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.

This month we are featuring sangha member David Clark.  We want to extend a big thank you to David for his devotion to taking care of our zendo space. David often takes the lead in setting up our weekly "flash zendo" in the basement of the Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship, ensuring that its ready for practice every Thursday night and then lingers to help finish clean up. 

Here is a short interview conducted with David; a bit about his life, his background, and his sitting practice.

Desiree: Tell me a bit about your early years and how you came to practice Soto Zen.

David: I was born in New Mexico, and lived in Boulder, CO, for a brief time, in the late 1950’s. I remember when I was only 10 years old, I took a vow of non-violence, and I’ve held to that ever since. In 1970, in CA, I was doing some yoga, and experimenting around. I had a profound transcendental experience after taking LSD that never really left me. Then, in 1973, my brother went to Green Gulch [part of the SFZC] and stayed as a resident there for a while.  He sent me a copy of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki and I found an affinity for it and for Soto Zen Buddhism.

I was doing a lot of sitting over those next years, on my own, often getting up at 5 am to sit for a couple of hours before heading off to hard, physical work. 

I moved to Marblemount, WA, working in the “Shake Mills” (roofing lumber).

It happened that I met our dear friend Seiu Hannah while planting trees in Marblemount when she was doing the same in Bellingham. It was tough in those years - living in a tent, being exposed to the elements - and I gave up sitting for a while then.

I realized over some time that I couldn’t sustain that kind of work and did some career counseling.  The counselor and I both thought the idea of becoming an EMT “medic” really suited me, so that’s what I became.

Starting in 1983 I was a medic for 25 years. It was a very rewarding and satisfying career.  When I retired, I was surprised by symptoms of PTSD, which included prolonged and severe depression, and overwhelming emotion.  The tears flowed out and were never-ending; I also struggled with anger—especially while driving.  I returned to sitting during this time and didn’t know what else could help heal me.  In 2022, after years of this intense suffering, I had a breakthrough.  I found a huge root of my suffering. As I started really allowing and listening to myself, opening up to that 3 year old child in me, I understood that it was not the suffering of those I attended - on its own - that caused me so much anguish - it was being in the position time and time again where I was having to decide on the outcome of someone’s life - sometimes having to make decisions about stopping resuscitation - knowing that their life was ending and I couldn’t save them - even if they were only 14 years old.

Desiree: Wow…So I’m hearing that the recognition, the awareness that this was the root of a deep suffering, was a beginning to the path of healing…to a release?

David: Yes, after that breakthrough, I was able to allow myself to start driving again, and to do more outside my home.  I started at Red Cedar in 2019, but then the pandemic hit and we were back to not meeting together live.  Finally, over these past few years, we’ve been able to be back to being in person for our main programs, and I’ve been able to attend.

Desiree: You’ve put yourself in the steady role of being our zendo set up person, nearly every Thursday, for a while now.  What prompted you to take on this role?  I know you often tell us about your love of work, and you demonstrate this to us every week, by sweeping the floors, setting up the entire zendo, paying attention to details like who is in what role for the evening.  We also asked you to be our work leader for the summer Samish retreat, and you carried a strong work ethic in that role also.  You are quite a reliable, dependable person!

David: I have a need to contribute, to be useful, and this zendo set up role suits me well for now, as we use this rented space. I can drive up here early - and only have to come once a week from Anacortes - and I can spend time in a quiet, environment, doing work I enjoy, and take care of the sangha in that way.

Desiree: Thank you, David, for your ongoing commitment to the sangha, and inspiration around your devoted Zen practice.

~David relayed to me that these days he continues with a steady sitting practice consisting of 3 hours every morning, and with Red Cedar.  He says that through all the hard experiences, and the traumas of his life, he has returned again and again to the thing that makes the most sense: “just sitting” and finds that this is the most important thing.

Desiree/Red Cedar