Mindfulness

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

To practice Clear Mind Zen is to practice with an open mind. Our mind should be so open that its like a room with large, open windows on each side. Nothing resides in this room. Whatever enters this room enters without being spun around, redressed, or otherwise altered. What is there is brief and pure and free to leave.

I am reading a book recommended by Rabbi Citrin entitled, Your Word is Fire. Its a collection of teachings from Hasidic masters of contemplative prayer. Usually, in our modern, superficial, sense prayer is considered a plea or supplication to God who we imagine might be listening. Rife with anthropomorphic simile, this understanding nearly always reflects, then forces, a concept of God as a "being".

Chasidic masters, like Zen masters, are masters of Emptiness. Prayer is a practice that allows heart/mind (in Zen, shin) to open and be filled with no-thing. Prayer becomes a dynamic process of joining the entire universe as it is, directly. This entire universe, as it is, is God.

Prayerbooks, liturgy, chanting...all are pathways to openness. Invitations to enter the empty room with its expansive, open windows. We read the prayerbook, go through a daily liturgy, and chant our way into emptiness: a total union between everything and us. We must see them, as Buddha saw practice, boats to the other shore. They are tools.

Yet, tools with a rub. The rub is that we never leave one shore for the other. The other shore is this shore: the tools are both a means and end. Practicing zazen is practice enlightenment. Prayer is direct and complete communion with the Universe.

In Judaism, prayer functions as a daily set of pathways, as well. We get up in the morning, thank God for returning our soul, we express our mindful awareness that we have a body and that all its tubes are working. we prepare to pray, we recite our statement regarding the oneness of God, we recite blessings, we ask for healing for those who are ill, we bless God when thinking of those who have experienced death. Throughout the day we are asked to be mindful of everything: flowers, trees, bread, fruit, the sights of life, good news, bad news, you know, the whole enchilada. In short, we move from a focus on ourselves to a focus of the entire universe as our domain in partnership with the Universal. We have work to do!

In Zen, it is exactly the same. We recite blessings upon waking and going to sleep. We are asked to be mindfull of the many hands and many lives that bring us our food. We are enjoined to recite the Wisdom Heart Sutra, a sutra expressing the core understandings of Zen: everything comes and goes, nothing lasts forever, and that we have a part to play in daily life and that part is to live mindfully. We recite the Four Great Vows of the Bodhisattva and take refuge in the Three Treasures, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. We move from the contemplative cushion to contemplative social action, an action demanding we help all beings throughout time.

My sense is that every religious tradition has this oceanic movement from the particular to the universal. We each come to understand we are both wave and water. It is our life to practice Zen, whether it is Zen Buddhism, Zen Christianity, Zen Islam, or Zen Judaism: the key practice is the practice of mindfulness.

Be well.



PS: We have received two additional donations, one for $50.00 and another for $20.00! Thank you both!
Items we will need are: mokugyo (about $150.00; large gong on cushion (about $140.00); small bell on cushion (about $50.00), and a statue of Manjusri (about $50.00).