Upcoming Trainings And The Spirit Of Practice: How Do You Interchange?

Just after I posted the announcement of the second 100-day training on-line practice focusing on the Genjokoan beginning March 5, I received a notice that Tricycle was going to offer a 90-day practice period focusing on the Genjokoan, beginning February 23. Kinda funny, no?

Some suspect that imitation, the highest form of flattery, is at work. Anyway, as a friend once said, “We all work for Buddha Incarnated., so no problem.”

What I’m doing is a bit different from the Big Sit in that I’m working with a small group (8) and including a weekly journal activity and once-a-month video practice meetings. I’m interested in seeing if it’s possible to do deep work via the internet. We’ll use this public blog for our interactions, kinda like dharma encounter at a temple.

Over at the Tricycle Big Sit, 750+ people are already on board! And one ugly Dosho Port is teaching there too. I’ll be editing and re-posting the Genjokoan essays that first went up here on the title and first paragraph so I think I’ll have enough time for it all – this online practice, my in-the-flesh students, kids, adult human relationship(s), dog, zazen, excercise, etc. (not in any order). Oh, and work too….

One thought for now about the “how” of practicing on blogs. There have been some comments on various Zen blogs of late about how we relate to each other on blogs. Is it practice to just let the shit fly, hiding behind our computers in the security of our little homes? Or should we repress our hostilities and pretend to be “spiritual?”

One word: FOCI.

The above is my rough-ish way of putting the extremes, the two sides that can be in intimate dialogue and from which dialogue a dynamic “middle way” expression can emerge. A middle way featuring real communication.

It’s a dialogue which best happens within each practitioner. If we as individuals take positions around one extreme or the other and make the case for it, surely there will be one damaged.

Here’s the pointer to Sansheng’s Golden Fish from The Book of Serenity (Cleary translation p. 147), a Chinese Soto koan collection that I see as guiding and challenging our interactions:

Meeting the strong, be weak; meeting the soft, be hard. If both are hard and hit each other, there will surely be one damaged. But tell me, how do you interchange?

Upcoming Trainings and the Spirit of Practice: How Do You Interchange?