Work
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Work practice is not volunteer work.
It's an exploration of community. Work is an investigation of community and an opportunity to experience carrying out our responsibilities in the world (non-reliance) without losing our balance (interconnectedness). Work practice takes place both inside and outside of the temple; we might be ringing bells and sweeping the zendo floor, or we might be carrying out career activities and family responsibilities. Each of these work venues offers a different opportunity for studying the dharma and the community with the body and mind.
Work practice teaches us that we’re not “helping out” around the temple, offering our time or expertise to something outside of ourselves with some expectation of receiving gratitude or an ego boost. We’re not working so that at some later point it will be possible for us to practice. We are simply and actively engaging with the sangha in this time and place, discovering what it means to be part of Indra’s net. Thus work practice is more than offering volunteer time to the temple, although giving is an important practice in itself. Work practice is in fact a great opportunity to investigate what giving really is within the network of interconnectedness. “Giving is not one person’s good deed to help another,“ Okumura Roshi explained. “Since we are living together, if we have something extra and someone else lacks something, something just moves from here to there. That’s all. We can’t say, ‘This is mine. You are in trouble. I will give this to you to help you, and I get merit from that action.’ There’s no such calculation. When my hands are dirty, I just wash my hands because they are mine, without thinking that I did a good thing.” While we may read and discuss texts as part of our study activities, our work activities are where we really experience those teachings with body and mind. It’s a practical study of interconnectedness and the nature of community as a manifestation of Indra’s net, whether that community is the practitioners within the temple or the beings in the entire ten-direction world. People who think secular duties interfere with buddha-dharma only know that there is no buddha-dharma in the secular realm, and do not yet realize that there is nothing secular in the realm of buddha.
-- Dogen Zenji, Bendowa |
Resources for work practice
Sanshin style
Dharma talks from Hoko
Dharma talks from work leader Hosshin Shoaf
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