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Guided Meditation: Participation and Surrender

So good morning, my friends. Things are a little bit different today than usual. I'm not at IMC; I'm at our retreat center, IRC (Insight Retreat Center). Today is also the 40th anniversary of when I was ordained as a Zen priest, so I thought I would like to mark this day. We'll do a meditation as usual, and then instead of continuing with the Satipaṭṭhāna^[1] series, I thought I'd pause with that and mark this occasion that is important for me. I've been talking a little bit about my Dharma^[2] life, so that's the difference for today.

One of the ways in which my Zen training unfolded was that, at a certain point, the practice was one of learning how to participate in life—how to really put myself into whatever I was doing. In Zen training, a lot of the practice was also in work and activities. When sweeping, for instance, to really participate in the sweeping, be really there for it. I did my first three-month training period at Zen Center^[3]—on those platforms on which all the monks were meditating. So I have my initial training in Zen, participating and practicing with zazen^[4] wholeheartedly. Zazen. Participating.

And then at some point, it switched. Rather than participation, it became a non-resistance—just getting out of the way. Maybe some people would say to open up, but maybe that's a little bit too neutral. The idea was that it was still participating, but now rather than me applying myself or engaging myself, it was more like engaging was happening, life was happening, and now it was getting out of the way, having no resistance to it. And so this participating fully in life but just not resisting life, I trained to do in the monastery, outside of meditation and then in meditation.

And so as we sit today in the Satipaṭṭhāna series, it's about experiencing the whole body. What a great thing to mark this practice of participation, as we participate with our whole body. When we participate fully in life, what else? That's the medium, that's the matter with which we can participate in life—with our whole body, which is very different than with our whole mind only. Participating and feeling, getting out of the way, and allowing ourselves to experience life—all of life—in a way that is three-dimensional, multi-dimensional, from all the different senses and all the different capacities for attention that we have.

So, assume a posture of participation with meditation.

If you're going to bring all of your body, all of your posture with you to participate in meditation, no part of your body is passive. It is alert, it is present. Like if some important person for you walked into the room and you would sit up straight and really be present, like, now you're going to be attentive.

And then lower your gaze, maybe 45 degrees to the floor, letting the gaze of your eyes rest, not trying to look at anything in particular. And then gently close your eyes.

In the practice that we often do here of breathing in deeply, it is a practice of participation. Breathe in deeply into your body, letting the whole torso expand and stretch, shoulders lifting as you breathe in deeply. And then a certain kind of surrender into the body, into life through your body, on the exhale.

Breathing in deeply, connecting to this life.

Exhaling, surrendering to this life.

The lived life of the moment, not the life that you can think about, anticipate, or remember. But the lived life.

And then let your breathing return to normal.

Every sensation you have in your body is there because you're alive. When you're dead, your body has no sensations. It's kind of like proof that you're alive that you have sensations, even if they're uncomfortable.

As you breathe in, feel the life of your belly.

And as you exhale, relax. Surrender to the belly.

On the inhale, feel your chest, your upper torso.

And as you exhale, relax your upper chest, your torso. Perhaps surrendering to the lived life that expresses itself through your chest.

On the inhale, feeling the sensations of your face. Generously, openly, allowingly feel your face.

And as you exhale, relax. Surrender your face, giving up your public face, giving up how you feel like you need to present yourself to the world. Let your face have a break. Deep relaxation as you exhale.

And then the same with the mind, maybe in the area of your brain, your forehead, anywhere you tend to feel the mind. Feel it as you inhale.

And as you exhale, relax your mind, soften.

See if you can soften any ways in which you're driving your mind, pushing it along with your desires and wants and fears.

Surrender your fears, your desires, so you can better participate through your body in this moment-to-moment lived life.

And then settling down into the body breathing.

Either participating in this experience of breathing, or surrendering to your breathing.

The lived life of the body breathing.

One breath at a time.

Just the inhale when you're inhaling.

Just the exhale as you exhale.

Dedication of Merit

So then, as we come to the end of this sitting, may the intention of this practice that we've done, may the dedication, the effort, be dedicated to the welfare and happiness of others. May it be that we practice in such a way that we help reduce suffering in this world for ourselves, for those that we know, and the whole world. We live in a world where there is incalculable suffering, and we live in a heart that has an incalculable capacity for love, for compassion. And may it be that our care, our compassion, our love grows through this practice day by day, week by week, year by year. May our compassion grow so that our care, our participation in life is for the welfare and happiness of all.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

And may we live a life that contributes to that, or at the very least doesn't contribute to more suffering.

