Practicing in community

For most of Sanshin’s life, if you had asked a practitioner what its purpose was, you were likely to hear something about intensive zazen or genzo-e or making Okumura Roshi’s teachings available to the world.  All of those things are important, but there is something else at the heart of this project called Sanshin Zen Community.  It’s the community itself as the ground for building a deep and concrete understanding of interconnectedness.  Figuring out what community really is means studying what selflessness really is.  Our zazen, work and study are all ultimately connected to this investigation of interconnectedness.  Early Sanshin documents point out that “Uchiyama Roshi emphasized that people must live and work together every day in order to truly practice the Buddha-dharma.”

Practicing in a community has been likened to putting potatoes into a bucket of water and agitating them together to knock off the dirt, or putting rocks into a rock polisher to chip off the rough edges and make them smooth.  If practicing in a community is the study of interconnectedness, and if community is the central aspect of Sanshin’s life, then practicing here cannot be a curriculum for individual self-improvement, a mystical spiritual quest, or a personal project of any kind aimed at achieving a goal or gaining anything at all.  The point is immersion in the total dynamic functioning of the universe, and nothing more.

Living in the intersection between non-reliance and the structures of communal practice is an opportunity for deep investigation.  On one hand, we’re told not to rely on roles, teachers, calendars or other things to drive our practice.  On the other, we give up a lot of personal choice when we enter into a practice community and agree to go along with what’s being done.  Antaiji’s website reminds potential arrivals, “Life at Antaiji is based on shared practice where it is not possible for individuals to make their own schedules. You will be expected to work together with everybody else and perform shared tasks at set times.”  Sanshin’s life is also like this: different people with different karmic circumstances all engaged in the same activities.  Practitioners sit, study, work and eat together, taking responsibility for themselves and their practice within the network of community.

That shared practice life points us back to interconnectedness moment after moment.  As Uchiyama Roshi has written,  “In a monastery, no matter how weak our determination may be, we have to get up at four o’clock in the morning when we hear the wake-up bell.  No matter how tired we may be, we have to go to the zazen hall to sit.  Even in July or August during the hottest time of the year, we have to wear various robes, Japanese kimono, Chinese koromo, and Indian okesa, and sit in zazen.  Since all monks in the assembly do the same things in the same way, we have to always work together in harmony with others even if we don’t like the work or the people.  Somehow we can do it.  This is the so-called divine power of the assembly.”  [The Wholehearted Way p. 194]

Japanese and american communities

Building a dharma community in America is really a challenge, especially within the context of a transmission of practice and understanding from Japan.  While the Buddhist teachings are what they are, the concept of community is understood and experienced differently in different times and places.  What keeps a Japanese practice community together and what keeps an American practice community together are not quite the same, despite a shared set of underlying principles and teachings.  While the word “sangha” indicates a group of people unified by something—in our case, the dharma—the way that manifests is different across cultures. 

The shared understandings in Japanese communities differ from those of American communities in some important ways.  Japanese culture is much more homogeneous, and the assumption is that everyone understands social rules and traditions and will follow them.  There is much less emphasis on the individual, which means that interactions are more subtle and indirect, and each person understands and accepts that he or she has a place in the hierarchy with attendant responsibilities.  Those who are older or more experienced have a duty to mentor those who are younger or newer, and the junior has a duty to help and support the senior.  Status is not based on personal accomplishment or merit.  Overall, a Japanese community stays together because its culture sees groups and communities as most important.  One finds one’s identity and fulfillment within the group rather than in one’s own aspirations and achievements (company loyalty vs career advancement).  

Americans can find these expectations dismaying.  We’re used to rising to the top based on our own effort, being recognized for our personal contributions, having the space to express ourselves as individuals and having our opinions heard and taken into account.  We value our privacy, our self-concepts and the diversity of our communities and feel compelled to fight for these things when we perceive they’re being threatened.  Not only that, but unlike the flexible young monks for whom traditional Zen training was created, Americans typically come to practice at an older age, when we’re more set in our ways and viewpoints and have a harder time letting go of our habits of thought.  

