Not Thinking Ill of the Three Treasures


From a talk given by Roshi Eve Myonen Marko during the Renewal of Vows ceremony of August 18.

The 10th grave precept is:
Honoring my life as an instrument of peacemaking. This is the practice of Not Thinking Ill of the Three Treasures. I will recognize myself and others as manifestations of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

I enjoy talking about this precept. I like to remember that it’s the last of the Grave Precepts, and that rather than seeing myself as the one who broke the first nine, it encourages me to honor my life as the Three Treasures—as Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, to always have that confidence that I can’t stray from the path because I am the path. You and I are our own respective harbor, our lives are our refuge.

The temptation of cynicism is often there. Thinking ill of the Three Treasures is very profound cynicism. What does it mean to think ill of the Buddha? It means thinking ill of liberation, of awakening from delusion. It means denying that there is liberation from suffering. This has a profound effect not only on the person thinking this but also on the people around her. My family of origin was not a happy one. Since we were religious Jews we’d go to the synagogue every Saturday, and on the way back we’d walk along other families who were going home, smiling and cheerful and happy. One Saturday, walking this way, I said to my mother, “How lucky all these people are. They’re so happy!” And my mother said, “No they’re not. They pretend to be happy in public, but inside their homes it’s very different.” This statement had a strong impact on me. I believed her for many years, well into adulthood, and it influenced my hopes and beliefs about what was possible in marriage and family.

The same is true about denying the power of the dharma, of the teachings. I do this often. I have never been an enthusiastic reader of Buddhist texts or books on Buddhism, and I often mutter about all the Buddhist books that are now available. Yet I once studied a long version of the Heart Sutra, and in the middle of reading a chapter on the Bodhisattva I found myself crying uncontrollably at the extraordinary love and selflessness that the words pointed to. Beside, where would I be without the dharma in my life—as a living force, as the lamp that shines the way day and night?

Finally, there’s thinking ill of Sangha, which to me amounts to denying the power and life I get from being among this group of practitioners, the inspiration I get from others’ dedication. To what? To being human, to reaching into the deepest part of ourselves for the strength to not react, to not be angry, to not add more mischief to an already tumultuous world, and behave like a responsible human being. Mahatma Gandhi mentioned a case where two brothers fall out and decide not to speak to one another, causing a schism in the family. It’s the kind of thing the media loves to talk about. But in truth, he said, that happens very rarely. Much more common is the case when two brothers fight, then talk it out, apologize to one another, and find the way to go on together, as a family. Nobody reports on that, he wrote. For me, every time someone decides to be patient rather than impatient, to forgive rather than stay resentful, to open the heart rather than close off, the Sangha emerges.

So why are we cynical? Why do we think ill of things? One reason is laziness. If we’re tired or crabby or have a stomach ache, we reach inside and grab the first thing we could get a hold of, and say, Life sucks, This will never work, I don’t know why I bother. We repeat the same clichés over and over again, and then we believe them.

So please, don’t be cynical. Don’t be cool, don’t pretend that nothing matters. Don’t lose trust in yourself and in your own joy. Don’t think ill of the Three Treasures. Relish your life.

The Search for MeaningFrom a dharma talk given by Roshi Eve Myonen Marko on June 9

We’re all doing koan practice. Whether we’re dealing with health issues, relationships, family or work, we’re all working on the koans of our lives. One of Roshi Bernie’s favorite koans is What’s the Deal Here?All of us are working on that koan, trying to penetrate the essence of our lives as deeply as we can.

We say that the seeker is the very thing that is being sought. The One is looking for the One. Dogen’s verse on the Precept of Not Being Stingy says:

One phrase, one verse–that is the ten thousand things and one hundred grasses;
one dharma, one realization–that is all Buddhas and Ancestral Teachers.
Therefore, from the beginning, nothing has been withheld.

In the world of one dharma, one realization, the one who’s ill, the one who’s tired, the one who practices, the one who works, the one who’s at the beach, the one who pollutes and the one who hunts and kills–they are all equal. In that world–the world of the Buddha–there’s no difference.

And there’s the world of the ten thousand things and one hundred grasses, the world of the Bodhisattva. Roshi Genki Kahn uses the following words as parts of the vows undertaken by his priests: I will open the Gate of Enlightenment, stand just outside that threshold hearing the cries of existence, and usher all creation through before entering. This is a beautiful description of the way of the Bodhisattva who chooses to remain outside, in the world of the ten thousand things.

And what is the Bodhisattva ushering all creation to? What gate is this? We are helping everyone realize that our life as it is, is the enlightened way. That our judgments of wrong, bad, unpleasant or unfair are simply that–judgments. They have nothing to do with the way things are. As Einstein said, Behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp.

Many things happen in the world of the one hundred grasses. A drought occurs. The grass dries; animals starve. The land becomes desert. Mothers run out of milk and babies die. The way of the Bodhisattva, of standing outside the threshold and bearing witness to the way of the world, can lead us to despair. Life begins to feel meaningless.

But what is meaning? Meaning is something that gives coherence to the chaos of life. Our search for meaning is what brings us into the zendo, and it’s that very search for meaning that keeps us floundering and faltering. When we ask the question–What’s the meaning of it all?– the only answer we can give comes out of our idea of coherence and chaos. If we live our life always looking for the meaning behind it then we’re saying that life as it is is simply not good enough to be lived, we need to have our story around it. We’re like a small kernel of corn hiding in its husk, making up beautiful theories, articulating noble feelings, looking for meaning–all within a cornhusk.

When we’re the one dharma, one realization, we are the brown grass and the green, the merciful rains and the merciless sun, we’re everything. A mother doesn’t ask what’s the meaning of her baby. It’s part of her. I don’t ask the meaning of my arm or my leg, it’s all me. I only ask the meaning of something that I perceive as Other. When I experience the world as all one dharma, nothing is Other and the search for meaning ends.

