blog — Zen Practice/Ordinary Life

I am thinking these days: Chant or work on grief often, everyday, because when you really need it, there will be a well to draw from. Or in other words, grief work through chant, bows, x, y, z when you not in crisis and maybe when crisis hits you’ll have some reserves/resilience.

When my colleague and chair of the department had a stroke…. I learned of it while at my university office. I left the office, and while walking in front of Stevenson College, muttered under my breath, “damnit, I always forget.” What do I forget? The frailty of being human. In a flash, with not much apparent warning it can be an accident, a stroke, a tragic turn of events that forever reshapes our future plans.

Chanting the daihi shin dharani everyday, right before dinner, is a good practice. A memorable thing. The densho rings at 5:40, get in the zendo shortly thereafter, pick a side and line up. Bows, chant, bows.

A temple is at once a place of refuge—a recognition of samsara —birth life sickness old age and death. Sure, you can pray for good stuff but one does that because samsara is given.

Yeah well we used to say this about being queer. Being out was good for you and others because it signaled affirmation not shame.

For me, being out in the world is a true test of one’s zen practice. Whether lay or priest, novice or teacher, being out in the world is practicing hard. I believe KT once said something like being out in the world can be a little more difficult than simply following the schedule in residential practice. My extrapolation is, there are more ways to fuck up when outside of residential practice. More things come at you. Cars, things, people, culture, politics, history. So many more ways to enact greed, hate, and delusion.

So this is a different kind of “out” in the world than being visible. Visibility is top layer practice. Sure its important. I recently asked someone who was sporting several malas “are you Buddhist or just rocking the malas?” Their reply, “no, I just like em”.

Buddhism is now commodity culture. So that adds a layer of sticky stuff too. Because others might be inclined to tell you about zen, about buddhism, about the Buddha. Smile like you mean it, okay? And, because others have ideas about what Buddhism is, one can be surrounded by the projections.

I think the data show that 1 in 10 Asians are Buddhist or grew up in Buddhist families while .7% of the US pop is Buddhist. Nonetheless, we are surrounded by Buddhist and especially Zen iconography.

So why do I say its important to be out in the world? Because following the precepts in the monastery is just training practice fore being out in the world—where we relate to our families, friends, co workers, random people in stores, gas stations, concerts etc, is true grist for the mill. At least for the majority of us.

Like get a grip —unless you are independently wealthy or you plan to stay at a monastery for the rest of your life, the marketplace awaits. For the vast majority of us, monastic practice is a step for living in the non-monastic world. Or to put it bluntly, who takes care of old monks? Only a finely tuned cultural system that allows for that… can do this.