Jomon: 00:00

Hello, and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.

Shonin: 00:18

I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha. Happy beautiful fall, everyone. It's lovely out there.

Shonin: 00:37

The rain is gonna make more leaves fall down. It's gorgeous. Today, I'd like to share a teaching from this book called Appreciate Your Life. It's a book of, collected talks by Maizumi Roshi, who was the teacher of Chosen and Hogan Roshi. He...

Shonin: 01:09

I find it entertaining that he was a missionary to us. He came from Japan bringing Zen to The United States in the forties. And it it worked. Here we all are directly related to this person. So this teaching is entitled The Three Pillows of Zen.

Shonin: 01:40

So, yes, you heard me right. Not the three pillars of Zen, not the hard concrete structures that are weighty and hold up the teaching. It's the three pillows of zen, soft and receptive and comforting. So let's let's take a look today at Zen practice from the point of view of this support and receptivity, the three pillows of Zen. He starts right out.

Shonin: 02:18

What is the primary matter of our practice? That sounds like a pillar comment... Question. What is it? Like, what are we doing?

Shonin: 02:27

What's the most important thing here? And he says, it always comes back to your life. This is so true of this practice. It's alive. And the way it's kept alive is that it goes from what is most important to one person to the next, and it's expressed through our unique and individual life, this one life.

Shonin: 02:57

He starts out by quoting Dogen in this, famous couplet that we've... Many of us have heard many times to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the 10,000 dharmas or by everything in this world. And to be enlightened by the 10,000 Dharmas is to free one's body and mind and the body and mind of others.

Shonin: 03:33

So he he goes on in his teaching to use that as the three pillows. How did Dogen's teaching become the three pillows of Zen? So the first the first pillow is Samadhi. Samadhi is... It can seem like such an exotic word.

Shonin: 04:02

It's... It simply means to collect the mind, to unify the body and mind, to concentrate. When I first heard that, I thought, well, I can't... That's not me. I can't do that.

Shonin: 04:15

That's some, you know, Middle Eastern or, you know, Indian adept, but but not but not me. I'm not even keeping concentration for one breath. Then I went on to... I went to my first sasheen and I had this fantasy, oh, I wanted... I want Samadhi because I'm in so much pain and I hear that people just go into it and wake up six hours later.

Shonin: 04:38

I want that. I want that. So, Samadhi, bringing... This is the first pillow. What's comforting about Samadhi?

Shonin: 04:51

Bringing the mind to a point of stillness. He uses a water analogy. You've heard this before. The mind is all churned up, and it's muddy, and there's all this silt. And if we can just leave the water in this bucket alone, slowly the silt settles, the mud settles, and you're left with clear, bright water.

Shonin: 05:19

But the thing about that is that's different with the mind, this... With this brain is this brain has this autopilot that can just keep going and going and going, And it... It's like a little constant agitator, which is fine. And with some training, with some help, with a pillow, we can settle that down. So this is where this idea of counting to settle the mind or watching the breath, experiencing the breath in the body or listening to sound, it gives that thinking mind something to rest on.

Shonin: 06:04

I think about my dog. He'll stay calmly on the ground much longer if he's on a fluffy pillow. So we give that mind that's so used to being agitated, so used to chasing after every thought something to rest on, a nice pillow, and that is this concentration object. And with that, with coming back, letting go of the story, letting go of that impulse to follow that delicious thought and think about it more, the mind settles. That's the first pillow of Zen, this Samadhi.

Shonin: 06:52

And this is something that gets stronger the more you do it. It's strengthened with practice. It's a quality of mind, but it's something that grows, that we can work on, that is... Progresses. And it's very natural, and it's it's it's just a quality of mind.

Shonin: 07:14

So we know this intuitively from anything that you've ever learned before, practicing the piano or drawing, the more time you spend at that, then you get better. You you start to learn things about it. You understand how to do it. See what he says, Raising Samadhi power is always gradual. I found that so reassuring.

Shonin: 07:51

Here's the Zen master telling me that raising Samadhi power, concentrating the mind is always gradual. No one can do it overnight. I think this is true for any kind of practice. You do the same thing over and over again just practicing the most basic thing. And with time, with time, it changes, it improves.

Shonin: 08:20

Then he goes on to to share some other qualities that are developed through this concentration, Samadhi. Another one is evenness, just not being so reactive when we train the mind to hold onto one thing. It gets used to that. It it can then approach life or approach meditation with a little bit less of a tendency to grab on and work yourself up. And so we get access to a little bit of space and less reactivity, evenness.