Turning PointsThis talk was given by Roshi Eve Myonen Marko in a one-day retreat on January 14, the day before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday.

We’ve dedicated this one-day retreat to Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow. I want to talk about a particular night in King’s life, a dark night of the soul that he said changed him completely.

He was about 26 years old and in his first year as minister in a church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was married and already had one or two children. And one day a woman by the name of Rosa Parks, a seamstress, boarded a bus to go home after work. She took a seat in one of the bus’s middle rows. At that time the segregated bus system had 4 rows in the front of each bus for whites, some middle rows, and then the back rows for black people. Black people, who hade up 75% of the bus ridership, sat in the back rows. They could also sit in middle rows until a white person wanted to sit there, at which time the entire rowÑnot just one black personÑhad to get up so that one white person could sit in a middle row. That day a white person came to sit in Rosa Parks’ middle row. As he stood there, 3 out of four blacks sitting in that row got up from their seat. The fourth, Rosa Parks, did not. The bus driver stopped the bus, walked back towards her and told her to get up. She refused. He said he would call the police, and she told him to go right ahead and do that.

That night the ministers of the various churches got together to plan a bus strike. At that point the purpose of the strike wasn’t to get the buses integrated, that came later. They had more modest objectives, such as resolving the issue of the middle rows. The more veteran church leaders competed and disagreed with each other, so they asked King to take over. He was too young and too new to have enemies, so he was the compromise choice. At that time no one thought the strike would last longer that 1-2 days. Black people depended on the buses to get to work. They were hoping to hoping toget one or two concessions from the bus company before the strike totally fizzled.

But that’s not how it turned out. There was almost 100% participation in the strike by Montgomery’s black population, not just for 1-2 days but for the 14 months that the strike continued. They used taxis, carpools and walked to work. As the days passed the bus company was ready to make concessions, but the city council became more intransigent than ever. In the meantime the national press had taken notice and had descended on Montgomery. And what had originally been thought of as a small action became a national movement, making world headlines. And King was the spokesman for that movement.

He was unprepared for that. Nothing he’d ever done or learned had prepared him for this. He received threats on his life and on his family, and finally his home was firebombed. They saved themselves, but he knew they were all at terrible risk. So shortly after the firebombing, with the strike still going full steam and the tempers getting ugly, he couldn’t sleep one night. And according to his account he went down to his kitchen and sat down with his head in his hands, feeling fear and despair at what could happen to him and his family. That could have been the breaking point for King. He could have given in to fear and depression, all of which he was feeling that night. Instead it became a turning point for him, and at the end of that night he had lost his fear and become more committed than ever to a civil rights movement and his role in it.

What happened? How does a breaking point become a turning point?

First there’s the great doubt. And in this case, it meant the realization that the old way of doing things couldn’t work anymore. Whatever he learned at Morehouse College, whatever he’d seen his father do in his church, none of that was relevant now. He had to let go of it; it wasn’t valuable to him anymore. We sometimes refer to that as Not-Knowing, which is the First Tenet of the Zen Peacemakers.

And then there’s the element of faith. Martin had faith in God. What do we have faith in? I have faith in the oneness of life. Sometimes I say that I have faith in the Dharma, but what I mean by that is that I have faith in the oneness or interdependence of life. In the morning liturgy that we do here during the week we have a third service, Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo. We dedicate it to those who are ill or suffering, and the dedication starts: The absolute light, luminous throughout the universe, unfathomable excellence penetrating everywhere. There’s an unfathomable excellence that penetrates everywhere, unfathomable because we can’t see it or access it using our usual dualistic mind. Whenever this devoted invocation is sent forth, it is perceived and subtly answered. How do we know that it is always answered? Because we’re one. So the very moment that I put out a need or request, there is an answer. If life was two that wouldn’t necessarily be the case. But life is one, so at the very moment that there’s a call, there is also a response.

It may not be the response we want or are looking for. That’s why we say it’s subtle. My Buddhist name is Myonen, and myo means subtle. It’s so subtle that it’s right in front of my face. An answer comes up and it’s right in front of our face. Maybe it’s that we should get up and do the next thing: take care of the crying baby, make ourselves a cup of tea, clean the house, go to work. We sometimes envisage some deep transcendent voice giving us THE ANSWER, but often the answer is subtle, something right in front of our face, just the next step. That’s what we have faith in: the oneness of life that guarantees an answer at the very moment that we have a need.

King had faith in it, trusted it without necessarily understanding it, and surrendered to it. His turning point came out of his deep doubt coupled with faith. One without the other would not have done it. He renounced his attachment to things as he understood them and went with the answers that life brought him, that God brought him. He said that he heard the voice of God tell him that he was not alone, and that God will protect him. Of course he was not alone, he was everything! How could he be alone?

Some 14 years later he was killed while standing on a balcony outside a Memphis hotel room. Did that mean that God had failed him? Did that mean that God did not protect him? We know that he was indeed depressed that last year of his life. In that last year he went against the advice of his most trusted friends and came out against the Vietnam War. They had told him to stay with what’s safe, civil rights for blacks. But he decided to come out against the war because he’d begun to see that racism was just one severe manifestation, but still a manifestation, of a more basic and ingrained system whose other manifestations were poverty and war, which affected blacks as well as whites. So he began to speak against that system, not just racism per se. During that year, depressed and feeling once again at risk of losing his life, he talked about the mountaintop. He said that he had seen it, but would not get there. He promised his audience that they would get there even if he would not, they had to go on. What is that mountaintop? Who gets there, who does not?

King was highly unusual, and in some ways not at all unusual. We always think that leaders such as him are special and highly gifted. But Gandhi said of himself that he was a very average person, and that any other average person who was ready to make the effort could do what he’d done. Many of us sitting here today are Caucasian and middle class. We rarely feel the despair that King felt that night; we trust our police and court system to protect us, at least minimally. But with all our privileges and defenses, even we have our bad nights in the kitchen, the dark night of the soul when we don’t know what to do. That’s when we either have breaking points or turning points. Are we giving in to despair, or are we giving in to not-knowing? And in that space of not-knowing, can we really listen to what comes up?

