Since leaving the monastery a few years ago, I have become interested in how the ancient Zen teachers talked about the spiritual path. Language about the realizations that compose awakening are nested in the Zen chants that I would chant daily as a monastic, but we were so immersed in the continuous-ness of practice, that rarely would we stop and try to map out the territory.
We were living it, who needed the borrowed words of those long dead to put a conceptual overlay onto something so fleeting as experience?
My teacher Chozen was fond of saying that Zen was a practice without guardrails or measuring sticks—we stumble around in the dark. And somehow in this stumbling, in the dark terrain of life before concepts— our faith deepens and our sense of self loses its limiting bearings in exchange for an indescribable vastness that belongs to no-one.
Zen teachers over the years have said of Zen that, “it is good for nothing”, or “a practice of non-attainment.”
Others, including the early founders of the Soto school, described or attempted to show through poetry and image, some of the dynamics at play in this “good for nothing” journey of “non-attainment” and spiritual maturation.
Two such teachers are Zen Masters Shitou and Dongshan Liangjie. Shitou’s famous work The Sandokai or The Identity of Relative and Absolute is still chanted at Soto Zen Monasteries and Temples all over the world. And Dongshan’s Precious Mirror Samadhi, which contains his teaching of the Five Ranks is similarly revered.
There is a magic to language. A symbol is passed down for centuries, from spoken word, to ideogram, to letters and words in our own tongue, which become images again appearing in our imagination, references to a memory that we can almost taste.
Words are sensual. We taste our words as we speak them. We feel their images and are invited into their song. Sentences are like spells. They captivate the heart. They have the power to render us transformed in this midst of their utterances. When used mindlessly words can kill the thing they are attempting to name. They can create landscapes of lies, delusive dreams that collectively capture our imaginations and send us spiraling further away from ourselves.
Yet, words are also alive. Language lets us re-cast the spell on itself. A single word can be a deep medicine for the exiled heart. A point of connection—a way in.
The theme of the absolute and the relative is a timeless dance of wholeness. What happens when we really venture to peer into Mind, inquire into the inner workings of our hearts, this experience we call my life?— well it's empty yet appearing, spacious yet seemingly tangible, here yet unfindable. What we call one, is also many—a relationship so intimately entwined, it can feel like a great wrong has been committed to even speak as if they were two separate and distinct experiences.
And yet, we long to make meaning. To communicate the inner landscapes of the heart-mind. To celebrate the journey. We are map-makers of consciousness, knowing that as we chart the choppy, ever-changing waters of the heart, it's already shifting—there is nowhere where we truly stand besides the momentariness of standing right where we are.
As I study the Sandokai and Dongshan’s Five Ranks, I have come to appreciate the play of light and shadow or relative and absolute as a generous reminder once spoken by Master Ma, and later by my own teacher Hogen Roshi—”we can’t fall out of the deep samadhi of the universe.” We are always on the path, and the path is always revealing a new face of this mystery.
So let’s explore one map of the great ocean of awareness and perhaps through these words and images we will recognize some of our own footsteps.
The Light within the Dark (the Relative with the Absolute)
Dongshan: The third watch of the night, before moonrise—don’t be surprised if there's a meeting without recognition. One still harbors the elegance of former years.
My meditation is so spacious, it reminds me of that time when…
Dogen Zenji says, when the truth fills our body and mind, we realize that something is missing.
As someone who spent a lot of days, months and years in zazen and retreat, a taste of spaciousness can trigger a longing for my time as a total beginner to practice, who just stumbled into this dark mystery of being and had no skin in the game, no vow, just a heart turned towards spaciousness.
The Dao De Jing says, In the Dark, darken further…
Have you ever meditated in the dark before moonrise? Have you ever let yourself let-go for a moment the ordinary distinctions of seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking? What kind of place is this? Does anyone remain?
The Dark within the Light (The Absolute in the Relative)
Dongshan: Having overslept, the elder woman encounters the ancient mirror. This is clearly meeting face-to-face, only then is it genuine. Don’t lose your head by validating shadows.
I love this concept called non-linear emergence. A recognition that being human is non-linear. Healing in non-linear. Awakening surely is non-linear.
Because we are never outside of the mysterious grace of our awakened nature, sometimes a moment of clarity rises up in the midst of a seemingly ordinary moment or even what we might consider a moment so outside of our concept of practice. Like those days when we sleep in, or are hungover, or ate too much cake, or feel distracted, busy, on autopilot, lost, alone in our suffering, or pain.
Then suddenly, there is an encounter—a stranger smiles, we notice the yellow of a sunflower, a piece of music grabs our attention, we look up at the sky—and something happens. We find ourselves gazing into the ancient mirror. A true encounter. Face-to-face—we glimpse, we remember our shared nature, we feel an enduring love and acceptance, we taste the light of being.
Yes right here in the midst of the ordinary, in the midst of the colossal ways we harm each other, in the midst of all the injustices in our crazy-making world—there is love, there is peace.
The sacred rises up and kisses us on the cheek. And we keep on living. We go to work, we meet with a friend, we use the toilet when we need to, we continue to heal, we face the innumerable challenges of living a human life.
As one Zen master said, awakening is an accident, practice makes us accident prone.
Just the Dark (Coming from within the Absolute)
Dongshan: Within nothingness there is a road out of the dusts. Just avoid speaking the forbidden name of the emperor and you will surpass the worthies of ancient times, who cut off tongues.
Rinzai says: sometimes I take away the person and the environment
All reference points lost
Just don’t try to speak of it
Though many people practice Zen
Few have lost their Mind
Cutting off tongues aside, let me ask— when your mind isn’t reifying anything—where do you abide?
Enter the dark cave of meditation, it's OK to not-know who you are.