A Dharma Life: Reflections on Zen Priest Ordination

Warm greetings to everyone.

Today I'm going to mark the 40th anniversary of having been ordained as a Zen priest, so it's a little pause in our series on Satipaṭṭhāna. I feel very fortunate to certainly reach this 40th anniversary and to have spent these 40 years in the Dharma, practicing and teaching. But also, the fact that I'm here at Insight Retreat Center is very special. This is also a part of the wonderful Dharma life that I've been graced by, or blessed by, to have this wonderful retreat center to practice in, be on retreat in, and to teach in—to be able to open the doors of the center to so many people to come and practice here.

Coincidentally, the reason I'm here is that we have a two-day retreat for our teacher training. IMC started its very own teacher training back in April. In the past, people who got trained in our tradition trained through Spirit Rock^[5] or Insight Meditation Center, and here they started their own training for fifteen people. It's a culmination of more than 40 years of Dharma practice—45 years or more—that come to the wonderful circumstance of training others to be full teachers. All this comes together: being at IRC, my anniversary of my ordination, and the teacher training that I feel so fortunate to be able to do. So I wanted to mark it.

Forty years ago, I was ordained with two other Zen students, Victoria Austin and Gary McNabb, and I felt very fortunate to know them both. Both of them dedicated their life to the practice—in their case Zen practice—and the life of what became a priest. I say "became" because at the San Francisco Zen Center^[6] where I was ordained, at the time of my ordination it was called a monk ordination. The word monk was being used for both male and female as a monastic ordination, and that's what I thought I was doing, ordaining as a monk. I knew that there was a track to become a teacher someday, but there were so many other monks, priests, and ordained people at Zen Center when I was there that I calculated it'd be something like 25 years before my turn to move up into even just the very beginning teaching roles or to be trained as a teacher.

But I wasn't being ordained to be a teacher; I was ordained to be a monk. To my surprise, a few months after I was ordained, the abbot decided to stop calling the ordination a monastic ordination, but rather a priest ordination. Maybe partly because traditionally in Buddhism monastics are celibate, and in Japanese Sōtō Zen^[7] there's no rule of celibacy, so there can be marriage and sexual relationships. But also, there's a way in which the Zen priest is a life that's in the world in all kinds of ways, participating in all the different aspects of life, sometimes in a way that traditional monastics hold themselves a little bit apart from the world. A small example would be that monastics are not allowed to marry people, and Zen priests are. It kind of represents a little bit of that distinction.

What this ordination represents for me is that every time in my adult life where I chose the Dharma practice over any other possibilities, it always worked out fantastically, wonderfully. I could never have imagined how well it was going to work out. There were even times where I had almost no money and was living a poor life as a practitioner, where I thought the reasonable thing to do was to go find work. I even had a job lined up once, and then I said, "Nope, that's not what I'm dedicated to. My life is dedicated to the practice, and come what may, that's what I'm going to do."

Periodically, it just became clear that this Dharma path was opening up in front of me. The decision to become a monastic, to be ordained, wasn't exactly a conscious decision or a reasoned decision. I was sitting at the monastery looking at the creek that runs through it, reflecting about my life and what I should do with it and what direction to go. It was like lightning went through my body, and suddenly I just knew that I was going to be ordained. Generally, I'm a person who does things for reasons, kind of a rational person perhaps, or I tried to be. So afterwards, I thought of reasons for that. The reasons were sincere, but the decision was not reasoned; it was just a deep knowing. Suddenly I just knew that this is what I was doing.

One of the reasons I gave myself was that I wanted to live a life that responded to the suffering of the world at the deepest place of suffering. The only thing that I knew in life up until that point that somehow was able to touch the deepest places of suffering in myself and in other people was Buddhist practice. I didn't necessarily think that that was the only way to do it, but that's the only thing that I knew, and I wanted to dedicate my life to responding to suffering at its deepest level.

