all been murdered. Women are treated like breeding animals. Men of the subjugated nations are second class citizens with no access to power or wealth. German males possess all authority. Hitler is worshipped as a god.

The only people to live outside of this terrible hegemony are random bands of Christians. They seem to live in extended family systems. At least they don't put the women in camps. They treat them with kindness and affection, the way some people treat their dogs.

Near the end of the novel, when the protagonist, an English worker, is hiding out with some of these Christians, he asks his host if he believes that women can go to heaven. His host is shocked at the idea. No, he says emphatically. Women are like birds' nests. Nobody would keep a bird's nest after it's served its purpose.

I'm not sure how the author feels about this. I believe that she was a Christian. I'm sure she was feminist. Did she expect her readers compare the status of women under the German hegemony and snuggle up to the Christian ideal? Did she expect us to rebel, to say, "of course women have souls, too"? Me, I'm reading against the grain. I don't think anybody has a soul. We just have these bodies and these egos and this one opportunity at life.

What does this have to do with Buddhism?

I think that Burdekin has given us a lovely way to think about "the small self," as a bird's nest, constructed of bits of this and that, woven tightly in some places, maybe a little looser in others. Our job as Buddhist meditators is first to see the constructedness of our small selves and second to start to pull away, piece by piece, the twigs and blades of grass and strands of hair and bits of string that comprise the nest of the self. It's really hard work, because we live in those nests and everytime we pull out another bit, we risk . . . what?

How to Meditate

sit on the ground as close
to the longest widest wildest river
you can find

sit as close as you dare

pick a rock in the river
something bigger than a grain
smaller than the mountain range--

any boulder will do--

rest your mind inside the rock

foreswear all desire to follow the water
up to its source in the belly of the mountain
down to its outpouring place by the sea

abide until you feel the thunder
of snow melt parting around you

until the slightest flick of the merest fingerling
quivers your flanks

sit like this for a millennia or two

after a while a crack will appear
the haste of stone the stillness of river
and swallow you

no one no where

adrift in earth rooted in stars

How a Fly Changed My Life

This is bout how a fly changed my life. I guess you take your lessons where you find them.

One morning, a fly got into my bedroom. I didn’t think anything about it. When I left the house, I shut the fly in, because I have cats and if I don’t keep my bedroom door closed, they sleep in my laundry, on the bed, leave cat hair everywhere, and I don’t like it.

When I got home that afternoon, the fly was still in my bedroom. You know how flies get when they’ve been cooped up all day. Bzzz bzzz bump bump bump. But I just changed my clothes and went out and did whatever it was I did that evening.

When it was time for me to go to bed, the fly was still there. Bzzz bzzz bump bump.

Because I’m a Zen student and thus wise and compassionate, I decided to try to get the fly out of my room. Really, I wasn’t acting from compassion, but for myself. I need total darkness and silence in order to fall asleep, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep with this fly going bzzz bzzz bump bump bump. So I tried to shoo the fly out the door. But before I could close the door, the fly would do 180 degrees and fly back into the room. After about a half a dozen efforts, I, in my infinite wisdom and compassion decided, “the fly must die.”

I went and got a flyswatter, waited for the fly to land, and swatted. Well, I missed by several inches. Then this thought arose, “Oh, I missed on purpose.” Then a crack appeared across my visual field, and this thought arose, “There’s something here I’m not seeing.” Then the crack disappeared and I was just standing there holding a flyswatter hearing the fly go bzzz bzzz bump bump bump.

I thought, “Oh, maybe I’d better not kill this fly.” I went to bed. The fly and I comfortably cohabitated all night.

In the morning, it occurred to me that the fly must be suffering. It had been trapped in this room for over twenty-four hours with nothing to eat or drink. And when it’s August and your whole imperative is to reproduce and there’s nobody there to reproduce with—well. So I got a water glass and caught the fly and took it outside and let it go. I guess I was feeling a little cynical or something, because I was humming “Born Free” a little under my breath as the fly took off.

Of course, I’ve thought a lot about what it is I don’t see and what that crack appeared in, what cracked. A day or so after this happened, I read an excerpt from a book by a Japanese Zen Master named Katagiri Roshi. He says that there is an invisible world; it sees us, but we don’t see it. But it upholds us and our job is to learn to see it. Based on this I decided that reality itself had cracked a little and that an invisible super-reality had almost revealed itself. But I’ve come to think that this is a mistaken idea.

