Brooklyn Zen Center (Brooklyn Zen Center)

On the forth day of Rohatsu there’s an effort, an energy that is coursing through the zendo. But it is no longer our energy or our effort. We are all sharing it. So I think that is something we can enjoy and can rest in.

Oryoki has become this dual choreography of giving and receiving. You don’t need to play a part in it anymore. You just need to be there and bow to the server and the nourishment is there.

The only thing that we can do is to keep the precepts and the bodhisattva vows and the refuges as measures of the heart. They can’t be measures of the intellect. They’re impossible for the intellect.

There is a teaching in Buddhism called Buddha nature, which is such a loving and encouraging teaching, which says – my words – that love is a potentiality and a realizable force. Even if we feel a thousand miles away from it, it’s there. It’s available, we can return to it and live it!

What would it be [like] this week to be completely devoted to the infinities that are sitting with us everywhere. To the mothers of our being that are sitting with us everywhere as dishes, as people, as prostrations, as clocks, as thoughts, as moods, as knee pain – whatever they are. However they’re showing up, to bring complete devotion to them.

It could be confusing when we hear that instruction: the middle way between gentleness and discipline.  As if we’re trying to find some quality that’s halfway between discipline and gentleness.  That’s kind of a watered down discipline, or an insincere gentleness.  And I don’t think that’s what’s meant by that instruction.  The middle way between gentleness and discipline is fully gentle, and fully disciplined.  It contains both of those without holding on to either.

That’s where we live in zazen. We are grounding ourselves fully in the mud. We are not trying to clean it up. If we try to clean it up, we will kill life. We will kill the possibility of meeting ourselves and each other in ways that will clarify our karma, and clarify our conditioning.

Resisting reality is a mistake. Because reality will win. No matter what that reality is. It’s safer and better to face whatever is happening with as clear a mind as you can possibly muster. And it’s from there that we respond to the world.

Resisting reality is a mistake. Because reality will win. No matter what that reality is. It’s safer and better to face whatever is happening with as clear a mind as you can possibly muster. And it’s from there that we respond to the world.

This is an updated podcast version of the dharma talk offered by BZC’s root teacher Teah Strozer on March 21, 2020, which includes the Q&A portion of the talk.

It’s really good if you can live without time. Don’t think there is a tomorrow that is going to be better. That you are going to fix something tomorrow, that it will be nice tomorrow. There is no tomorrow.

My deep gratitude for the many people taking care of those who are suffering. Boundless gratitude. And for all the people who are courageously keeping the basic functioning of our city going. Of course, the medical workers who take care of the sick, the people who drive the ambulances, the truckers who are delivering us food from the farmers, the people who are selling and delivering our food to us, the people who pick up the trash, the people who deliver the mail and the packages. And deep gratitude for whoever it is that is keeping all this technology going at this time. It’s a mystery to me how it even works but I know there are human beings working hard to keep us in contact. Deep gratitude to all of them.

[The Dharma] is always between us. It is always the conversation that is happening even when we’re silent.  It is going on between us; that is where the Dharma always lives. Even when we’re at home in our apartments and we’re not next to each other, the Dharma is being expressed between us, and throughout us.

For me, over the past three weeks, the request and the challenge has been how to touch that quality [of stillness, that is our true nature], for ourselves and for others, now that we are all apart.

How to live in a world in a situation that is difficult and remain steady and grounded in the deepest way that we can, which is silence and stillness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

This teaching [of impermanence] thrusts us into realization. Most of us may think of impermanence as something that is solid for a while and then it decays and goes away. We think of impermanence as a kind of temporary permanence. But it isn’t.

There’s always been suffering in the world – nothing new. But these days, I think, we are given the gift to notice it more. We also have the gift of noting that pretty much everybody in the world is kind of suffering right now. There always are, but we don’t notice it. And now we have this gift to feel connected. We have the opportunity to actually, everyday, be with the suffering of people everywhere.

The BZC audio dharma is available free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to BZC here. Thank you!

Along with dukkha and the dust of our delusion, there is love and kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. And this is where our Zen practice really begins.

