Internet Dharma Wars? And What I’m Doing Here

December 4, 2009 By Dosho Port

Last night a student brought over the recent Tricycle with the article, Dharma Wars: What is it about the Internet that turns Buddhist teachers into bullies? It chronicles a few of the more ignoble moments of internet dharma exchange – people questioning each other’s credentials and saying mean things.

Although I don’t think the author, Zenshin Michael Haederle, supported the eye-catching “bully” thing in the body of the piece, he raises some important criticisms of internet dharma practice.

The dramatic part is hardly a news flash. It’s easy to zip off zingers without reflection. “People don’t realize they’re relating to a machine,” says Ken McLeod. “Something pops up on their screen that offends them and they scream at it.”

Sure enough. I moderate the comments here so we have little of that. On the one hand, I want to encourage participation and on the other I want to encourage conversation that is to the point and opens vistas, not publish someone practicing their pathology. I’ve probably deleted 18 or so comments in the past 18 months of blogging.

Another criticism Haederle presents is about the leveling effect of the internet. “Anybody with a keyboard is instantly allowed to present whatever they’ve pulled out of their butts as if it were the dharma,” says dear Rev. James Ford.

Sure enough. Indeed, to deepen our life, a sustained, calm heart mind is necessary, so one of my concerns is that whatever dharma might be offered via the internet might be received with the same glazed mind one might attain after Facebooking for several hours. Although if you look around at your local Zen hall (or at yourself) during a dharma talk … well, a certain portion of the people (those people!) are zoning there too. The speaker, of course, might also be beating the same dead horse … as do we all from time to time.

Once again, it’s not the tool but how it’s used.

What I want to do here is to create – together – an online Zen training program that is accessable AND that has depth and integrity. If you’d like to be a part of that, stay tuned. I’m in the midst of digesting the experience from the current 100 day training that added webinars for the first time and will be asking for feedback and ideas soon about how you think we might go forward.

I’ll give James the last word (from the article): “I think that on the balance, more good will come out of this than harm. I think it’s bad for many people participating, I think a level of misinformation is ubiquitous, and I think it’s very exciting.”

In the Burning World, Why Study Dogen?

November 15, 2009 By Dosho Port

There’s a bunch of themes tugging at me today, including my upcoming talk at Kannoji in Second Life and the Zazenshin book that I’ve started but want to find more time for.

In addition, in the virtual practice period we’ve begun to get into some conflict – necessary and healthy – and are beginning to explore some issues around boundaries in the cyber world. I’ll save that for another day….

In the nonvirtual practice period, we’ve recently had a session on the study of Dogen – what is it good for? This was provoked a couple sessions back when Tetsugan shared her concerns about how to help regular people in her social work internship, not weirdos like those of us inclined to the luxury of spending lots of time on little black cushions and/or contemplating a 13th century monk in medieval Japan who spoke in riddles and never had a sexual relationship, a job or a mortgage (from “weirdos” on that’s my liberal paraphrase).

How does Dogen study serve people? Here’s a smattering of remarks from the session and then some thoughts of my own (and some Dogen too, of course). You are welcome to chime in too with a comment.
– “Goes with the territory of studying Zen.”

– “So we don’t get a big head and are thrown into constant groundlessness.”

– “I study Dogen because that’s what I do.”

– “That’s what my teacher studies.”

– “I know it benefits me. People say I’m calm and can listen to them.”

– “Dogen is so subtle that to be ‘real,’ study requires lots of zazen.”
– “Dogen’s teaching is so subtle that without lots of zazen, my understanding is merely intellectual or theoretical.”

– “Dogen is deep and subtle – shallow understanding doesn’t stand up the the crucible of daily life.”

– “As a ‘luxury,’ study can help refresh us so that we have energy to serve others.”

In my view, this world is on fire and it seems likely that some rough times are ahead. The always-in-motion future is hard to see so we cannot really know what will really help.

Therefore, it’s really important that some people devote themselves to directly helping those suffering the most with poverty, illness, war and ignorance; that others devote themselves to politics at all levels; that others live a quiet life just taking care of their families and themselves as best they can; and that others do their utmost to plumb the depths of the great traditions so that what they have to offer in their deepest and most subtle dimension can be preserved and handed on to the “helpless ones” (a Crazy Horse phrase) in the future (helpless now because they depend on us).

