Letter from the President
by Tim Kennedy

Dear Stillpoint:

I'm Tim Kennedy and I am the new president of the Stillpoint board of directors. This is my first opportunity to say a few words to you while holding this office and I wanted to introduce myself. I know quite a few of you, and I'm sorry to say that there are quite a few members that I have never met.

I guess I should explain that I have been around Stillpoint since a few months after Neal and Barry Lavery started sitting. I met Barry on a bus and was invited to join those two in sitting. I might add that a few of my friends thought it crazy to follow up on an invite from some guy who had been asleep on a bus. Be that as it may, it seems to have worked out. Since those early days we have had quite a few changes in the groups, with many folks coming and going; teachers coming and going; and practices and rituals coming and going.

Back in the old days things seemed more "organic." In a small group, if you had an idea you just spoke it and likely the idea would become policy. I don't think that that is the case anymore. There are many more of us and as you probably have experienced from sitting practice-the mind never stops. Many, many thoughts-lots of stuff to speak and not enough energy to follow up all of it with action. That is a problem.

How can we approach these group dynamics from a Zen perspective? In some way, I think that the last sesshin spoke to that question.

At the April sesshin with Shohaku, he read part of a teaching from the great Soto teacher Dogen. He taught about the Genjo koan - the first part of Dogen's large work "The Shobogenzo." Shohaku explained how Dogen used the word "koan" and why. Usually, a koan is regarded as a kind of question and the question/answer between student/teacher represents some truth or understanding or insight. But Dogen used another meaning for koan that Shohaku explained by the way the word is written in Japanese. Dogen used koan to mean the issue of how we publicly behave, and more specifically the problem of being independent vs. dependent. He was raising an issue of life that we confront in deciding whether to emphasize "myself"or "other." Naturally, it is a balance. One must have some concern for him/herself, but it is also true that we are all connected to each other.

I think that this is a great issue for us to look at as sangha members. Doesn't this come up as a concern for all of us as individuals and as those concerned about the larger sangha with whom we practice? At this retreat, as is always the case in extended sitting, I had the opportunity to look at this question more deeply than I had before. I think that it may be a critical question to consider as we look for ways to practice with one another.

Sangha News

Sangha member June Peters is leaving for a new job in the Washington, D.C. area. June is a genetic counselor and will be taking a new job with the National Cancer Institute's Genetic Epidemiology Division in Rockville, Md. "Finding the spiritual practice and community at Stillpoint was, in retrospect, the true meaning of my being in Pittsburgh," she says. "It's reassuring to realize that the sangha comes with me, wherever I live. Sangha members hopefully will realize that they always will have a home in Maryland and will avail themselves of a chance to visit." She reports that she has two sanghas to sit with - one in Chevy Chase, Md. and another she used to sit with in D.C. We'll miss you June, but we're happy for this new opportunity.

A new discussion group has formed at Stillpoint. The focus of the discussion in on Shunryu Suzuki's book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." The group meets alternate Sundays at 11:30 a.m., following Sunday zazen. All are welcome to join.

A new Buddha statue now graces the zendo garden. Many thanks to Mike Usman for donating this beautiful addition to the garden - and for all his gardening work. Also to Don Orr and Tim Kennedy for organizing the last teacher-led retreat with Shohaku Okumura, and to Angus McDonald and Catherine Gammon for organizing the Buddha birthday ceremony.

A Dharma Friend Returns
by Neal Griebling

Patricia Dai-en Bennage will lead Stillpoint's next sesshin June 9-11, 2000. It is a homecoming of sorts: Dai-en was the first teacher our sangha brought to Pittsburgh. She is remembered with great fondness by many of our older members who have had the opportunity to study with her at her Mt. Equity Zendo in Muncy, PA.

Unlike many American zen teachers who assimilated the Dharma in the United States, Patricia was a resident of Japan for 23 years. Her first trip to Japan was with her husband, an American businessman. Their visit, in November of 1963, coincided with the assassination of President Kennedy. They stayed three years. After they returned, she found it difficult to adjust to the social turmoil of American life. The couple decided to separate and she returned to Japan.