We’ve dedicated this one-day retreat to Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow. I want to talk about a particular night in King’s life, a dark night of the soul that he said changed him completely.

He was about 26 years old and in his first year as minister in a church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was married and already had one or two children. And one day a woman by the name of Rosa Parks, a seamstress, boarded a bus to go home after work. She took a seat in one of the bus’s middle rows. At that time the segregated bus system had 4 rows in the front of each bus for whites, some middle rows, and then the back rows for black people. Black people, who hade up 75% of the bus ridership, sat in the back rows. They could also sit in middle rows until a white person wanted to sit there, at which time the entire rowÑnot just one black personÑhad to get up so that one white person could sit in a middle row. That day a white person came to sit in Rosa Parks’ middle row. As he stood there, 3 out of four blacks sitting in that row got up from their seat. The fourth, Rosa Parks, did not. The bus driver stopped the bus, walked back towards her and told her to get up. She refused. He said he would call the police, and she told him to go right ahead and do that.

That night the ministers of the various churches got together to plan a bus strike. At that point the purpose of the strike wasn’t to get the buses integrated, that came later. They had more modest objectives, such as resolving the issue of the middle rows. The more veteran church leaders competed and disagreed with each other, so they asked King to take over. He was too young and too new to have enemies, so he was the compromise choice. At that time no one thought the strike would last longer that 1-2 days. Black people depended on the buses to get to work. They were hoping to hoping toget one or two concessions from the bus company before the strike totally fizzled.

But that’s not how it turned out. There was almost 100% participation in the strike by Montgomery’s black population, not just for 1-2 days but for the 14 months that the strike continued. They used taxis, carpools and walked to work. As the days passed the bus company was ready to make concessions, but the city council became more intransigent than ever. In the meantime the national press had taken notice and had descended on Montgomery. And what had originally been thought of as a small action became a national movement, making world headlines. And King was the spokesman for that movement.

He was unprepared for that. Nothing he’d ever done or learned had prepared him for this. He received threats on his life and on his family, and finally his home was firebombed. They saved themselves, but he knew they were all at terrible risk. So shortly after the firebombing, with the strike still going full steam and the tempers getting ugly, he couldn’t sleep one night. And according to his account he went down to his kitchen and sat down with his head in his hands, feeling fear and despair at what could happen to him and his family. That could have been the breaking point for King. He could have given in to fear and depression, all of which he was feeling that night. Instead it became a turning point for him, and at the end of that night he had lost his fear and become more committed than ever to a civil rights movement and his role in it.

What happened? How does a breaking point become a turning point?

First there’s the great doubt. And in this case, it meant the realization that the old way of doing things couldn’t work anymore. Whatever he learned at Morehouse College, whatever he’d seen his father do in his church, none of that was relevant now. He had to let go of it; it wasn’t valuable to him anymore. We sometimes refer to that as Not-Knowing, which is the First Tenet of the Zen Peacemakers.

And then there’s the element of faith. Martin had faith in God. What do we have faith in? I have faith in the oneness of life. Sometimes I say that I have faith in the Dharma, but what I mean by that is that I have faith in the oneness or interdependence of life. In the morning liturgy that we do here during the week we have a third service, Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo. We dedicate it to those who are ill or suffering, and the dedication starts: The absolute light, luminous throughout the universe, unfathomable excellence penetrating everywhere. There’s an unfathomable excellence that penetrates everywhere, unfathomable because we can’t see it or access it using our usual dualistic mind. Whenever this devoted invocation is sent forth, it is perceived and subtly answered. How do we know that it is always answered? Because we’re one. So the very moment that I put out a need or request, there is an answer. If life was two that wouldn’t necessarily be the case. But life is one, so at the very moment that there’s a call, there is also a response.

It may not be the response we want or are looking for. That’s why we say it’s subtle. My Buddhist name is Myonen, and myo means subtle. It’s so subtle that it’s right in front of my face. An answer comes up and it’s right in front of our face. Maybe it’s that we should get up and do the next thing: take care of the crying baby, make ourselves a cup of tea, clean the house, go to work. We sometimes envisage some deep transcendent voice giving us THE ANSWER, but often the answer is subtle, something right in front of our face, just the next step. That’s what we have faith in: the oneness of life that guarantees an answer at the very moment that we have a need.

King had faith in it, trusted it without necessarily understanding it, and surrendered to it. His turning point came out of his deep doubt coupled with faith. One without the other would not have done it. He renounced his attachment to things as he understood them and went with the answers that life brought him, that God brought him. He said that he heard the voice of God tell him that he was not alone, and that God will protect him. Of course he was not alone, he was everything! How could he be alone?

Some 14 years later he was killed while standing on a balcony outside a Memphis hotel room. Did that mean that God had failed him? Did that mean that God did not protect him? We know that he was indeed depressed that last year of his life. In that last year he went against the advice of his most trusted friends and came out against the Vietnam War. They had told him to stay with what’s safe, civil rights for blacks. But he decided to come out against the war because he’d begun to see that racism was just one severe manifestation, but still a manifestation, of a more basic and ingrained system whose other manifestations were poverty and war, which affected blacks as well as whites. So he began to speak against that system, not just racism per se. During that year, depressed and feeling once again at risk of losing his life, he talked about the mountaintop. He said that he had seen it, but would not get there. He promised his audience that they would get there even if he would not, they had to go on. What is that mountaintop? Who gets there, who does not?

King was highly unusual, and in some ways not at all unusual. We always think that leaders such as him are special and highly gifted. But Gandhi said of himself that he was a very average person, and that any other average person who was ready to make the effort could do what he’d done. Many of us sitting here today are Caucasian and middle class. We rarely feel the despair that King felt that night; we trust our police and court system to protect us, at least minimally. But with all our privileges and defenses, even we have our bad nights in the kitchen, the dark night of the soul when we don’t know what to do. That’s when we either have breaking points or turning points. Are we giving in to despair, or are we giving in to not-knowing? And in that space of not-knowing, can we really listen to what comes up?