Zen Master Seung Sahn says that if you can break through the wall of yourself, you will become infinite in time and space. What I think happened is that a very small crack appeared in my self, in what we call the “small self,” the ego, the intricately constructed identity, this “Christina.” And what lies beyond that small self, what it is I didn’t actually see but became aware of, is the interconnection of all beings. And I mean that not as a cool idea or as an ideal, but as an absolute fact. We are all connected. That fly and I were—are—connected.

How has this changed my life? The first change showed up a couple of days later. Margaret and I were preparing a picnic, and we had a can of sardines, and I looked at that can, and I thought, “I can’t eat those fish because I don’t know what that would mean.” Ever since then I’ve been pretty much unable to eat meat, not out of any positive conviction—that it’s wrong to eat meat—but out of a sense of doubt: I just don’t know what it means to eat the flesh of other animals.

The second change was actually the more important. I’ve become very aware of flies. And let me tell you, they are aware of us, and they know what we think of them and what our intentions are. So now, whenever I see a fly, I say, “hello there.”

(Dharma Talk given 02/18/00, Manhattan, KS)

The Least I Can Do

Two weeks ago during a workshop at Midwest Sangha Weekend a dharma teacher from the Kansas Zen Center reminded me that many years ago I had given her first instruction in meditation. She told me also that she remembers the talk I gave that morning, which was in part about the trials and tribulations of trying to a grow a lawn. I've posted a version of that talk below: click here if you'd like to read it.

When Jane reminded me about that talk I had to laugh because within about two years, our magnificent lawn reverted back to its former state of dirt and weeds and random clumps of grass. Even funnier, I had just decided to try again for that lush green look, and only days before I left for Chicago, the guys at Blueville Nursery came out and overseeded.

If you've ever put in a lawn you know that the secret lies in keeping the seed moist. So twice a day for the last week I've gone outside to water. This is actually a gift, because like any daily practice, watering the lawn offers me a chance to see my own mind. And I am happy to report that my mind has changed over the past nine years: even though I still worry that the grass won't grow, I have a lot more confidence that each of the thousands of seeds knows how to grow and will grow if I keep giving it what it needs.

But I'm also forced to admit that my mind hasn't changed entirely for the best. Since I left the Kansas Zen Center four years ago, my practice has gotten kind of lazy. My mind has sprung a lot of weeds. Greed and anger and ignorance have grown tall and rank.

As you may know, greed, anger and ignorance are the three roots of suffering. The Buddha prescribed various kinds of medicine for suffering. All of them involved some kind of meditation practice. Meditation is like weeding your mind. It creates some clear space so that wisdom and compassion can grow.

After the Midwest Sangha Weekend I prescribed a little Buddha medicine for my mind. So I'm renewing my commitment to perform 108 prostrations every morning--the great mind medicine Zen Master Seung Sahn prescribed for his American students--and to sit for at least fifteen minutes. And I'm adding fifteen minutes of sitting meditation to my evening chanting practice. It seems like the least I can do.

Spring Comes, The Grass Grows By Itself

Here is a version of a talk I gave at the Kansas Zen Center, in Lawrence, about nine years ago.

Good morning. Thank you for coming to practice.

Recently, Margaret and I have embarked on some home improvement. This is truly to enter the cave of poisoned grass, to arouse the mind of acquisition and to stimulate it over and over. There are so many decisions to make, about flooring and walls and countertops. And so many things to buy. So we’ve made this meal of poisoned grass and we feed and feed. This is truly suffering. And we have to see it through to the end. Well, we don’t have to. We could stop now if we wanted, but that would mean living in a very messy situation for a long time, so we choose to complete the project.

The first bit of improvement we did was to put in a new lawn. This is very appropriate, because our home is also Tall Grass Zen Center. Ironically enough, however, we had a totally pathetic front lawn, almost as much dirt as grass. Sometimes we’d joke, I’m going out to mow the dirt now! And certainly it grew tall, but that was only the weeds. The lawn resulted from poor soil and years of neglect and not enough sunlight. We have these two forty year old oak trees, and they block the sunlight, so the first thing we did was have them professionally pruned. But we weren’t sure what the next step should be.

Then one day I saw this sign, “ask us about organic lawn care,” and I thought, oh, we could do that. One reason we haven’t done much for the lawn is because we are leery of putting chemicals into the ground. So I went home and asked Margaret what she thought and she thought it was a good idea and I called the company and someone came out and gave us an estimate—$830—which was higher than I’d hoped but lower than my worst fear. One of the reasons it cost so much was because they recommended putting down a huge amount of organic compost—somewhere on the order of ten cubic feet, a truckful, almost enough to fill this room. Margaret and I talked it over and said, OK, let’s do it. And these people came out with all these machines and dug up the lawn and lay down compost and seed and hay and that was that.

