Original Root Zen Center

A Bodhisattva Culture, 2nd point: Re-awakening practices that honor the 3rd Jewel.

By Mathew Somlai

… throughout the collections of texts that have come down to us as authorized “Word of the Buddha,” we do not find a single sutta, a single discourse, in which the Buddha has drawn together all the elements of his teaching and assigned them to their appropriate place within some comprehensive system.
While in a literate culture in which systematic thought is highly prized the lack of such a text with a unifying function might be viewed as a defect, in an entirely oral culture – as was the culture in which the Buddha lived and moved – the lack of a descriptive key to the Dhamma would hardly be considered significant.  Within this culture neither teacher nor student aimed at conceptual completeness.
Bhikkhu Bodhi, In the Buddha’s Words

Park towards the back and that way you can walk through the garden before going inside.  The day lilies have finished blooming for now.  To your right used to be grass, and then a wedding garden that MT Linda created for my wedding.  Now it’s an herb and edible garden.  To your left also used to be grass, and then MT Tony said, “Here,” and a Buddha appeared and then plants and then three beds and then nothing and then a brick labyrinth and then nothing and then wood chips and now flat sandstones marking a quarter of a spiral path.

I believe that the search for comprehensiveness, the need for validation, the hold that lineage has over our practice, and the manner in which the 3rd Jewel has been distanced from practice are all intertwined.  Bhikkhu Bodhi points to a marvelous teaching in that our very literacy, in many ways, has accelerated a search for unification, for having it all in one place, stamped by one person after another to show that this is the true teaching.

Go inside.  We have only had this downstairs for about a year now.  Many of the members here had a hand in creating the wall mural.  Each brush stroke, many hands.  Children of Zen Center members made the hand and feet prints.
Back here is the peace pantry.  A need arose and we are trying to meet it.  Feel free to take and donate as you wish.
This is the ancestor room.  My uncle’s ashes rest here now.  I knew half the people in here when their bodies were breathing.  Now I believe I know them all quite well.  I look here often.  I wonder where my ashes will rest and for how long.

How then do we go about creating Sangha in a literate world without seeking a penultimate model of community interdependence?  Can we return to this ‘oral’ version of community and culture without co-opting this version as some utopia?  How does honoring the 3rd Jewel become our practice, such that the very humanness we bring is the completeness?  Is it even possible to say ‘this is the model’ in regards Sangha when we don’t do that with the 1st and 2nd Jewels?  How can we create, maintain, and continue a community that thrives in its own fleetingness?

We had to add this sink in the kitchen.  The old one, installed when the Montessori school was here, came up to your knees.  Tough to wash dishes.  We had no kitchen before this.  Everyone brought food from home, or made it at the MT’s apartment, and then we washed dishes in the bathroom sink.
The quilt you see as we go upstairs, as well as the faces and spirit dolls and prayer flags and multitude of other creative projects, are from 15 years of Women’s Retreat.  We had been told for years that we were not allowed to have a Women’s Retreat.  Finally, we decided that no one allows us anything.  This is the result.  Things change.

Simon Ortiz, William Bevis, and other Native American scholars have used the example of Navajo sand painting to explain how a culture influenced by oral storytelling differs from one based on writing.  This metaphor first arose through Leslie Marmon Silko’s use of the sand painting ceremony in her own book Ceremony.  The book is truly a must read.  In regards sand painting itself, check out Wikipedia (yes, its somewhat right on this one) or www.anthro4n6.net/navajosandpainting or the best would be to go to navajopeople.org/navajo-sand-painting.htm.

The mosaic pots and prayer flags you see on the altar are from the 2nd annual Camp Bodhi Root.  This is our day camp for children.  We held our first movie night during this year’s camp.  Horton Hears a Who.  Kids watched from inside the fort they built in the middle of the Dharma Room with meditation cushions and chairs and sheets.

No single leader knows all the images used in sand painting.  According to the sites and authors mentioned above there are several different groupings of images and songs, each containing hundreds.  As the Navajo People site states, the healer performing the ceremony will choose which images and songs best fit the illness of the individual for whom the ceremony is being performed.  But, as Wikipedia states, a healer can only master one or two of these groupings in a lifetime.  And, as the Anthro. site states, no one master will teach the entire grouping to any one person.  So those seeking to learn to perform the ceremony must seek out many masters.  Moreover, these masters must know each other’s work and masteries so that an ill person or student may be sent elsewhere if necessary.  The ceremony lasts several days, and seeks to realign the ill person with their lives in the everyday, the mythic, and the spiritual.  The sand draws out the illness.  It is not to be taken lightly.  This is the difference between lineage and tradition.

The targets on the window are for Nerf gun practice.  We had a Nerf or be Nerfed assassin competition.  Peaceful non-violence at the end of a Nerf.  We have a golf club on Sundays.  We have a Baggo league on Friday nights.  Zen cooking classes.  Creative Asylum.  Compassion Fest.  Classes on peaceful action, creative intention, gardening, writing, music.  Renaissance of Rummage is headed up by our Elder Teacher Sue.  Breakfasts in the Garden.

Vine Deloria was (still is) a pre-eminent scholar to read on variances between oral and written cultures, as well as spiritual practices based on space vs. time.  Perhaps most important in his delineations is the point that these are not mutually exclusive, nor should we make an ‘oral tribal’ tradition into a ‘thing’ – some new completeness to steal as a unified tradition that will be routinized and nailed down for conceptual legitimacy.  That said, here are some of his delineations from God is Red: a temporal based spirituality seeks a beginning and end of time, such that behavior answers to an abstract ethical system of good and bad, and preaching is the core of religious practice.  Getting it right and recording the right answers becomes very important.  For spiritualities based on space, communal involvement is of utmost behavioral importance, preaching is given up, and ethics are pragmatic, related to the situation and context.  The story must change.

Many have come here and said they feel at home and peaceful.  Many have left saying they felt nothing.  This is neither good nor bad.  I do not believe this place is utopian, The answer, the path all must take, a thing, an endpoint, nor a new lineage.  I would not kill something I so love by nailing it down to ‘this is it’.

Bhikku Bodhi discusses the Sutras much as many American Indian scholars have discussed how oral traditions have incorporated the written without becoming linear and conceptually focused.  It is important in these traditions to attack the process of creating latticework in one’s mind, and thereby these traditions do not attempt to create latticework themselves.  Bodhi focuses on themes, but attempts to do so through the themes associated with everyday life.  There is a beautiful passage where the Buddha meets a man completing a morning ritual of honoring the 6 directions.  The Buddha quietly, and seemingly improvisationally, helps the man modify the ritual into honoring the 6 types of relationships that exist in all lives.  The Buddha continues, according to Bodhi’s translation, by providing the 5 behaviors that should be meditated upon for each relationship as it is honored (definitely read Bodhi’s translation for a much better discussion, p. 116).  The ritual continued on, and others picked it up.  Some wrote it down years later to help others, to point to the ever-changing nature of ritual and life and the Buddha’s usage of this fleeting nature.  Reading kong-ans with this organic, alive, changing, oral in the written intention often leads to a very different ‘conception’ of the kong-an.

There is a completeness in Sangha that cannot, should not, be conceived.  To do so is incorrect practice.  What then can be done?