Talk in Honor of Sandra Jishu Angyo HolmesThis talk was given by Roshi Eve Myonen Marko in a one-day retreat on March 18, 2006

Today’s talk is a reminiscence about the woman whose picture is up on the altar. Monday will be the 8th anniversary of the passing of Sandra Jishu Angyo Holmes, the Co-Founder of the Zen Peacemaker Order. Jishu was her Buddhist name. Angyo, which means peacemaker, was a name which members of the Zen Peacemaker Order received when they were installed in the Order.

She was born in California in 1941. She came out East, went to Columbia University and became a biochemist. She did early research in the AIDS disease that was only then being identified and diagnosed. And she was a seeker. At first she pursued Vedanta and followed the teachings of Ramana Maharshi. She went to visit his ashram in India and continued to practice in New York, even teaching herself Sanskrit. Finally, around 1981, she left her work and came to live at the Zen Community of New York in Riverdale. In addition to a regular schedule of meditation, study and retreats, the Community had already begun a business, a bakery, and its next steps were in the direction of social action. That is where I met her 5 years later when I, too, came to ZCNY.

I remember her as slim, very pale, pretty, dark haired, and overworked. She was highly intelligent and deeply committed to the practice. She ordained as a priest and in 1986, when we started our first social action ministry, the Greyston Family Inn, she was named its director. The mission of the Greyston Family Inn was to build apartments for homeless families, mostly single mothers with children. We lived in the city of Yonkers in Westchester County, which at that time had the highest per capita rate of homelessness in the country. We had almost no money and no professionals in the field. The Yonkers community did not welcome us right away and we were building everything from scratch. It took us 4 years just to get the first housing project (18 apartments) purchased, renovated, and open to families.

But for Jishu other things were more difficult. In many ways she was a hermit. She said about herself that she’d always wanted to be a nun and practice in simple seclusion. When she came to live in ZCNY she was thrust into a communal setting, living in the midst of a large group of people in one house. And when she became the head of GFI there were people around her morning, noon and night: not just Zen practitioners like her, but construction workers with immigration problems, the local ethnic community that frowned on the strange white Zen people living in their midst, the creditors who called day in and day out asking for their money, the New York government bureaucracy, and most of all the single mothers with children, from backgrounds of poverty, drugs and alcohol, whom she was trying to help. By temperament and he was not sociable or gregarious, but rather shy and timid, and often worried that she was not likeable. By choice, she took it all on.

I remember coming to work one Saturday morning. We’d begun to hire local people in the organization, some of whom never had office jobs and needed training in office skills and equipment. I had trained a receptionist and asked her to make many copies of a newsletter to send out. The following morning I came in to discover that it was a mess. The pages were in the wrong order and they were upside down. I was tired, frustrated and angry. Jishu, who was then my supervisor, was the only one there. I walked over to her and said, “Look at this job. I don’t know what do anymore. How are we supposed to get anything done with so little help?” She thought a minute, then said quietly, “It helps to know why you’re here. You see all these things?” She motioned to the financial reports, construction drawings, and the many files on her desk. “I could do this with one hand tied behind my back. It’s important work, but that’s not the reason I’m here. The reason I’m here is to be with people.”

I have here quotes from her journals which were made public after she died: My basic form of spirituality is faith in the unknown. I believe that everything that comes into my life is for me to work with spiritually. Zazen is my ideal practice although I have to struggle with myself every day to do it. My spirituality is an inheritance from my father. He has been a seeker all of his life but could never find peace. He could never see that he is everything that happens to him. His whole world seems to be a struggle against the enemy, both internal and external. I find that my own struggles are an integral part of my spiritual path and that my awakening is very, very gradual.

At some point it became clear that she was on a path towards dharma transmission and becoming a Zen teacher. She had little faith in herself as a teacher; she often said that she was afraid of misleading people. I am trying to keep a phantom self alive and the further I proceed towards Shiho (dharma transmission) the more precarious the existence of that self is. Maybe it has to be killed. I have to kill the idea that there could be such a thing as realization or awakening for me. Everything just as it is leaves me with just who I am, which has never been acceptable to me.

We can talk about realization, enlightenment, and dharma transmission, but those are just ideas. What is Zen? Life as it is. And as she wrote, life as it is leaves me with me just as as I am: Jishu as she is, Eve as she is, Kiyo as he is, Basia as she is. Can we accept that? Can we accept ourselves just as we are?

I believe that in the end she learned to accept herself in the way many of us learn to accept ourselves even in the pits of our days, when we really hit bottom. It’s at those times that we look at ourselves and say: With all my faults, with all my failures, with all my doubts, I am a vessel of the dharma. And as such, I can serve. I will continue to have my doubts and misgivings, and I can serve.

And she served. She built apartment buildings and day care centers. When we got involved in AIDS work she did the initial research to get us a Certificate of Need from the government. That AIDS center is today a national model in this country for effective, compassionate work with people with AIDS. She began to teach and ultimately co-founded the Zen Peacemaker order. And she did all that with doubts and struggle. And the struggle was transparent to all. When you lead a public life you don’t have the luxury of retreating to a private space and having your struggle all to yourself. It’s right out thereÑthe depression, the doubts, the misgivingsÑvisible to the entire world. And she kept on going. She practiced a lot, she realized a lot, and some of the doubts remained, for that was part of who she was.

While working with a prison inmate, she wrote: Just as the Buddhist who said to the hot dog vendor, Make me one with everything, the good news is that you are one with everything. Just as you can’t fall outside of God’s loving embrace, you can’t fall outside the Kingdom of God, which truly is within you. Whether you are in a state of bliss or in the profoundest hell, you are not anathema. All your paths are superintended, you have always been on the Path. You can’t fall off it. Everything is conspiring to lead you home to experience you true nature. Everything you are doing now, including all the mess-ups and screw-ups and mistakes are exactly the right thing for you to learn what you need to know to move along your path. All the causes and conditions of your unique life have brought you to this moment. And given your particular set of causes and conditions you have always done your best.

