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Zen Silence

 This seems to be a time for me to be revisiting slices of my past.  Maybe a deep letting go is taking hold of me, or maybe there is a need to draw something valuable for the present from my past. My teacher Swami Rudrananda used to say that you can draw energy from your past experiences. I am trying to learn to do that rather than just wistfully reminisce (though I have to confess that there is a lot of that going on).

 Last week, for no obvious reason, I was drawn to Zoom into Reb Anderson's Dharma talk from Green Gulch Zen Center (just north of San Francisco). We have known each other for almost 35 years, though we have rarely met since I moved from the city. But our connection is important in many ways.  Before Kayla and I left for our long retreat in the guest house of the Dalai Lama's monastery I worked out with Reb that upon our return to the USA I would be a "visiting scholar" at Green Gulch. And upon our return that is what I was for almost two years, which gave me the opportunity to complete my book Rehearsing Enlightenment.

 Though my Buddhist practice is mainly in the Tibetan tradition, I have always had a foot in Zen. In fact my first Buddhist teacher was Thich Tien An, a refuge Vietnamese Zen monk, whom I met while a student at UCLA.

 Reb began his talk with his own reminiscence, telling us that today was 50 years since he was ordained as a priest at Tassajara Zen Center by Suzuki Roshi.  That would have been the summer of 1970.  Were it not for the Viet Nam war, I most likely would have been living at Tassajara that summer, because I'd told Thich Tien An of my interest in living at there and he had offered to introduce me to his old friend Suzuki Roshi.  But my draft board had other ideas and I never met Suzuki Roshi. 

 Perhaps in a parallel universe Reb and I would have become priests the same day. But in this universe, 25 years into his priesthood, Reb kindly offered Kayla and I refuge at Green Gulch.  It was an important time in my life for many reasons, not least of which was that although I was a visiting scholar, I was put to work in the kitchen every morning. Initially I was somewhat taken aback by that expectation, but in the Zen tradition "a day of no work is a day of no food." Yet, as it turned out, learning to cook soup for over a hundred people was a wonderful experience.  It grounded my Madhyamaka (middle way) Philosophy into the material world. It took dependent origination out of my mind and into my hands, knives, pots and carrots. And sitting zazen in the magnificent Valley of the Green Dragon, whose mouth bites the Pacific, introduced me to a deep well of silence.

Bell Tower at Green Gulch Zen Center

 The Green Gulch bell pavilion memorializing my old friend David Lueck.

Reb exposes the silence in his heart in his wonderful talk, which is linked here. Listening to Reb that morning I thought about the way in which my own meditation on emptiness has been divorced of Zen  silence, divorced of that Zen stillness.  It has been more visual. I can see things as dependently arisen, as impermanent, and see their lack of substantial existence. But I have not been experiencing their emptiness as silence, as stillness. Or better yet, I have not been present to the silence and stillness in the world's lack of true solidity. 

 Or maybe some part of me has been.  I am waking up rather early most mornings, and I am appreciating the silence of my neighborhood. Maybe something in me is yearning for that Zen silence? Reb is hearing voices in his stillness and silence.  What might I find in mine if I pay better attention?

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