How can we become a community that fosters awakening to these systems of harm, in our bodies and between us? I want to understand how we can go beyond a fragile superficial harmony in our community to be a better community, to be truly anti-racist. To tear apart what we have to tear apart, to take responsibility for what we have to take responsibility – a loving responsibility, a loving accountability that listens and it’s humble and it’s disciplined and apologizes. And tries again, even though we don’t know what we are doing. Because we don’t know what we are doing.

One day you may be serving food. One day you may be ringing a bell. It’s all the same. It’s all about doing that practice together with intention and with, dare we say, love. And it’s about getting in each other’s way. And it’s about knowing when to move. And knowing when to say the appropriate thing, when to correct. When to accept correction.

I have hope because I think the virus has actually caught our attention. I have hope because it has stopped us in our tracks. I have hope that maybe this time we will rethink our relationship to the Earth, to this living miracle. […] That maybe we can live in gratitude for this gift of life.

I have been thinking about waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night. It’s my first vow of the day to liberate all beings and it’s my last thought at the end of the day to vow to liberate all beings? And can I try to encourage that in myself? […] Because we know the suffering of the world and we are moved to respond to it.

Buddha activity is a pivotal activity. The pivotal activity of Buddhas can be called zazen. […] It’s the way Buddha or Great Awakening is pivoting with all living beings.

We are being called to compassion. Everybody is calling us to compassion. All the phenomena within our own mind are calling for compassion.

Letting go – real letting go – is letting go that doesn’t abandon the pain. It’s being there completely with it and, through that complete compassion with it, pain is released, without being abandoned, or exiled or tampered with. Compassion respects pain, right now, the way it is. It lets it be. It doesn’t touch it, it doesn’t turn away, it’s right there.

Buddha activity is accepting that this conversation may never end, the conversation with evil. It isn’t just accepting it. It’s accepting working with it, it’s accepting responding to it appropriately.

We are a very small circle of water. We are not complete. The truth or liberation comes from all the truth manifesting, just like the plum trees – southern branch and northern branch. As they are. As we all are.

We are being confronted with the amplification of centuries of historic pain that just seems to want to be acknowledged, demanding our attention, demanding we reckon with it.

We all, just like Siddhartha Gautama did, run back to the palace for a bit. We learn about the suffering of the world, we feel it, we run back to the palace. We come out again, we feel it, we run back to the palace. Until we come out enough that we decide: “Ok, I am not going back to the palace, I am staying here. I am going to understand what is going on, I am going to understand why we do this to each other.”

The ceremony of zazen is a ceremony of non-separation. It’s our intention to sit down and be with everything. This is how we start working with those many moments of painful separation, of harm enacted upon us, or that we have enacted upon another – all the vulnerability of our humanness.

In the knowing that needs no words, the entire reality of the thinking mind is called into question.

All I can do is cultivate conditions that are conducive for a vow to emerge. […] Vow is not something I generate out of my own power. It’s something that happens in community and relationship with others and through a practice that cultivates the conditions for it to emerge.

This practice, this way of understanding, this way of knowing, is crafted in such a way that we have access to freedom in each and every moment of our waking hours. The freedom that I am speaking to is the freedom from the conditioning, the freedom from being reactivated in response to conditions or persons or circumstances. The freedom to be who we are, unafraid. The freedom to be able to meet whatever comes our way with a magnitude of heart and wisdom. To know in that moment what the action may be or not be. Where we want to direct our energy — not in reaction to something but because we want to be engaged in contributing in the lessening of suffering for all beings.

We are doing this work of undoing, which is not easy. It’s really having this courage to go into places that you actually don’t want to see. A lot of times we don’t want to see how we oppress others. We don’t want to see how we oppress ourselves. Gender wise, or it could be race, class, age — there are so many kinds of ways that we oppress in this world. And so to really look at how we do that is to really see clearly the pain that is real in our bodies. And that is the most difficult work we are doing because it is so physical. This practice is not intellectual practice, it is physical practice.

So when we sit in zazen, our karmic patterns come up. And we have an opportunity to see them and to not act on them, to let them fall away. So in that sense we acknowledge them, we see them and in that moment of acknowledging we can take responsibility. So it is a two-part process. There is an acknowledgment of it, and a avowing, which is a take on responsibility and the possibility of space around that. We are able to own it, own our twisted karma. And in that moment, be free of it.

