SESSHIN

Sesshin are intensive, full-time retreats that last from two to eight days. Sesshin means to touch, receive, and convey the mind. Participants dedicate themselves to their zazen practice during sesshin and organize their lives so that all other cares can be left aside for the entire practice period. During sesshin, participants do zazen, eat, perform jobs to sustain the group, and rest.

“To touch the mind is to touch that which is not born and does does not die; it does not come or go, and is always at rest. It is infinite emptiness – empty infinity – the vast and fathomless Dharma which you have vowed to understand.”

– Robert Aitken, Encouraging Words

Trust in Mind
(Faith Mind Inscription) 

by Chien-chih Seng-ts'an (529-613)

The Supreme Way is difficult

Only for those who pick and choose.

Simply let go of love and hate;
The Way will fully reveal itself.

The slightest distinction
Results in a difference as great as heaven and earth.
For the Way to manifest,
Hold not to likes and dislikes.

The contention of likes and dislikes
Is a disease of the mind.
Without realizing the Profound Principle,
It is futile to practice stillness.

Intrinsically perfect like the Great Void,
Without lack, without excess;
In choosing to grasp or reject,
One is blind to Suchness.

Neither pursue conditioned existence,
Nor stay in idle emptiness.
In oneness and equality,
All self-boundaries dissolve.

Trying to still action
Is an action itself.
Still trapped in duality,
How can you recognize oneness?

Failing to penetrate the meaning of oneness,
Neither side will function.
Banishing existence entwines you in existence;
Pursuing emptiness turns you away from it.

The more you talk and think,
The more you go astray;
Cease all speech and thought,
Then everywhere you are with the Way.

To attain the principle, return to the source;
Pursuing reflections, the essence is lost. 

Inner illumination, in a moment,
Surpasses idle emptiness.

The appearance of this idle emptiness
Results entirely from deluded views.
No need to search for truth,
Just put to rest all views.

Abide not in dualistic views;
Take heed not to pursue them.
As soon as right and wrong arise,
The mind is bewildered and lost.

Two comes from one,
Hold on not even to one.
When not even one thought arises,
All dharmas are flawless. 

Free of flaws, free of dharmas,
No arising, no thought.

The subject disappears with its object,
The object vanishes without its subject.
Objects are objects because of subjects,
Subjects are subjects because of objects.

Know that these two
Are essentially of one emptiness.
The one emptiness unites opposites,
Equally pervading all phenomena.

Not differentiating what is fine or coarse,
How can there be any preferences?

The Great Way is all embracing,
Neither easy nor difficult.
The narrow minded doubt this;
In haste, they fall behind.

With clinging one loses judgment
And will surely go astray.
Let everything follow its own nature;
The Essence neither goes nor stays.

To follow your true nature is to unite with the Way,
Be at ease and worries will cease.
Fixation of thought is unnatural,
Yet laziness of mind is undesirable.

Not wanting to wear down the spirit,
Why do you hold dear or alienate?
To enter the One Vehicle,
Be not prejudice against the six dusts.

To have no prejudice toward the six dusts
Is to come into true enlightenment.
The wise abide in wu-wei,
The fools entangle themselves.

Dharmas do not differ,
Yet the deluded desire and cling.
To seek the mind with the mind--
Is this not a great error?

In delusion chaos and stillness arise,
In enlightenment there is no desire and aversion.
The duality of all things
Comes from false discrimination.

Dreams, illusions, like flowers in the sky—
How can they be worth grasping?
Gain and loss, right and wrong--
Abandon these at once.

If your eyes are open
Dreams will naturally cease.
If the mind makes no distinctions,
All dharmas are of One Suchness.

In the profound essence of this Suchness,
One abandons all conditioning.
Beholding the myriad dharmas in their entirety
Things return to their natural state.

As all grounds for distinction vanish,
Nothing can be compared or described.
When what is still moves, there is no motion;
When what is moving stops, there is no stillness.

Since two cannot be established,
How can there be one?
Reaching the ultimate,
Rules and measures are nonexistent.

Achieving a mind of impartiality,
All striving comes to an end;
Doubts are completely cleared,
In right faith the mind is set straight.

Nothing to linger upon,
Nothing to remember.
Clear, empty, and self-illuminating,
The mind exerts no effort.

This is beyond the sphere of thought,
Which reason and feeling cannot fathom.
In the Dharma Realm of True Suchness,
There are neither self nor others.

To reach accord with it at once
Just practice non-duality.
Non-duality embodies all things,
As all things are inseparable.

The wise everywhere
All follow this teaching.
The Way transcends time and space —
One thought for ten thousand years.