However, communal practice requires a certain amount of trust.  We have to be willing to be transparent and vulnerable, because there’s nowhere to hide.  If we’re expending all our energy trying to maintain separation and solitude in the midst of a community, then there’s no point in being there.  The study of interconnectedness is impossible under those conditions.
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Zen practice does not require American sanghas to operate on Japanese cultural principles, but it does offer Americans the opportunity to examine the assumptions of their rugged individualism and look beyond them to deeply study interconnectedness as one of the three marks of existence.  

Building a dharma community in america

When he was considering the establishment of Sanshin in 2003, Okumura Roshi wrote, “I believe Sanshin Zen Community was formed not from my desire to establish a religious institution, but as a natural fruit of people’s wish and aspiration to practice, study and deepen our way of life based on the Buddha’s and Dogen Zenji’s teachings.  But still, when it is incorporated and owns its own property as a practice center, we cannot ignore the aspect of being an organization or an institution.  We should make every effort to make Sanshin a healthy and wholesome organization without forgetting that the life of a practice center is nothing other than practice, not organization.  An institution or a practice center is simply a tool for practitioners to get together and practice and study each other as a community.”

Much of Okumura Roshi’s early effort in establishing Sanshin in Indiana was in trying to help us deeply investigate the nature of sangha and community as a means of understanding interconnectedness.  Zazen, work, study and ritual are all aimed at bringing us back to this investigation in a direct and immediate way, and Uchiyama Roshi’s teachings as they are carried out at Sanshin are vital in helping us to subtly refine our understanding.

Sanshin’s life includes three kinds of practice communities: the temporary community of those engaged in sesshin, those who maintain their own households and commute to Sanshin to practice as their lives permit, and those who participate in our practice virtually.  Sesshin is the most intensive practice container and, as Okumura Roshi says, the most refined way to practice Dogen Zenji’s shikantaza.  We can take “refined” here not to mean elegant, exclusive and high-class, but pure and concentrated—just sitting with nothing extra: nothing extra on the schedule and nothing extra in our hearts and minds.  

If we deeply understand the nature of sesshin, we also understand our practice outside of sesshin, so it’s important to study sesshin with body and mind and to investigate it as the basis of Sanshin style.  With the foundation of our practice firmly established in sesshin, we then know how undertake a householder practice carried out largely outside of the temple.  This is how we can carry out a Sanshin-style practice during the other weeks of the month that consistently carries through the themes of Uchiyama Roshi’s teachings.

Thus Sanshin is a place for the intensive practical study of interconnectedness within the context of community.  The core of that study is sesshin; it forms the basis of our investigation and provides the purest way to manifest our understanding.  From there our practice spreads outward on a firm foundation to include householder practice and engagement with the larger community.  When we can successfully practice within the sangha, we can continue to have the same attitude toward home life or work or the larger community.

Precepts and getting along

It might seem that the project of studying community requires the elimination of conflict.  After all, we take precepts and vow to work hard and be skillful and liberate beings.  “These great precepts are the same as the network of interdependent origination,” Okumura Roshi says.  “The precepts are sixteen aspects of the way things are within that network.”  If living in community is an investigation of interconnectedness, then observing precepts should be an important component.  Isn’t that  a measure of insurance against conflict? 

Certainly, no one wants to live in a situation where practitioners are always arguing and creating suffering for each other, but humans being what they are, it’s impossible to avoid conflict completely.  Sometimes in order to resign ourselves to the discomfort that interpersonal conflict creates, we decide that this discomfort is good for us because it teaches us to be patient and compassionate with these shallow, deluded people around us that know so much less than we do.  But what is that attitude other than a continuing attachment to self?

Instead, we need to see the inevitable human conflict as a means of studying the self and selflessness.  “Conflict is how we become more clear and study how to be together with others,” Okumura Roshi said.  “We all have self-centeredness, but until we have close relations with others, we don’t really see our own self-centeredness or think it’s a bad or harmful thing.”  That means that putting ourselves into a communal living and practice situation is an exercise in bumping into others and then doing some inquiry into where and how we went off the rails, not only with regard to our actions but to our understanding of how the universe works.  Conflict is necessary as a mirror, reflecting our own practice back to us; without it we would be like the beings in the heavenly realm who don’t practice because they don’t understand that they’re suffering.

