I continue to be deeply struck by in the Ugrapariprccha Sutra that Ken introduced us to how when the sincere layperson, Ugra, asks the Buddha how lay people should practice he emphasized so strongly taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Take refuge, recollect that refuge, practice that refuge, keep taking refuge.
And how taking refuge in Buddha doesn't just mean being devoted to Buddhism or Buddha it's a much deeper engagement, a deeper commitment to that, it's a commitment to fully expressing our own Buddha Nature. It's a transformational intention.
Thich Nhat Hanh's translation of the sutra has the Buddha saying, "When you take refuge in the Buddha, you must truly want to become Buddha. You should feel, "I want to take refuge in you, I want to become like you. I want to be a Buddha adorned with the thirty-two beautiful signs." He says we shouldn't settle for just wanting to hold the hem of the Buddha's robe.
This is a deep engagement, a deep committing. A willingness to dive in. To be steady and committed yes, there is work to do, effort to be wisely applied, but I think even more it's a radical undoing - a letting go of our own agenda.
It's a bit like when you have children you realize sooner or later that for the next decade or so you're personal agenda is going to take the back seat. The first thing must be the needs and well being of the children. And that can actually be quite wonderful and quite difficult.
Can our practice we that full and complete? We balk at words like renunciation - renunciation sounds like what the monastics would do, not the lay people - but that's what the parent does in letting go of putting themselves first, in putting the children first.
Can we practice that way with Buddha? As Buddha?
Letting go of putting our habits and desires and usual ways first and putting our own Buddha nature first. Being willing to get out of our own way and become more fully the Buddhas we are?
This is very vulnerable. You have to be willing to admit you were struck, you were wrong, you were being reactive. You were running on the habit energy of me-me-me.
We are lucky to get to explore this taking refuge in Buddha together in the context of sangha life. We are so lucky in that way. This particular, but ever changing, mix of people and personalities are exactly the teachers we need to loosen our grip on ourselves on open to our Buddha nature.
In the new collection of Suzuki Roshi teachings he talks about taking refuge in Buddha like this:
To take refuge in Buddha means to become one with Buddha, or to find our true nature which is not different from Buddha. Dogen Zenji uses the phrase kanno doko, which means “responsive communion.” It is a very difficult phrase to translate. Kanno means “to respond to each other,” and doko means “true relationship.” Do is dao or path, and ko is interrelationship. In terms of conscious awareness, kanno doko happens for us in this way: we feel some coherence, interrelationship, or correspondence between Buddha and ourselves. Although we feel that way, originally there is no difference between Buddha nature and human nature. So it is more than responsive communion or relationship, but in our conscious awareness, it feels like that. By mutual communion, or kanno doko, we mean the true experience of Zen. It is not some ecstasy or mysterious state of mind; it is a deep joy that is even more than joy. You may have this true experience through some change in your mental state. But a change of mental state is not, strictly speaking, enlightenment. Enlightenment is more than that. A change of mental state comes with it, but it is more than that. The part that we experience is the joy of a mysterious experience, but something else follows. That something which follows aside from this experience is true enlightenment. So you should not suppose that enlightenment, even though it is there, will always be experienced in terms of consciousness. By carrying out your various activities with this subtle caution, the experience becomes deeper and your consciousness will become more and more mature and smooth. You may say that enlightenment is the maturity of your experience of everyday life. When enlightenment does not follow, your experience is black and white. When true experience follows your conscious activity or conscious experience, the way you receive and use it is more natural, smooth, and deep. This is not just joy. It is something more than joy. It may not be possible to experience enlightenment just in terms of consciousness, but what you do experience is much deeper than joy. This point should always be remembered. If you remember this point, all the precepts are there. You will not be attached to some particular experience, and you will not be caught by a dualistic experience of good or bad, or of self or others. .... Namu, to take refuge, in Japanese means to plunge into something. We say, “You cannot bring up water in a basket.” If you put the basket on the water, the basket will sink. That is the way. As long as you are making a dualistic effort, you are a basket and you cannot do anything. You are full of holes. Holes are you. We say murochi, wisdom with no holes. But our wisdom is hole wisdom, wisdom with holes. Murochi means no-holes wisdom, but for us no-holes wisdom is just to dip a basket in the water. While it is in the water there are no holes! That is namu, to take refuge, and that is how we practice zazen. This is the interpretation of precepts and the understanding of our zazen.
