UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud

By: Silent Thunder Order
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  • Summary

  • A podcast of original teachings and music by Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston Roshi, guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order.
    Michael Elliston
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Philosophy Social Sciences Spirituality
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Episodes
  • 170: Happy New Moment

    170: Happy New Moment
    Jan 1 2025
    In the previous segment of UnMind, titled "the least important thing," I closed with a call for submissions; quoting myself: If you have any topics or areas of interest in Zen that you would like me to explore in 2025, please let me know. You know where I live. Having received little response, I can only assume that this podcast is not gaining much traction out there, in spite of near-weekly continuity for the past three or so years. Or that those of you who are following it don't have any topics of interest related to Zen, at least none that you would like me to take up. Or some combination of both. In this segment, the last one of the year, let me start with the obvious: the fact that actually, you do not know where I live. That is, none of us really knows what the rest of us are going through, on a year-in-year-out, day-to-day, hour-by-hour, moment-to-moment, basis, except in the most general sense. And that's okay. But we have to wonder whether everyone else is dealing with the same kinds of issues, such as anxiety over aging, sickness, and death, those personal dimensions of dukkha that Buddha taught we all face. Anxiety stems from the unsatisfactory nature of living in the face of impermanence, imperfection, and insubstantiality, universal aspects of the koan of existence. Are you feeling the angst? Can you remember when it first dawned on you that this life — which seems so substantial, so perfect in so many ways, and that we once took to be permanent — is insidiously deceptive in that regard? That the causes and conditions of it are not part of what you bargained for, opting into birth? Assuming you had any choice in the matter. Few of us would credit a claim of any real intentionality on our part that preceded birth. But in fact Buddha does, explicitly — or at least implicitly — in his explication of the Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Origination. It is his model of how things got to be the way they are — including, most crucially, our own presence in this world of sentient being. According to this cogent analysis, we come into being owing to our very desire to exist — the desire for knowing, or consciousness itself. Considered dispassionately, how could there be any simpler explanation for life? Upholders of theism would have us believe that there is a separate intent to life, an intelligent "designer" operating behind the scenes, as author and director of its creation. The adherents of deism hold that the creator god is not directly involved, but simply got the ball rolling, perhaps by means of the Big Bang. Atheists deny outright any possibility of such disembodied intent, and agnostics try to walk the tightrope between belief and disbelief, according reality to the limitations of their senses and intellectual understanding. No woo-woo, in other words. Most religious thinkers are resistant to the idea that we are simply a fluke of some kind, the result of a secular-reductionist chain of events beginning with material elements combining physically in a random process; yielding organic chemistry; leading to one-celled organisms; finally culminating in human beings, the absolute apex of evolution, or God's greatest creation. In our human opinion, anyway. Most rationalist thinkers would probably push back on the equally simplistic notion that some creator god is to be given credit, or to be blamed, for our being here, and its corollary, that we have to pass the test of Her intent. On the one hand, this doctrine conveniently relieves us of the burden of accepting responsibility for our own existence; on the other, it tasks us with noodling out exactly what that intent might prescribe for the behaviors and attitude adjustments necessary to pass muster. One logical consequence of this notion is that we assume that our reward will be in heaven, if anywhere, but certainly not on this earth. But we cannot escape or postpone the inevitable onset or aging, sickness and death, simply because we hold to a belief, however compelling. Unless you believe in a scientific possibility of eternal life as suggested by sci-fi speculations such as technologically-enhanced consciousness, uploaded to digital hardware and/or downloaded to new bodies, or the same old carcass rejiggered with endlessly replaceable parts, grown in tanks from genetic sources. With apologies for that discursive ramble into weirder pastures, let us return to the focus of Zen on the present reality of the moment, devoid of any beliefs — religious, scientific or fantastical — that we may tend to turn to for comfort. The Heart Sutra of Buddhist liturgy — a central, condensed summary of Buddha's teaching chanted on a frequent basis in Zen centers, temples and monasteries around the world — takes us through a long litany of what might appear to the uninitiated to be a thoroughgoing denial of reality as we know it. Testimony as to what the iconic "Bodhisattva of Compassion" (Skt. Avalokiteshvara; Ch. ...
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    15 mins
  • 169: The Least Important Thing