When conflict becomes really unwholesome or even turns dangerous, then of course something must be done.  (Sanshin has an ethics policy and a procedure that allows practitioners to raise grievances, be heard by a small team, and engage in a reconciliation process.)  However, a certain amount of mature or insightful conflict in a community is not toxic and may in fact be helpful.  The arising of conflict doesn’t always make a community unwholesome, though it may be uncomfortable for awhile.  Growth is often uncomfortable, and when people undertake residential practice they need to understand that they are not signing up for an environment of perfect peace and harmony day after day, or a means to escape from the reality of human life.  The investigation into the arising and experiencing of conflict is the real practice.

One important opportunity for that investigation is sesshin.  Like zazen, sesshin has no goal.  However, it does have an important function in the life of Sanshin.  As individuals, we naturally have various likes and dislikes and opinions, and sometimes we become so attached to these things that divisions form within the sangha.  Disagreements can break out, relationships can become threatened, and discord can settle in.  “In order to have a community there has to be something that unifies,” Okumura Roshi once commented.  “Sangha members are unified by dharma, and sesshin is the unifying practice of the sangha.  Preferences of individuals are natural, but if we don’t do sesshin those preferences become more serious and larger.  When we can be quiet within ourselves, the differences melt away.”

Uchiyama Roshi told the same thing to his own students:
Even in a community of practitioners, troubles arise somehow without any particular reason when we don’t sit, for example for a month during summer vacation.  Since the monastery is a community of people with the same bodhi mind, there should not be any conflict.  Yet as soon as the bodhi mind becomes even a little bit weak, the world of individual strangers appears.  When we uphold bodhi mind and devote ourselves to practice and cooperate together, practitioners become even more intimate with each other than parents or brothers and sisters.  When bodhi mind weakens, the world of conflict arises.  When we start sesshin and daily zazen schedule again, the disputatious mind melts away.  [The Wholehearted Way p. 111]

In North America, we need to understand these messages about the role of zazen and sesshin in managing conflict as one part of a larger teaching.  Sitting regularly keeps us flexible and open-minded so we don’t become permanently locked in our own worldviews, unable to understand and appreciate what’s happening when we encounter perspectives that differ from our own.  However, conflict is inevitable and we still need the ability to take skillful action when it arises.  Telling a couple having an argument over their divorce proceedings to go sit zazen is not a satisfying response, and it doesn’t deal with the immediate strong feelings that are coming up in this moment.  If this couple has an established zazen practice, their arguments might not escalate as quickly or become violent, but they still need the skills to communicate effectively and manage their own anger.  In the absolute world, zazen merges us all back into the collective.  In the human world of form, being able to take beneficial action when fire breaks out is critical.  Otherwise, we’re likely to fall prey to spiritual bypassing, ignoring the concrete unfolding of real conflict in an effort to avoid unpleasantness.  Both stillness and action are necessary. 

It might not seem like our individual practice of zazen is much use in dealing with a world on fire.  Aren’t we fiddling while Rome burns?  However, Okumura Roshi reminds us, “Unless each one of us is healthy, harmonious and peaceful, it’s not possible to create a harmonious society.  We start by making peace within ourselves and within our community, and then enlarge the circle.  That’s the way to change the entire world, but the starting point is always our effort to be healthy, harmonious and peaceful people ourselves.”  [forthcoming precepts book]

Thus it’s not that sesshin is an opportunity to escape from the conflict around us into some blissful state but that it allows us to hit the reset button on our habitual clinging to preferences.  Doing zazen and sesshin within our own community is the training ground for dealing with conflict outside the temple.  Understanding non-reliance and the interconnectedness between practitioners is critical to doing beneficial action in the larger world.  “If there is some unhealthy part within the sangha or community, we don’t accuse, criticize or blame people.  We consider the situation a difficult or challenging problem facing our community, and we think about how we can improve the health of the community as a whole.”  [forthcoming precepts book]

Teacher and student

Because Sanshin has a well-known and beloved founder, it’s not surprising that practitioners from all over the world have wanted to come here to practice under Okumura Roshi’s guidance, or “become his student.”  They have all kinds of ideas about what that would be like.  Maybe they’ll get some private mentoring, or have access to special teachings, or sit around drinking tea with him, swapping stories and becoming close personal friends.  They may be disappointed when they discover that within Sanshin style, the role of the teacher is something quite different.  