Personally, why do I choose to study Dogen? Before Katagiri-roshi died, I asked him to live for another 20 years, at least. “I’m too stubborn and stupid for you to die now,” I said. “I know who you are,” he said. “Anyway, I will always be there with you.”

And when I study and offer what I can of Dogen’s Zen (from my hinky perspective, of course), Katagiri and I do it together and he’s really here with me.

From within Dogen studies, the reason to study at all is to complement dropping body-and-mind in zazen. In other words, to counteract the tendency to simply rehearse our pathology in zazen and life we directly challenge, illuminate, and transform our mental formations (which aren’t apart from body).

Dogen talks about this in his “Points to Watch in Buddha Training,” part 10, “Jikige joto.” Here’s how Roshi explains this phrase (from p. 105 Keep Me in Your Heart Awhile: The Haunting Zen of Dainin Katagiri):

Jikige is “direct,” no gap between. Jo of joto is to receive, absorb, or to assimilate. To is “it.” “It” is the identity with the ultimate, exactly the fundamental itself. Together, “joto” means to assimilate, receive, and actualize it. We are it so we have to digest it and then we can actualize what we are. It does not come from outside. Jikige joto is direct assimilating and actualizing it.

Moon Reflected in the Water, the Kinetic Art of Zazen and the Fear of Annihilation

October 26, 2009 By Dosho Port

For my sweet 16th birthday, my oldest sister (I’ve got five) gave me Alan Watts’ Way of Zen. I devoured it and then immediately put it on my bookshelf for about five years and had a freaky kind of feeling whenever I’d see it there. The message I received was that Zen was about destroying the self and it scared the hell out of me.

Now in the 100 days practice session we’re investigating and practicing this part of the Genjokoan:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.

In terms of the flow of the text, this metaphor follows Dogen’s presentation of firewood and ash (see earlier posts – click here). What’s the connection?

Firewood and ash, as one person said during the last webinar, is like the Halloween of Zen because it calls for such radical one-doing moment by moment. Die sitting, die standing.

As we dip our toes into the actual practice of firewood and ash, the push back often comes from a fear of annihilation that ranges from barely conscious to painfully obvious. I discussed this same fear, by the way, in Keep Me In Your Heart Awhile, “Bow is Like a Rock in Your Heart” as an underlying barrier that creates resistance to letting go of ourselves and completely bowing (and in the act of many of the forms of Soto Zen).

It also appears in zazen or what Katagiri Roshi calls “the kinetic art of zazen.”

Kinetic art? Merriam Webster has this for kinetic: “…of or relating to the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith.” For more on kinetic art, click here.

Just-one-doing zazen (aka, nonthinking) is full participation, nothing left out. It’s like holding a sparkler and swinging your arm around as fast as you can. The individual sparkler isn’t destroyed when it participates in creating the optical illusion of the circle any more than the moment when it creates the optical illusion of just being one sparkler at rest.

Dogen seems to be offering some solace for fear of annihilation from fully participating in this one great life by encouraging us to clearly and accurately understand how the whole works. The moon doesn’t get wet. The water isn’t broken.

Enlightenment does not destroy the person as the moon does not shatter the water.

Significantly, Dogen also addresses this issue in Zazenshin (the needle point of zazen):

Bielefeldt renders the passage like this:

There is someone in “nonthinking”, and this someone maintains us. Although it is we who are sitting “fixedly”, [our sitting] is not merely “thinking”: it presents itself as sitting “fixedly”. Although sitting “fixedly” is sitting “fixedly”, how could it “think” of sitting “fixedly”?

And here’s the same passage in it’s Shasta Abbey version:

There is a someone involved in not deliberately trying to think about something, and that someone is maintaining and supporting an I. Even though being ever so still is synonymous with that I, meditation is not merely an I thinking about something; it is the I offering up its being as still and awesome as a mountain.2 Even though its being ever so still is being ever so still, how can its being ever so still possibly think about being ever so still?

This “someone” is quite a stinker, like the dewdrop illuminated by the moon, like the sparkler flowing like a circle. There’s really nothing to fear.

And here’s one Dosho Port’s encouragement for how to practice with this from Keep Me in Your Heart:

Reflecting on Dogen Zenji’s teaching can educate consciousness and be solace at those times that we fear the moon. Making fear itself the practice through thorough intimacy with the bodily sensations of fear is actualizing the moon in a dewdrop.

