Zen Studies Society

Engaged at ZSS – Please Call Me By True Names

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By Jikyo Bonnie Shoultz Sensei

In today’s world, where there is so much war and suffering, we yearn for peace. In November 2023, Jifu Devyani Sadh, the originator of the ZSS Engaged Buddhism initiative, held a workshop that explored the delusion of separateness, the root cause of conflict and strife. This workshop examined Buddhist Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s famous poem, Please Call Me by My True Names, and I invite you to experience this poem today as we contemplate the possibility of peace.

This poem was written soon after the Vietnam war ended, and it provides us with insight into how we cannot separate ourselves from the world around us, even from those who cause harm. I find that each time I read this poem, its meaning deepens and sheds new light on my questions about peace.

“Please Call Me by My True Names” by Thich Nhat Hanh

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.

To me, this poem exemplifies that peace cannot come as long as we separate ourselves as “us” vs “them;” peace will only come when we truly realize our oneness. Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other? Can we generate peace?

2024 A Historic Transition

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By Jishin Liz Kuney Sensei

This past fall, two ceremonial events marked the historic transfer of the abbot’s staff from Shinge-shitsu Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi to Chigan-kutsu Kyō-On Dokurō R. Jaeckel Roshi.

On a sunny October 1st, Dai Bosatsu Zendo hosted its first Abbot Retirement Ceremony, a bounteous celebration in honor of Shinge Roshi’s twelve-year term and 50-year association with the Zen Studies Society. Beginning with board president Hokuto Daniel Diffin Osho, several sangha members spoke about the challenging and remarkable journey of Shinge Roshi’s tenure and shared sentiments of gratitude.

Shinge Roshi read numerous excerpts from Like a Dew Drop, an anthology of her recent talks that the Society gifted to those in attendance. As a unique feature, after the sangha chanted the Heart Sutra and Great Light Dharani, the Most Ven. Tet Tung Thai and the Ven. Nguyen Thai from the Định Thành Temple in Frankfort, New York, chanted the Great Light Dharani in Vietnamese. Moving and sublime performances by Anthony Bez on classical guitar and Marco Burmeister on shakuhachi lilted through the autumn air of the majestic zendo. A sumptuous feast
prepared by Muken Mark Barber Sensei and additional speeches followed the ceremony in the tented courtyard. The board of directors presented Shinge Roshi with a
large, vibrant scroll by calligrapher and scholar Kazuaki Tanahashi.

On November 24th, Chigan Roshi was installed as the third Abbot of the Zen Studies Society during the canonical Abbot Installation Ceremony. Chigan Roshi received the Abbot’s staff and presented his four-line verse to mark the occasion: On this mountain, white clouds appear in radiant light,

On this mountain, white clouds appear in radiant light,
Morning dew gathers, heart’s flowers bloom bright.
The valley’s echoes transmitting Dharma-song,
This Dharma jewel shall forever shine on.

山白雲聚承明光
朝露心華綻顏庭
谷回傳響法音悠
法界金剛永輝耀

The dignified and austere traditional ceremony featured chanting and a teisho. Chigan Roshi used an iron nyoi (a ceremonial scepter) that belonged to Nyogen Senzaki, the first Rinzai monk who lived in the United States. Chigan Roshi noted that Senzaki, who called himself a “mushroom monk,” worked quietly and without affectation for half a century, “preparing the ground for us to receive the beneficence of this teaching.”

Article – Turning Your Everyday Life Into A Koan

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By Eshin Brenda Shoshanna

Koans are a powerful medicine and they must not be ignored. These ancient questions and stories coming from the world of Zen hold a key to transforming suffering and seeing life with new eyes. 

Simple, direct, and inscrutable, koans refuse to be understood logically or rationally. Our usual strategies will not do. Koans jog the mind and make us laugh. As we grasp their inner meaning, life suddenly ceases to be a problem and instead turns into an adventure, with surprises along the way.

Life presents challenges daily. As we learn how to see these challenges as koans, life turns around. All that we encounter becomes part of our koan, and problems become a source of strength.   

Where Is Our Koan Hiding?

Life throws koans at us constantly. The sudden loss of someone we love stops the thinking mind and leaves us stunned in the face of the great unknown. We ask, Why is this happening? What will happen next? Questions like these are deep koans.

These everyday life koans are often the most powerful. They are designed to push us beyond logic into a new way of knowing and living. They remind us that life is fundamentally unknowable, truly impossible to figure out. 

Do You Have A Big Problem To Solve?

Good. First Thing, Forget About It.

Move the Mountain Without Using Your Hands

All kinds of mountains appear in our lives and all kinds of situations seem larger than we are. They feel immovable, hemming us in. Our immediate response is to try to adjust the circumstances, to move the mountain with our hands. We want to fix this or that, and using our cunning intellect, we start to maneuver. However, the more we try to alter circumstances according to our usual understanding, the more tangled they often become.  

