given by Nomon Tim Burnett
the night before the Mountains and Rivers Retreat, Hawk Meadow Farm
September 04, 2003
Tonight we give our blessings to a small Dharma expedition. Bob, Chris, Terry and Lisa are spending the next three days entering, by foot, the sacred space of the mountains.
When we first considered offering this type of retreat one of my hesitations was that it would probably never work out for that many people to go for several reasons: the physical challenge of it, the limits they place on group sizes in the wilderness, that we don’t have a fully transmitted teacher along. Should sangha resources really be invested in something that will only benefit a few of us?
But now I realize that we all benefit whenever any of us deeply embraces the way. We can probably never understand how it all works out, but somehow these four people through their commitment to practice in this form, by hiking quietly, alone and yet together in a group, by stopping every few miles to chant from Dogen’s great works, by dedicated their practice not to themselves, but to the spirits and powers of mountain, river, cloud and mountain, by remembering their sincerity and their dedication to awareness, to awakening; somehow by these four people devoting this energy for the next three days to practice, far from our busy regular; somehow that brings a deep feeling to the whole sangha. So we wish you well, and we thank you for your commitment to practice.
I hope this doesn’t sound too heavy! You should all go out there and have a great time together too. It’s hard to quite express the balance there: we can all deeply commit to practice, with true sincerity, without taking this all too seriously. I really do feel, though, that we have to take ourselves seriously as practitioners. But it’s an open kind of serious, it’s a deep commitment to letting go - usually serious means tight and holding on. Our serious is sincerity, it’s release and it’s a steady, gentle, day by day commitment to waking up.
Everyone knows the supposedly Chinese proverb about The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I think our practice together is not really about beginning a long journey. It’s about continuing a long journey, a journey without end actually. It’s about keeping it up, day after day, year after year. We need a proverb more like When you are 699 miles through the thousand miles and you freak out, just take another step. All of us here are somewhere in the middle of our lives. We have started many, many thousand mile journeys. Taking that momentous and exciting first step in one direction or another, only to change course, reverse, or just funk out after a mile or two. We all know the excitement and exhilaration of beginnings. Of starting a new relationship, a new career, a new spiritual practice. And we all know very well that this feeling, as fun as it is, is doomed to fade. And like all feelings there is nothing truly sustaining or substantial to it.
Suzuki-roshi’s way of practice, it seems to me, is about our actual life right here smack dab in the middle of the journey. The initial excitement is fading, and there is a long, long way to go. We can rekindle our excitement a little by going to another retreat or reading a new book or something, and that’s nice to do - we need to do those things, but really what gives us staying power is accepting and embracing every step, every mile, regardless of whether there are exciting vistas, or whether we are stuck for months or years in the deep shadows of a gloomy forest.
I think it’s not a coincidence that there are so many metaphors in spiritual practice about walking, about paths, about ascending mountains. There is something about walking, especially walking for quite a while, that allows the lock our minds have on us to soften a little. The cognitive mind gradually releases as we release ourself into walking. You know how after you’ve been walking quite a while and you can hardly even tell you are still walking? There’s just a kind of flow happening.
So we send these four off to walk in sacred space. With trees, rocks, birds, and butterflies. Step by step. Allowing themselves to be embraced by the fullness and completeness of the world. Settling the self on the self as Katagiri roshi said. We look forward to hearing about it and sharing the joy of this with them.
And very long walks have a deeply rooted place in our tradition. This wasn’t written about too much because it was such an elemental part of practitioner’s lives for almost all of the 2500 year history of Buddhism, but people who practice would walk. From town to town if they were mendicant monks living on the kindness of the townspeople. From monastery to monastery if they were monks during the times and places when the monastic establishment was strong. And not just 6 miles into a campsite either. These folks would hike hundreds and hundreds of miles. Days, weeks, and months on the road. Walking on dusty dirt roads, along paths, and animal tracks. All of that walking, breathing, contemplating, allowing themselves to embrace the earth in every step. All of the walking, I think was a very important part of their practice.