Being nowhere yet everywhere,
All places are right before your eyes.
The smallest is the same as the largest,
In the realm free of delusions.
The largest is the same as the smallest;
No boundaries or marks can be seen.

Existence is precisely nonexistence,
Nonexistence is precisely existence.
If you cannot realize this,
Then you should change your ways.

One is everything;
Everything is one.
If you can realize this,
Why worry about not reaching perfection?

Trust in the non-duality of mind;
Non-duality results from trust in mind.
Beyond words and speech,
It is neither past, present, nor future.

-Translated by the Chung Tai Translation Committee

 

Dzogchen in Everyday Life

By Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

The everyday practice of dzogchen is simply to develop a complete carefree acceptance, an openness to all situations without limit. We should realize openness as the playground of our emotions and relate to people without artificiality, manipulation or strategy.

We should experience everything totally, never withdrawing into ourselves as a marmot hides in its hole. This practice releases tremendous energy which is usually constricted by the process of maintaining fixed reference points. Referentiality is the process by which we retreat from the direct experience of everyday life.

Being present in the moment may initially trigger fear. But by welcoming the sensation of fear with complete openness, we cut through the barriers created by habitual emotional patterns.

When we engage in the practice of discovering space, we should develop the feeling of opening ourselves out completely to the entire universe. We should open ourselves with absolute simplicity and nakedness of mind. This is the powerful and ordinary practice of dropping the mask of self-protection.

We shouldn’t make a division in our meditation between perception and field of perception. We shouldn’t become like a cat watching a mouse. We should realize that the purpose of meditation is not to go “deeply into ourselves” or withdraw from the world. Practice should be free and non-conceptual, unconstrained by introspection and concentration.

Vast unoriginated self-luminous wisdom space is the ground of being - the beginning and the end of confusion. The presence of awareness in the primordeal state has no bias toward enlightenment or non-enlightenment. This ground of being which is known as pure or original mind is the source from which all phenomena arise. It is known as the great mother, as the womb of potentiality in which all things arise and dissolve in natural self-perfectedness and absolute spontaneity. All aspects of phenomena are completely clear and lucid. The whole universe is open and unobstructed - everything is mutually interpenetrating.

Seeing all things as naked, clear and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize. The nature of phenomena appears naturally and is naturally present in time-transcending awareness. Everything is naturally perfect just as it is. All phenomena appear in their uniqueness as part of the continually changing pattern. These patterns are vibrant with meaning and significance at every moment; yet there is no significance to attach to such meanings beyond the moment in which they present themselves.

This is the dance of the five elememts in which matter is a symbol of energy and energy a symbol of emptiness. We are a symbol of our own enlightenment. With no effort or practice whatsoever, liberation or enlightenment is already here.

The everyday practice of dzogchen is just everyday life itself. Since the undeveloped state does not exist, there is no need to behave in any special way or attempt to attain anything above and beyond what you actually are. There should be no feeling of striving to reach some “amazing goal” or “advanced state.”

To strive for such a state is a neurosis which only conditions us and serves to obstruct the free flow of Mind. We should also avoid thinking of ourselves as worthless persons - we are naturally free and unconditioned. We are intrinsically enlightened and lack nothing.

When engaging in meditation practice, we should feel it to be as natural as eating, breathing and defecating. It should not become a specialized or formal event, bloated with seriousness and solemnity. We should realize that meditation transcends effort, practice, aims, goals and the duality of liberation and non-liberation. Meditation is always ideal; there is no need to correct anything. Since everything that arises is simply the play of mind as such, there is no unsatisfactory meditation and no need to judge thoughts as good or bad.

Therefore we should simply sit. Simply stay in your own place, in your own condition just as it is. Forgetting self-conscious feelings, we do not have to think “I am meditating.” Our practice should be without effort, without strain, without attempts to control or force and without trying to become “peaceful.”

If we find that we are disturbing ourselves in any of these ways, we stop meditating and simply rest or relax for a while. Then we resume our meditation. If we have “interesting experiences” either during or after meditation, we should avoid making anything special of them. To spend time thinking about experiences is simply a distraction and an attempt to become unnatural. These experiences are simply signs of practice and should be regarded as transient events. We should not attempt to re-experience them because to do so only serves to distort the natural spontaneity of mind. All phenomena are completely new and fresh, absolutely unique and entirely free from all concepts of past, present and future. They are experienced in timelessness.