Sanshin is not a place where “teachers” “train” “students.”  There’s no training system and no curriculum.  It’s a place where practitioners take care of their own practice together, following an example set by teachers or more experienced sangha members.  Somehow our own bodhicitta and the practice of others arise together and respond to each other.  That means both sides of the equation are important, and our own aspiration is a necessary ingredient; no one else can do our practice for us, even though we may draw support from being with others who practice.

Thus we cannot rely on teachers to take us in hand and shape us into model practitioners.  Okumura Roshi explains, “In order to become Buddhists, we have to make vows, accept the teachings as Buddha’s disciples, and want to live according to Buddha’s way.  It’s a matter of our own aspiration or intention; no one makes us Buddhists.  It’s up to us to decide whether we want to be Buddha’s students, and accept and try to follow the precepts.  That’s why, at the very beginning of the precepts ceremony, the recipients come to my office and do three full bows and ask to receive them.  I can’t give the precepts unless I am asked.  I cannot force anybody to become a Buddhist.  We are Buddhist because we wish to be.”  [forthcoming precepts book]

Another reason for the lack of a training system at Sanshin is that each practitioner has his or her own karmic circumstances, and no one’s situation is the same.  Uchiyama Roshi recalled Sawaki Roshi’s approach: “Teach individuals one by one.  Rather than educating people within a system, we need to address each individually, since each is unique.”  [Homeless Kodo p. 233]

Since there is nothing toward which we are “training,” the emphasis is on what’s happening here and now.  There’s no reward for our practice that comes in some future time and no regret at having not done any sitting yesterday or for all of last week.  No one’s zazen is better or more effective than anyone else’s.  When we enter into the space of zazen, we are all doing the same practice whether we’ve been sitting for a week or for  20 years.

Thus there is no expectation that lay practitioners are the particular “students” of any teacher, even if they take lay precepts.  The committment is to the practice, not to the teacher, and practitioners have no obligation to the teacher or to Sanshin.  When people write to Sanshin asking how they can become Okumura Roshi’s students, or how they can join the sangha, we have to say that there is no process for becoming a “student” because that structure doesn’t exist at Sanshin.  Neither is there any procedure for becoming a member of the sangha.  The only thing necessary is to take up the practice.

Hoko remarks, "Sometimes a practitioner suddenly returns to the zendo after some period of absence, and upon seeing me the first thing he or she does is to apologize.  Gazing at the floor, the person says, 'I’m so sorry I haven’t been around for awhile.  I’ve been . . .' and out tumble all kinds of things that have gotten in the way of practice.  I’ve been taking care of children, taking care of parents, taking a trip, taking a class.  I’ve been getting married, getting divorced, buying a house, selling a house, renovating a house.  I’ve been overworked, under the weather, in a daze, out of sorts.  Hindrance is piled upon hindrance to build the case for forgiveness.

'It’s not necessary to apologize,' I say.  'This isn’t about me.  I’m not taking attendance or keeping score.  Your practice is your practice.  The zendo is here when you’re ready to participate.'  If practitioners are using their feelings of guilt, or their idea that somehow I feel rejected when they don’t show up for zazen, in order to get themselves onto the cushion, they’ve missed the mark.  Their own aspiration is the only thing on which they can rely."

Cows grow themselves

The image Okumura Roshi uses to describe the relationship between teacher and practitioners is that of the farmer turning his cows out to graze on the mountain in the spring and letting them back in in the fall when they return.  “They need to grow themselves,” he explained.  “The farmer, or teacher, doesn’t take care of them but serves as an example.”  The farmer doesn’t drive the cows ahead of him but shows them the path and lets them go.    