Did you catch that last metaphor about using a basket, not a bucket but a basket, to scoop up water? A loose basket with holes in it. It doesn't work as a water bucket. But the purpose of the bucket is to change something: to move the water from here to there. Do we really need to change ourselves in the ways we think we do?
The holes are only holes when you try to move the water with the basket. The holes are only holes when the basket with water in it is pulled up into the air. The water coming through the holes is the appearance of holes. But when the basket stays in the water there are no holes. Letting the basket sink in the water, letting ourselves be who we are, and there is no struggle. Just basket, just water. So we don't suffer any more when we stop scooping ourselves. Not judging ourselves. Not trying to fix ourselves.
Suzuki roshi also said, "When you are you, Zen is Zen."
This journey is joyful and confusing and simple and complex and wonderful and annoying and ... everything. And it's a journey home. To our true home. He talks a bit in that section about enlightenment which is an idea that confuses us a lot. But what it means is realizing you're home.
One the coast of Northern California are the headwaters of the Klamath River, which flows down from Oregon - 250 miles long. Like so many Western rivers the Klamath was dammed for hydroelectricity, flood control, and agricultural diversion of its waters. The dams went in in the early 1900's - a hundred years ago. This was a major salmon bearing watershed and the dams cut off 250 miles of habitat. And it's a relatively intact habitat. No major metro areas there and some large wilderness areas and logging lands. A nature writer I love calls the whole region the Klamath Knot because of the intricacy of the terrain and the resulting diversity of habitat.
And as you know salmon spawn in freshwater and then swim out into the ocean to live most of their lives, returning to where they were born in the rivers and creeks to lay eggs and let go of their bodies. One of those amazing natural stories that's all around us. If you haven't yet tuned into this amazing natural cycle we are blessed with wild and hatchery salmon returns in many of the creeks right around us.
The creek below us here, Squalicum Creek, is actually named after the salmon: the species that commerical fishers like the least called dog or chum salmon (sorry guys for the derogatory name) and it has a small return. The major estuary project at it's mouth down at Bellingham Bay, which we can walk right to on the trail over there, should help. Other streams like Whatcom Creek, Padden Creek, and especially Chuckanut Creek have returns of chum and coho salmon every Fall. It's an amazing thing happening right here. Maybe we should add a sangha fish watching event to our Wilderness Dharma Program: definitely a big part of the Way of Water.
Back to the Klamath River in Northern California and Southern Oregon. In an amazing feat of cooperation, which involved decades of patient and skillful lobbying from the tribes along the river, four large dams in the lower section of that river were removed in late 2023 and early 2024.
And guess what happened? The salmon miraculously came right back. They returned home even though that home had been lost to them for 100 years. Full sized returning adult Chinook salmon were spotted on October 16th, 2024. The very first season the river was open again and they found they swam 250 miles to their ancestral spawning grounds the upper Klamath River.
How did they know?? Biologists think they have a kind of internal magnetic compass to help them get to the right area of coastline but from there they can actually smell their way to their spawning grounds.
But that this normally happens because as baby smolt the deeply imprint on the chemical make up of their spawning ground waters after birth. How did salmon communities hold that knowledge through all of those generations? Chinook Salmon live 3 to 7 years so maybe 15 to 20 generations couldn't get back to the upper Klamath. Somehow they kept the knowing of their home alive all that time.
I bring all of this up as a way of thinking about Suzuki Roshi's talk of enlightenment. It's more like the Chinook Salmon finding their way home than some spectacular mental ah ha event.
