2023 Spring Virtual Retreat

Meeting on Equal Ground - Community as an Expression of Buddha Nature

The entirety of the Zen path is wholly relational through and through. Our engagement in Sangha practice reflects this relationality, and this is where we come to realize that spiritual community is the living, embodied expression of Buddha nature — meeting life as it is, together.  We know that spiritual community requires not only our mindful attention, but the everyday enactment of our deepest intentions to foster harmony and to engage in everyday problem solving. We arrive in sangha from such varied backgrounds, with a diversity of life experience, bringing with us different understandings of meditation, and yet we feel that something universal is always drawing us together. How do we cultivate a vibrant community, grounded in the precepts, with an orientation towards ongoing maturity, both personally and relationally? Relational practice will deeply challenge and loosen our limited personal perspectives while encouraging the realization of the universal connectedness which is our actual life. Sangha supports this collective waking up and growing up, so how might we best foster the sort of relationality in which we can not only be fully ourselves but, at the same time, offer wholehearted care to one another? This is the bodhisattva’s work, to continually transform the world through kindness and compassionate action. During this one day retreat, we will explore the concept of community within the Zen tradition. 

Retreat Occurred 11 March 2023

Handouts for the Retreat

Books Mentioned by Flint During the Retreat:

The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging- Charles Vogel

More Together Than Alone: Discovering the Power and Spirit of Community in Our Lives and in the World - Mark Nepo

Casting Indra's Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community by Pamela Ayo Yetunde

After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age

by Stephen Batchelor 

Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World – by Stephen Batchelor

Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch'an Buddhism - Peter Hershock

Additional Readings from Retreat:

Several readings were shared at different points during the retreat, that we thought people might appreciate for further reflection.  The readings from Zenkei Blanche Hartman and Zenju Earthlyn Manuel are also included as PDF attachments.  

From the Ceremony for Gathering:

Zenkei Blanche Hartman - Seeds for a Boundless Life: Zen Teachings from the Heart (2015)

"Those of us who have chosen Zen practice have discovered that sitting zazen is a good thing. This is how you can find your home right where you are. This being at home wherever you are means being comfortable wherever you are. Not having to have some special place or special things to make you comfortable. Right here in this very body in this very place as it is, to be at home. This just sitting, just being this one as it is, is finding yourself at home and at peace with this one. It is finding out how to express this buddha in the world.

Commitment and renunciation are significant elements. What is really to be renounced is self-clinging, to renounce whatever it is that we cling to, whatever it is that we attach to. Let it go, let our life flow through our hands like a river and not try to grab some piece of it and hold on to it. Just to be present with it and find out how to express our vow in this moment, in this circumstance, right where we are right now, instead of trying to figure out how to make it the way we want so that it'll be just what we always dreamed of. It won't be. There will be many surprises.

If we're open to embracing the surprises as they arise, then there will be inconceivable joy. If we fuss and fume and say, "This isn't what I expected," then there will be inconceivable misery. Just to welcome your life as it arrives moment after moment, to meet it as fully as you can, being as open to it as you can, being as ready for whatever arises as you can, and meeting it wholeheartedly: this is renunciation—this is leaving behind all of your preferences, all of your ideas and notions and schemes. Just meeting life as it is.

How can we meet our life as it is wholeheartedly, just like this? This is what our practice is; this is finding our home in the midst of homelessness, right here."

—Zenkei Blanche Harman

(Blanche’s dharma name, Zenkei,

means inconceivable joy)

Prompts/Questions from the Ceremony for Gathering:

"I take refuge in Sangha."

What does it mean for you to take refuge in Sangha? What is refuge? What is Sangha? What is this "I"?

"We take refuge in Sangha, before all being, bringing harmony to everyone, free from hindrance."

How do you relate to this "We" as we gather together? And how do we relate to all being, before all being? How do we bring harmony, free from hindrance?

"Now all being has completely taken refuge in Sangha."

How is all being taking refuge in Sangha completely? How might we allow ourselves to completely come home to our relationship with everyone and everything and with ourselves?"

During the Introduction to Kinhin:

"Zazen also incorporates kinhin, or walking meditation [walking zazen], as ritual. This ritual is the slow walk of zazen. The movement is meant to sync with the breath, honed in sitting meditation and with touching the ground with the toe and heel. The power of this way of walking is often missed in contemporary Zen centers, where the participants tend to leave the ritual of zazen, mentally and physically, at kinhin for various reasons. What is missed, then, is the experience of moving with the state of consciousness that comes from sitting. This meditating in movement deepens zazen as the participants in the ritual circumambulate in various patterns in the zendo [or in our home spaces when we are gathered online]. There is an awareness of the body in how it walks and breathes, and an awareness of how [tension or constriction or] pain resides in the body and mind and how it relates to the simple action of walking. Kinhin is an experience of how movement and action connect to the mind and thus create suffering and/or awakening."

from Zenju Earthlyn Manuel - The Shamanic Bones of Zen: Revealing the Ancestral Spirit and Mystical Heart of a Sacred Tradition (2022) in a section called A Prolonged Ritual of Seeing and Listening: On the Forms of Zen

From the Morning Dharma Activity:

“From our very first breath we are in relationship. With the indrawn draft of air, we become joined to everything that ever was, is and ever will be. When we exhale, we forge that relationship by virtue of the act of living. Our breath comingles with all breath and we are part of everything. That’s the simple fact of things. We are born into a state of relationship, and our ceremonies and rituals are guides to lead us deeper into that relationship with all things. Big lesson? Relationships never end; they just change. In believing that lies the freedom to carry compassion, empathy, love and respect into and through whatever changes. We are made more by the practice.”

&

“We approach our lives on different trajectories, each of us spinning in our own separate,spinning orbits. What gives this life its resonance is when those trajectories cross and we become engaged with each other for as long or as fleeting as we do. There is a shared energy then, and it feels as if the whole universe is in the process of coming together. I live for those times. No one is truly ever “just passing through.” Every encounter has within it the power of enchantment, if we are willing to look for it.”

Both from:  Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations by Richard Wagamese

Thomas Merton Quote shared by Flint:

"Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts where neither sin nor knowledge could reach, the core of reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the divine. If only they could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more need for war; for hatred, for greed, for cruelty. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other."