Shonin: 08:58

And with that comes the ability to see what's in front of you more clearly without the overlay of the judging mind or the critical... The self critical mind or really strong ideas of how it should be and try to slot what you're seeing into your preconceived ideas. So this idea of a gradual training of concentration through breath or through sound or or... I just came back from the ten day retreat, and in that retreat for the whole ten days, our concentration object was chanting the name Buddha. So there's nothing magical about what you choose.

Shonin: 09:48

It's just this slow gradual training of the mind that results in this spaciousness, this evenness, and the ability to see things more clearly. So the second pillow is to forget oneself. The second fundamental aspect of our practice is to forget oneself. So how do you do that? How do you do that?

Shonin: 10:32

He goes on to say, there are many different states of Samadhi, many different kinds of concentration. And it's really... You know, you don't have to worry about that. One such... One type of experience or another isn't that big of a thing.

Shonin: 10:56

Dogenesenji says, it's like sticking your head into a gateway. You calm the mind and you and you then begin to have this experience of seeing things clearly. And when you do, when you're absorbed in that, the self settles down. It's not so much part of the experience. By raising concentration, by experiencing that, it's just natural.

Shonin: 11:42

The more absorbed you are in what's actually happening, the less you can be commenting about it, the less you can be judging what's happening, and the more you're just being with what is happening right right then, right now. This is such a natural process, and it's not something that needs to be efforted. It's just something that we can, receive from how we are. He goes on to say, when you do zazen, simply identify yourself as zazen. You say, we don't have to think, oh, I'm doing zazen.

Shonin: 12:24

I'm meditating, and now I need to let go of that thought. It's just... You're just... It's just happening, just dropping the narrative, being the sitting. And this is all strengthened through this process of Samadhi, through this process of of absorption that we practice with sitting.

Shonin: 12:56

When you do zazen, simply identify yourself as zazen. In a sense, you're already doing this whether you realize it or not. It's comforting to know it's happening anyway, so you can fight it or you can just sit here and allow it, receive it. Still, you sense there's a gap between your apparent self, which struggles and suffers, and your true self. And our task with repetition and with repeated experiences to realize that they're not separate.

Shonin: 13:34

They're not separate things. And again, process, process. This is just what happens, what unfolds slowly when we start with practice. So the second pillow of zazen, forgetting ourselves in a way, is just you put the dog bed down on the ground and you relax on the dog bed and you enjoy it, and then this second aspect begins to unfold. The third pillar of zen, actualization.

Shonin: 14:20

This process, we hear the teaching, and then we reflect on them, think about it, wonder about it, feel confused by it, talk to friends about it, read, listen. And then we say, oh, you know what? I I could do... I can do some of this. I'm gonna try I'm gonna try this.

Shonin: 14:46

Remember, and we practice it. And then and then what happens? We say, oh, what happened there? That that was really... That was different.

Shonin: 14:54

That was interesting. I wanna I wanna try that again. Over time over time, these things become who we are, and it's just natural that they flow out of us, this actualization. We get out of our own way by not being so self centered and so reactive through meditation and through actually doing things and seeing the results, and then that is the actualization. That is being verified by the 10,000 dharmas.

Shonin: 15:35

Again, it just flows one from the other. And the self is forgotten what remains. We're not so busy thinking about how is this gonna be for me? What am I gonna do? Open my eyes and and look, there you are.

Shonin: 15:57

Like, there's this beautiful room. Like, that... In that moment, I am being verified and actualized by all of you and and by this. That is the 10,000 dharmas verifying me. And then this all gets integrated into life, and quite naturally, it flows out to other people.

Shonin: 16:30

This last part of Dogan's poem here, To forget the self is to be enlightened by the 10,000 dharmas, and to be enlightened by the 10,000 dharmas is to free one's body and mind and the body and mind of others. Here's how he ends this teaching. Of course, we can't just jump into this actualization. I love this. Here's this, you know, wonderful teacher with so much to share, and he's he's reassuring me that if I am not already enlightened, it's really okay.

Shonin: 17:22

This is a process. Right? We can't just jump into this. This is why our practice advances little by little, though in a sense, there is no little by little. And yet, even though we are the way, we don't know it.

Shonin: 17:40

Even though our life is already actualized, we don't see it as such. Everything is just as it is, just as you are, just as everything is. And we start by really appreciating our life and stepping forward and beginning and practicing.

Jomon: 18:14

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