Manners and customs
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Our practice includes a relatively small number of the forms and formalities present in other places of Soto Zen practice. This is not because forms are not important. We do a few forms and do them simply so that we can understand why we’re doing what we’re doing and keep the connection between forms and zazen. Our larger tradition includes a number of elaborate and decorative ceremonies and customs, and in some times and places these are completely appropriate. Our particular aspiration at Sanshin is to keep the meaning and spirit of our simple forms without letting them become empty gestures, done simply because custom dictates that they be done. Without using them to build our egos or compare ourselves to others, we just do the forms as directed and fold ourselves seamlessly into the activity of the community. Forms should be an expression of our zazen mind, particularly respect and gratitude.
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This past year or so, I have been reflecting on the lectures I heard given by our former teacher [Dogen]. Even though I heard all of them from our former teacher, now they are different [in meaning] than at first. This difference concerns [the assertion that] the Buddhism transmitted by our teacher is [the correct] performance of one's present monastic tasks. Even though I had heard that Buddhist ritual is Buddhism, in my heart I privately felt that true Buddhism must reside apart from this. Recently, however, I have changed my views. I now know that monastic ritual and deportment themselves are that true Buddhism. Even if apart from these there also is the infinite Buddhism of the Buddhas and patriarchs, still it all is the very same Buddhism. I have attained true confidence in this profound principle that apart from the lifting of an arm of the moving of a leg within one's Buddhist deportment there can be no other reality.
-- 53rd ancestor Tettsu Gikai as quoted in Soto Zen in Medieval Japan by William M. Bodiford |