I was going to go to graduate school to study soil conservation. I wanted to support and help the world by doing erosion control in different places where there was a really serious problem. But I felt that somehow there was something inside of me that, as important as that work would have been, wouldn't have reached into the depth of the human heart where suffering really lies at the core. I didn't know if I'd be effective as someone who touched people or supported people to do so, but I wanted to be in an environment that was for that, and to support it. My long-term image of myself as a Zen priest was to have a little neighborhood storefront meditation center—just a little one-room storefront kind of thing. My job was to keep the place clean, open up, and allow people to come and meditate. I wasn't much more thoughtful about what I was going to do in the long term than doing that.

But then I had this wonderful life where things just kept unfolding after I was ordained, and even things that were tragic for many people somehow kept opening up to going further and further in the practice. One tragic thing was that the abbot of the Zen Center had an ethical scandal and left, and it was devastating to many people^[8]. But I was invited by someone to go to Japan. My father, actually, was working in Japan, and he said, "When do you want to come to Japan?" This was coincidental with the abbot leaving, and I said, "Oh sure, I'd like to continue my Zen training in Japan."

So I went to Japan for a while. But in order to stay in Japan, I had to go to Thailand to get a new visa. And in Thailand, I discovered this practice we do here, Vipassanā^[9] practice, and that opened up wonderfully for me.

That then continued for a while, this dual track of both Zen and Vipassanā, and that's still a dual track. The Zen is very important for me still; it provides a fundamental religious orientation for myself. It's an orientation of participation in the world, of being fully present in this world, practicing in the world as a place to be free. And then the Vipassanā practice is equally deep and valuable for me. That is a practice of deconstructing the world in a very deep way to discover the deeper potential capacities we have for freedom.

There is this wonderful synergy of these two—Vipassanā allowing for a depth of deconstruction, of seeing through the conditioned, constructed world that we live in, and opening up to greater capacities for freedom; and then Zen learning participation, learning to give yourself to the world, enter the world, and participate with that freedom.

One of the teachings or ideas in Zen that was very influential on me was the idea that we express our practice, our understanding, the depth of our practice within us. How we mature in the practice is not just to be in enlightened retirement, but it's something that is expressed or enacted. There was this person many years ago who heard all these Buddhists keep talking about "practice, practice, practice." "What kind of practice do you do? I'm going to retreat to practice. I'm practicing." The word "practice" is used very quickly and a lot in our scene. The person heard all this and said, "You guys, all you ever talk about is practicing. When's the performance?" [Laughter]

In Zen, the idea is that you live the life of the performance. So it's how you enact, how you express your understanding, that is the fulfillment of it. For me, the combination of Vipassanā teaching freedom and Zen teaching living that in our life—those are these dual tracks that were so important. It's not inherent that one is just one way and one is the other way, it's just that's the way these two lessons came through to me, and I'm very grateful for it.

I feel so fortunate to be able to live this Dharma life and find my practice in everything I do. I have this fortune of being able to teach here to all of you on YouTube, which is a little bit of a manifestation of my practice. But it comes around in that it's also the location for practice when I'm teaching. It isn't that this is only an expression of whatever practice I have; I track myself and notice what's happening inside of me—my thoughts, my feelings, my body—being present for the whole show. It is a practice. I track myself and stay mindful of what's happening so that I keep discovering more freedom, depth, fullness, participation, and getting out of the way of this life.

Someone I saw in the chat earlier asked me what my Zen name is, my ordination name. In Japanese, it's Ryuge Kojun, spelled R-Y-U-G-E (that's one word), and the second word is K-O-J-U-N^[10]. The abbot who gave me the name translated it as "Dragon Tusk, Sunlight Revere." One of those names is supposed to represent how you are when you're ordained, and the other is supposed to represent your potential, what you can become. I don't know which is which, but it's a nice pairing of these two words and ideas. "Dragon Tusk" sounds a little bit ferocious and so maybe I'm a little bit dangerous, and then "Sunlight Revere." So that was the name I was given.

My Pali name—you get lots of names in Buddhism sometimes—in the Theravāda^[11] Vipassanā world where I teach is Dhammadāsa^[12]. That means a servant of the Dharma. So with both the Zen ordination being a Zen priest and being a Vipassanā teacher and practitioner, I feel very much that I'm a servant for the Dharma. I love serving it, supporting it, letting it grow in our hearts, and spreading across the lands.

Thank you. Tomorrow I'll be back at IMC, and we'll continue with the Satipaṭṭhāna.