Crossing Nebraska

  It has been a season of many losses within my family and circle of friends, bringing life and death to the forefront of my mind. Life and death is something of a koan that each of us must resolve—the Great Matter that I spoke of in a recent post. Dogen’s Shoji ( Life and Death ), on the other hand, is a koan in the more traditional and literal sense. It is one short fascicle of a larger work, the Shobogenzo , composed sometime in the first half of the 13 th Century by Eihei Dogen, preeminent teacher within the Soto Zen tradition. Sunset with silhouette of trees Dogen begins Shoji with a quote from another Zen teacher: “Because in life and death there is buddha, there is no life and death” (Nishijima and Cross, 2009, p. 299). This first sentence may well be a koan unto itself—a koan within a koan, if you will. What does it mean? Perhaps we can gain a toehold by thinking of Buddha as ultimate reality beyond all so-called separate things. Thus, when we recognize Buddha in life a...

As stated in my previous post on the subject , what Buddhists refer to as enlightenment is nothing other than a profound realization of the most fundamental truth regarding the emptiness of all things ( sunyata in Sanskrit). Myriad other Buddhist teachings can be understood as various facets of this diamond-like truth. For example, it is emptiness that has us speaking in terms of dependent origination, interbeing, and the non-dual; and it is emptiness that has us speaking of the three marks of existence: the impermanence of all things, the lack of inherent selfhood of all things, and the unsatisfactory nature of all things. The last of these, by the way, is merely the first noble truth – the truth of suffering – viewed from a slightly different angle. However, it is the second noble truth that points to the fundamental difficulty of human existence: our almost unrelenting tendency to overlay the infinite potential inherent in the emptiness of all things with our own ...

Nestled here at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the air around my hometown is often laden with moisture rising up to become part of the clouds that form over the region and then rain back down again. This summer has been an especially wet one here, and when it hasn’t actually been raining, or storming, there have been beautiful billowing cumulus clouds streaming past overhead like I haven’t noticed in a long, long time. They’ve actually reminded me of very pleasant times during my childhood when I’d lay back on the cool grass, alone or with a friend, holding to my nose a wild onion freshly plucked from the earth while watching clouds slowly form and change and slip away against a backdrop of brilliant blue – pulling me with them deeper and deeper into the joyous reverie of watchfulness without separation.   Unfortunately, even as I’m reminded of this joyous childhood reverie – and slip into some adult approximation of it from time to time in the here a...

By now all of us Buddhists have weathered well over a month of what is commonly referred to as “the holiday season.” It starts with the dominant culture storming out of the gate the moment the Halloween decorations come down and gathers momentum as Thanksgiving approaches. By Black Friday the sprint has begun. Whatever pace each individual can muster is then maintained by whatever means necessary until everyone collectively collapses into a physically and emotionally exhausted and overindulged pile of debt-burdened human wreckage on New Year’s Day! Jizo statue How are you holding up so far? Have you gone stir-crazy yet from hearing Christmas carols nearly everywhere you go? Is the ubiquity of wasteful and distasteful lawn art finally wearing you down? Has workplace pressure to pony up for an offering of useless crap for the “white elephant” gift exchange put your principles of simplicity to the test? And how many times have you lamented to friends and family the ...

Stillness, silence, truth – just like the words to that Beatles song: “These are words that go together well, my Michelle.” Stillness, silence, truth – I knew the first two as a child and completely took the third for granted. After all, we need not have a word for air in order to breathe it deeply so that it may become us. Stillness, silence, truth – this was what I spoke of in Returning To The Source . The Buddha innately knew it as a child, and so did I. (And I suspect that you did, too.) No…, it is not so much a matter of knowing it as being it – stillness, silence, truth. It is what the Buddha returned to after a long and arduous search, and it is what I now return to (albeit, with varying degrees of clarity) each time I sit zazen – stillness, silence, truth.     A spider actualizes his understanding of Indra's Net     “Zazen is the most venerable and only true teacher.”   This was the second of seven points of practice laid ou...

The Missouri Zen Center’s Spring Egg Hunt takes place this Sunday. It’s a takeoff on the traditional Easter egg hunt. However, since we’re a Buddhist organization, no particular overt belief in the Easter Bunny is required. What’s that you say? An egg hunt doesn’t really sound all that Buddhist? Well, to tell you the truth, it doesn’t sound all that Christian either! For those readers unfamiliar with the modern Easter egg hunt, it generally involves putting candy or chocolate or perhaps coins inside hollow plastic eggs which are then hidden around the garden just as the Easter Bunny would have hidden them in days gone by. Children seem to love it – the exception being those occasions when the older ones find ten times more eggs than any of the hapless and uninitiated toddlers in their midst. About this time last year a few of us were standing around after meditation and chatting about the upcoming event. “What do you put inside the eggs?” somebody asked. “Well, we’r...

This was one of the first blog posts I ever wrote, and I think it holds up well. The fact that it also fits nicely into my new “blog within a blog” series ( Power, Practice, and Peace ) prompted me to update and highlight it. Certainly, there is much more to say regarding how to build a peaceful world for all living beings, but I think the information contained herein will go a long   way toward fulfilling that aspiration. I hope you enjoy it! What would it take for you to really be at peace? Would it take a change of jobs—with a little less stress and a little more money? Does your retirement account need to reach some certain level? Do you need to find that perfect life companion—someone who’ll make even the most mundane aspects of daily living seem just a little bit brighter? Hey, maybe all you need is for the little one to start sleeping soundly through the night! Yes, there always seems to be something standing between us and contentment. There always seem to be some conditi...

I began collecting my thoughts for this post with a fairly straightforward objective in mind: provide a reasonably comprehensive review of the mechanics and usefulness of the traditional postures for seated meditation – zazen. I knew from the start that in order to achieve that objective I’d need to talk about appropriate stretching to at least some degree. Why? Well, first of all, the issue of flexibility (or lack thereof) comes up nearly every time I provide instruction to a group of beginning meditators. Stiff legs, tight hips, and sore backs just seem to be endemic in our increasingly sedentary society. Secondly, even though it is such a common issue, it doesn’t seem to be something that we in the Zen tradition are all that willing or prepared to discuss. When I think about it, though, that makes perfect sense. Japanese monks probably only rarely exhibited the difficulty that we Westerners have in molding ourselves into the full or half lotus position; and even if they did, ...