UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud Podcast Por Silent Thunder Order arte de portada

UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud

UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud

De: Silent Thunder Order
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A podcast of original teachings and music by Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston Roshi, guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order.

Michael Elliston Ciencias Sociales Espiritualidad Filosofía
Episodios
  • 177: Connecting the Dots Part 4

    177: Connecting the Dots Part 4
    Aug 6 2025
    From time to time over the nearly 50 years since the establishment of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, a significant number of its members and its affiliates in the Silent Thunder Order have complained of burning out in terms of their participation in the Zen community. Some have faded into obscurity and were never heard from again. Others have come back after years. The record for the longest hiatus is about three decades. This cohort would amount to a small percentage of the total attendance, or course, but it has been noted that more people come and go than stay. Matsuoka-roshi used to say, of some disciple that was no longer showing up, "Come-and-go type" or, "Wishy-washy type." I assume that these lost souls continue to practice in some form or other, hopefully maintaining their practice of meditation at least. And they probably retain an interest in reading about Zen and Buddhism. And I think it fair to say that if they had stayed, instead of moving on, we would have no place for most of them to sit. This is why I refer to the Zen sangha — and it is probably true of all communities — that it is like a cloud, constantly evaporating and recondensing, with new molecules of water, over time. People have real lives, other demands on their time and energy, and they always have. Master Dogen pointed out that the famous places in China were not typically comprised of large groups, but a small core of a half-dozen monks or so, with others coming and going from time to time. A cursory reading of the history of the formal transmission in Soto Zen makes this clear. Many of these encounters were short-term. So I don't worry too much about the many former members who are no longer in attendance. I do reach out from time to time if someone has suddenly disappeared who was diligently engaging on a frequent basis for some time, out of curiosity if nothing else. But I have enough to worry about, dealing with those who are presently practicing, as well as the constant flow of newcomers knocking at our doors. Most newcomers report that their first exposure to Zen is through reading — or, nowadays, listening — to a well-known teacher online, such as Thich Nhat Hahn, or Ram Dass. I had the pleasure of meeting Ram Dass in person in the 1960s, when I was teaching at the School of the Art Institute and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle campus. Some friends of mine who knew him told me he was travelling through the area, so I asked them to connect us, and invited him to speak to one of my classes at the U of I. I still have the 1/4-inch reel-to-reel audiotape somewhere of his talk, which was his classic trip to India, giving LSD to the guru tale. I plan to have it digitized so that those who are interested can listen to it. Not to be too much of a name-dropper — near to greatness, and all that — but he came to our apartment for dinner that evening and cooked chipatis and beans for us. My friends told me later that he had told them he thought I was one of the most spiritual people he had ever met. That may have been because my apartment was full of student work, models of geometric structure studies they had done in one of my design classes.Another factoid of interest, and one of those coincidences that we say are not in Zen — he was driving a Chrysler Airstream at that time, and several years earlier, before I had graduated from the Institute of Design, my best friend at that time and I attended a talk by Claes Oldenburg, the famous Swedish-American sculptor, at the University of Chicago, at which presentation, amongst other things, we saw his life-size soft sculpture of — you guessed it — a Chrysler Airstream. But I digress. I have never heard of anyone burning out from too much study of the dharma, or too much sitting in meditation, although some naturally grow tired of too much group discussion, especially when it slides down the slippery slope of intellectualism and erudition, as has been seen many times in the history of Zen. Ch'an Master Huineng famously made a public show of burning scrolls of sutras to make this point. Dogen held that both things can be true at the same time — that the written record also contains the dharma, even though subject to the limitations of language. No, usually, problems with burnout arise in the context of serving the Zen community. Community, or sangha, is the third leg of the stool of Buddhism, joining that of dharma, the study of the teachings of Buddhism and Zen; and most centrally, buddha, the practice of zazen, or the meditation of Buddha. This is what Zen claims to transmit. Where the rubber hits the road in terms of burnout is usually in an individual's efforts to serve the sangha in ways that demand what seems to them to be a lot of time, effort, and energy, with all the opportunity costs associated with any form of contributions of one's precious time to any cause. The third rail for most or all not-for-profit enterprises such as ASZC ...
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    18 m
  • 176: Connecting the Dots Part 3