Although she began reading about Buddhism at the age of 17, it was not until she experienced a spiritual crisis at age 33 that she began sitting zazen. Her marriage had ended, her father and nephew had died, and her best friend had been killed in Vietnam. She was teaching English in a rural area of Japan at the time. The husband of a couple she was staying with introduced her to sitting practice and his teacher, the Rinzai master Omori Sogen. She studied with him until he had a stroke.

Her second teacher was Noda Daito Roshi. He was a stern teacher who demanded she become a Buddhist nun before he would allow her to study with him. Noda Roshi, his wife and his students lived in a bizarre environment comprised of five upside-down soy sauce vats with windows and doors set into them. Roshi had co-opted a white bus for a meditation space, removing the seats and outfitting it with a yellow carpet, zafus and a statue of Bodhidharma. During her year with him, Dai-en spent much of her time doing heavy physical labor, repairing the community's stone road, building her own cabin, digging her own toilet. The community lived on brown rice, vegetables and a little tofu.

At the end of the first year, Daito Roshi sent Dai-en to the Aichi Semmon Niso-do, a training monastery for Soto Zen nuns in Nagoya, Japan. The abbess was Shundo Aoyama Roshi. Dai-en was later to serve as the English translator of Aoyama Roshi's Zen Seeds.

While at the monastery, Dai-en experienced considerable discrimination as a foreigner, although Aoyam Roshi was very kind to her. She also was ravaged by malnutrition, the effect of the poor diet the monastery provided. Other nuns fell sick with tuberculosis and pneumonia.

After seven years at the monastery, Dai-en began a four-year program to enable her to teach. During this period of her training, she spent three months of each year at temples where she was the only woman. She found her way through the resistance by cooking chocolate chip cookies!

In July of 1990, Dai-en was officially given recognition as a Soto Zen Roshi, or teaching master. As a kind of post-graduate training, that year she chose to stay four months with the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh in Plum Village in France. His flowing, informal style was in stark contrast to the austere formalism of traditional Japanese Soto practice. Dai-en respected Japanese zen form and spirit, but was also receptive to Thich Nhat Hanh's invitation to "enjoy your breathing, enjoy your sitting, enjoy your life."

The Chinese characters dai and en combine to signify "great circle," an embrace that takes in everything, without exception. Please join us for a sesshin with Patricia Dai-en Bennage.

Eat Your Rice, Wash Your Bowl
by Catherine Gammon

Almost three years ago, when I was still fairly new to Stillpoint, Tim Kennedy organized a sangha-led sesshin that started on a Friday evening and continued all day and evening Saturday and Sunday. I had joined in some multiple sittings during Saturday sesshin earlier in the summer but I hadn't yet sat a full day or days and I was determined to do it. My determination was driven by the desire to be ready for the fall sesshin with Shohaku Okumura, whose teaching with the sangha was spoken of so highly. That was all. I had come to Stillpoint the winter before looking for support in reestablishing for myself a simple daily half-hour sitting practice. What came to me was incomparably more.

Shortly after that first sesshin I was doing a writing exercise with some introductory students in which for ten minutes we wrote about an experience with food. This is what I wrote then:

"In the zendo meals are eaten in silence. On the stove a pot of soup, hot but not too hot. One by one we go to the counter, we take a bowl, a napkin, a silver spoon, a slice of bread. One by one we ladle soup into the gleaming white bowl: the soup, rich, red, brown, full of creamy noodles, black beans, red beans, onions, pepper, herbs. One by one we return to our cushions. We place ourselves, our meals carefully. We eat slowly, one bite slowly at a time. We watch the food, we chew the food, bite by bite. The silence is gentle. We've been together in silence for seven hours now, or is it eight? How shocking it was after lunch when I was sitting alone on the porch that someone greeted me in spoken words. How delightful really, the ordinary words, -How's it going? -Fine? Such ordinary words, so full then in that silence, like this food, this soup, this bread, and afterward, alone again, the tea.

"But the next day, at lunch, eating alone in the yard, I eat the old way, without the ritual of attention, without awareness, tea in one hand, bread in another, book in between. Forgetting, so soon, already forgetting, right now, in the midst of it."

I would write all this differently today: I would see it all differently. I would call the silence palpable, perhaps, but not necessarily gentle. (And formal zendo eating, I have learned, is not all that slow!) Mostly I would see myself differently here, not judging that split attention so hastily or harshly, maybe not even regretfully, since split attention is after all what we have been conditioned to and accustomed to throughout our lives.