The pithy little stories which became the Zen koan literature are kind of like the endnotes on long periods of walking meditation practice. A monk would go off to study with some renowned master. He or she would walk for a few months wondering, like you or I would, did I make the right choice?, am I going to the right teacher?, Is this whole thing a big waste of time? And finally just settling into the journey with a spirit of well now I’m committed might as well just see what happens. And finally reaching the monastery. And finally getting to dokusan. Wow! What now?!
One of my favorites, which I’ve probably spoken of several times and I know Norman has too, is case 52 of the Blue Cliff Record - the story of the great stone bridge of Zhaozhou.
A monk asked Zhaozhou, "For a long time I’ve heard of the stone bridge of Zhaozhou, but now that I’ve come here I just see a simple log bridge."
Zhaozhou replied, "You see the log bridge, you don’t see the stone bridge."
The monk said, "What is the stone bridge?"
Zhaozhou said, "It let’s donkeys cross, it lets horses cross."
The way these stories are written, there’s a kind of stylistic literary conceit that the new student just waltzes in has full access to the teacher, and usually the student tries to whip out a big zinger right away to test the teacher’s understanding. Well since these were human institutions I don’t think they were really set up that way. More likely you had to serve as junior-under-monk and clean toilets for a year before you even caught a glimpse of the teacher at the bigger monasteries. Some of these Tang and Sung dynasty monasteries had two or three thousand students practicing there! Can you imagine? We have a real struggle getting 40 students into dokusan with Norman - think about 3000 for a minute. But anyway it’s a great literary device so let’s just go with it.
The student had just walked for months and he had great expectations. He really wanted something. He wanted to find a great teacher who could help him to understand. He wanted to be a good monk. He wanted release from suffering. We all want these things. The first level of meaning here is that he had this idealized expectation of Master Zhaozhou himself and once he finally arrived the master didn’t measure up to his expectations. As you probably know the symbolism here is that by the town of Zhaozhou in Heibei Province in China there is a really impressive stone arched bridge. It still exists today - I looked it up on the internet and saw a picture of it, the site said it’s even now the largest and oldest stone arch bridge in the world. It was already about 300 years old and very famous even when the story took place. Common practice for the abbots of the monasteries in those days was to take a new name from the place of the monastery. Usually the abbot would take the name of the mountain where the monastery was sited. In this case I think it was either the name of the town nearby or the region.
A monk asked Zhaozhou, "For a long time I’ve heard of the stone bridge of Zhaozhou, but now that I’ve come here I just see a simple log bridge."
And so the monk is referring to the fame of the stone bridge of Zhaozhou as a metaphor for the fame of the Zen teacher Zhaozhou and saying he’s not impressed. Apparently Zhaozhou wasn’t a real flashy teacher. He is famous for quietly saying just the right thing, but I guess he didn’t give lots of theatrical and impressive teachings like some of his contemporaries.
So that’s the most obvious level of meaning to the story. I expected more and I didn’t get it. And so I’m suffering and I’m disappointed and I want to at least put someone else down so I’ll feel a little better. Can you relate to this?
At first blush it doesn’t seem like the monk has benefited much from his months of hiking meditation practice. But consider what happens next.
Zhaozhou replied, "You see the log bridge, you don’t see the stone bridge."
This is kind of amazing don’t you think? The teacher is not reactive at all to the monk’s impertinence. He realizes that there is an opportunity here for deep learning about the mind. Oh, how interesting that your mind would work that way! You don’t see the stone bridge? What do you see? Consider carefully.
And here is where the monks’ practice shows even across all of these millennia. He is not caught in his own disappointment, he is able to turn around and open his mind to the potential for enlightenment even in the midst of disappointment and despair. He is able to do the most liberating thing we can do with cognition and language. He lets go of his certainly and asks an open question. Or an opening question you could say.
The monk said, "What is the stone bridge?"