She died 8 years ago, just a few days short of her 57th birthday. Had she lived she’d be approaching her 65th birthday now. Towards the end of her days she wrote: I want results instead of process. What a trap. As I create and listen, I will be led. As I create and listen, I will be led. As I create and listen, I will be led. The process takes care of itself. Just listen. As I create and listen, I will be led.

It’s so simple. It’s life as it is, and if it’s life as it is then it must be me as I am. I don’t have to add anything extra; I don’t have to worry too much, I don’t have to analyze or plan or think, though all these things have their place. As I create and listen, I will be led. I just have to listen. Just listen.

On the Saturday Between Good Friday and Easter SundayThis talk was given by Roshi Eve Myonen Marko in April, 2006

Last Tuesday we began to examine what emptiness means. Emptiness, of course, does not refer to a void, but rather to no self-identity. Some years ago I began to see emptiness as relationship. The more we have a fixed sense of who we are, the harder it is to be in relationship. Emptiness points to a radical form of relationship where we become a space of resonance, of receptivity and deep connection. The less we cling to our self-identification, the more responsive we are to the universe. At that moment we function as though we are that universe, which indeed we are. And that’s the most intimate relationship of all.

Last week today we celebrated the birth of the Buddha. Three days ago was the first night of Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom, when an entire people turned their back on slavery and went into freedom. What is a deeper form of slavery than the ego-clinging that causes the world to shrink so much, and us with it?

Some 2000 years ago a man celebrated the feast of liberation. And in the middle of that meal he turned to his disciples and told them that one of them will betray him. That night he walked in Gethsemane, which is now a beautiful park in the valley beneath the Old City of Jerusalem, and contemplated what would happen to him. Then he was taken, tried, flogged, and paraded along the streets of the city. People lined up to laugh and jeer at him, manifesting the forces of attachment, of greed, envy, and jealousy, of anger, fear, and arrogance. They crucified him on Good Friday, which we marked yesterday.

Imagine what his disciples must have felt. They’d left their work, they’d left their families, to follow him. They’d renounced the world much as the Buddha’s monks did 2,500 years ago in order to walk a path with their teacher towards enlightenment. Only this teacher was not given alms and gifts, this teacher was crucified.

And on Easter Sunday, which we celebrate tomorrow, he arose. Not just his spirit or his soul, but his body too was taken up to heaven. What does that mean? One way to look at it is that he completely realized his True Nature. Before he’d believed it. He’d walked in the desert and had a vision of it, but now there was no doubt. There was no separation among body, mind, or spirit, no separation anywhere. Only Buddha Nature. And on that Sunday He appeared to his apostles and told them to go out and spread the Good News. And the Good News is that there’s only Buddha Nature.

What is Buddha Nature? A few years ago I received an Easter holiday E-greeting from a Palestinian peacemaker in Bethlehem named Niveen. When I opened the card the screen showed a big, gray stone wall, nothing else. Then, with a loud creaking sound, a rock swung open and fell to the ground, revealing an opening. That opening is emptiness. Not a diminution, but an opening. Not a void, but boundless space.

In Passover and Easter there are festive meals to celebrate the miracles of liberation and resurrection. And we sit. We sit because every moment is resurrection, every moment is slavery and every moment is freedom. So how do we live? We just live this moment. When we become this moment, we also become a space of receptivity and response. It’s spring and young birds are all around us. When you watch them, you notice that the slightest breeze causes their wings and feathers to flutter, and you feel that they’re in deep resonance with the basic rhythm of nature, with the basic rhythm of new birth. Life gives us the opportunity to be a space of resonance, of receptivity and complete responsiveness moment after moment. Each time we take it, the miracle of freedom and resurrection occurs.

How Deep Is Your Love?From a dharma talk given by Roshi Eve Myonen Marko in Summer Sesshin, July 2008

We’re at sesshin, during which we gather the minds: the minds of others as well as the pieces of our own. While the group starts out feeling fragmented, with everyone in their own space, over time we become one. We will experience this by the end of sesshin.

But in the beginning it’s difficult; in the beginning I often wish I could sit alone. In some ways that’s easier: I can follow my own schedule, eat what I want, rest when I want. Most important, I don’t have to deal with other people. Because of course, it’s always the others who are messing up.

At the same time, our goal is to raise the Bodhi Mind. To awaken with others, for the sake of others. People wish to serve. When we began our jukai studies and we went around asking people why they were doing precepts study, the one motivation that was common to every person in the group was a wish to serve.

All this comes together in this sesshin whose two main themes are Transmission of Precepts and Loving Action, which was the focus of the two-month Intensive led by Jim Daikan Bastien. During that time we worked with a group of social action koans from Daikan’s real life of social service combined with a traditional koan or Zen story. The last pairing of these was titled How Deep is Your Love?

Daikan’s Social Action Koan:
Lou was the Community Director for a residential treatment program comprised of 10 group homes, each one staffed with a live-in married couple called Family-Teachers. Jeff and Becky were one of the best Family-Teacher couples in the program and lived with 10 kids in their group home. Billy ran away from Jeff and Becky’s group home six times in a month, causing considerable disruption for everyone in the home, including Jeff and Becky. At a Family-Meeting, the other kids in the group home told Jeff and Becky they should kick Billy out of the program as he was taking valuable time and attention away from them. Having finally reached their limit, Jeff and Becky met with Lou and told him to immediately terminate Billy from the program or they were going to resign. Who should stay and who should go?