During one of the breaks during that first sesshin I was walking in the neighborhood and saw running parallel to a set of outdoor steps an electric lift-chair that must have made entry safe and accessible for some resident of that house: in that chair I saw the possibility of bringing my mother from Oregon to Pittsburgh to live.

This coming of my mother did not happen immediately, but only after a series of experiences through which both she and I, quite separately, became entirely ready for it, so that when the moment arose we were there to meet each other fully. In the simplest exchange we made the decision at once:

"I shouldn't live alone anymore."
"Do you want to come to Pittsburgh?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"The sooner the better."

These words were written, not spoken, although we were sitting together at the corner of her dining room table; even then my mother relied on writing more than speech.

Six weeks later she was here. Not quite a year had passed since that first sesshin.

My mother was a strong, stubborn, proudly independent woman most of her life (rather like her daughter, some may be tempted to say). Although in earlier years we had mutually disappointed one another, over time we had found our way to a deeply appreciative and affectionate if quite unsentimental peace. This general progression may not be so unusual, yet to me it still seems as if a person would have to have access to our individual and particular histories to know how extraordinary this coming of my mother to live with me really was: there was an amazement and a gratitude about it, and the important thing here is the clarity I had at the time that I was not doing it, it was being done through me. It was arising because it had to arise, it was being done because it had to be done, and I could do it wholeheartedly only because I wasn't doing the doing.

It is an extraordinary gift of our practice that I began my mother's care in this spirit, not only because it enabled an intimacy between us that would not have been possible on any other basis, but also because as things became unexpectedly so much more difficult, I needed that reserve of knowing I could (and really had to) get out of the way. Many times I couldn't do it. Many times I got lost in my aloneness with the weight of responsibility and couldn't feel the wealth of support that really was with me, helping me and my mother through the incremental but also sudden transformations of her decline.

This is what her dying showed me: that the support was here and with us all along. From before she ever came here, from before I ever heard of Stillpoint: so much of this and what and who is here made her coming to me possible, and so much here and elsewhere that comes from beyond anything I could have done alone or constructed or imagined.

I was fortunate to be with my mother during her active dying, and sometime during those hours the phrase arose to mind: "Eat your rice, wash your bowl." It comes from a koan: A monk new to the monastery goes to the master to ask for guidance. The master asks him whether he has eaten breakfast. Yes, the monk responds. Then wash your bowl, the master says.

Those who join in Wednesday night koan discussion know this exchange is about something more than rice and bowls, eating and washing, and yet it is also about just that: just this-and it is certainly in this way that it kept coming to me as my mother was dying. It was about being there with her, moment by moment, as fully as I could, even when she seemed (as most of that time she seemed) no longer to be aware of the outer world. And more than that it was about the next day.

My mother died at 10:10 on a Friday night and the next day I was with the sangha sitting sesshin. This was eating my rice and washing my bowl. Nothing could have been more fitting that morning and afternoon and evening than to sit with these people with whom I have been sitting day after day, week after week, month after month, even, what seems like so soon, year after year.

This is sangha. This is taking refuge. This is gathering the heart-mind: it is sesshin.

Thank you, all, very much.

Cat Chow Zen
by Junshu Jay Hershey
(Written for a friend about to make a pilgrimage)

Before hearing what we have never heard, look at Pai-chang's words.

"I always urge everyone to unlock the depths of inherent reality; if the truth within you is profound, you can use virtue and knowledge like a noble employing menials. It is like a cart which does not stop. If you hold this as your understanding, this is called the jewel in the top knot; it is also called a jewel which has a price, and it is called carrying excrement. If you do not hold to this as your understanding, this is like the king giving away his top knot; it is also called a great precious jewel, and it is also getting rid of excrement."

"...bodhisattva's ten thousand practices through six ways of transcendence are like riding a dead corpse to cross over to the shore, like being in a prison latrine hole and getting out. The Buddha puts on the thirty-two marks of a great being and calls them a robe of filth."

Pai-chang urges people to look and warns them not to construct visions. That is, to have true vision. True vision can never be merely a version of a vision. True vision has no aversion to a vision, only to twisted views. Because zen espouses emptiness, it does away even with itself. Behold further destruction.