Into the Fire

August 23, 2009 By Dosho Port

I’m back at it here and have a few stray themes tonight, tied together with fire.

First, sesshin turned out rather weird. I got a nasty, nasty flu in the wee hours of Friday morning and am still only at about 75% usual energy.

And tomorrow I go back to my day job. That’s one fire I’ll be jumping into.

Another fire I’m trying to start is through webinars. I’m offering another Keep Me In Your Heart Webinar tomorrow night, 8/24, at 7pm CST. Click here for more information. The theme is about going beyond self-consciousness – very important for this human life, imv. There are seats available so register soon – probably best to send me an email and I’ll add you to the list (wildfox@gmail.com).

I’m also trying to decide which other fire to jump into next – write a book on Zazenshin (English: The Healing Point of Zazen or The Precept of Zazen or more usually, The Lancet of Zazen) and buying a house in the city and starting another practice center. Doing both well doesn’t seem possible given the other things that I’ve taken on … so what do you think?

I usually go around chewing something like this from all angles, listening to others’ ideas, and finally jump into it. Anyway, it’s a tough one for me but I must like tough one’s like this because I find myself doing it a lot. As one wise friend put it, “Seems like creating a big risky conversation is prime discovery ground for having something to say.”

And speaking of fires and big risky things, how about Zen training? We’re going to be starting another 100 day practice on September 12 (or September 10th for you hearty folks who show up out here from time to time).

Here’s the details for those practicing from afar via the internet:

The purpose of these virtual 100-day practice sessions is for home-based practitioners to use the internet to focus, deepen and sustain practice with a virtual community and teacher. The specific practice recommendations fall into 3 categories: zazen, study, expression.

Zazen

Sit zazen and chant the Heart Sutra at least five of seven days each week (if you’ve been practicing for less than one year, I recommend a sitting commitment of at least 30 minutes; if you’ve been practicing for more than one year, I recommend a commitment of at least 60 minutes). Seal your practice with chanting the Heart Sutra.

Study

Attend the webinars, Saturdays, September 12, 26; October 3, 10, 17, 24; November 7, 14, 21; and December 5 and 19 at 10am – 11am CST (and CDT).

Study selections from Dogen’s Genjokoan and commentary that I’ll provide to participants. You might find the dharma talk by Pat Enkyo O’Hara at http://community.tricycle.com/ on this topic helpful.We’ll start with a review of the text and then dig into the passage about fire and ash:

Firewood turns to ash; it cannot become firewood again. Still we should not regard ash as succeeding and firewood as preceding. Note that firewood abides in the dharma‑situation of firewood and has preceding and succeeding; although there is before and after, it is cut off from before and after. Ash abides in the dharma‑situation of ash and has succeeding and preceding. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it has been turned to ash, human being does not return to birth after death. Accordingly, it is a traditional way of the Buddha‑dharma not to say that birth becomes death; for this reason birth is called “not‑arising.” It is also a traditional teaching of the wheel of the dharma that death does not become birth; hence death is called “not‑perishing.” Birth is the state of a time; death is the state of a time as well.

Expression: It isn’t complete to sit and study without finding a way to share and express our heart. It doesn’t need to be long. Find something to share that connects the study with your life and speak from the first person, take the student seat, play.

Comment on my weekly Genjokoan blog posts.

Meet with me via Skype or Webex for virtual practice meetings once each month.

Email me a short summary of what’s been up in your practice each week (take no more than 15 minutes for writing). Here’s more details on the format: during the week, find a phrase that summarizes your week, then quote the phrase and explain how that fits. Your phrase can come from anywhere (but it should be from somewhere other than your internal dialogue) – for example, an overheard conversation, something you read or came across on the internet or from a dharma source.One wonderful dharma source for phrases like this is Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Koan Practice, now translated by Victor Sogen Hori (click the title if you want to order it). We’re using phrases like this to express our daily life as koan.So for example, Zen Sand, 4.333 (p. 139), “The tongue falls onto the ground.” Or 4.324 “Heart exposed, naked and red.” Or 4.323 “With one hand s/he blocks out the sun.” Or 4.318 “Stroll through the blue heavens.”