101 Zen Stories – Case 45: Right and Wrong
When Bankei held his weeks of meditation, pupils from many parts of Japan came to attend. During one of these gatherings, a pupil was caught stealing. The matter was reported to Bankei with the request that the culprit be expelled. Bankei ignored the case. Later the pupil was caught in a similar act, and again Bankei disregarded the matter. This angered the other pupils, who drew up a petition asking for the dismissal of the thief; otherwise they would leave in a body. When Bankei had read the petition he called everyone before him. “You are wise brothers,” he told them. “You know what is right and what is not right. You may go somewhere else to study if you wish, but this poor brother does not even know right from wrong. Who will teach him if I do not? I am going to keep him here even if all the rest of you leave.” A torrent of tears cleansed the face of the brother who had stolen. All desire to steal vanished.

Who goes, and who stays? Taking effective action usually means making up rules, but someone will always fall in the cracks. Then we have to make a tough decision. We get angry and defensive. Sometimes we blame that person because we can’t help her. We also get angry because we see our limits, the areas we can’t or don’t wish to deal with.

How deep is your love? What is love? Often, love is made up of many things that are in conflict according to my dualistic mind. Donna Haraway writes that love is often found where simultaneously true and unharmonizable things meet. It’s found as much in the place of disappointment as in the place of joy, but our dualistic mind can only accept the latter. By its very nature our mind can’t find love in areas that don’t feel good.

We often talk of emptiness. How do I experience emptiness? There are different ways, but one way is to let your heart break. When you do you are encountering the frontiers of your mind, the boundaries of what’s acceptable, beyond which the only voice you hear says: This can’t be. This should not happen. There, in that very place that the mind rejects as impossible, where the mind/heart breaks, where we realize the ungraspability of our life, there is where we find love.

The Gift of FearlessnessFrom a talk given by Roshi Eve Myonen Marko on the Dana Paramita on September 12, 2009.

Recently I read a brief talk by Sharon Salzberg, in which she said, “There is always trauma in the room.” You don’t have to be a war veteran or a survivor of abuse, trauma is in the room. And with trauma comes fear.

The dana paramita, the paramita of giving, is about the giving of fearlessness. One way to do that is by showing fearlessness. When we sit we let go of thoughts, eschewing fear and distraction, and give ourselves the gift of our own life. We let go of protective mechanisms and the world comes in. We let go of separation, and the riches of the universe pour in. Off the cushion we practice and live in the same way, as though nothing is missing. Anytime we think we’re poor or we withdraw in fear, it reflects a fixation on some aspect of poverty or suffering. Life lived out of that attachment is narrow and fearful. Living from the moment, living out of letting go, is a gift of fearlessness to others.

There is another way of giving fearlessness that is quite different. It’s sharing the fear and vulnerability, showing the trauma as it’s being healed. This is a way of giving not from our strength, not from what we have a lot of, but rather from what we perceive as weakness, from our own vulnerability, from the side we prefer to keep private.

Ordinarily we like to show the world our best side, the side that is successful, that manages, that’s healthy and under control. But there’s always trauma in the room. We have another treasure trove from which to give, and that is the sharing of our failures, of our struggles to remain connected in a real way to ourselves and others, of trust in the big picture. It’s like presenting a koan, and the koan I’m presenting is my own life, including what I label as its underbelly. Instead of keeping weaknesses and doubts secret I share them, I present the day-in, day-out work that I do in engaging with them.

One sees that in council, when we’re asked to be spontaneous and speak from the heart. Those who do that often speak hesitantly, as if hearing the words for the first time, working out what they have to say as they say it. That, too, is a model of fearlessness. Natalie Goldberg says that when you write, don’t be afraid to be the worst writer in the world. Don’t be afraid to present incorrect grammar or spelling mistakes, don’t be afraid to be repetitive or tentative or garbled. Just write. That’s fearlessness.

It means not hiding, not posturing, not pretending. The Dalai Lama has said that if you understand the doctrine of dependent origination, you understand the dharma. If there’s this, then there’s that. If this happened, then that happened. Everything is interdependent and co-arising. How do you teach it? By being it. By facing our lives cleanly and transparently. By not hiding or holding secrets.

Giving possessions is often easier for me than giving the dharma, which means sharing all of me. It’s easier to give homeless people money than introducing yourself by name; it’s easier to write a check to a distant charity than go into our own schools and slums. It’s easier to give a workshop on something I’ve mastered than to share something I struggle with. It’s easier to know than to bear witness.

What to Talk AboutFrom a talk given by Sensei Eve Myonen Marko on June 13, 2009.

Whether we know it or not, we develop our own life’s collection of koans. Here is one of mine:
Eve asked Zen Master Bernie early one morning, “What should I speak about today?”
Zen Master Bernie asked, “The way we make love?”

Appreciatory Verse:
Blue morning, gray morning.
Leaves open to the sun.
Crows everywhere, looking for roadkill.

This koan is about expression.  Or is it about the lack of expression?

What should I speak about today?  We all have moments when we feel there’s nothing to say.  We open our eyes, we look around, and no special insights or perceptions appear.  We feel talked out, written out, thought out.  There are traditional koans that deal with this.  Nor is this something that just happens to me.  Probably many of us here come to a point when we feel there’s nothing to say.  Things are what they are, and any expression feels superfluous.

Bernie replies: The way we make love?

Writers know that it’s hard to write about making love.  What do you say about it?  If you say too much, you risk being unnecessarily graphic and even salacious.  If you say too little, you risk sounding coy.  So what do you write?

We can ask that about anything.  What’s the proper way to express it?  Why say anything, when ahead of time you already know it’s insufficient?  Why not take the way out that Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener took, when he constantly reiterated, I would prefer not to.

I have talked before about the Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York, with the illegal paint factory operating across the street, the all-night bar right next door, and the fumes from the trailer trucks loudly driving down that narrow road.  At the corner there was a meat market, and whenever I passed one of the men would be standing outside wearing his butcher whites splotched with blood.  Often the door was open and I could see large carcasses of cows hung on meat hooks, blood dripping down the grates underneath.  Whenever that door opened the smell hit me like a shock, the smell of blood and of flesh being sliced up.  The butcher would teasingly ask me when I will bring him a chocolate cake from the bakery, and we would talk pleasantly, like neighbors.