Finding our way home to our true nature, our Buddha nature is more shedding than gaining. Dropping away more and more of our conditioned fears and doubts and insecurities. Releasing our held trauma. Learning through experience and intution both that we don't have to cling on to our ego-istic selfs. The arising of trust. What a major example of trust that was for a salmon to nose it's way into the mouth of the Klamath River - hmm: this feels right I'll keep going. Our practice is feeling our way like that. It's not a set of calculated pros and cons around the perfect meditation techniques to do and the right Dharma books to read.
This place is a Dharma home so that's it's own journey. And maybe it's a big part of my own finding my way to the headwaters.
This last year of building the temple was an intense time of practice even though there wasn't formal zazen practice in this building until just a few months ago. Still creating this place was a powerful journey in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
I myself was involved in so many decisions. So many conversations. Swimming this way and that. I had so many ideas, and imagine-ings and hopes and reactions and joys in the mind. Swirling through my mind. Sometimes one would take hold as some kind of a big problem, or I didn't feel a problem about something and was so surprised when another did feel a big problem about this or that decision or outcome or arrangement or floor plan or materials or color or ... the list is literally endless.
As a human practicing being Buddha of course I preferred harmony and agreement but also I wanted my ideas to be right. I preferred this strongly to when I was wrong which happened many times. But it's just like the holes in the bucket: there is not right or wrong when we immerse together as community. If we're fully in this together.
Returning to Ken's basic question for us: how should committed lay people practice? And the question you can't disconnect from that: what is a lay person? what is a monastic? How do they differ? Are they really even that different?
The monastic lifestyle usually does look different, sometimes quite different, from lay life. One surrounded by formal practice, bound by a schedule and many other agreements. Raizelah and Seishin at their practice periods in two beautiful valleys had to agree not to leave for the duration of the practice period except for emergencies. Every day immersed in practice. Turns out the longer term monastics, those in leadership, do end up with lives that look a bit more like lay lives as they have to manage the place with meetings and logistics and finances and all of that but their daily lives, still, immersed in that environment.
And then there's the lay person's lifestyle with school and jobs and kids and career and retirement and all of that. Trying to sit everyday, come to the temple regularly, it's not like there isn't also a container of practice but maybe it's more fragile, it certainly has to be more self-created. In a way the serious lay practitioner has a bigger job as each one of us must create our own version of a life of practice that fits our circumstances and abilities.
But still it's always humans learning that they are Buddhas in the middle of the arrangements, in the middle of the lifestyle.
I've been in monasteries many times and my sense is people are people. There is something impressive about deeply grounded people and it might be you might a few more of them in monasteries, but I can't really be sure. We can't really be sure of much of anything when we're involved.
But one thing I am sure of is there are many many expressions of Zen practice. There are many ways to come home. And coming home is coming home. One way isn't better.
Whether it's sitting at home, reading Buddhist books, coming to the local sitting group or temple regularly, going on retreats, or living at a monastery for a short, medium, or long time.
Each expression is valid and deep.
The depth of the practice doesn't seem to have any clear relationship to the format as far as I can see. I'm cautious when someone asks me how they can "go deeper" in the practice. Maybe there's a judgment there than the practice now is "shallow"?
And it's more like be deeper than go deeper isn't it? And the barriers to that are more in our own hearts, our history and conditioned tendencies, in our clinging to who we think we are whether that serves us well or not.
When we started the sangha almost 35 years ago without really realizing I was thinking this way I assumed: oh this is just the introductory thing, the baby version, the hope here is people get interested enough to go off later to the real Zen centers and experience the real thing.
But then you know what happened as the decades have gone by?
Well, very very few of the sangha members have gone off to spend significant time at the so called "real Zen places" - a few do, which is wonderful but not many, which is just fine too - and as I have watched and listened and learned and interacted with, and regularly humbled by, the people who take up this way of practice as we see it here: we've all changed and grown so deeply.