The continual stream of new discovery, revelation and inspiration which arises at every moment is the manifestation of our clarity. We should learn to see everyday life as mandala - the luminous fringes of experience which radiate spontaneously from the empty nature of our being. The aspects of our mandala are the day-to-day objects of our life experience moving in the dance or play of the universe. By this symbolism the inner teacher reveals the profound and ultimate significance of being. Therefore we should be natural and spontaneous, accepting and learning from everything. This enables us to see the ironic and amusing side of events that usually irritate us.

In meditation we can see through the illusion of past, present and future - our experience becomes the continuity of now-ness. The past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?

We should free ourselves from our past memories and preconceptions of meditation. Each moment of meditation is completely unique and full of potentiality. In such moments, we will be incapable of judging our meditation in terms of past experience, dry theory or hollow rhetoric.

Simply plunging directly into meditation in the moment now, with our whole being, free from hesitation, boredom or excitement, is enlightenment. 

Ten Oxherding Pictures

Verses by Kakuan Shien (12th century)
Oxherding text translations by Victor Sogen Hori

“Here, our essential self is compared to an ox. We seek the ox, grasp it, tame it and finally the self which has always been seeking becomes completely one with the ox. But this also is forgotten so that we now simply carry on our ordinary lives. This is the process described by the Pictures. They show concretely the progression of our practice and are very helpful for a self-examination of our own practice and as encouragement for further practice.The Ten Ox-herding Pictures have concretely depicted the process in which the imperfect, limited, and relative self (the little child) awakens to the perfect, unlimited, and absolute essential self (the ox), grasps it, tames it, forgets it, and completely incorporates it into the personality. But we must stress that these pictures and verses are merely an indication of the way to practice and not an object for conceptual thought. Thus, the study of the Ten Ox-herding Pictures are very useful for those who are actually striving to make clear the true self in Zen through the actual sitting with aching legs. But for those who want only to learn the rationale of Zen I must warn that these pictures and words will be only “white elephants” of no use whatsoever.”

   — taken from the Teisho (commentary) by KUBOTA Ji’un

 1. Searching for the Ox

Preface:
Until now, the ox has never gone astray. Why then does he need to search for it? Because he turned away from himself, he became estranged from it; then, lost in the dust, at last he let it astray; he’s lost as soon as the path divides. Winning and losing consume him like flames, right and wrong rise round him like blades.

Verse:
Beating about the endless wild grass, he seeks and searches, the rivers broaden, the mountains stretch on, and the trails go ever deeper. His strength exhausted and his spirit wearied, no place allows him refuge. He listens–there’s just the evening’s shrilling of cicadas in the trees.

Waka:
Sought ox in the mountains–missed it. Only a cicada’s empty shrilling.

__________________

II. Finding the Tracks

Preface:
With the aid of the sutras, he gains understanding; through the study of the teaching, he finds the traces. The many vessels are clearly all of one gold; and he himself is the embodiment of the ten thousand things. But unable to recognize correct from incorrect, how is he to distinguish true from false? Since he has yet to pass through the gate, only tentatively has he seen the traces.

Verse:
By the water and under the trees, there are tracks thick and fast. In the sweet grasses thick with growth, did he see it or not? But even in the depths of the deepest mountains, how could it hide from others its snout turned up at the sky?

Waka:
Deep in the mountains, his efforts bear fruit. Tracks! How grateful to see a sign.

__________________

III. Seeing the Ox

Preface:
Through sounds he makes an entry and comes to know their source. But it’s no different for each and every one of the six senses. In their every function, it is plainly present, like salt in water, or glue in paint. Raise your eyebrows–it is nothing other than yourself.

Verse:
On the tree branch a nightingale sings, warm sun, soft wind, green willows on the bank. Now nowhere for it to hide, its majestic horns no artist could draw.

Waka:
In the spring sun in the green willow strands, see its timeless form.

__________________ 

IV. Catching the Ox

Preface:
At last today you finally meet up with the ox so long hidden in the wilderness. But the world around is so distracting, it is hard to keep up with the ox. It will not give up its longing for the sweet grass. It is just as willful as before and just as wild natured. He who would truly tame it must lay on the whip.

Verse:
He expends all strength to take the ox. But willful and strong, it won’t soon be broken. As soon as he gains the high ground, it vanishes once more deep into the mist.

Waka:
Thinking “At last, my mind–the ox. Don’t let go.” Just this is the real fetter.

__________________

V. Taming the Ox

Preface:
If even the slightest thought arises, then another follows. With awakening, all becomes truth; but if you reside in ignorance, all is unreal. Things arise, not because of the objective world, but only because of the mind. Keep a firm grip on that rope and do not waver.