Now, this isn’t usually the kind of consumer I am. I like to do a lot of research, to solicit different bids, talk to people, dicker. And right away some problems appeared that made me doubt the wisdom of doing business with this company. First, there was this problem with the fertilizer, and that took a couple of phone calls to straighten out. Then there was this problem with a lack of directions. I’ve never done anything like this before, and I had no idea what to do with the one thousand square foot plot of dirt. After a few phone calls I got my first written instruction: start watering right away! But that didn’t help me. I didn’t know how often to water or how much to water. I didn’t know anything. I made several more phone calls, and finally this man asked me, well didn’t you get our brochure. No. He promised to send it. Ironically enough the brochure arrived with the bill. And this is kind of funny, because it seems to me that although they really took their time getting us the instructions, they sure didn’t waste a minute issuing the bill. But they arrived on the same day in the same envelope. Funny.

We were instructed to water twice a day, three times if it got really hot, which fortunately it didn’t, because we had no idea how we would manage that. The first time I went out to water, I suddenly remembered that one of the reasons I’ve never gone in much for lawns is because they are ecological disasters. They require a lot of water and we are living through a drought—just ask the farmers; more and more of the wheat crop fails every year because there simply isn’t enough rain. So there I was spraying vast amounts of water onto the dirt and suddenly envisioning a drought-proof rock garden with maybe a few aesthetically placed native plants and kicking myself for acting so impulsively and not looking into other options. But I’d already paid the $830 dollars—not on a credit card but out of my savings—and I wasn’t about to waste that so I just kept watering.

So Margaret and I went out there twice a day, watering and watering. My misgivings grew and grew because nothing was happening! Nothing seemed to be growing. And our neighbors were teasing us a little—nice plot of dirt you got there, Christina! And I started to wonder if I had been ripped off. How do I know they put all that compost down? How would I know if it was organic or not? Maybe it was just sludge. And maybe the seed was old. Despite my misgivings, though, I’d sometimes find myself enjoying myself. I’d do 108 prostrations and go out and simply water. It was kind of nice, in the pre-dawn light. A lot of my neighbors would be out taking walks and we’d say hello. But mostly I worried.

One afternoon, as Margaret and were bending over examining the dirt for signs of life, I told her that I had a very bad feeling about this. She asked why and I told her, “I don’t trust those people.” She said, “I don’t trust them either, Christina. But I trust the grass, I trust the seed.” This is a great teaching. It cut through all my doubts and concerns. Oh, sure, the grass knows how to grow. You don’t have pay the seed or persuade or compel or shame it into growing. It simply grows. There’s a Zen saying that encompasses this point, “spring comes, the grass grows by itself.” I’m very grateful to Margaret for reminding me of this, for putting my mind to rest. It’s one of the reasons that we started Tall Grass Zen Center, so that we would have the opportunity of building a sangha, a community of practitioners, so we could remind each other of the teaching, of our purpose. In Buddhism we speak of the triple gem, buddha, dharma and sangha, the teacher, the teaching and the community of practitioners. Of these three, the sangha is the most important. I would therefore like to encourage each of you to come practice at the Zen Center as often as you can, to let other people help you in your practice and to help others in theirs.

I’d like to talk a little about this phrase, “spring comes, the grass grows by itself.” The phrase “by itself” doesn’t mean “all alone.” As I’ve already said, the grass doesn’t need any special encouragement to grow. But its growth takes place in an immense network of interrelationships. This is signaled by the phrase “spring comes.” Spring brings longer days and more light and warmth, both of which the seed needs to germinate. And spring also brings rain. The grass also needs the soil. And you know, the soil isn’t some inert substance like concrete. It’s alive, full of microorganisms, and not so micro- organisms, and the warmth of the sun wakes them up, and they begin eating and digesting and defecating and fornicating and reproducing, and all that activity helps the grass to grow and the grass by growing helps those beings to live.

This is actually a pretty clear illustration of karma, which is the name we give to the law of cause and effect. Spring comes and the grass grows. Cause and effect. So everything happens by natural process, and this is true for us as well. “Spring comes the grass grows by itself” also means that when conditions are ripe, our enlightenment will appear. We don’t have to do anything special to make our great mind manifest. Of course, conditions do have to be right and we can create the right sort of conditions for enlightenment to appear. The right condition is practice. In my experience daily practice is essential, but so is coming to retreats regularly. Practice is sort of like watering the lawn. All the water helps the grass to grow; all that practice helps our enlightenment to appear. One of the reasons that Margaret and I chose the name Tall Grass Zen Center is because this is kind of practice we want to encourage, practice that isn’t focussed on an outcome, such as enlightenment, but that is complete in itself. I encourage you to practice this way.