    169: The Least Important Thing
    Dec 18 2024
    In the last segment of UnMind, we looked at the implications of Master Dogen's expression, "the most important thing in Buddhism," from Fukanzazengi, the set of instructions for zazen he composed after returning from China. We speculated on what he could possibly have meant, by singling out one of the many points he made in the text. I suggested that it may be more useful to consider the "don'ts," rather than the "do's," such as: not thinking, notinteracting, and not distinguishing between the absolute and relative, rather than speculate upon a single bumper-sticker summation of his broader points, as the singular, "main thing to do." In other words, maybe he is pointing at something holistic, in the visceral realm, rather than the intellectual.This is in keeping with Buddhism's major teachings — that their meaning will be found in our direct experience on the cushion and in daily life, rather than in words, which can point at the truth but fail to express it in any comprehensive sense. So when we consider the least important thing in Buddhism, it may be helpful to turn to the written record of the spoken teachings of Buddha himself, beginning with the First Sermon, reputed to be what he had to say to the five ascetics he had been training and traveling with at that point in his spiritual quest. It starts out with come "don'ts." In that original dharma talk, Buddha essentially dismisses the extreme lifestyles of the rich and famous on the one hand — self-gratification writ large; and that of the ascetics themselves on the other, who had turned away from Siddhartha after witnessing him drinking goat's milk, violating their high standard of discipline, including virtual starvation. Buddha had landed in the Middle Way, after a night of extreme introspection. Here we have to reiterate that "extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no vice." In articulating the Middle Way between the usual pursuits of the lay hoi polloi and the monastic minority, Buddha indicated the futility of both lines of endeavor — self-gratification versus self-mortification. The most balanced and natural approach is nether to deny the cravings born of body, mouth and mind, nor to overindulge them. This suggests an innate trust in basic human nature — or we should say buddha-nature — our original nature, which is untrammeled by the limits and demands of biological needs and societal norms. Not exactly the noble savage, but the natural sage: a person who lives freely within the bounds of nature as well as those of society. Mr. Natural. Amongst the least important things in Zen would be concerns about our social identity. As one contemporary author's mother told him, You would be a lot less concerned about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do. We all see ourselves as the marquee character in our own movie, with all others playing supporting roles. The trouble is, everyone else sees their reality the same way, with us as the bit players. While the most important thing, or things, about Buddhism will necessarily lie within the personal sphere, the least important will be found in the social sphere. Those in the natural and universal spheres will fall in-between. For example, it is more likely that we can safely ignore developments in society that may indirectly threaten our livelihood, safety and security — such as which party is currently in power — than we can those from natural and universal sources — such as climate change, pandemics, and asteroids. The most important things in Zen revolve around personal applications of the method — zazen — and the results of such training in terms of its effects directly upon the body-mind as well as attitude adjustments regarding our misconceptions of buddha-dharma, and some that tend to have a halo effect upon social life. One major overlap is the practice of patience. Sitting upright, straight enough and still enough for long enough, we are forced to become much more patient with ourselves, our general ignorance and the monkey-business machinations of the discriminating mind — citta in Sanskrit — which serendipitously sounds like Cheetah, Tarzan's famous chimpanzee companion, making it easy to remember. Wisdom, or enlightened, mind — bodhiin Sanskrit — comes to the fore. Citta and bodhi, foreground and background mind, or analytical and intuitive mind, gradually or instantaneously, come into better balance: the original, unified mind, in which the apparent dichotomy is "not-two." Much like central and peripheral vision, which collaborate interdependently to make up the whole of the sense of vision, the two aspects of mind are not in opposition to each other. Not competitive, but complementary. The most important thing, then, would be to allow them to work in harmony. Vacillation from one to the other is the natural way that intelligence and consciousness work. The least important thing would be to worry about them as ...
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    13 mins
  • 168: Election Year Zen part 10