This is the same question as What is Buddha? or What is this mind? or simply the deep question What is it? I used to ask myself this question a lot. It’s a powerful practice, you can try it, with the exhalation ask What is it? And after a while the words dissolve and you are left with just the feeling of questioning. The feeling of opening to the universe, the feeling of letting go of being so sure all the time. What is it? Not worrying about whether it makes you look smart or dumb, just asking a clear honest question with great sincerity. That is the activity of awakening.
I will leave Zhaozhou’s wonderful answer for all of us to contemplate because I promised Bob I would keep this short.
Zhaozhou said, "It let’s donkeys cross, it lets horses cross."
Here’s the whole case again:
A monk asked Zhaozhou, "For a long time I’ve heard of the stone bridge of Zhaozhou, but now that I’ve come here I just see a simple log bridge."
Zhaozhou replied, "You see the log bridge, you don’t see the stone bridge."
The monk said, "What is the stone bridge?"
Zhaozhou said, "It let’s donkeys cross, it lets horses cross."
As practitioners we have an opportunity, maybe even the responsibility to work more deeply, and a little more honestly, with our disappointments in life. To practice being honest with ourselves. To notice how stuck we get in our ideas and our desires. And I think what this case really points out is we need support in understanding our mind. We need to find teachers and elder brothers and sisters in the Dharma, people we can trust. We need to have these people in our lives and we need to speak up. We need to let it all hang out a little, like the monk did, and from the strong foundation of our practice we need to be ready to open to our ideas as just ideas, and let them go.
The monk in this story didn’t just swallow his disappointment. He asked for an interview with the teacher and spoke up. Maybe our self-awareness is strong that day and we manage something graceful like, "Teacher please help me understand this horrible feeling of disappointment. I came here projecting an idea on you and you didn’t measure up to my fantasy and now I am caught in suffering and regret. Can you help me?" Or maybe we are not feeling so clear but we can trust our teacher not to be caught so we just blurt out, "You suck!"
And our teacher, or our friend can help us shift the ground of our being so that we realize, "oh I was caught in an idea there, now I see - stone bridge, log bridge, it makes no difference. Donkeys can cross, horses can cross. All being can cross - how beautiful!"
All of this zazen we try to do helps us with this. Walking meditation helps us with this. Learning to allow thoughts to come and go without grasping. It’s such a simple idea. There’s not much too it. But it’s the most amazing and liberating thing if we can put it into practice off the cushion for even a second once in a while. If you look around at people, if you look at yourself, if you read the news, you can see, it’s so painful but you can see how caught we all are. We wanted to see that stone bridge and we are suffering so badly when it’s not there. So many people in the world are committing horrible acts of violence in the anguish of fixed views and unimaginably deep disappointment and suffering.
We can at least work with our minds a little more skillfully and learn how to open to questions, open to ambiguity, and let go a little. It’s the least we can do as privileged first world people who have had the further good fortune to be in a position to practice.
I am confident that our four mountain hikers will work on this these next days of peaceful practice in the mountains, and I am confident that all of us little by little are working on this every day whether we know it or not. Please let’s continue this practice as best we can for the rest of the time allotted to us.
Thank you very much. I would like to close with a famous quote from John Muir. John Muir could really see the wonderful stone bridge when he went to the wilderness, and his clear vision can inspire us whether we are going to work tomorrow or walking the trail.
"Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Natures peace flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drip off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature's sources never fail."
Resident Priest Nomon Tim Burnett has been a student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer since 1987 when he was a resident at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm. After sitting practice periods at Green Gulch and Tassajara Zen Monastery, Tim helped found the Bellingham Zen Practice Group in 1991. Tim was ordained as a Zen Priest by Norman in June, 2000. Like his teacher, Tim is interested in the possibility of deep and complete practice by lay people.
A person of wide-ranging professional interests, Tim has been a botanist, elementary schoolteacher, writer, and computer programmer. In addition to his work at the Resident Priest of Red Cedar Zen Community, Tim works as a software developer.