Our audio dharma talks are offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. If you would like to support Brooklyn Zen Center, please visit the “Giving” section of our website.

Our audio dharma talks are offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. If you would like to support Brooklyn Zen Center, please visit the “Giving” section of our website.

The Teaching of Thus: the Avatamsaka Sutra as a Root of Zen Practice

As our lives come into being, as we become, we learn about sickness, old age and death. It becomes life, loss, gain, or what we see as gain and loss. And what we do with it, in terms of how we create our own suffering from those changes that happen, from the life that happens.

Zazen is a way I would offer to open to relationality and to open to spaciousness in a full life.

We are afraid to break open, afraid to cry. And that is exactly what my invitation is. Go hear stories, be in community. It’s not just about right and wrong and seing our responsibility. It’s about grief.

We can’t acknowledge impermanence in the world if we can’t acknowledge it in ourselves. And it’s frightening.

Our path is tiptoeing, falling in —sometimes drowning in— our own created fire.

We trip, we fall, and we look to see what did we just trip over. What was the cause of the mistake? We try to learn from what just happened. That is the most important thing. We are not about being perfect. We are about being awake.

Everyone is doing their best, even when we make terrible mistakes. I think that people who do things that are cruel and senseless, the conditioning that they had to endure in order to do those kinds of things is tragic. Not to say that they are not responsible. They are responsible. But there are reasons.

Reverends Konjin Gaelyn Godwin and Taiga Ito visited Ancestral Heart Zen Monastery  last September and gave a presentation on Soto Zen International’s mission and its alignment with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The 17 Goals address the broadest range of issues: from poverty and inequity to the health of the oceans and forests. Their presentation was an opportunity for us to develop our understanding and encourage each other’s efforts in these areas.

Reverend Konjin Gaelyn Godwin is the Director of the Soto Zen Buddhism International Center (in addition to being the Abbot of Houston Zen Center), and Reverend Taiga Ito is the Assistant Director. Konjin is also a longtime friend and visiting teacher of the Brooklyn Zen Center.

Stand up and be authentically what we are.

We show up for each other, we show up as a community. We have to understand at some level sangha in some ways does not work unless we understand that our showing up is not for ourselves – but it is for the whole of the sangha.

The Teaching of Thus: the Avatamsaka Sutra as a Root of Zen Practice

The combination of precepts and community practice allows us to take refuge in a new relational orientation to the world, to others, to the Earth. And it entails of course vulnerability, literally opening the heart to something mysterious, to another person who I can’t completely know, to a context where I can only see my own perspective.

You have to just stay on the path and keep walking it through all the conditions that will be in our lives. And it’s not a seeking of an end, of a prize, of some attaining. You just have to let those things go and keep going step by step.

A Bodhisattva knows that going into every situation is walking into a completely different world. And in that completely different world we have to have stillness of mind and presence to receive that world fully, so that we can then respond to that world. But we can’t respond to that world until we build the capacity to receive that world.

If all your doing is imitating the form again and again, you’re going to receive benefit. But if you don’t inhabit the form, and the form is not infused into your entire being; if you don’t bring it into your life — the life you’re living outside of the look of your form– then there is a big disconnect, like a bridge has not been built from practice in a space that is made for practice and then living life. The purpose is to live life, to freely live your life as your fully realized authentic being.

We vow to uphold these precepts, to live by these precepts. Then we fall away, we fall into hell. But we come back. The vow is vast enough to include this experience. And when we can open up even in the moments when we fall into hell, and meet our pain even for a moment. We can actually trust that. And the felt distance between these impossible Bodhisattva vows and our lives, that distance gets shorter as trust flowers. And we are actually with life, we are always with life.

The flowers, the plants, will communicate to us. But they need our care, our attention, in some way – if we are listening. Or a bowing mat, or a laundry basket. It’s everywhere. And when we are not distracted we are right there with it. And it’s a chance to be in communication with life.

This essence, this emptiness, this vast nothingness – somehow or another there is awareness there. And somehow or another when this awareness comes into form it functions as love. It walks in the world as love. And to me that is what our path is about.

If we do not collectively find clarity and courage to act, there will be large scale catastrophe if not extinction. So the paradox is there is a sense of urgency, but we can not act if we are always in fight, flight, and freeze. So it is like hold on to each other, let’s face this difficult fact together, and come to some calm and important decisions.

The presentation by Kritee Kanko can be found here.

What do we dismiss in ourselves? What do we exile and alienate or say it’s not important? And it could be anything. From “I don’t have a right to feel a sense of loss or grief because these other people have lost so much more.” Or dismissing joy! Dismissing opportunities for connection…

The whole process must return to the source. Just like a baby taking to it’s mother. Just how natural that is that we all have a mother. How natural that is that we come from our ancestors. How natural that is that things sprout from roots into leaves. We can take refuge in the roots, we can take refuge in the source. We can take refuge in that moment, in that place. Underneath us where the ground has been churning before these phenomenon’s spring up into our individual consciousness, our awareness. We can take refuge in that silence.

