PZI ART SENSEI
PZI is unique in that we have the position
of Art Sensei, which is filled by a teacher who is an artist in any medium and
who holds up the teachings through her art. We have always cared about the arts.
We have music with our sutras and an art studio is available at long retreats.
There are some fine writers associated with PZI too.
Allison
Atwill is our new Art Sensei
Her work is based on an intense and embodied interaction with koans.
The way she describes it is that a koan chooses her and begins to show her the
images as she paints. The placement of the image in the painting and even the
size of the piece are also part of her conversation with the koan. Also
included are birds, canyons, snakes, people, anything in the world that comes
to meet her when she is in the field of the koan. The way her work makes itself
through her is an illustration of the way a koan can open your life when you
keep company with it.
Here we have two views of a box Allison
did in interaction with the koan, "Take a Step From the Top on the Hundred
Foot Pole and the Whole Universe Will be Your Body." The box is on the
altar in the Santa Rosa Zendo. The underside is birds and when you open it,
inside there are stars. A video of a talk by Allison during sesshin will be on
our web site soon. She'll be leading a retreat on koans and art (along with
John Tarrant) in autumn-September 24 and 25.
 
Another piece of art in this issue of the
journal is by Alok Hsu Kwang-han. He works in the way of the ancient Chinese
calligraphers with brush and ink and the spirit of the moment. He has found
doing sesshin with us to be a fine way to get into the spirit of the moment.
The piece here was done during sesshin and we are very happy to have it hanging
over the altar in Phoenix. Alok is moving to the Bay Area and will be
working with The Asian Art Museum and a regular presence at PZI events.
Trusting Heart
by Alok Hsu Kwang-han
Roger Jordan is a painter and photographer
who has a long running project photographing clouds. He takes two versions of
the same shot with different exposures and mixes them together digitally to
achieve a remarkable depth and brightness. He has a great passion for
understanding the creative process and its connection to koans. His photos hang
in the Santa Rosa Zendo.
Our first art Sensei was Mayumi
Oda who now lives in Hawaii but spoke at PZI Santa Rosa recently. Her project
is to give feminine form to the Buddhist archetypes. We have some of her
paintings at Santa Rosa and in Phoenix, and we show one here. She gives a
sense of fun, erotic life and delight to Buddhist images.
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Koan Seminar with David Weinstein in Aptos, CA, Sat, June 12
Celebrate Buddha's Birthday in Healdsburg, CA, Sat, June 19
Summer Sesshin with John Tarrant & David Weinstein at Black Mtn Preserve in Cazadero, CA, July 4 - 11
Christian/Zen one-day Retreat with David Parks-Ramage in Santa Rosa, CA, Sat, July 17
Oryoki lunch one-day Retreat with David Weinstein in Alameda, CA, Sat, August 7
Coming in September: Koan Study Email Class with Roshi John Tarrant.
Watch for more information
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I went to Phoenix to teach in May when they had the first 100 degree day of the summer. In the late afternoon we went to the gardens.
The saguaros have white flowers stuck all over them
like the hands and eyes of Guanyin.
Quail and mourning doves attend them.
-John Tarrant
Partly Here
My knees have begun to complain.
That spot between my shoulder blades?
Don't get me started. Wondering
why I do this--listen for hours
to the cruelty of my mind and nothing else--except
now: the crackling of the fire, rain.
The woman next to me sniffles and, including her,
I become her.
Partly here, I am awakened.
Any presence is present.
Any part of now is here.
-Rebecca del Rio
Proper
What is the proper response to seeing a
hare running with it's tail up, in spring? I saw the first plum blossoms I've
ever been aware of really, yesterday...granted they are sour plums and
miniature at that. Thanks pour out of me every day, the earth and I greet each
other.
-Joyce Pointe
Outside my Window
[dedicated to Chris Wilson, head of
practice at Spring sesshin, a generous, guiding spirit and friend]
The constant light rain
clears momentarily.
Cold.
A bird's three bare notes-
infinite variations
flood over me.
Red camellia blossoms
fall
upside down.
-Ken Ireland
Morning Argument
I see an old
newspaper floating in a mountain
stream; the text
on the last page has bled
through to the text on
the first page, so
the newspaper looks
like it's been read by
the water and the water's
reading of the news has transformed
it into something
blurred, multi-layered and beautiful. If
I look I can make
out phrases and
these phrases are also
beautiful, proving,
again,
that water can
handle everything.
-Thaisa Frank
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We
welcome your feedback, suggestions, and submissions of poetry and art
for the Fall issue of the PZI Newsletter. Send submissions to:
janand...@sbcglobal.net.