It starts to become really clear that […] responding to the difficulties of our lives often requires the energy of others. That being with others, our daily routine that we take for granted, is often the way we gather the strength and energy to meet our lives.

The freedom will be in the allowance of the arising, not in the arrangement of the arising.

If you look deeply at where the body ends, you can’t find an end to it.  That is how much we are not separated from anything.  So this idea of separation is an illusion, it’s a inaccurate way of perceiving.

We are in a time where being able to take refuge in each other, being of service to each other, being a community that can rely on each other – this is something that we put forward, and that we understand that zazen is certainly important, our ritual practice is certainly important. But our sangha is the thing that will allow all of that to be. And that our deep service to each other will really be everything.

In order to get free in this human life we have to meet these parts that are really broken at times. They are not broken out of hatred. They are broken out of a lack of love.

Practice is taking that step time and time again and slamming again and again into the reality that the world is not built for me, around me, by me alone. That my story is just that – a story. And that there is a reality that I am a part of, that other beings are a part of, and would not happen without all of us.

Sometimes that Buddha ancestral connection is represented between a teacher and a student – which Dogen talks a lot about – but it can be represented by our relationship to the Buddhas and ancestors we don’t see right in front of us, that we know came before us. And so we speak to them about what it is we wish to renounce and what is we wish to manifest, and we ask for their support.

We sit together, and in that sitting together we carry our individual practice. But also there is no distinction among us, we are sitting together. And together we are actually supporting each other’s practice. We are not sitting in a cave by yourself, we are sitting right next to each other. It’s lovely, I saw that during this last period of zazen. This is the tradition we have been given. So we have to continue to do this and recognize we are all in this together. And recognize that the practice of open upright sitting and open upright mind is what we are learning to carry forth into the world.

To live by vow. To live by not your conditioned mind, but to live with intention. Beyond the little selflessness. To live by vow, is to live as the universe. This is practice realization.

When we come together and sit, then we are supporting each other. And this is a interesting practice, to think that the person sitting next to me is practicing dying. And that when someone is stuck — we use that word when someone is stuck in their conditioning — that part of that stuckness is the fear of dying. It is a fear of actually letting go of, a fear of grieving, it’s a fear of falling into the swirl of the unknown. And so hopefully if we do that a great compassion will arise for those who are stuck in their conditioning. Because who wants to die?

The Bodhisattva path is a counterintuitive approach. It’s a method to help us let go of this obsession over ourselves. This is very different from our usual mode of operation, if you think about it. That is why it feels counterintuitive, and it can take a really long time for us to really understand and to get into it. We are very much conditioned by the world around us, by the opposite way of being.

In the way of the Buddha, karma is always in the background. It’s like the little key that unlocks all these teachings. When you kind of understand that, as I’m sure many of you do, when we understand that karma is such an important teaching, it unlocks all these teachings. This is the teaching of karma.

This darkness, this mystery of who we are, and how we are together, and how we are being influenced all the time, is to be honored and to be listened to, and is necessary for our wholeness.

When we work on ourselves deeply enough, when we really are in touch with our own fundamental openness of heart, which really is there, the love that we have for ourselves and other people comes from a place of unconditioned openness. That is what you feel, tremendous gratitude – for every single person.

And when you meet them, you are meeting yourself. You are meeting a mystery that we both are. If you can walk with another person to that place for the both of you – it’s a tremendous gift.

It’s not easy, it’s not guaranteed, and it’s a lot of work. And this is what we do in practice

When we talk about karma, it’s a way of talking about causality or cause and effects, specifically in human life, in human moral life. It’s the effect we cause on the world through our intentions – through our volition, through our will. And the Buddha was clear that when we are looking at the effects we are having, we have to pay attention not just to our actions, but we have to pay attention to our intention behind it.

[We can think of] these arising traumas, these beings as I like to think of them, as survival strategies of our ancestors. So fear, anxiety, anger, rage, or joy – these are blood memories. And we all have them, we all carry them. And if we can open them up, see and work with them, we can transform them; we can see what the wisdom is there for us.