We may not see that what we are trying to solve is not really what we’re up against. The so-called problem may have appeared in our lives simply to ask us to listen and look more deeply. When we do that, we finally give up both question and answer, and clarity and wisdom come by themselves. 

We seldom face our problems as koans. Instead, we dream up all kinds of answers, searching for understanding in books. We grab at secondhand explanations and cling to them. This is not to say that study is unimportant, but the answers we find belong to someone else. They’re not yet our own. We haven’t personally taken the question into our life, sat with it, engaged with it deeply. We haven’t allowed the question to do its work upon us, make us strong, bring us to life. From the Zen point of view, that’s a missed opportunity. Reaching for secondhand answers is a way of avoiding your life and your truth.

Secondhand Answers Will Not Do

Zen teachers give students koans and demand a response. 

“Bring me the answer!” they may yell, “Your very life depends on it.”  

When we bring a prefabricated answer to a teacher, they’ll reject it time and time again. Unless you live from the truth of your life, it isn’t yet real.  You are only following along with others, an imitation person. What a missed opportunity!

Despite rejection from the teacher, the koan can still grab you, and when it does, how wonderful! The new dance has begun. 

When You Become You, Zen Becomes Zen 

Koans demand that you become who you are. Usually, we copy others or compare ourselves to them. This person is right, this one is wrong. This one is better, this one is worse. We try to be the best of all, modeling ourselves after others.

Koan practice stops all that. It allows you to find your true voice and honest responses. What do you say? If you pretend to be someone you’re not, the interview with the teacher is over! Come back next time. 

Painted Cakes Never Satisfy Hunger

If we go into a restaurant starving and read the menu over and over, we still won’t be full. We must order the food, eat it, see how it tastes, and digest it on our own. We must let it nourish us. Same with a koan. Koans are food, filled with vital energy. We must eat them up with our very own life. By working with koans, we discover who we are and what we’re doing on this precious earth.

You Are Not Working On Your Koan, Your Koan Is Working On You

When we receive our lives as a koan, nothing becomes a problem, simply a new experience to be received.  Rather than get caught in a battle with endless drama, issues begin to resolve themselves. So how do we proceed? There are many wonderful guidelines for taking this journey that have been offered throughout the years. Here are just a few which can be applied to all aspects of life.

Don’t Fight the Mountain

Rather than trying to solve the koan, make friends with it and welcome whatever comes.   As we stop fighting, complaining, and objecting to everything, we can deeply experience our situation, and our innate wisdom starts to flow.  For example, if your mountain, or koan, is a terrible relationship and you fight it or push it away, you’ll simply repeat the same cycle. If instead, you receive the situation as a koan and embrace it, larger truths will be revealed.  

Listen To What Your Koan Is Trying To Tell You

Instead of imposing your ideas upon the problem, stop and listen to what your koan is trying to tell you. As you do this, you may see that your mountain does not need to be moved at all. The more you listen, the sooner the mountain will change by itself.  

Sit with Your Koan Like a Mother Hen Sitting on Her Eggs to Keep them Warm

Working with a koan is like a mother hen sitting on her nest, keeping the little chicks inside warm. She doesn’t abandon her chicks but gives them all the time they need. When the chicks are ready, they’ll pop through the shell and come to life all by themselves. 

Same with your koan. Give it time. When it’s ready the koan will burst through the shell of your delusions all by itself. Boom. Oh my! 

In the Readiness of Time, All Is Revealed

“When it’s soup, it’s soup.”

As you spend time with your koan, it cooks you. Patience, endurance, and fortitude are needed.  Forget about looking for an answer, enjoy each moment of the journey, be with it one hundred percent. 

Pass One Day, Fail the Next

We can pass the koan one day and bring the same answer the next day and fail. We can even bring an answer we know is right, and it’s rejected. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. One day our spouse may love us, and the next day, turn away. We may spend hours trying to figure out why.  It does no good.

The teacher, like life itself, must say No again and again until we are finished with good and bad, right and wrong; until we stop clinging to the need for approval and expecting everything to go our way. When this is done, we have passed our koan. 

A teacher is here to make us more confused, to mirror our confusion and the strange ways in which we engage with life. And to insist that we Make A Response! 

Make a Response

Zen is not about withdrawing, transcending, or saying No to life. Our koans force us to Make a Response! This reminds us that it is crucial to both hear and respond to the call of life. In the silence, we sit and listen, but do not linger. Once off the cushion, we act.  

My beloved teacher passed away and took all his koans with him. He took all his answers, too. When I pick up one of the koans, I am with him again. There is no space between us. The koans connect us with eternity as well.

Poetry – Buddha

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By Keigetsu CM Brown

I purchased this little
statuette of Buddha
at a store in town and
now he is sitting on
the table next to the door.
And even though his eyes
seem to be closed there is
that slim slit of vision
that sees me sitting here
drinking this cup of coffee.
He hasn’t moved a
millimeter since I brought
him home two years ago.
There he sits. But when I
turn my head does he
stick out his tongue
and open his eyes as
wide as the boardwalk
at Seaside Heights?