What should I speak about today?  The way we make love?  The way we make love, the way we come together, the way we make paint, the way we treat illegal immigrants, the way we cut up sirloin, and yes, the way we make chocolate cake—these are all expressions of the dharma.  The dharma speaks to us day after day through the johns staggering out of the all-night bar, the friendly flirting of the butcher, the smell of incense from the zendo commingling with blood and paint fumes and the smell of chocolate brownies, all these things together in our nostrils, in our ears, in our eyes, in our hands and mouths, all this is the dharma.  The world is speaking; the world is making love right under our eyes.

And we participate.  We are making love too.  We walk and eat and sit and sing.  Why?  For the same reason that the butcher smells of blood and the paint factory of harsh, illegal chemicals, for the same reason that the green leaves reach out to the warm sun and the crows feed on the dead raccoon.  Because we, like everyone and everything else, participate in creation and destruction.  Because at every moment we’re nothing other than creation and destruction, shining.

The National Teacher Calls Three TimesFrom a talk given by Roshi Eve Myonen Marko on June 19, 2011

The National Teacher called to his attendant three times, and the attendant answered three times.  The National Teacher said, “I thought I had transgressed against you, but you too had transgressed against me.”[1]

Whenever I study this koan I think of intimacy, of which there are varying kinds and degrees.  Today I will talk mostly about the intimacy of students and teachers, but I believe that what I say applies to any relationship.

A student can travel far to listen to or sit with a teacher, and then come home. Conversely, a teacher can travel far to give teachings or lead retreats. Whenever I travel to teach, I feel like a big success.  People take care of me as soon as I arrive in the airport; they’re grateful and pay me well.  By the same token, my own students are often telling me how moved and excited they are by sitting with and listening to teachers who are far away. This is one form of intimacy. It’s important, and at the same time it’s a lot like visiting family on Thanksgiving or Christmas. People are happy to see you, they’re on their best behavior, and you eat great food.

It’s like the start of another famous koan about intimacy:
Attention! Master Jizo asked Hogen, “Where have you come from?”  “I pilgrimage aimlessly,” replied Hogen.  “What is the matter of your pilgrimage?” asked Jizo.  “I don’t know,” replied Hogen.  “Not knowing is the most intimate,” remarked Jizo.  At that, Hogen experienced great enlightenment.[2]

Hogen, too, liked to go on pilgrimage from one monastery to another and listen to different teachers. In fact, that was customary.  But as the appreciatory verse says:

The matter of thirty years pilgrimage--
a clear transgression against one’s pair of eyebrows.

Going on the road is great; it’s when you get home that the tsures start. Driving back from the airport you find out what happened when you weren’t here, who argued with whom, what worked out and what didn’t, and all the work that’s waiting to be done. Another kind of intimacy is awaiting you, the intimacy of being with your local dharma family, the complicated one.

Where do we find intimacy? Just look at how we function. If someone asks me if I wish to go to Hawaii for a holiday, I’ll probably say I have to talk to my husband. Why? Because I take him into account in my vacation plans.  And if we had children I’d look into whether the vacation works for them, too. Obviously, we don’t go around thinking in that way, we simply function like that naturally. We live out of a consciousness of the couple rather than of just me, or of the family rather than of just me, or of the sangha rather than of  just me. So one way of looking at intimacy is how we manifest our unity with others. These mundane relationships, in which nothing stands out as special, are intimate precisely because nothing stands out as special.

And now we get to the intimacy between the teacher and the attendant. In a monastery the attendant was one of the top students who’d already finished or was about to finish formal training, someone who would probably receive dharma transmission and even take over as abbot.  He was with the teacher day and night. Why?  To become intimate, so intimate that there’s nothing special anymore. To live with her so intimately there’s no reason to even call out. After all, if you live with someone in the house and they’re sitting right by you, you don’t call them by name. When my husband and I sit together over breakfast, the talk could go something like this:

The rain’s not stopping.
Uh-uh.
Are you taking the dogs out? 
Maybe later. 
Did you see that email by so-and-so?
Not yet.

We don’t bother calling to each other, we certainly don’t call each other’s name. Why should we, when we’re both there? In the words of the appreciatory verse, it’s like living with one’s own eyebrows.  When do I call my husband by name?  When I’m not sure he’s there, or when I’m not sure I have his attention.  At that point I experience him as a separate being. And even then the sense of oneness persists.  It doesn’t preclude disagreement. In that context of oneness, of intimacy, there are still the differences, and we often have to work them out.  But the general consciousness—or even better—the lack of consciousness of oneness, persists.

There’s also intimacy with yourself. Each of us has many different aspects, but when we experience ourselves as whole and integrated nothing stands out, nothing’s special. One minute you’re preparing a talk, the next you’re doing the laundry. Each is equally special and not special. If my knee hurts I’ll massage it or take a bath, but in some way that’s no problem, either. I don’t have to call it by name or mull over it or fuss or get frustrated.  The less it stands out, the greater the intimacy. Life unfolds naturally and spontaneously in all its manifestations.

I have mourned deeply after people who’ve died. There was the usual pattern of deep loss and grief, the waking up day after day to the absence of someone who was very important to me. I think of them, picture them in my mind, I miss them. But that’s not the deepest intimacy.  The deepest intimacy comes years later, long after they’ve stopped haunting my thoughts and dreams, long after I stop thinking about them. I occasionally may gaze at a photo and remember them in the form I knew them, and feel love and appreciation, but basically they’ve disappeared. And for me, that’s the greatest intimacy.

[1] Shibayama, Zenkei.  Zen Comments on the Mumonkan.  Harper & Row, New York, NY, 1974, p. 128.
[2] Wick, Gerry Shishin, The Book of Equanimity.  Wisdom Publication, Boston, MA, 2005, p. 63.