Now the stillpointless audience can appraise the Blue Cheese Cliff Record which, although named after the gastronomic tastes of the meditators who practice and eat together, may yet claim a place beside works like the Biography of Eminent Monks, The Empty Valley Collection, the Record of Further Inquiries and other zen classics.

The Blue Cheese Cliff Record does not record lines of dharma succession because in the late twentieth century all transmissions were automatic. Students opened the hand of thought and shiftlessness was as spontaneous as laughter. Thereafter, they were driven in ways that were teacherless but not treacherous. Clearly not satire and lacking the bite of zen humor, this work nevertheless has authentic Zen flavor. These are the off-the-cuff remarks and traces left by zen masters Cat Chow and Noh Me. If you don't understand, you get a cuff on the head. Reconsider this:

zendo shikantaza; just sitting
coffee house shikantaza; just sipping
outhouse shikantaza: just . . .

If you thought, heard, calculated or said the next word then you are like a cat pacing in a cage, unable to get out. But if your mind stopped at the unfinished end, then you are free to stop or go on anytime. You can give or avoid the last word anywhere.

Commentary by Cat Chow and Noh Me. Cat Chow said, "Just kidding." Noh Me said, "Not just kidding." How are they both correct?

Just kidding and not just kidding, what is the difference? You cannot adjust the absolute. You don't tinker with the resolute. This is samadhi. Kidding or not is in the realm of the personal self. In the Living Room Sutra it says that zazen is a must see to be experience. You must see it for yourself looking at and with yourself. This is no effort meditation. In this there is no need to be a person. The routine parameters of the physical plane and ego world do not apply, so the mind's eye is free to function. Here you see and see more and more differently, rearranging and superimposing times and spaces. Eliminating time from awareness is just one exercise in mind focus pocus. It is the charm of dharma.

In the Empty Rock School of Zen, all day meditation sessions are meant to provoke a stream of extreme consciousness to go beyond the personal self, to achieve awareness and a wariness of the true unreal. It is just what you think, but there is much more. If you establish what is true and real, you naturally establish what is untrue and unreal. Is the untrue and unreal as true and real as the true and real? If it doesn't suck you in and spit you out, it isn't real zen. Cat Chow brings out the dharma with a state of mind that can only be achieved without effort, graciously.

Cat Chow looked out a window and saw a bull pass by. First, he saw the horns and head, then the body, but he didn't see the tail. Why did he not see the tail? Noh Me answered, "Why presume there is a tail?" Cat Chow said, "Not seeing the tail, now I wonder if I saw the horns and body." Don't let this zen bull fool you. You cannot force reality to be something it isn't. But if you don't force your way into clarity, the force of delusion holds you. To see clearly, zen cuts off words and demands an answer. Here is where words part company with the truth, provoking new mind ground. The masters meditated on this question in silence, then raised it again. Why did he not see the tail? Noh Me stomped his foot on the ground and bellowed. Cat Chow fanned the air. They carried on this way, making good endings after bad beginnings, and good beginnings before bad endings.

In zen practice after many sittings, the mind and body melt effortlessly in one seeing knowing, spine mind consciousness. There is where the mind's eye sees an opening. Also called heart mind, this viewing is driven at a pace of eighty-six thousand beats a day, give or take few beatings. Zen asks what is your true nature when you step on the gas? To see this, Noh Me says that, first thing in the morning you should awake and put on your trance. In the coffee ground mind ground school, the ordinary mind represents the extraordinary. In this way Zen plays at reversing pairs, using the crude to show the subtle, making space for the unseen, indulging the inconceivable. This is revering the "scenery of signless wonder." What could the scenery of signless wonder be? To see it, is to be it.

The zen cult stares for hours at space, practicing the facility and felicity of contemplation. Trance is used to awaken from the daze of routine days. Zen uses and questions thought to empty the mind of its clutter. The heart mind of zen is samadhi. It is an experience of indivisible oneness that towers up "like a mile high wall." Samadhi is also the no need to think mind. But the mind that doesn't need to think has to look sharp. The Blue Cheese Cliff Record says, if you have a hunger for self understanding, check out the zen menu. Bon appetit.

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