Karma, the law of cause and effect, is very interesting. For example, Margaret and I kept watering the lawn and sure enough after a couple of weeks a few blades began to appear and day by day more blades of grass began to appear and pretty soon we had this beautiful green plush lawn, which I can honestly say is the envy of the neighborhood. So this lawn appears and pretty soon a new effect appears, what the capitalists call “pride of ownership” appears. We buddhists call this “attachment.” Every time Margaret and I drive up to our house, one of us will say,” look at that beautiful lawn. We grew that. It’s ours.” So pretty soon a new problem appears. There are lots and lots of dogs in our neighborhood. They eat lots of food and that means that they make lots of shit. And everyday their owners take them around on leashes, and they just seem to love doing their business on our lawn. Most of our neighbors are pretty responsible and they carry around little plastic bags to clean up after their dogs, but still, Margaret and I just hate the thought of dog poop on our beautiful lawn.

I’d like to tell you a little about one incident that happened last weekend. You know, this practice changes you, but the changes are very subtle and sometimes you can’t see them. I’ve been practicing pretty hard for about three years now and sometimes it seems like nothing changes. I’ve still got this yadda-yadda going on continually through my mind. Oh, maybe those lawn care people are trying to rip me off, what can I do, and then there’s my job and then there’s Margaret and then there’s my evil department head and yadda-yadda my life is so hard. But every once in a while something happens and I can say, oh, yeah, this practice changes you. So last weekend I happened to be looking out the front window, and I saw this woman letting her dog crap on our lawn, and so I stepped outside. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what to say. She saw me and pulled her dog along and walked away. Not fast, but I could see that she knew that she was doing something wrong, and she didn’t want to face it.

So I was just standing there not feeling anything really or thinking anything. I remember that there seemed to be kind of green flow. Everything is very beautiful right now; we’ve had a long wet spring and everything is growing. At the back of my mind was the thought that in a minute I’d have to go and get a plastic bag and clear up the mess, but I didn’t feel one way or the other about it. Then this really amazing thing happened. The woman, who had walked out of sight, suddenly reappeared and said, “Do you want me to clean that up?” Now this, it seems to me, is true Zen practice. I don’t know anything about this woman; I doubt that she practices Zen. But Zen Master Hae Kwang says that Zen is recognizing correct situation, correct relationship, correct function and then just doing it. So this woman recognized her mistake and came back offering to correct it. Now I do practice Zen and I was in a pretty good space so I promptly said, “yes, I do.” I wouldn’t always answer this way. If I had been feeling angry for example, I might have said, “no, it’s OK, I’ll do it,” not because it was really OK but because cleaning up the shit would have fed my delusion that I am the most imposed on person in the universe and would have enabled me to cling to that sense of having been treated unjustly. The woman said, “I forgot my plastic bag.” Suddenly, her situation became clear. She wasn’t an irresponsible person, she was a person who had forgotten something. So I said, “Let me get you one,” and as she cleaned up the mess we chatted. It turned out that she often has to go clean up after other people’s dogs and it really bugs her, so maybe this is why she turned around.

What happened there was the fruit of my practice. When I stepped out of house I didn’t know what to say and so I didn’t say anything. And this created the space for the woman to correct her mistake. I didn’t try to make this happen. It simply happened. And more and more it seems to me that the less I say, the better. And my growing ability to keep my mouth shut is proof that this practice has really helped me.

Listen. The world is in really bad shape right now. India and Pakistan are threatening to destroy one another. The U.S. is continuing to flatten Afghanistan. And it’s happening everywhere, as people bump up against one another, too often over religious conflicts. What happened between this woman and me is the true fruit of Buddhist practice. We could have come into conflict, but we didn’t. She and I together managed to make a little moment of peace and understanding, managed to bring a little more love and compassion into the world. And this is how it will happen, individual by individual, household by household, block by block. I hope that you all will practice has hard as you can, for this world.

Kwan Yin in Vegas

Kwan Yin says, deal me in.

Kwan Yin says, keep your hands on the table
where I can see them.

Kwan Yin says, no table, no hands--then what?

HEY!

Keep your head in the game--deal me in.