WELCOME TO THE ARIZONA SOTO ZEN TEMPLE NEWSLETTER

 

“No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation,
no intention; let it settle itself” — Tilopa.

 

NOTE FROM KOZEN SENSEI

 

A Sesshin was held Feb 15-17 at the Phoenix Temple.  The guest Priest was Abbot Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston, from the Atlanta Soto Zen Center(www.aszc.org).  Rev Gozen and some of his students from the Zen Center of Las Cruces (http://www.zencenteroflascruces.org/index.html) joined us for a wonderful weekend.

 

Our next planned Sesshin will be March 28-30 with Yuko San as the guest Priest and will be held at the Tucson Temple.  This may be the last Sesshin until August when Kozen Sensei returns from Japan.

 

Sesshins are special times of training and allow us to deepen and intensive our training ­ come and join us in March. Details are on the Arizona Soto Zen Centers’ Website www.AZSZC.org.  The cost is $85.00.  Please let Kozen Sensei know as soon as possible if you will be attending this wonderful weekend.  This is Yuko San's second visit as a guest Priest for Sesshin.

 March 28-30 SESSHIN: an intensive 3 day meditation and extended meditation that includes sitting meditation, chanting, oryoki (a formal, meditative way of eating), Dharma talks, work assignments, (samu) and Dokusan (a private meeting with the teacher).

 

PHOENIX

NEW TEMPLE HOURS:  Beginning next week our service schedule will change. We will have a Tuesday evening service at 7:00 p.m. and a Beginner's night on Friday beginning at 7 p.m. And our Saturday morning services will remain the same.

 

March 1:  Please plan on attending this very special service and witness a Jukai Ceremony.  Several of us will be taking our vows tomorrow.

 

February 14 - 16:  The Phoenix Temple will be closed this week.  Kozen Sensei will be preparing the Tucson Zendo for Sesshin which begins on Friday.  Please email Kozen Sensei at sokozen@azszc.org with your confirmation if you will be attending Sesshin.

 

Please plan on attending a Zazenkai and a Sesshin ­ they will help you to jump start your practice and make for a great way to spend time with the Sanga (fellow Buddhists). See details on our website.

 

 

Zazenkai - All-day Sitting Zazenkai provides us with the opportunity for deepening one's practice through the experience of intensified periods of zazen. There is a nominal fee of $25.

 

Mindfulness Day - First Saturday of every month.  Rohatsu, Jodo-e celebration of the Buddha's enlightenment.

 

Ryaku Fusatsu - Lunar full moon celebrations.  The Buddha taught that the Uposatha day is for "the cleansing of the defiled mind," resulting in inner calm and joy. On this day, we intensify our practice to deepen our knowledge and express our communal commitment. A wonderful old ceremony with lots of bowing and chanting.

 

Sesshin - Sesshins at the AZSZC can last from 3 to 7 days. A Sesshin is an extended meditation that includes sitting meditation, chanting, oryoki (a formal, meditative way of eating), Dharma talks, samu (work assignments ), and Dokusan (a private meeting with the teacher). There is a nominal fee of $85.

 

 Buddhist Prayer of Blessings

 

We surround all men and all forms of life

with infinite love and compassion.

Particularly, do we send out compassionate thoughts

to those in suffering and sorrow,

to those in doubt and ignorance,

to all who are striving to attain truth,

and to those whose feet stand close to

the great change that men call death,

 we send forth all wisdom, mercy and love.

A brief introduction to Buddism and the Practice of Zen 

Information contained within this section is taken directly from Wikepedia.org.  If you have questions regarding any information contained herein, please attend one of our services and speak directly with Kozen Sensei and visit our website at www.azszc.org to view Kozen Sensei’s personal recommended reading list.  The purpose of this newly added section is to acquaint you with some basic background of Buddhism and the practice of Zen.