    176: Connecting the Dots Part 3
    Jul 2 2025
    In this third installment of my "DharmaByte" column and "UnMind" podcast, exploring the general subject of Zen in our Times, we turn to the last of three suggested topics from Hokai Jeff Harper, Halifax-based publisher of the STO newsletter: • To everything there is a season• The wax and wane of householder zazen practice• What we are feeling right now IS impermanence manifesting itself Hokai somehow managed, perhaps unintentionally, to progressively home in on the central experience of Zen on three levels. Starting with the most universal sphere of our experience on Earth, the seasonality that is an effect of orbiting the sun for approximately 365 rotations of the planet; then down to the social sphere of our practice as householders; and finally into the realm of the intimate, up-close-and-personal sphere of consciousness itself. What I call the "singularity of Zen." As I mentioned in the last segment, we often seem to labor under a misconception that because we follow the lifestyle of householders, we cannot hope to penetrate to the fundamental meaning of the teachings of Buddhism. But Hokai's assertion puts the lie to this assumption. If the Dharma is simply pointing at the present reality that we are experiencing, lifestyle choices cannot possibly have a determinative or dispositive, causal relationship in terms of coming to realization of our buddha mind. What we are feeling now is impermanence manifesting itself, to quote the above quote. Not only what we are feeling now, but what we are seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting, as well as what we are thinking. Or reading, if you are reading this rather than listening to the podcast version. You might quibble with Hokai's construction - "impermanence manifesting itself" - as it suggests that "impermanence" is some sort of independent force capable of manifesting itself, rather than an attribute of the changing nature of the universe. But let's not let mere semantics distract from the message. We are witnessing the "endless, unremitting, unnamable, unthinkable buddha-dharma," as Master Dogen expressed it; and we bear witness to IT mainly through the dynamic of change, or impermanence. Otherwise, we would not register seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, or even thinking, at all. If nothing were changing, there could be no awareness of it. As I mentioned in the segment on householder practice, renunciation in Zen is a matter of seeing through the delusional aspect of living, not a matter of lifestyle. Discernment in Zen is like Sri Ramakrishna's analogy that, like a swan, we need to be able to drink milk mixed with water, and drink only the milk. Or as Master Tozan analogized: A silver bowl filled with snow A heron hidden in the moonTaken as similar, they are not the sameNot distinguished, their places are known So this refined awareness of the nondual nature of reality, termed "emptiness," as opposed to "form" or appearance, is so close to ordinary reality, or perceptual duality, that it is nearly indistinguishable — like white snow in a silver bowl, or a white heron and the full moon — white on white. Buddha taught that the discriminating mind imposes a "false stillness" on reality, tamping down the uninhibited flow of sensory data to a dull roar. This enables us to maintain our balance and negotiate a dynamic, 4-dimensional spacetime environment.This is part of the natural process of "individuation" that sets in once we are born, and culminates in the conception of the independent self, which is a fundamental category error, according to Buddhism. The original alienation that is our fall from grace. It is not that Buddhism claims there is no self whatever. There is a constructed self, and there is a true self, according to this model. The prevalent perception of separation as an incarnated being is not entirely delusional. But it is incomplete — reification of a separate self ignores the rest of the story, the fact that all beings are interconnected, co-arisen and co-dependent. The Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Arising, attributed to Shakyamuni, parses this coming-of-age story, slicing and dicing stages of development finely, like an Italian chef shaving garlic with a razorblade. This is similar to Master Dogen's fine discernment of reality — from a perspective uniting space, or existence, and time — as articulated in Uji—Being-Time, explored in some detail in a prior podcast. What he referred to as the "fine mind of Nirvana," or the "subtle mind of Nirvana." Master Sengcan, third Chinese patriarch after Bodhidharma and his successor Huike, points to something similar in Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind: In this world of Suchness there is neither self nor other-than-selfTo come into harmony with this realityJust simply say when doubt arises: "not two"In this "not two" nothing is separate nothing is excludedNo matter when or where Enlightenment means entering this truthAnd this truth is beyond extension ...
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    19 m
  • 175: Connecting the Dots