Optional: use a blog and share that way with other practitioners. Simple is fine.

Okay, that’s all for tonight. I’m going to sit on my deck and enjoy the stars now.

Hakuin’s Rules Were Lax and Dogen Canceled Zazen

July 31, 2009 By Dosho Port

The above is by Soen Nakagawa Roshi (thanks to Genmyo Smith for allowing me to share this calligraphy, a gift to him from Maezumi Roshi that appears in his Prairie Sky Newsletter and includes a well-done talk by Genmyo on Zazenshin). Soen Roshi’s calligraphy is a pattern concealed in a freedom and so is difficult to read. It might be “Buddha” or “New” or something else.

It conveys what I have in mind to say today.

In his Extensive Record, Dogen is recorded as canceling zazen during the summer because it was too dang hot. How could it be that the great founders were such slackers? What does that have to say to many students today who think that Zen is all about discipline?

These questions came up while I’m reading Norman Waddell’s Hakuin’s Precious Mirror Cave: A Zen Miscellany when I found this about Hakuin in the introduction:

While he demanded total dedication from his monks, temple routine was relatively informal. There were no set schedules for sutra-chanting or other rituals and, if temple legend is to be believed, Hakuin would appear for teisho, formal Zen lectures, wearing a tattered old jacket and carrying a long kisera pipe in his hand.

This prompted a couple reflections. First, it’s a lot like early reports of Dogen’s monastery where they’d chant a sutra if the rice wasn’t cooked yet when zazen was over. Interesting to me that the founders didn’t seem to stress “discipline” (as in strict schedules and routines) so much as the later tradition.

This spirit might go back to the Buddha. His Seven Factors of Enlightenment – mindfulness (sati), investigaion (dhamma vicaya) into the nature of dhamma, enthusiasm (viriya), joy or rapture (piti), tranquility (passaddhi), concentration (samadhi), and equanimity (upekkha) – don’t include “discipline” or “following the schedule.” Attachment to rules and rituals is regarded as a fetter to freedom.

I understand this as suggesting that “investigation” and “enthusiasm” are more reliable guides. I’m reminded of Trungpa’s phrase “disciple in delight.” This is really important for people who are doing home-based practice today. A practice with too much super-egoish discipline will break when the conditions are challenging.

So when investigation and enthusiasm are strong, as in the early communities of Hakuin and Dogen, there isn’t so much need for rigid schedules.

A second angle on this was provoked by Danny Fisher posting a video clip of Robert Thurman distinguishing spirituality (“pattern breaking behavior”) and religion (“pattern maintaining behavior”). Perhaps Hakuin and Dogen stressed pattern breaking behavior more than pattern maintaining behavior but it’s a mistake, imho, to think that we can just do one and not the other.

Want to break a pattern and the pattern is there. Teenagers rebel, for example, like teenagers have been doing for centuries. Older people can hunger to break the dull pattern of life and so have an affair (like ~70% of men and ~50% of women). Hospitals (like the one I spent the morning in with a loved one) set up patterns for intake, for example, and then add humans who don’t necessarily fit.

On the other hand, strictly following a schedule and engaging in pattern maintaining behavior can break our pattern of living a willy-nilly life. And within the pattern, breakthrough can occur.
In other words, wearing a tattered coat and smoking a pipe while giving a dharma talk can be maintaining or breaking a pattern. What’s vital is how we do it.

Religion needs spirituality and spirituality needs religion. To paraphrase Dogen, not only is it important to be a person free from pattern (i.e., rank) but also a person who is completely home within a pattern.

Comments welcome, especially about the home-based practice observation.

Knowing Without Touching

May 21, 2009 By Dosho Port

I’ve got a couple things for you today. First, a lovely, evocative poem from today’s Writer’s Almanac, “Durum Wheat,” with some “forgetting the self” overtones. And that’s the second offering – some study resources related to what I mentioned a few days ago – Sen’ne said that “forgetting the self” was “knowing without touching things,” a reference to a line from Hongzhi’s “Zazenshin” poem. Below that you’ll find Dogen’s comments on Hongzhi’s poem.

Dogen suggests that knowing without touching things (a.k.a., forgetting the self) is (among other things), “sitting and breaking skin born of mother” – a wonderful call to wholeheartedness. Enjoy.