In whatever way Buddhas are directing their attention, their abiding and dwelling happens there.

I think that this gender work is very important for us, it’s a real big doorway, and very deep.

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.

I would suggest a mind that is awake, and that settles, and that finds love, joy, and ease in precariousness, so that we can be with each other, and love each other, and support each other. In very real, concrete meaningful ways.

How do we work through our pain, through our numbness? How do we regain a sense of aliveness?

The Chinese character “Juryo”

We really need human beings that are devoted to the difficult spiritual path required to release the full light of love into the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We can cultivate this sense of great expansive unconditioned love. That allows us to meet the difficulty in life without turning away and without getting caught.

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.

For me the most powerful things the vows do are because of their impossible nature — they are humbling. They have a kind of leveling effect. In the face of this impossible vow, I’m one person in a community. So there is an aspect of confession in that vow, of acknowledging our humanness and our limited view. So there is a humbling and tenderizing effect of the vow, that enables us to open up to the functioning of the universe, we actually open up to possibility. We become tender in the face of new possibilities, our imagination is liberated.

We are training ourselves – in our bodies, in our minds, through the practice, through the teachings – to make it more likely that in a moment of suffering, in a moment of threat, that we will be able to have an intention to, and maybe some sort of capacity to respond to courageous connection, instead of tightening into separation and division.

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.

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.

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

This is our practice, the practice of love, the practice of intimacy. That’s why we offer a relationship with a teacher, and we offer sangha, so we can work this way with each other.

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

We deeply desire to be in accord with the natural functioning of life, with dependent co-arising, with the way things interact and support each other, without these false senses of separation. That is what our heart and our lives desire in the deepest sense.

Sometimes you sit down – or I sit down – because there is fear. But that is still a fearless choice to face your fear, to understand your fear. Bodhisattva can have fear, but does not live from fear. Fear is not the source of Bodhisattva activity.

The Bodhisattva vow of living for the liberation of all beings, even before my own, to raise up in the heart the liberation of all beings — this is the most powerful interrupter and lover of karma. This vow turns everything toward karma.

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…

 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?

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.

In the sensation of the low-grade heartbreak there is gratitude, appreciation, grief and sadness. How can I cultivate the space in my life for a low-grade heartache, that I think is necessary to engage in Bodhisattvic activity? It’s an uplifting grief that sustains us and that can keep us in the game.

Everything you do is an opportunity. Everything you say, every gesture you make, every thought that arises in your mind. All of those are opportunities – each one is an opportunity to take care of this Samadhi that has been given to you.

The Samadhi is the teaching of Suchness. The Samadhi is intimate communion. The Samadhi is Buddhas and Ancestors. Buddhas and ancestors are the Samadhi. Buddhas and Ancestors are that teaching. Buddhas and Ancestors are intimate communion. Bodhisattvas want to live in that intimate communion, they want to be Buddhas and Ancestors, they want to be the teaching of Suchness. Because that is what they understand is the way to help people. They work on that in their own practice. Which they understand is how you help other people.

The beings who have this wish and commitment – to realize perfect understanding for the welfare of all beings – when those beings enter into Samadhi, their vow goes with them. So in that sense, the Bodhisattva Samadhi (or what I would call zazen) – I consider the zazen that I am recommending and encouraging is Bodhisattva Samadhi. And that Bodhisattva Samadhi, that zazen, is a vow. It’s an open, relaxed, buoyant, undistracted vow: to gather the entire ocean of Buddha’s teachings, for the welfare of all beings.

The focus of the Bodhisattva Samadhi is the Bodhisattva wish, the Bodhisattva aspiration: to make Buddhas for the welfare of the world. And then there is that aspiration, you can also, in a sense, vow and commit to that aspiration. So the aspiration, and the commitment of the aspiration, is at the center of the Bodhisattva Samadhi.

Please take care, and practice this song, this Samadhi song, for the welfare of this world. And listen to the teachings that you working on this Samadhi yourself is transforming beings. We are not doing this just to transform our self, were doing it to transform all beings. But working on our self in this way, transforms beings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.