Blessings,
Illana Berger & Jan Brogan
Cyber Editors
Pacific Zen Institute
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The peach trees without words
open a path
Our PZI mission is to create
a culture for transforming the mind. That's what we do. It's not so hard to
have an experience of enlightenment. It's like the Red Queen in Alice in
Wonderland thinking of impossible things-"Why
sometimes I think of six impossible things before breakfast," she told Alice. But
the trick is to embody the transformation, to live in the world that is
transformed.
To find out what it's like to
be free, to live inside a mind that is open and free, that's worth a lot. It's
nice if we can do that without too much effort. One feature of enlightenment is
that it's light, you can wear it because you don't need a lot of equipment.
And what does it mean to create
a culture of enlightenment? It means we want to make it easy to trip over
moments of clarity, big and small, and also to support each other to live in
that fresher air. Enlightenment happens to you in a place along with other
beings. The Bodhisattva idea is that we live in a field with each other, and
our most profound wish is that we can be happy and hear each others' joy and
find the way. A culture is something we all contribute to.
Working on this project is an
adventure. There will be different opinions and visions and there will be innovation
from surprising places but the different visions will all refer back to the
core. There is always a balance between discovering and learning something and
still being open to the wonder that comes with not knowing. That not knowing is
part of how we support each other. Leadership is also about expressing
gratitude and serving. We can all do that too.
When we are creating a
culture together we get a chance to live inside the enlightened world, not as a
static unchanging place but as a path that keeps opening between the trees. The
core of the culture is the koan practice and the experience of awakening. There
is also the idea that at bottom, we are not selfish, we do want to help each
other. In PZI we refer things back to that vision of waking up.
In a practical sense, PZI is embodying
enlightenment, and changing and growing in exciting ways. We have new centers
springing up, new leadership emerging, new initiatives forming. In koan work we
say that after a while the koan does the meditation, the trees and the birds do
the meditation. With culture, after a while the culture starts creating itself
too, it carries us as we serve it.
-- John |
Message from the President
Jon Joseph
"If you meet a Buddha on the path, kill him!"
But
Master Linchi, the author of those words, may just as easily have said,
When you meet a Buddha on the path, feed her!" Or when you meet a Zen
Center on the path, feed it!" Giving life to a Zen Center is an
affirmation of the totality of our lives. It is alive with the hands of
the Bodhisattvas, and needs to be fed.
This is a special
project we do together. The project is our life, and when we try to put
a name on it, we call it Pacific Zen. As the old teacher Linchi was
creative with his shout, we are developing koan small groups, opening
up koan seminars to all, and in developing a liturgy based on our own
American traditions. Our unique practice at PZI does not deceive the
ancestors.
Over the years my own practice at many centers shows
me that our Zen tradition is insight. It is affirmation of the
enlightenment experience that we have shared with Shakyamuni Buddha
these two and a half millennium. Our practice is merely recognition
that, just as we are-painted toenails, unkempt hair and spilled diet
Coke in the car-we are whole and wonderful and beautiful. There is
nothing more to add.
But there is something more to give.
As
simple as it seems, affirming that life is wonderful is itself a great
joy. And a great project. When you meet the PZI Fund Drive, feed it!
Say ' I have!' and truly give what you can to our Drive: money, an old
car, labor in the vegetable garden. Artwork. Practice.
If you meet a Zen Center on the path, by all means, feed it! That is the Bodhisattva way.
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The MaggidRoshi David Weinstein
Hoarding, Inside and Out
The Collier brothers, Homer, a
lawyer and Langley, a concert level pianist, were heirs to a vast fortune from
their grand father's shipping business. Their father was a gynecologist, which
doesn't have much bearing on their story, though his marriage to a first cousin
might be of some import.
After their parent's deaths, the brother's continued living in the family home,
in what was once the upper class neighborhood of Harlem. As the character of
the neighborhood changed they stood out more and more, becoming the object of
considerable attention and ridicule for their unusual appearance and behavior.
In 1917 all utilities, electricity, gas, water and phone were cut off due to
their failure to pay the bills and they lived without those amenities for the
next three decades. They heated, cooked, and illuminated the place with
kerosene stoves and lamps. They carried water in by bucket from a nearby park
and they rummaged for food from garbage cans around the neighborhood. When
false rumors of great wealth being hidden in the house brought a break in by
burglars, the brothers began fortifying the residence. Thy boarded up the
windows and piled up bundles of newspapers to barricade the entrances. They
also devised a series of booby traps to protect them from intruders.
At some point, Homer went blind, and became increasingly disabled due to
rheumatism, leaving him completely dependent on Langley for his care. It was
Langley who confronted the cleaning crew from the bank that was foreclosing on
their house due to the lack of mortgage payments. He wrote a check for the
balance of the mortgage on the spot and explained that the mountains of
newspapers were being saved for his brother to read when he regained his sight.
In 1947 the
police received an anonymous call reporting a stench emanating from the
building, which could only be coming from a dead body. They went to investigate
and getting no response to their repeated banging on the front door, they
attempted to break the door in, but were unable to do so.