Elsewhere he’s written, “Particularly while we are beginners, we need a role model to support us and pull us along. We might not have a clear understanding of practice or a strong individual aspiration, but because of some person or a group of people, somehow we are able to continue to practice. When we see someone else practice and live in a certain wholesome way, we feel that we want to practice too, and to be like that person. . . . This is what Dogen Zenji meant when he said [the precept of embracing beneficial actions] is the way in which one should practice by oneself and the way in which one should lead others. These are not two different kinds of practice, but practice for one’s own self can be the example for others. After coming to the USA, I have been trying to continue to practice with the attitude to be a role model of American practitioners. I still hope that what I am doing is an encouragement to other people. Our practice is not only for the sake of ourselves. Because of one person’s practice, someone else may start to practice. Our practice is important, not only for ourselves, but for other people too. This is the way Buddhism has been transmitted for more than two thousand years, generation after generation.  Our empathy and the Buddha’s or our teacher’s response are essential.  I think this is true not only of Buddhist practice, but of all activities in society.”  [forthcoming precepts book] 

The teacher’s role as a compelling example of practice supports the bodhicitta of the other practitioners without releasing them from the responsibility for carrying out their own practice.  While our teachers may have a strong and steadfast practice—in Uchiyama Roshi’s words, serving as locomotives for others—it’s up to us to get our cabooses on the tracks and join them.  They aren’t going to badger, wheedle or cajole us onto the cushion.  The encouragement that comes from our teachers may not be overt; we shouldn’t expect a lot of praise and sometimes we may not even receive correction for our mistakes.  As Uchiyama Roshi pointed out, “The most important point in Buddhism is that each of us practices it ourselves. We must apply every teaching and every practice to ourselves.”  He called this an essential attitude.  We don’t rely on teachers to shape or mold us while we remain passive, and we don’t use teachings as a way to judge others while avoiding looking carefully at ourselves.

The non-directive approach of our teachers doesn’t mean that what we’re doing isn’t important or that they don’t care about us.  The message is that it’s up to us to pay close attention to what’s going on around us at all times, to follow the examples of our teachers in forms and dharma understanding, and to guard against making assumptions about what we see and experience at Sanshin.  

Okumura Roshi never set out to create a defined teacher-student relationship or training plan at Sanshin.  “First I practice what I want to practice, and then if others are interested in my way of studying and practicing, they can come.  There’s no system, and that was always my intention.  Within a system, like traditional monastic practice, you are safe.  I appreciated Uchiyama Roshi’s style because it works only for people who have their own aspiration.”  Uchiyama Roshi called this arousing of bodhicitta becoming a “wayseeker” (gudosha).  As wayseekers, we may look to maps and signposts and we may follow along with those who have been on the path a bit longer than we have, but we chart our own course and walk with our own feet.
 
Thus we need to be clear about what we’re expecting out of practicing at Sanshin and out of our relationship with the teacher and community—and it’s not about basking in a container of absolute purity and worshipping a teacher.  As Uchyama Roshi has said, “Right from the start you have to know clearly that no master is perfect: Any master is just a human being. What is important is your own practice, which has to consist of following the imperfect master as perfectly as possible. If you follow your master in this way, then this practice is the basis on which you can follow yourself.”  Even while practicing with a teacher, our practice is completely our own.

Hoko explains, "Occasionally my fellow teachers in other dharma centers ask me for help with strategic planning or teacher succession, and sometimes I suggest they discuss the following question with their leaders: is our center a service organization or a practice community?  Both of these things are good, but they’re not the same."  A service organization provides something to people: outreach, classes, mentoring, counseling, programs, social events, etc.  It may ask participants what they’d like to have available or what would make them more likely to participate and may modify its program on that basis.  On the other hand, a practice community is a group of people which is focused on its own day-to-day practice together.  It may welcome newcomers and provide some help with acclimation, but it doesn’t make recruitment and retention a priority or put a lot of resources into outreach or “spreading the dharma.”  If someone is intrigued by the example set by the teacher or practitioners and wants to participate, that’s great.  If it’s not a good fit, the community wishes that practitioner well but doesn’t change its approach in order to be accommodating.  Needless to say, Sanshin is more of a practice community than a service organization.