Dear Sangha friends,

I've been thinking a lot about this upcoming stage in our development as a community. One important pivot is that after over 30 years of doing our formal practice in shared and rented spaces we'll be the proud owners of our own practice space once we move into Cedarwood next year.

With that fact, and our general deepening of our community over the years, it's clear to me that this new space should properly be considered a Zen Buddhist Temple.

The term temple as opposed to Zen Center or Dharma Hall (or Rented Church Basement!) has a feeling of deep roots. Deep roots in our Zen Buddhist tradition through Japan; deep roots in the soils of our Cascadia bioregion; deep roots in our hearts as we together practice, and live into, serving as bodhisattvas in a wonderful and tragic world.

And temples have names. While we'll continue to be Red Cedar Zen Community as an organization, we'll be practicing at a space, at a temple, which also has a name: a marker or a pointer to something about that particular spot on the planet as well as our deep intentions as practitioners.

So I've thought for a year or two about what that name might be. I've pondered how we practice and where we practice. I've consulted with Japanese priests around the kinds of names that are appropriate and fitting.

An idea came to me early but I didn't want to be too quick to be sure that was it. While temples are sometimes renamed, pretty much: that's the name of our temple from here on.

Then during my sabbatical in July I was sitting on the banks of Gamma Creek at my camp in the Glacier Peak Wilderness area. I was thinking about all of this as I studied Shokahu Okumura's wonderful commentary on Dōgen's Mountains and Waters Sūtra.

Shohaku-san shares that Dōgen was deeply inspired by the work of an 11th century Chinese poem named Su Shi. Here's a poem that particularly moved him (in my translation based on several different English possibilities):

Valley Sounds, Mountain Colors

This mountain stream

    is Buddha's long, broad tongue

This vast mountain

    is Buddha's formless body

All night long - listening to 84,000

    sutra verses

When the light returns,

    how will I explain it?

As I felt the solidity of the mountain beneath me and listened to the mountain stream's teachings I felt in my bones that the temple name idea I'd been turning over in my heart for a while was the right one. Here's what I chose for us:

山水経    Sansui-ji   “Mountains and Waters Temple”

Sanjui-ji includes a clear reference to the Mountains and Waters sutra (山水經 San-sui-kyo) and it honors where we sit between deep mountains and flowing waters as well that at our annual backpacking retreat for 25 years we've chanted this text trailside as we've moved through the mountains and streams below Koma Kulshan (Mt. Baker).

But not just that. As as Shohaku-san helped me see more clearly with his commentary, the mountains and rivers aren't things outside of us. We don't actually go to the mountains and look at them from over here while the mountains are over there.

We are mountains and rivers. We are solid, we are flowing, we are beyond any ideas of solidity or flow. We are impermanent and always changing but we are also beyond such ideas of permanence and impermanence. These are the deep truths also pointed to by the teachings on going beyond birth and death.

As we mountains-and-waters beings plant these deep roots of practice in our local mountains-and-waters soil, may we all feel the depth and transformational power of what we are doing, and what we have to offer.

And so after returning from the mountains I sought input from our Practice Leaders group, shared the decision with the Board of Directors, and am so happy to share our temple name now with you. What a miracle that all of this is coming together! That we have the incredible opportunity to help this world by establishing a temple together.

I so very much look forward to practicing with everyone at Sansui-ji Temple.