Eventually,
they resorted to using an axe to chop the door out, which revealed a solid
wall of newspapers and other junk. After several hours of burrowing into that
wall didn't get them any closer to entering the building they climbed to a
second story window and crawled in there. Once inside, they made their way
through a narrow canyon in the accumulation of stuff, which stretched from
floor to ceiling. At some points, the walls of the canyon had fallen in,
leaving only a tunnel to crawl through. After two hours of making their way
through the canyons and tunnels, they found Homer, dead, the victim of
malnutrition, and dehydration, but not that long dead and not the source of the
stench in the house.
After two weeks of the removing over 150 tons of stuff from the house, which
included 14 pianos, 25,000 books and a model T Ford that was on the second
floor, Langley's putrefying body was discovered beneath a couple of huge
bundles of newspaper, evidently the victim of one of his own booby traps.
There is currently a cable TV show called "Hoarders", which is very popular. I
took a look at an episode and got a sense of what makes it so popular. Seeing
the conditions in which the "Hoarders" live, left me with a sense of relief
about the state of my own home. I also noticed that shortly after watching the
episode, I did a major cleanup of our house.
It is only a matter of degree, not kind that separates us from the hoarders
highlighted on that show. Besides the accumulation of material things, there is
another kind of hoarding that we are all subject to, an interior hoarding. We
hold onto old, outdated ideas about who we are, about our relationship to the
world and about the world
itself. In one account of a therapist working with a Hoarder, an old ATM
deposit envelope was very difficult to throw away. Although there was no money
inside, there were notes on the envelope about how the money had been spent and
throwing the envelope away felt like losing a day of their life, like losing a
part of their identity. After putting the envelope into the trash, the Hoarder
sobbed uncontrollably for some time. However, when a short time later, the
therapist asked about how they felt about the envelope, the Hoarder reported
that it felt OK.
Experiencing
what they feared, allowing it to move through them, rather than building a wall
trying to keep it out, led to a release from it. We see this again and again as
we practice, moment after moment. Pushing something away or guarding against
something happening is a way of clinging to it, Hoarding it. We can end up in a
prison of our own making, trapped under one o our own booby traps.
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New Koan Teacher
Deborah Saint
Deborah Saint is stepping
into the role Sensei in our koan line. This is not a surprise since Deb has
been leading the Phoenix group for a decade. She has also had a long and
interesting career doing water rights negotiations for Indian tribes. Deb is
cooking for sesshin in summer, which is a traditional role for a Zen teacher,
thought the actual reason she is doing it is because it is interesting and because
service is part of being a teacher.
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Deb Saint and Chris Wilson
have joined the board. Deb is our new Sensei in Phoenix and Chris is a faculty
member who gives talks in a number of our centers.
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JOHN TARRANT'S BOOKS
OF THE SEASON
Antony Osler, Stoep Zen
A wonderful intelligent and generous book, Zen in the new South Africa, with infinite views, baboons, cobras, the changeover from Apartheid, poverty law clinics, and an open heartedness about what it is to be human. A book I'm giving to my friends.
It's a little bit hard to get in the US but we're getting copies to sell at the summer sesshin.
Peter Hershock, Chan Buddhism
This book gives a sense of the development of koan Zen in old China in a way that is amazingly relevant what we are doing and has an understanding that is practice based.
Recommended by Joan Sutherland, Roger Jordan, Deb Saint, and John Tarrant.
Here is a Jordan quote selected from Hershock:
From the perspective of Chinese Buddhists, both Confucianism and Taoism are mistaken. The culture-consolidating efforts recommended by Confucianism err in establishing a bias toward fixed standards and the inculcation of habit formations. They mean an intensifying karma for suffering, because they involve ignoring the fluid interdependence of all things and the necessity of improvisational skill and creativity in responding to situational needs. Likewise, the culture-subverting effortlessness recommended by Daoism errs in celebrating a failure to address the present situation critically. Simply following what comes naturally means acting on the basis of previously conditioned patterns of ignorance and thus failing to revise one's karma and the meaning of things.
By contrast, Buddhist practice focuses on giving situationally and critically responsive form to the emptiness or interdependence of all things. As such, it means both fully appreciating our circumstances and skillfully contributing to their expression of a truly liberating intimacy among all things. Buddhist practice does not bring about the resolution of suffering by establishing an utterly secure place in the world for the practitioner or by a retreat to 'no-place' in the world. It does so by opening for revision the meaning of our entire world as the true buddha-body."
David Chadwick , Thank You and OK! An American Zen Failure in Japan
One of the most interesting and amusing books on how it is to live a life in Zen. Though it's set in Japan it's about being a modern Zen practitioner. David is an incarnation of Shi Te, the ancient Chinese master who is always shown giggling and holding a broom.
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