One Zen student said when asked, what happens when you think about the one who thinks—I find that there is nothing there at all.
Just the Light (Mutual Integration / From within the Relative)
Dongshan: No need to dodge when blades are crossed. The skillful one is like a lotus in the fire. Surely you possess the aspiration to soar to the heavens.
In the midst of our work, our relationships, our confusion, our intellectual pursuits—the dharma is here. We don’t need to look for peak experiences or make wonderment happen. Every meeting is genuine. The dharma is us. Our vow, our heart’s aspiration, the bodhisattva dwells in this very ordinary, cryptic, heart-wrenching human realm.
Let yourself be a lotus in the fire.
Aspire to see your life as a lotus blooming in the midst of all these flames.
Light and Dark Together (Arriving at Concurrence)
Dongshan: Everyone longs to leave the mundane stream, still you return to sit in the charcoal heap.
Zen celebrates such a complete shedding. Is such a place possible? To no longer long for some peak experience, some validation from the universe that you are OK, that all is sacred. Faith can permeate one’s being so completely that the world of oneness and the world of diversity are so intertwined that it no longer makes sense to make distinctions.
The tradition also celebrates responsiveness. Born from practice-realization we respond to the complexities of our lives. We walk freely through the other ranks, as we live our lives of practice. Most great Zen and Buddhist teachers continued to sit retreats and had a daily practice throughout their lives.
Whether the charcoal heap is your zafu or this burning world of change and pain or the complete combustion of being so fully here for those you love + the work you do—you continue to sit in it, with it, with all beings.
Thank you for your practice, thank you for living the life you have as genuinely as you do. As we walk the circle of the way, never falling out of the deep samadhi of the universe, we encounter these different expressions of the great heart of being. You might describe them differently, if you bother describing them at all.
Perhaps you too are a mapmaker, a spell-caster, one haunted by a call to make meaning and embody love in our sometimes chilling yet beautiful world.
In the dharma talk, I offer some other reflections on this topic—as it pertains to the practice of Ango. A time in the Zen Community of Oregon’s annual practice cycle that we dedicate to intensifying practice with the support of Sangha.
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I’m Amy Kisei. I am a Zen Buddhist Teacher, Spiritual Counselor, budding Astrologer and Artist. In my Spiritual Counseling Practice, I practice at the confluence of spirituality and psychology, integrating mind, body and spirit. I am trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dream Work, Hakomi (Somatic Therapy) and Mindful Eating. Below are some of my current offerings.
Monday Night Meditation + Dharma
Every Monday 6P PT / 9P ET
Join me on zoom for 40 minutes of meditation and a dharma talk. We are currently exploring a text called The Eight Realizations of Great Beings, which gives us an opportunity to practice inquiry and embodying love as we discover our Awakened Nature together.
This event is hosted by the Zen Community of Oregon. All are welcome to join. Drop in any time.
Beyond Mindfulness: Deepening Your Meditation Practice Class Series
Starts today! This workshop style course is designed to provide a map of the meditation path as well as:
Introduce you to the five main styles of meditation (calm-abiding, concentration, heart-based practices, inquiry and open-awareness)
Help you understand the intention of each method and how to practice it
Help you understand how the various methods and techniques fit together and support each other
Provide a fun, non-judgmental learning environment where you can try things out, ask questions and explore
Give you the opportunity to work with a teacher with an extensive background in various meditation techniques
Sky + Rose
What is it? An experiment in the impossible task of excluding nothing and loving everything. An alchemy of play, presence and wandering into the shadows, you could say.
Sky & Rose is a practice container that will:
Center group parts work practices to explore the fluidity, span and dream of who we are - somebody, nobody, everybody. You will be invited to express yourself vocally and physically, engage your imagination and play outside habituation.
Do interpersonal and group meditation practices of seeing, being and awakening.
Directly explore emotional embodiment & shadow work
Include Beauty, Art & Wonderment as core practice elements
Through rituals of imagination, meditation technologies and co-created fields of intentional play, we can slip out, for a time, of confining identities defined by our histories, culture and comfort.
Delivered by these practices, we can begin to inhabit perspectives and modes of being that stretch our sense of the possible and refresh our sense of the everyday.
You might find yourself wearing Luminosities face or inhabiting Laughter’s chest. Together we might try out Venus’s view of the very life we live or we might make space to feel Chaos's dance and shake off some rigidity.
All of these are just examples of where our wondering and feeling into places of vitality and expansion may take us.
We will rebel against the quotidian and respect ourselves too much to only have crumbs of the sacred!
It was also be a time to work together with the challenges to living heart forward with sanity and presence within this hyper-fractured funhouse/madhouse world.
Sky and Rose is a place for Jogen and i to invite you into practices and explorations of 'soul work' that are not part of the Buddhist tradition but that have nonetheless been sources of growth and joy for us. Our influences in this include Paratheatre, IFS and Voice Dialogue, Hakomi, Process Work, Butoh, Jungian dream work and more.
We initiate Sky & Rose as an experiment in embracing Spirit and Soul simultaneously, together imagining and practicing interpersonal liberation, playfulness and spaciousness in this time of deep adaptation.
Meets monthly on Sundays from 10:30A PT - 12:30P PT / 1:30P ET - 3:30P ET
Join us for our Opening Ritual + Practice exploring
The Ritual of Liminality
Sunday October 27
I currently live in Columbus, Ohio with my partner Patrick Kennyo Dunn, we facilitate an in-person meditation gathering every Wednesday from 7P - 8:30P at ILLIO in Clintonville through Mud Lotus Sangha. If you happen to be in Columbus, feel free to stop by. We have weekly meditation gatherings, and are offering a day of meditation in October.
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