    175: Connecting the Dots
    Jun 4 2025
    As I mentioned in the last installment, when thinking about content for the next Dharma Byte or UnMind podcast, I turn to my collaborators for inspiration: Hokai Jeff Harper, publisher of the newsletter, and Shinjin Larry Little, producer of the podcast. Jeff responded to a recent call for suggested topics with: • To everything there is a season• The wax and wane of householder zazen practice• What we are feeling right now IS impermanence manifesting itself In the last episode I delved into the first of these three, the seeming seasonality of everything as a universal principle. We might take a moment to remind ourselves that seasonality is also considered natural, as the waxing and waning of the four seasons. And, while somewhat arbitrary as a concept, is considered causal in terms of the natural sciences of biology, botany, and even psychology — as in "seasonal affective disorder." Arbitrary in the sense that, as Master Dogen says, "You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring." Now that we have gotten off the planet, any middle-schooler knows that the root causes of the seasons is a universal phenomenon. Unless they are being home-schooled by a flat-earther, that is. In this segment we will take up the second, the waxing and waning of householder practice, moving the discussion to the social level. Which, of course, is part and parcel of our personal sphere of activity and influence. Whether Hokai meant to point out the usual periodic waxing and waning of our personal commitment to meditation in the context of the many distractions assailing your average householder; or a more societal angle on how householder engagement has grown and diminished over time through the various Eastern countries of origin, compared to its prevalence and intensity in the West modern times, I am not sure. I think it may be more instructive to consider the alternative — monastic practice — and how it colors our perspective on our own, personal options for pursuing the dharma in the midst of life. Zen householders often harbor a misconception that because we are householders — and not monastics — that we cannot hope to penetrate to the fundamental meaning of the teachings of Buddhism. This seems to be a widely shared meme in the Western culture, perhaps particularly in America. And it is based on a fundamental misconception — namely that the social sphere of Zen trumps the personal sphere —that you can tell a book by its cover, when it comes to Zen practice. But you can't. Because we interpret the history of Zen Buddhism as primarily monastic, from its inception in India and its transmission through China, Korea, Japan and the Far East, we presume that the approach of material renunciation — leaving the householder life for that of the mendicant monk, nun, or hermit, or wandering on pilgrimage — is the most effective way, the only way, of recovering our Original Nature, or Buddha Mind. While traditional prescriptions for practice definitely include divesting ourselves of our dependency upon, and predilection for, the pleasures and problems of our times, the renunciation recommended in Zen is not limited to merely rejecting and replacing one lifestyle for another. It is more a matter of seeing through the delusional aspect of any way of living. Including monasticism. This is true spiritual poverty. Master Dogen articulated four levels of renunciation that members of his monastic community were either able or unable to embrace, which I have discussed in more detail elsewhere. They range from the ability or inability to relinquish attachment to family, home, inheritance, et cetera, to the inability or ability to relinquish our own opinions and biases regarding our own reality, regardless of outer appearances. The latter — Dogen's highest level of renunciation — would apply equally to monastic or householder. So apparently the main difference between the two lifestyle choices is that the former is relatively simpler compared to the complexities of the latter. In terms of the ability to realize the truth of Buddhism, lifestyle is just another form of pomp and circumstance. If you find your practice — by which we usually mean meditation — is waxing and waning beyond your intentions and control, you might want to take a radical departure. Stop. Quit, with all the negative connotations that may have in our goal-oriented culture and society. Admit that you have failed, once again. Or rationalize that Zen may work for others, but it does not work for you. In doing so — in "not doing Zen" — you will confirm your bias, and prove to yourself that, like everything else you have tried in life, it just didn't get the job done. Zen did not live up to your expectations. Now that you have resolved that untidy business you can get on with your life. Good luck with that. It turns out that this kind of discernment, that Zen is something we started doing, so it ...
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    15 m
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