With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,
Even with the sun up over the mountains the air is still quite chilly: there is frost sparking in the sunlight on the wooden bridge in the back. I still have chest and throat issues, but less so. I do not feel comfortable enough to go outside so I'm missing today's activities: breakfast discussion group, streetZen,and possibly yoga and the Journeys classes this evening. We'll see.
One of the readers of this blog has suggested that I often repeat and reference Thich Nhat Hahn. I would like to talk a little about that this morning.
Thich Nhat Hahn is a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk who lives in Plum Village in France, but who, like the Dalai Lama, travels to teach all over the world. He is one of the founders of the so-called "Engaged Zen" movement and promotes mindfulness training as a primary practice tool. He also created his own Order called the Order of Interbeing. I have read nearly every book that Thay has written. I respect him greatly.
While I respect TNH as a teacher and Zen Master, I do not always agree with his point of view. I do feel he is a bit out of touch with the actual level of rage in the world and puts far too much faith in the ability of others to look deeply. His teaching, while wonderful, is often easily misunderstood and can come off as shallow, far too simplistic, and sweet.
I see him as an ideal to model, on one level, and a danger to model on another level. Perhaps this is the real truth about models.
I, on the other hand, have also created my own Order, Clear Mind Zen. While I no longer have a Temple or Zen Center, I have been teaching using this media for something like seven years. I do not write books, but I write enough to make several books. Its just a different medium.
I try to take my practice experience and integrate it with other learning from other gates of practice: study, work, art, exercise, etc. Each informs the other. This is as it should be, but with the Buddhist caveat that nothing is as we say it is, its only what we say it is. What it actually is, is something else again, not matter, not energy, not consciousness.
We only know through the experience of our six senses: eye, ear, nose, skin, mouth,, and mind. These sense organs send perceptual stimuli to our brain which processes them. There can be no experience without perception. Yet it would be a mistake to mistake the sense perceptions as copies of the actual thing. Why? Because they are being processed and understood by a brain. In so doing, the brain makes a division between the sense organ and the object of the sense organ. I becomes I; you becomes you. Two. In truth, however, there is no "I", no "you" just the matter and energy in the universe becoming aware of itself and coming and going from one form to another constantly.
Zen teachers have all sorts of ways to get us out of this duality: zazen, koan work, silence, an insistence that the student face himself.
THN teaches all of this. All Zen teaches teach all of this. We are all teaching from the same source: the Dharma, which is to say, the reality of actual life. In the end, my primary influence as a Teacher is my own experience on the cushion. Guided there, as I was, by my Teacher, who was guided by his Teacher, and so on all the way back to Buddha Sakyamuni, I came to experience our oneness.
Lastly, we should all be careful as we talk about Zen concepts and practices knowing that each of us comes to the term with our own history and experience of the word. This history and experience is not shared and therefore may differ from another's' Just a different aspect of the same thing.
Be well.
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