Buddhist<\/a> schools) including his first teacher, Myoan Eisai, who brought Rinzai Zen and green tea to Japan, and the monk who aced Dogen out of a really big important monastery (Tofukuji), Enni Bennen, who brought another Rinzai lineage and udon noodles to Japan.<\/p>\nPersonally, as I have a great fondness for both green tea and udon, I find the syncretic camp quite tempting at the moment.<\/p>\n
The remaining aspect of our work, following Katagiri Roshi, is study. And, wow, btw, was Katagiri Roshi a student. OMG. When I served as his attendant, I saw his life close up \u2013 zazen and study were about it. For engagement\/work, he did meet with people, go to Zen Center meetings, hang out with his family, and laugh himself silly with \u201cGilligan\u2019s Island\u201d and the \u201cCosby Show.\u201d Really.<\/p>\n
This wasn\u2019t true only for Katagiri Roshi \u2013 the study part, that is. All of the great Soto monks of the last couple hundred years (e.g., Nishiari Bokusan, Oka Sotan, Kishizawa Ian, Hashimoto Eko, Swaki Kodo), were also great scholars. Victor Hogen Sori reports the same for the Rinzai side of the family.<\/p>\n
Anyway, even the zazen-only guy (back to Dogen) who didn\u2019t bring back anything useful like green tea or udon, said, \u201cThere are two ways to penetrate body and mind: study with a teacher\u00a0to hear the teaching, and devotedly sitting zazen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Studying with a teacher includes\u00a0listening to dharma talks,\u00a0embodying the liturgy, studying the old Zen texts and sutras together, and even taking up a koan (and if you think Dogen Zen is non koan Zen, I respectfully disagree and have a blog post in draft on just this point so stay tuned).<\/p>\n
Dharma study has the great possibility of broadening our limited horizons and challenging our sacred cows. It is an antidote to harmful doubt.\u00a0<\/span>It\u2019s often said that enlightenment is an accident and people who sit zazen or accident prone. I\u2019d go one step further and say that people who sit and study are accidents waiting to happen.<\/p>\nJust sitting without study (or engagement), leads to endlessly rehearsing our old views, and nurturing those sacred cows until they\u2019re rather bloated and stinky.<\/p>\n
Now everything has a shadow, of course. Study can lead us to thinking that we understand the buddhadharma when we don\u2019t \u2013 or just have it swirling in our big heads and not embodying it. That\u2019s why study with a teacher, within the context of a community of practitioners, is a vital aspect of study.<\/p>\n
Coming soon: \u201cDogen and Koans: The Smoking Gun\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my last post I addressed the issue of why we\u2019ve chosen to place \u201cGuidelines for Studying the Way\u201d at the front of our study work here in Portland, ME, and on the Vine of Obstacles: Online Support for Zen Training. In this post, I\u2019ll take up the issue of why we emphasize study at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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In my last post I addressed the issue of why we\u2019ve chosen to place \u201cGuidelines for Studying the Way\u201d at the front of our study work here in Portland, ME, and on the Vine of Obstacles: Online Support for Zen Training<\/a>.<\/p>\n