Verse:
Let drop neither whip nor line even a moment lest the ox wander back to dust and desire. Tame this bull and it will be pure and gentle. Without fetters or chain, of itself, it will follow.

Waka:
Days past counting and even the wild ox comes to hand. Becoming the shadow that clings to my body–how gratifying.

__________________

VI. Riding Home on the Ox

Preface:
The struggle is over; all concern about winning and losing has ceased. He sings woodsman’s village songs and plays children’s country tunes. Lying back on top of his ox, he gazes at the sky. Call him back but he will not turn around; try to catch him but he will not be caught.

Verse:
Astride his ox, leisurely he heads for home. Trilling a nomad’s flute, he leaves in misted sunset. In each beat and verse, his boundless feeling–what need for an intimate companion to
say even a word?

Waka:
Roar in the sky of limpid soaring mind; white clouds come back on the peaks.

__________________

VII. The Ox Forgotten, the Person Remains

Preface:
The dharma is not dual; the ox just stands for the actuality. Likewise, the snare and the rabbit are different, and fishnet and fish are not the same. So, too, gold separates from dross, and the moon emerges from the clouds, sending out a single shaft of icy light from before the age of Ion.

Verse:
Aback his ox, he’s reached his original abode, Ox now gone, he too is still. Sun risen high, yet still he dreams, old whip and line put away in the woodshed.

Waka:
Hard to take–people who fret over good and bad, knowing nothing of Naniwa reeds.

__________________

VIII. Forgetting Both Person and Ox

Preface:
He has shed all worldly feelings and erased all thought of holiness. He does not linger where the Buddha is; he hurries right past where the Buddha is not. As he does not cling to either side, not even the thousand-eyed one can find him. Birds flocking around bearing flowers–that would be a disgraceful scene.

Verse:
Whip and line, man and ox–all vanished to emptiness. Blue sky utterly vast–no way to say or convey. Into the flames of a fire pit, how can a snowflake fall? He who attains this is truly one with the Patriarch.

Waka:
Without clouds, or moon, or cassia–the tree too is gone, the sky above swept so clean.

__________________

IX. Return to the Origin

Preface:
The fundamental is pure and immaculate, without a speck of dust. The sees the things of existence arise and decay though he resides in the serene quiet of doing nothing. But he is not merely conjuring up visions. Why then is there any need to change things? The blue waters, the green mountains–he just sits and watches them rise and pass away.

Verse:
Return to the origin, back to the source–such wasted effort. What compares with being dumb and blind? From within the hut, one sees not what is in front–the river by nature broad, flowers by nature red.

Waka:
No traces of the Dharma way, on the original mountain. The pines are green, the flowers glint with dew.

__________________

X. Entering the Marketplace with Extended Hands

Preface:
All alone, the gate shut so tight–not even the thousand sages can comprehend. Hiding his light he strays from the tracks of the sages who have gone before. He comes round to the market with his gourd dangling and returns to his hut clumping along with his staff. He shows up at the drinking places and fish stalls to awaken all to their Buddhahood.

Verse:
With bare chest and unshod feet, he walks into the market, daubed with dirt and smeared with ashes, laughter fills his face. Without using mystic arts or divine powers he makes withered trees at once burst into flower.

Waka:
Hands extended, feet in the sky–on a dead branch perches a bird.

 

Nelson Foster Roshi on koans 

From his foreword to "Entangling Vines" translated and edited by Thomas Yuho Kirchner 

This book offers “entangling vines,” but who would want them and what for? The phrase suggests tough, jungly vegetation that will trip you up, snag you in its rope-like sinews, and hold you captive. As a title, it seems calculated to put off all but the boldest or most foolhardy readers, signaling that exploration of these pages will be a struggle—arduous, exhausting, possibly futile altogether. It invites risk-takers, curiosity seekers, and especially, perhaps, people driven to get to the bottom of life’s biggest questions. Shall we count you in?

As the subtitle makes clear, the vines threatening to tie us up here are koans, the famously enigmatic little stories of Zen tradition. The liveliness and strangeness of koans—the humor and inscrutability of their repartee, their unorthodox treatment of Buddhist doctrine, the indifference they exhibit to logic or social convention, their frequent eruption into hitting and hollering, their broad expressive range, from crudeness to banality to poetry of great subtlety and beauty—have made them intriguing to people of diverse cultures ever since they emerged as a feature of Zen’s Chinese precursor, Chan, some nine centuries ago.