Buddha

Usually Buddha ("Awakened One," from the root bodhi) refers to Siddhārtha Gautama (Sanskrit; Pali: Siddhattha Gotama), the historical founder of Buddhism, who adopted that title. He is sometimes referred to as Sakyamuni or Buddha Gautama

Siddhartha, destined to a luxurious life as a prince, had three palaces (for seasonal occupation) especially built for him. His father, King Śuddhodana, wishing for Siddhartha to be a great king, shielded his son from religious teachings or knowledge of human suffering….Although his father ensured that Siddhartha was provided with everything he could want or need, Siddhartha felt that material wealth was not the ultimate goal of life.

At the age of 29, Siddhartha left his palace in order to meet his subjects. Despite his father's effort to remove the sick, aged and suffering from the public view, Siddhartha was said to have seen an old man. Disturbed by this, when told that all people would eventually grow old by his charioteer Channa, the prince went on further trips where he encountered, variously, a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and an ascetic. Deeply depressed by these sights, he sought to overcome old age, illness, and death by living the life of an ascetic.

Siddhartha initially went to Rajagaha and began his ascetic life by begging for alms in the street….Siddhartha left Rajagaha and practiced under two hermit teachers….but moved on after being unsatisfied with his practices. He then became a student of Udaka Ramaputta, but although he achieved high levels of meditative consciousness and was asked to succeed Ramaputta, he was still not satisfied with his path, and moved on.[12]

Siddhartha and a group of five companions led by Kondanna then set out to take their austerities even further. They tried to find enlightenment through near total deprivation of worldly goods, including food, practicing self-mortification. After nearly starving himself to death by restricting his food intake to around a leaf or nut per day, he collapsed in a river while bathing and almost drowned. Siddhartha began to reconsider his path. Then, he remembered a moment in childhood in which he had been watching his father start the season's plowing, and he had fallen into a naturally concentrated and focused state that was blissful and refreshing, the jhana.

After asceticism and concentrating on meditation and Anapana-sati (awareness of breathing in and out), Siddhartha is said to have discovered what Buddhists call the Middle Way—a path of moderation away from the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification....Then, sitting under a pipal tree, now known as the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, he vowed never to arise until he had found the Truth. Kaundinya and the other four companions, believing that he had abandoned his search and become undisciplined, left.

After 49 days meditating, at the age of 35, he attained Enlightenment; according to some traditions, this occurred approximately in the fifth lunar month, and according to others in the twelfth. Gautama, from then on, was known as the Buddha or "Awakened One." Buddha is also sometimes translated as "The Enlightened One." Often, he is referred to in Buddhism as Shakyamuni Buddha or "The Awakened One of the Shakya Clan."

At this point, he realized complete awakening and insight into the nature and cause of human suffering which was ignorance, along with steps necessary to eliminate it. These truths were then categorized into the Four Noble Truths; the state of supreme liberation—possible for any being—was called Nirvana.

DOGEN ZENJI

Dōgen Zenji was a Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher born in Kyōto, and the founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. He was a leading religious figure of his time, as well as being an important philosopher.

Dōgen was born into a noble family. His father may have been Koga Michichika, a high-ranking minister in the imperial court, while his mother was likely the daughter of Fujiwara Motofusa, who had once been a regent in the court[1]. Dōgen's father died when Dōgen was three years old, and his mother when he was eight, which strongly impressed Dōgen with the Buddhist notion of impermanence.

At the age of thirteen[2], affected by this early glimpse of impermanence and faced with the possibility of a career as part of the aristocratic Fujiwara family, Dōgen decided to become a monk[3]. Initially, he went to Mount Hiei, the headquarters of the Tendai school of Buddhism. While there, he studied the Buddhist sūtras, and became possessed by a single question:

“

As I study both the exoteric and the esoteric schools of Buddhism, they maintain that human beings are endowed with Dharma-nature by birth. If this is the case, why did the Buddhas of all ages—undoubtedly in possession of enlightenment—find it necessary to seek enlightenment and engage in spiritual practice?[4]

”

 

This question was, in large part, prompted by the Tendai concept of "original enlightenment", which states that all human beings are enlightened by nature and that, consequently, any notion of achieving enlightenment through practice is fundamentally flawed[5].