“Durum wheat”

by Lisa Martin-Demoor

Memory at its finest lacks corroboration
—no photographs, no diaries—
nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick.
Just because you’ve got this idea
of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads
of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires —
just because somewhere in your memory
there’s a rust-coloured pulse
taking its place among canola yellow
and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures—
just because you want to
doesn’t mean you can
build a home for that old, peculiar ghost.

Someone tells you you’ve imagined it,
that gash across the ripe belly of summer,
and for a year, maybe two, you believe them.
Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned,
to escape the heat, out the Pontiac’s backseat window
you just remembered it that way
because you preferred the better version.

Someone tells you this.
But what can they know of faith?
To ask you to leave behind this insignificance.
This innocence that can’t be proved: what the child saw
of the fields as she passed by, expecting nothing.

You have to go there while there’s still time.
Back to the red flag of that field, blazing in the wind.
While you’re still young enough to remember
a flame planted along a road. While you’re still
seeing more than there is to see.

Excerpt from Hongzhi’s “Zazenshin:”
Essential function of buddha after buddha,

Functioning essence of ancestor after ancestor

It knows without touching things;
It illumines without facing objects.

Knowing without touching things,
Its knowing is inherently subtle….

And Dogen from his commentary on “Zazenshin:”“It knows without touching things.” “Knowing” does not mean perception; for perception is of little measure. It does not mean understanding; for understanding is artificially constructed. Therefore, this “knowing” is “not touching things”, and “not touching things” is “knowing.” [Such “knowing”] should not be measured as universal knowledge; it should not be categorized as self-knowledge. This “not touching things” means “When they come in the light, I hit them in the light; when they come in the dark, I hit them in the dark.” It means “sitting and breaking the skin born of mother.”

More on the Path of Birds

April 13, 2009 By Dosho Port

Our investigating-zazen-and-life-as-kappatsupatsu (an onomatopoeia for the leaping of the carp as it climbs upstream) focus is on buddhas not knowing that they’re buddhas – not only through the head but also exploring tracelessness through the body. Thus the image of the path of the fish and bird.

The other day, I suggested the following reflection: When you practice the path of the bird, what traces are left? Ideas about this might immediately come to mind. You might say, “Well, there is nothing.” That misses it.

To clarify I’ll first muddy the water with some Dogen. This old man concludes his Healing Point of Zazen (my provisional rendition of the title, a.k.a., The Lancet of Zazen) by quoting a poem by Ch’an master Hongzhi and commenting on it. I’m going to selectively quote a digestable portion for you today, comment on that and move on. I might come back to this later in the week but I’m thinking of an ox tail that I want to bring in tomorrow or the next day.

Now here’s the last portion of Hongzhi’s poem:

The water is clear right through to the bottom;

A fish goes lazily along.

The sky is vast without horizon;

A bird flies far far away.

In what follows, Dogen is in italics; Dosho in normal type:

That which has no shore as its boundary…

Is not nothing.

…this is what is meant by clear water penetrated “right through to the bottom.”

This is what is meant by formless form – the coffin is empty and the sound of a bell fades off over the hill.

If a fish goes through this “water,” it is not that it does not “go;”

Nor that it does go. Or as Bob Dylan puts it, “Something is [going] but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. (and Ms.) Jones?” This going is forgetting the self.

The degree of the “going” that penetrates “right through to the bottom” is the “path of the bird,” along which the wholebody does not “go.”

It is doing not-going. The wholebody with no-eyes sees. The wholebody with no-ears hears. Still, when practicing the path of the bird, what traces are left? Investigate and verify through the practicing wholebody.

The Zazen of Mountains

April 9, 2009 By Dosho Port

At the Empty Hand workshop on Zazenshin we worked with the third section – Hongzhi’s poem, Dogen’s comments and then his expression of the precept of zazen. This section is important because it clearly distinguishes shikantaza from silent illumination zazen. I’ve written about that in this blog previously, though, so that’s not the point of today’s post.

I had hoped to provide context for our Empty Hand discussion with a different view on thinking/not-thinking/non-thinking but didn’t find a way to work it in. That’s what I want to present today. It goes to the essential art of zazen, as D-z puts it.