So much more clarity, kindness, and expression of Buddha through our eyes, hearts, and gestures. And of course we also have infinitely far to go towards full Buddhahood but we just keep on. We just keep going. We become less and less worried about the holes in our basket because we have learned to relax more and let ourselves stay fully immersed in our own lives. We gradually get it through our thick skulls that in a very fundamental way there is nothing wrong. Something to do. Something to fix. Nowhere to go. That our projects and process really is just like the title of the wonderful new Suzuki Roshi book: becoming yourself. Becoming fully ourselves.
In the book somewhere Suzuki Roshi mentions Katagiri Roshi, another somewhat younger Japanese priest he invited to come help him at Tassajara, liked to say "settle the self on the self." So that must've been in the late 1960's. I remember Katagiri roshi was still saying that when I got to practice with him in the late 1980's as a young man.
To be a wise lay person practicing is to settle the self on the self. It's another way of saying come home. To fully be who we are. To stop trying to scoop ourselves out of ourselves into some new form: you do that and the basket leaks all over the place.
There will be tears and there will be laughter. You'll remember who you are, and forget, and remember again. You'll discover and re-discover the ease of not pushing and forcing and trying so hard. The grace that only comes with admitting you were being a shmuck clinging to your opinion. How kind we really are when met with vulnerability. How brittle and fragile we are at the same time.
I was so touched one time, a few years ago, I was in a meeting with a group of senior practioners - people who've been at this for 2+ decades at least, and most of us together in the practice most of that time. One person looked up at the group and said something like, "It's just been so wonderful growing up together." Another way of saying coming home together.
That's how it is. This taking refuge in Buddha and Dharma as a sangha. It's growing up together. When you grow up you still feel like you, it's not like you're someone else, but you aren't the same as you were either.
The lifestyle details of how each of us expresses this - how we swim in these waters - will vary. Some of us will sit more than others, be here more than others. That's okay. It really is. Comparison is not helpful with this stuff. It really is a quality over quantity kind of thing.
Some of us will go away for a month, or 3 months, or a year, to a monastery. But most of us will not. And that's okay too. For most of us our Dharma is expressed in this everyday modern life. Coming here when we can and probably never quite as often as we'd like. The important thing to fully be here when you're here. And seeing this not as the one special place where you are more present and fully yourself but a place to remember that's how you are all the time and practice that way everywhere else.
And when we get really lost in our suffering and confusion sometimes we'll stay stuck in that for a time, maybe you'll get disgusted with me, or with someone else, or the practice in general, but sooner or later, whether in this lifetime or further down the road, you'll get through those periods, you'll sniff the truth in the waters again, and head back home, swim back upstream up to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
I want to thank Ken for being such a great Shuso. For his living example with us of a great response to his own question: how does a serious committed lay person practice? I felt like a neglectful Practice Period teacher with so much of my attention on finishing the temple and figuring out how to inhabit it fully and what comes next here and so on. But Ken assures me he had the support he needed and I'm grateful for that.
Assuming Ken gets through the Shuso's Dharma Inquiry Ceremony this afternoon, then he formally joins our group of Practice Leaders and is qualified to teach Zen here as a kind of apprentice under the supervision of the fully empowered teachers. I don't think it will look like all that much has changed in Ken's practice life. Maybe he'll get to form a mentorship relationship with someone a bit newer in practice, that's often a first step in teaching here. And fine it's the only step too.
In a more basic way, Ken just gets down from his high seat at the head of the room and rejoins the congregation. Fitting in and being one of the gang. Bodhisattvas are humble and Ken has certainly shared his humility with us.
But what a gang it is: a gang of deeply committed practicing Buddhas. I am very very grateful for all of this.
So a few reflections on taking refuge. I hope there was something helpful in that ramble for you. If I said anything half-baked or confusing please just forget about it. No words are ever quite right and I can only do my best in the moment I happen to sit down to prepare the talk. A Dharma talk isn't like a well reasoned essay trying to prove a thesis. It's an expression of that teacher's heart on that moment and this was mine.
Much love. Deep bows. Let's continue.