 As he found no answer to his question at Mount Hiei, Dōgen left to seek an answer from other Buddhist masters. Dōgen went to visit Kōin, the Tendai abbot of Onjōji Temple, asking him this same question. Kōin said that, in order to find an answer, he might want to consider studying Chán in China[6]. Kōin sent Dōgen to Myōan Eisai in Kyōto, a leading Tendai monk who had been to China and brought back the practice of Rinzai Zen in 1191. In 1214, Dōgen went to study with Eisai at Kennin-ji Temple, and—upon Eisai's death the following year—he continued his study under Eisai's successor, Myōzen. In 1221[7], Myōzen conferred Dharma transmission upon Dōgen, acknowledging that he had learned the teachings. Two years later, Dōgen decided to make the dangerous passage across the East China Sea to China to try to find an answer. His teacher Myōzen accompanied him on the trip.

In China, Dōgen first went to the leading Chan monasteries in Zhèjiāng province. At the time, most Chan teachers based their training around the use of gōng-àns (Japanese: kōan). Though Dōgen assiduously studied the kōans, he became disenchanted with the heavy emphasis laid upon them, and wondered why the sutras were not studied more. At one point, owing to this disenchantment, Dōgen even refused Dharma transmission from a teacher[8]. Then, in 1225, he decided to visit a master named Rújìng, the thirteenth patriarch of the Cáodòng (J. Sōtō) lineage of Zen Buddhism, at Mount Tiāntóng in Níngbō. Rujing was reputed to have a style of Chan that was different to the other masters whom Dōgen had thus far encountered.

Under Rujing, Dōgen realized liberation of body and mind upon hearing the master say, "Cast off body and mind". This phrase would continue to have great importance to Dōgen throughout his life, and can be found scattered throughout his writings, as—for example—in a famous section of his "Genjōkōan":

“

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.[9]

”

 

Shortly after Dōgen had arrived at Mount Tiantong, Myōzen had passed away. In 1227[10], Dōgen received Dharma transmission and inka from Rujing, and remarked on how he had finally settled his "life's quest of the great matter"[11].

DOGEN’S ZEN

At the heart of the variety of Zen that Dōgen taught are a number of key concepts, which are emphasized repeatedly in his writings. All of these concepts, however, are closely interrelated to one another insofar as they are all directly connected to zazen, or sitting meditation, which Dōgen considered to be identical to Zen, as is pointed out clearly in the first sentence of the 1243 instruction manual "Zazen-gi": "Studying Zen ... is zazen"[16].

In referring to zazen, Dōgen is most often referring specifically to shikantaza, roughly translatable as "nothing but precisely sitting", which is a kind of sitting meditation in which the meditator sits "in a state of brightly alert attention that is free of thoughts, directed to no object, and attached to no particular content"[17].

The primary concept underlying Dōgen's Zen practice is "oneness of practice-enlightenment". In fact, this concept is considered so fundamental to Dōgen's variety of Zen—and, consequently, to the Sōtō school as a whole—that it formed the basis for the work Shushō-gi, which was compiled in 1890 by Takiya Takushū of Eihei-ji and Azegami Baisen of Sōji-ji as an introductory and prescriptive abstract of Dōgen's massive work, the Shōbōgenzō ("Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma").

For Dōgen, the practice of zazen and the experience of enlightenment were one and the same. This point was succinctly stressed by Dōgen in the Fukan Zazengi, the first text that he composed upon his return to Japan from China: "To practice the Way singleheartedly is, in itself, enlightenment. There is no gap between practice and enlightenment or zazen and daily life"[18]. Earlier in the same text, the basis of this identity is explained in more detail:

 

“

Zazen is not "step-by-step meditation". Rather it is simply the easy and pleasant practice of a Buddha, the realization of the Buddha's Wisdom. The Truth appears, there being no delusion. If you understand this, you are completely free, like a dragon that has obtained water or a tiger that reclines on a mountain. The supreme Law will then appear of itself, and you will be free of weariness and confusion.[19]

”