Zazenshin, the lancet, acupuncture needle or precept (all of these work for shin) of zazen begins by focussing on the following koan:

Once, when the Great Master Hongdao of Yueshan was sitting zazen, a monk asked him, “What are you thinking of so fixedly?”
The master answered, “I’m thinking of not thinking.”
The monk asked, “How do you think of not thinking?”
The Master answered, “Nonthinking.”

A few points. First, Yueshan’s full name could be rendered as Medicine Mountain Majestic Consideration – an important detail for what follows. It is significant too that Yueshan had a similar exchange with this teacher, Shitou (which I’ll come back to in a future post) where he was sitting zazen and Shitou approached. Yueshan is still sitting zazen and a student approaches.

Second, the word that is translated as fixedly or in other versions as immobile, steadfast sitting, or still, still state, is kotsu kotsu chi. Kotsu is something high and level; lofty, bald, dangerous. The word is used twice for emphasis. Chi is earth, land, ground, space, position or foundation. Nishijima and Cross note that it therefore “…suggests a table mountain, and hence something imposing and balanced.”

Here’s the view from the top of Table Mountian in South Africa:

Yueshan’s zazen is “fixedly” in this way – high and level; lofty, bald, dangerous, arising as and grounded with the great earth. After all, “I together with all beings and the great earth attain the Way,” was the Buddha’s enlightenment utterance.

Third, here’s another way of understanding of the grammar of the above koan (from Kishizaza Ian’s commentary on Zazenshin – if anybody out there in blogland has this translated, I’d be delighted! to see it):

Monk: “Thinking in fixed sitting is ‘what.'”
Yueshan: “Thinking is not thinking.”
Monk: “Not thinking is ‘how’ thinking.”
Yueshan: “It is thinking ‘negation’ (hi).”

Steady, lofty thinking is What! Such thinking is free of itself. Free-of-itself thinking is How’s! thinking, as in the question in Keep Me in Your Heart Awhile, “HOW do you DO it?” Such thinking it is also “negation” or hi or its synonym, mu.

Our zazen, then, to be the Medicine-Mountain-Majestic-Consideration zazen that is the essential art, the precept, and the healing point (i.e., acupuncture needle) is ungraspability contemplating ungraspability. Or as our Rinzai and Harada Daiun descended friends like to say, Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.

Home from New York Trip: A Short Report of Visits to Three Zen Centers in Three Days

April 6, 2009 By Dosho Port

The first part was rough. My flight was five hours late in arriving at LaGuardia (as we floated in Buddhist purgatory circling western New York sandwiched between a vast blue sky above and mountains of pure white clouds below, waiting for the airport to reopen after a thunderstorm) and so I arrived almost 30 minutes late for my own talk. Still, Barry Magid’s Ordinary Mind group seemed to take it as quite ordinary and were a delight to speak with and meet.

I especially liked going out for dinner and conversation afterwards – at 9pm. Zen people in the Midwest tend to go to bed at 9pm or earlier.

Saturday morning I allowed two-and-a-half hours to travel what I was advised would take about one hour and arrived with just enough time to suit up before the program began. The opportunity to get lost on the New York subway system was just to much to miss and so I seized the opportunity with wholeheartedness. But for a kid from the swamps of Minnesota, I felt good having navigated my way through at all.

The Brooklyn Zen Center had a strikingly large proportion of young people, perhaps more than I’ve seen in any Center since about 1985. The group is connected to SFZC and an old friend Teah Stozer (who I haven’t seen since about 1989). Katagiri Roshi cut his chops as a teacher at SFZC so I felt like a lineage cousin and took some liberties in really saying what I thought. It must not have offended them too much though because they were a delight to hang out with after the talk and generously paid for a car to take me to Grand Central and get out of town.

Sunday I gave another talk at Susan Jion Postal’s Empty Hand Zen Center in suburban New Rochelle, loosely based on Keep Me In Your Heart Awhile and then lead an afternoon workshop on Dogen’s Zazenshin, one of my all-time favorite rock’nroll tunes. It seemed like all of the three dozen or so people there for the day had read my book and so they could remind me what was in it – very handy. It was great fun for me to work with them.

In brief, the dharma seems to be doing well in New York.

And by the way, I’m interested in getting out and visiting other Centers to talk about Keep Me In Your Heart Awhile: The Haunting Zen of Dainin Katagiri and would enjoy offering a workshop while I’m at it on Dogen’s teaching. If you’re interested in a visit, please get in touch.