    168: Election Year Zen part 10
    Dec 4 2024
    Well, now we know. That is, we know how the vote tally turned out. What we don’t know for sure is what will happen next. As I said in closing the last podcast, we are waiting for the next number of shoes to drop. But many of our fellow citizens are worried that they know all too well what is coming, ranging from your worst nightmare to the final establishment of Valhalla on Earth. But this time the hall will include only the living survivors, not those who died in battle, as in the Norse myth. We have been here before politically, which will be remembered by all but those who voted for the first time in this election, who may have known only the recent history, and thus are doomed to repeat it, according to Churchill (who should know). The sanctification of former President George W. Bush by certain religious groups, particularly in his second campaign and term in office, presaged the elevation of the current President-elect to the status of being anointed by God to lead the country. Vilification by the other side reached similar levels of hysteria, if memory serves. One might regard the entire campaign as an example of confirmation bias on steroids. Both sides interpreted events — crowd size, 50-50 polls, mob hysteria at rallies — as confirming their most cherished hopes for victory. Only time will tell which, if either, is the extreme position out of touch with reality. Midterms may be the next major tilt of the teeter-totter. Meanwhile, let us return to the central focus of Zen — reality itself, the ultimate in vacillation. Like a Taoist shaggy dog story, this may be good, but it could be bad. Through this lens, the question arises as to exactly how important — how relevant — the political landscape can possibly be, to the living-out of our daily Zen lives? It might provide a bit of perspective to recall that Buddha did not buck the political establishment of his time in India. Which, if my poor understanding of history is correct, was based on the caste system — from the Brahmin, or priests at the top of the pyramid — to Sudra, or commoners, peasants and servants, at the bottom. Completely outside the box were the outcasts, out-of-caste members of the society — untouchables — who were employed as street sweepers and latrine cleaners. From an online search we find the following AI-assisted definition: India's caste system is a social hierarchy that divides people into groups based on ritual purity and is passed down through families. It has been in place for at least 3,000 years and is considered one of the world's oldest social hierarchies. The caste system dictates many aspects of a person's life, including their profession, who they can marry, and their social standing. The system apparently does allow for some upward social mobility as it functions in modernity, but it appears that originally, the level into which you were born pretty much determined your fate and future in society — what degree of influence you might have on the social sphere, and its degree of influence on your personal sphere. Needless to say, it was an asymmetrical relationship at best. Buddha was born into the Kshatriya, or warrior caste, second only to the Brahmin. Which makes me wonder if he was basically a late-blooming draft-dodger, or resistant to implementing the military misadventures of his overlords. I am fairly certain that had he been born into the lower classes, or as an untouchable, he would not have been able to carry out his program of establishing Sangha, the original order of monks and nuns. It is notable that many who joined him were of his same caste, some related to Siddhartha Gautama by blood. It is also noteworthy that whoever initially conceived the caste system, they justified it based on a notion of inborn “ritual purity.” Compare to today’s stiff-necked, toxic, entrenched and unyielding attitudes on racial and ethnic superiority. In the last segment I encouraged you to vote, without consideration of how you vote or for whom, other than to vote your conscience and for the future. You may have been surprised, as I was, at the outcome, either distressingly disappointed, or irrationally exuberant. In either case, I suggest tempering your expectations as to what may transpire in the next four-year cycle. Again, we have been here, done this, seen this movie, and rode this rodeo, before. The pendulum swings. Though, admittedly, if it swings to far it may break its mount. Uchiyama-roshi, in “Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom,” which we have been studying in the Tuesday evening Cloud Dharma readings this year, encourages us to look at our present life as if we had been aborted at the beginning. That way, we would never even have been here to suffer the vagaries of our lifetime. A less extreme thought experiment is to imagine that you were born into another period in history. In any time, if you lived to the full “three-score-and-ten” lifespan of tradition, the ...
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    16 mins

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