BOOKS Mzansi Zen (Jacana) published in 2016
The author’s familiar and authoritative Zen style inspires us into taking up this life with both hands, calling us into an intimacy that is already beneath our feet. Read it. It will change your mind and open your heart.
Zen Dust (Jacana) published in 2012
Stoep Zen (Jacana) published 2008
Mzansi Zen, Zen Dust and Stoep Zen can be ordered from good book stores, on-line book sellers, and from Emoyeni, Bodhi Khaya and the Buddhist Retreat Centre. All three books have been reprinted. Signed copies can be ordered directly from Margie at Poplar Grove.
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PRACTICE NOTE My teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, said that when his monks understand the teaching of interconnectedness, the Dharma will have arrived in the west. In the parlour game of popular science, connection is Zen’s version of a theory of everything. Like any other teaching, it has to be tested in our own experience. What does it mean? Is it true? How will I embody it? We can safely accept that this teaching is not a conclusion in logic, a figment of religious hope or wishful thinking. It is about what we see when we open our eyes, what we hear when we open our ears, and what we notice within our bodies and minds in zazen, our meditation. And as we attend more closely, we notice that it is not so much about things in themselves but about the space between them; our relatedness. Put upside down; is there anything that is not connected? I have never been convinced by scientific ‘proof’ of Dharma teachings. But I was still encouraged to encounter the same assumption of interconnectedness in a variety of secular disciplines like environmental science and ecology, trauma studies and somatic healing, quantum physics and engineering. Two examples come immediately to mind. In environmental studies, we are seen as participants in a multitude of dynamic interwoven ecological systems, all of which affect each other in countless ways. This is the place in which we live; whichever way we turn we see it, we feel it on our skin, we smell it on the wind. The world and I are not separate. And in dealing with human trauma and healing, we are sensitive living systems, porous to the world and vulnerable to it. Trauma causes us to contract away from this essential relatedness and our healing lies in our ability to re-connect. The body remembers. So, in what we call the world of nature and in what we call our internal world, there is a continuity of connection. From this perspective, our sense of ourselves as inherently independent and self-sustaining is a fiction. We live, grow, decay, die and transform as part of the All. We are never alone. We are, in this sense, each other; I am the world. This sounds like a heady ‘mystical’ claim but it is one rooted in reality. In my own experience of Zen practice, our self-fascination fades quite naturally as we become still. And - equally naturally - our sense of connectedness grows. As our practice deepens, this becomes true in ever-widening circles. We begin to hear its echo in classical Buddhist teachings like emptiness and non-duality, in terms like mutual co-dependency, intimacy, inter-being or interpenetration – the universe as Indra’s Net. And out of this fundamental reality come the classical teachings of impermanence, change, selflessness and the suffering of regarding oneself as separate. It is our core practice; How do I wake up to, and live as, this unfathomable web of relationship? We come to Zen practice as an anxious self, determined to resolve our nagging disconnection. If we persevere in this, the world naturally comes closer. We discover that interrelatedness is our most authentic way of being – what is traditionally known in the trade as our ‘True Nature’, ‘Original Nature’ or ‘Buddha Nature’. The distinction between inside and outside begins to fray........ The whole world as a single flower. At home in our body, we are at home in life itself. Endlessly in relationship, we are stained with intimacy. Compassion is then simply the most natural way to live, wisdom the natural breath of this understanding. Please look after yourselves. With affection and gratitude to you all,
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