2024 Letter From The Abbot

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By Chigan Roland Jaeckel Roshi

The change of seasons reminds us of the ever-dynamic nature of life. Fall has turned to winter, and the days have gotten shorter in the northern hemisphere of our planet. More darkness than light exerts its natural influence on our physical, emotional, and mental being. Even when the light begins to increase, day after day, darkness still prevails, while the upcoming springtime approaches ever so slowly.

Similarly, periods of darkness appear in our lives, as life has its own seasons. All of this is a natural process, the interplay of activities of opposing directions, qualities, and properties. Even society and culture are subject to alternating periods of openness and freedom, and times when conditions are more favorable to undo these freedoms.

While it is all just a reflection of the natural activity of change (or the Dharma Activity as my ordination teacher used to call it), as human beings with the ability for introspection, cognition, and compassion, we have the opportunity and responsibility to not only experience but deeply fathom the functioning of this activity. The arising and disappearing is met by a mind that, if untrained, attaches to likes and dislikes and is convinced of its own permanence – even though the consciousness that experiences the changes is of that very same nature, arising and disappearing.

When we speak of liberation in the context of Zen practice, what is it from which we are becoming free? Is it that darkness and everything that challenges this world and society actually vanishes? Is there any solution to this dualistic worldview, separated into light and darkness?

Through introspection, Zazen, we rediscover the underlying nature of our being: our original face that exists before the dichotomy of our human, dualistic consciousness. So, you may ask, how does this make a difference when the present world still confronts us with warfare, genocide, racism, misogyny, and so many more issues?

Once we awaken to our original nature, we begin to relate to these challenges in a fundamentally transformed way. When darkness starts to prevail, we turn on our own light and help the world find its way to a brighter place. By learning through our first-hand experience how this activity of Dharma works, we become increasingly skilled at being in accord with the activity itself, and we are less likely to be overpowered by its content.

Human beings are remarkable. Our inquisitive mind enables us to investigate our own being, the nature of mind, and the universe. Let’s sit down together and investigate this human condition with vigor and determination. May this newsletter and the activities of the Zen Studies Society continue to illuminate the way for this Sangha. May we all be a light to one another and everyone whom we encounter!

Engaged at ZSS – Voices

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By Dr. Michael Fayne

As we march into this new year, I find myself searching with ever-greater urgency for some sense of solid psychic ground on which to stand. But the more I search, the more I feel that this psychic shelter does not exist, or rather, perhaps I am looking for the wrong thing. I cannot find solace or reassurance that all will be well, but what I have found are many voices, some quite recent, from the world’s spiritual traditions. These voices use different metaphors and terms, but they all convey a similar message pointing toward the deepest truth and the path forward. Here are just a few.

There is the voice of Lama Anagarika Govinda, a European man in the mid-20th century who became a student, a scholar, and finally an influential teacher of Tibetan Buddhism: “Unselfish love and compassion towards all living beings is the first prerequisite of meditation….To gain this attitude one should look upon all beings as upon one’s own mother or one’s own children, since there is not a single being in the universe that in the infinity of time has not been closely related to us in one way or another.”

Then we have the voice of Fr. Thomas Merton, a prominent Christian author who in his later years became a passionate proponent of Christian-Buddhist dialogue, expressing an overwhelming insight he had while standing in the middle of a crowded street: “I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts. I saw where neither desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the Divine. If only they could all see themselves as they really are! If only we could see each other that way all the time! There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

Then there is the voice of Hazrat Inayat Khan, a Sufi teacher in the mid-20th century: “… The third way of realizing the Sufi principle is to recognize in one’s own feeling the feeling of God – that is, to recognize every impulse of love that arises in one’s heart as a direction from God, to realize that that love is a divine spark in one’s heart, and to blow upon that spark until a flame may rise to illuminate the path of one’s life.”

And finally, there are these words from the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now, Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

When we hold even such tiny bits of wisdom from these divergent traditions alongside one another, we hold something far greater than the sum of the parts. The traditions say that everyone, everywhere, who has ever lived, is sacred. There are no exceptions to this truth. The traditions say: There are no separations, no “others,” no “me,” no “you,” no “them.” The world’s grief confronts us with a responsibility that is overwhelming yet sacred, and therefore a gift. Our path to peace, salvation, truth, and enlightenment, however we conceptualize it, lies in our daily readiness to “blow upon that spark” of these realizations, and then live accordingly in whatever ways we can.

May all beings draw nearer to Buddha’s wisdom in this coming year.

Locations

Dai Bosatsu Zendo
223 Beecher Lake Road
Livingston Manor, NY 12758

New York Zendo
223 East 67th Street
New York, NY 10065


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Dai Bosatsu Zendo
office@daibosatsu.org
(845) 439-4566

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