Understanding has lagged far behind interest, unfortunately. In attempting to characterize koans, popular writers commonly resort to the words puzzles and riddles, which are so inaccurate as to be positively misleading. Academic specialists fare little better with such arid definitions as “pedagogical tools for religious training.” Zen masters, who seem supremely qualified to explain the nature and working of koans, typically deflect requests for such information, declaring words inadequate to do justice to the phenomenon. Try a koan and see for yourself, they say.

Which brings us back to the entanglement under consideration—yours. Entanglement in koans takes two basic forms, one of them praised in Chan and Zen tradition, the other deplored, even ridiculed. The latter is a fascination with koans that remains merely literary or intellectual. The tradition doesn’t reject such pursuits wholesale; indeed, it possesses an extraordinarily rich literature, and many of its great figures have demonstrated nimbleness and delight in the life of the mind. Zen has always insisted, however, that other interests be subordinated to practice and awakening, and it deploys a set of vivid metaphors to emphasize the absurdity and fruitlessness of a Zen student entering the thickets of analysis and interpretation before experiencing insight: heading east when you want to go west, scratching your shoe when your foot itches, beating the cart instead of the horse.

The approved form of entanglement with koans involves thorough, sustained absorption in one koan at a time, in the hope that it will eventually resolve in a deeply liberating realization. Before the process runs its course, however, engaging a koan in this fashion often feels tedious or even torturous—every bit as constricting and exasperating as the title metaphor implies—and the bonds grow still tighter if one thrashes around mentally in the effort to get loose. So whoever originally applied the phrase “entangling vines” to koans undoubtedly deserves a prize for Truth in Advertising (Medieval Chinese Division). It wasn’t a private effort, though; institutionally, for centuries Chan and Zen have stressed the hardship of working with koans, promoting images of the process even more painful to contemplate than getting snarled in a web of creepers. The most cringe-inducing of these liken koan study to nightmares at the dining table—gnawing on an iron bun, eating the putrid mash left after the fermentation of alcohol, lapping up the shit and piss of bygone sages, swallowing a red-hot iron ball that can’t be disgorged.

Despite such repulsive warnings, generations of Zen practitioners—male and female, lay and monastic, dauntless or terrified—have undertaken koan work and survived to verify its joys and lasting benefits as well as its intermittent miseries. Most descriptions of the process attribute the difficulty of koans to their deliberate thwarting of rationality. By this account, koans function as efficient traps for logical thought because the masters of old designed them expressly for that purpose. While it’s true that logic rarely produces significant insight into a koan, the notion that koans are explicitly intended to impede logic doesn’t hold up.

Centuries ago, the annals of Chan tell us, a monk questioned his distinguished master about the sayings of his predecessors, asking, “Did the buddhas and ancestral teachers have the intention of tricking people or not?” The master’s reply holds for Buddhist texts of all kinds but fits koans particularly well:

Tell me, do rivers and lakes have any intention of obstructing people? Although rivers and lakes have no intention of obstructing people, still people can’t cross them, so they become barriers from a human standpoint. Although ancestral teachers and buddhas had no intention of tricking people, right now people can’t go beyond them, so ancestral teachers and buddhas trick people after all.

Rather than presuming that koans were created to confound us, we would do well to take them at face value, as good-faith attempts to present the Dharma, the wisdom of the Buddha, in a straightforward, perhaps striking, manner. Many events in everyday life surprise and confuse us, after all, though no one intends them to; we simply don’t understand them or even know how to understand them. From this perspective, it seems utterly unremarkable that a koan—a few words cherished for illuminating reality in a profound way—would go over our heads on first encounter (and maybe for quite a while afterward). Koans often perplex the monastics and lay people who appear in them, and evidence abounds that they’ve perplexed innumerable monks, nuns, and lay people who’ve pondered them as well. You’re baffled by them? Big deal. Join the crowd. 

Spring comes with flowers, autumn with the moon,

summer with breeze, winter with snow.

When idle concerns don’t hang in your mind,

that is your best season. 

 -  Wu-men

Words from our Ancestors

     In late summer of 1659, Ungo was living in a hermitage on the summit of Mount Tsunagi in Sendai. At twilight he climbed the mountain’s eastern slope, rang the evening gong himself, and then sat in meditation until midnight, when he summoned his disciples and announced that he was about to depart the world. Begged for a final verse, Ungo laughed and replied, “The streams, the birds, the trees and woods, all these are my verse. Why are you asking for something more?” And so saying, he quietly passed away.

            As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space,

            an illusion, a dew drop, a bubble,

            a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightening;

            view all created things like this.

                       - Diamond Sutra

           This dewdrop world        

           Is a dewdrop world

           And yet, and yet

                      - Issa (1763-1828)

- From Hilo Zen Circle Newsletter, October 2019