Shuzan and a StaffFrom a talk given by Roshi Eve Myonen Marko on October 18, 2011

Master Shuzan held up his staff, and showing it to the assembled disciples, said, “You monks, if you call this a staff, you are committed to the name.  If you call it not-a-staff, you negate the fact.  Tell me, you monks, what do you call it?”

Mumon’s poem reads:
Holding up a staff,
He is carrying out the orders to kill and to revive.
Where committing and negating are interfusing,
Buddhas and Patriarchs have to beg for their lives.[1]

Sometimes I feel that I lose my faith. In what? In my ability to see life as it is, to pierce through things and get to the essence. That loss of faith used to happen more frequently in the past; now, on occasion, it still appears. Our retreats at Auschwitz-Birkenau test that faith. As one retreat participant and long-time practitioner put it during this last retreat, it’s a fucker.  You think your practice is vast, that you have confidence in the dharma and your own understanding of impermanence and emptiness—and then you go there and witness the power of delusion and ignorance. The Nazis believed their delusions about reality to such an extent that they ignored mothers’ and children’s cries and yelled at them to go to the gas chamber. It’s hard for me to stand in that place for 5 days without questioning my own basic sanity, my own confidence in basic goodness.

When I got home I heard about a young woman, very dear to me, who was injuring herself. This is quite different, and in another way it’s the same, and once again I asked myself, how is it that she believes her delusions so much? Or as Byron Katie puts it, how can you believe your own thoughts so much that you would harm someone, or even yourself?

We have no choice about what life gives us; we do have a choice of how to experience it.  We have little choice about accidents, mishaps, and illnesses of all kinds. On Christmas Eve we heard that Bernie’s sister was dying. We had no control over that. We did have a choice about where we put our attention and how we respond, so we jumped in the car and drove down to visit her.  Things happen, and there’s how we choose to experience them.  My sense of Zen, my sense of life, is that there is nothing that is in principle good or bad, nothing to stay with or stay away from. The Buddha challenged us not to avoid suffering but to investigate it deeply.  That’s the First Noble Truth, and the practice of that calls for clear seeing and a combination of both firmness and softness at the same time.

That’s why this koan is so important. How I see a staff is how I see myself.

If you call this a staff, you are committed to the name. You are attached to labels and concepts—this is this, this is that—and all the substance and permanence implied by that.  In that case, you see yourself in the same way: I am solid, I am permanent, I exist within these contours and with these characteristics.  Not only me, but others as well. If I see myself in such a static way, I’ll see others that way, too, as some cardboard figures easily seen through and manipulated. You don’t have to visit a concentration camp to see how that manifests. Earlier today I went to a car dealership to explore buying a car. There was a receptionist, a salesman, a bookkeeper and another sales associate. We spent some 90 minutes there, and during that time I could see how these people stepped forward from first being in the background, like uninteresting planets orbiting my own much more alive, fascinating sun, to beings in their own right, with their own stories and lives, their own mysterious textures.

And still the question remains: What do you call them? How are you with them?

Are you attached to calling it not-a-staff? That reeks of trying so hard not to get caught by words that you get caught by the effort, much like the monk who said about a pitcher that it cannot be called a wooden sandal.[2]

Or are you attached to Oneness? To Presence?  To deconstructing it to show that all life is this staff, Oneness in constant flux and change? Even if you present that with no words, there is still danger.  At our last retreat at Auschwitz many people rushed to escape the suffering of the place and talked quickly about finding God, the soul, and even Presence in the beautiful leaves that fell so softly as we walked there.

Holding up a staff,
He is carrying out the orders to kill and to revive.
Where committing and negating are interfusing,
Buddhas and Patriarchs have to beg for their lives.

They beg for their lives because there is nothing but their lives to stand on, just as I have only my life to stand on. I have my life to investigate, pay attention to, bear witness to. I can’t do that without dropping off my former conceptions. A real investigation has to occur openly and dynamically.

Staffs figure in a big way in the lives of monks and in koans.  In the Blue Cliff Record’s The Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak Holds Up His Staff,[3] the commentary describes the following exchange:

The venerable Yen Yang met a monk on the road.  He raised his staff and said, “What’s this?”  The monk said, “I don’t know.”  Yen Yang said, “You don’t even recognize a staff?”  Again he took his staff and poked the ground saying, “Do you recognize this?”  The monk said, “No, I don’t.”  Yen Yang said, “You don’t even recognize a hole in the ground?”  Again, he put his staff across his shoulder and said, “Do you understand?”  The monk said, “I don’t understand.” Yen Yang said, “With my staff across my shoulder I pay no heed to people—I go straight into the myriad peaks.”

Where lay the answer? In recognizing a staff or a hole in the ground? In I don’t know? Or in going straight into the myriad peaks? Please don’t think that is a destination.

Even when doubt comes up, I feel no doubt in this vessel of awakening, in my life as a vessel of investigation. Feeling good or bad about myself or my life has nothing to do with it, it is a vessel of awakening no matter what. There is no reason to look anywhere else. With my staff across my shoulder I pay no heed to people—I go straight into the myriad peaks.  How? By choicelessly paying attention. And what do I find? Maybe something so present and immediate that I can’t see it: the meaning of my life.

Peter Hershock, in Liberating Intimacy[4], wrote: The Buddhist understanding is that meaning consists of the middle way between subject and object—something that is given directly in conduct or the dramatic unfolding of our interrelatedness. …  In short, meaning is the expression or evolution of appreciative attention—not something gotten, but offered.

Get his meaning?

[1] Shibayama, Zenkei. Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, transl. by Sumiko Kudo, Harper & Row, New York, 1974, p. 299.
[2] Ibid, p. 279.
[3] The Blue Cliff Record, trans. By Thomas and J. C. Cleary, Prajna Press, Boulder, 1978, p. 164.
[4] Hershock, Peter D. Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch’an Buddhism. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1996.