The Teaching of Thus: the Avatamsaka Sutra as a Root of Zen Practice.

How do we cultivate a present, an awake, and flexible mind? Because that’s the response. It’s not to come with some other persona to the world that is different, or opposite then the one we had before. But to drop the one we had before, and allow for nothing to be there. Allow for there just to be a body hearing. Not a body that is speaking who it is, but a body that is listening.

Zen’s focus on posture is very helpful and very wise. Because it is getting to something we don’t know how to get to on our own. Until we sit down and take a shape we are not accustomed to, we will always take the shapes we are accustomed to. And as long as we take the shapes we are accustomed to, we will never see them. And so we have to take a different shape. Our ancestors and teachers are asking us to take a different shape. And in taking a different shape we see personas, we see mental postures.

Wisdom is nowhere other than in intimate relationship to what is happening.

Are we going to embolden white supremacy or are we going to embolden healing and transformation?

When we come together in these spaces [physical zendo], our spaces for zazen are going to look very different. Here’s the opportunity to drop all the assumptions and, with beginner’s mind, come together at that altar and just pass incense and let go of those ideas of who is doing what.

 If we think of all of these as training — meditation, the precepts, the realization of our interconnectedness and enmeshment in sangha — that begs the question: what are we being trained for? What are we being trained to do?

Everything moves like the breath. Everything in the world is like the breath. It exists for a moment and then it’s gone. It’s full of impermanence, we can’t find it. It’s sometimes subtle, sometimes clear, sometimes hazed over, sometimes lost to us, sometimes the only thing that is.

Attuning to the body – more and more I feel for myself and I see it in my own experience and I hear it reflected from so many different places – when we attune to our body is an amazingly transgressive thing. Particularly in this country, I would say. Particularly if we have been really saturated with white supremacy culture.

Let’s all care for the grasping of our minds. Let’s listen for the silence of the Earth with our whole bodies. And let’s care for the relationships that are our lives.

To be able to free other beings, what we do is we actually just free them in our minds.

The Teaching of Thus: the Avatamsaka Sutra as a Root of Zen Practice

The Chinese character “Juryo”

My hope is that, as a community, we can support each other in the ongoing work of not turning away. That we can enter into a relationship with our own suffering, so that an appropriate response can be articulated.

We are all in a process of integration. What is the practice in relationship to everything that has happened? What are we in relationship to each other? What are the views that were in the sangha that needed to die? The ideas about who we were that needed to die?

The universe isn’t simply happening, the dharma wheel isn’t simply turning. The Buddha’s words turned the dharma wheel. The dharma wheel turns because it is both an eternal truth and turns, but also turns because human activity, acting out the dharma, is turning it. And both those things are happening simultaneously.

It’s wonderful how life works – there is an insistent disruption to any superficial harmony we make. We think we got it all just about right. And then something suddenly appears.

Openness requires the heart and the mind. Openness requires the mind to not be grasping. Openness requires the heart to be present, to feel, to make space for.

Often we feel the need to create our own shell, with our muscles, with our bodies, with our actions. But when awe are offered a container safe enough – a protective container – we can begin to release and let go of the shell, let go of the hardening of our muscles, of our ideas or our thoughts.

We are sitting at the center of the ten directions of this Earth, we are sitting at the center of the dharma wheel, we are sitting at the center of the spinning cycle of samsara. We are sitting at the center of them all and allowing the dharma to arise, allowing the dharma to be present with the dukkha that is this wheel out of balance.

Stillness manifests as care. […] I am talking about stillness with my karmic mind, with my conditioning. So, my conditioning rises up and there’s a choice to be propelled by it or to stop and see it.

Our audio dharma talks are offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. If you would like to support Brooklyn Zen Center, please visit the “Giving” section of our website.

The Teaching of Thus: the Avatamsaka Sutra as a Root of Zen Practice

When we come close together and listen to each other’s karma and to our own karma, and it’s difficult – what do we do? […] How do we know how much is mine and how much is yours? How do we discern that?

Our audio dharma talks are offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. If you would like to support Brooklyn Zen Center, please visit the “Giving” section of our website.

Our audio dharma talks are offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. If you would like to support Brooklyn Zen Center, please visit the “Giving” section of our website.

I encourage that with each other, with the world, with our social and political systems, with everything that Dr. King pointed to, that we ask the question: “What is being just here?” Both here, in this moment, and what is being just here [in the world]. Because, ultimately, they cannot be understood without each other.

Our audio dharma talks are offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. If you would like to support Brooklyn Zen Center, please visit the “Giving” section of our website.