…when you met your teacher Genpo Roshi, what
happened with your development? Did anything transpire?
Diane Musho Hamilton: Yes I would say there were two
things maybe more, but just in terms of my own path, what happened
was that Trungpa had died and a kind of scandal involving the
Regent Osel Tendzin ensued. Because of that scandal at the time, I
simply differentiated from that lineage and for a period of seven
years I had a child, who was born with Down’s syndrome. I was
practicing in a much more, I guess nurturing way, and raising a
child and dealing with my own grief. This was my practice at that
time. I was integrating everything I had studied to that point and
I would stay with my child 10 or so years into that and like many
teachers and students in the West, I would say it was a bit of a
smorgasbord of practice where I was exposed to some nature
practices – to earth based Native American practices. I did yoga
and kundalini and the whole spiritual market place, but my
fundamental practice was really raising my child at that point.
Then this appetite for formal practice just arose
spontaneously. I felt that meditation drawing me again, that deep
stillness; that deepest enquiry into that dimension of who we are.
It was kind of pulling at me and I knew that I wanted to study
with a master and I wasn’t so concerned with which lineage, but
what I wanted was a genuine lineage master. It could have been a
sufi or a zen or Koeren zen master but it was at that point that I
met Genpo Roshi. So I would really really credit Genpo with first
of all creating a space in which my own reality deepened because
his zazen was so stable and so committed just being in his
presence and his sangha. I was also introduced to the soto zen
lineage, the rituals and the ancestors. The way in which you have
probably heard that Tibetan Buddhism is referred to as the
complete Buddhism, and that zen is referred to as the essential
Buddhism, and the way to use an integral phrase – the lower rite
of practice the forms. I was introduced to the beauty of those
forms as the formalism of Japan as you know is unparalleled; the
way that they work with the robes and the way that they attend to
the lineage master. So I was introduced to the forms and the
beauty of Japanese zen and Genpo Roshi held the practice for the
sangha. He had a monastic practice here at the time but it had a
permeable boundary. The monks were very inviting of the lay people
who wanted to practice; people who were questioning and people who
were confused. There was a bit of a swinging door of how welcome
people were to participate in those forms. So I learned a lot from
Roshi how to hold the practice for others. So I would say that
transmission was extremely important in my own development as a
teacher.
And then finally I also participated in koan study.
Koan study is one of the main ways that I interact with my
students, which comes more from the Rinzai line, but Maezumi Roshi
was more recognized in both the Rinzai and Zen schools. So finally
I began to work with this process called big mind. He started to
use what we might call a contemporary form of teaching in which
the perspective of the student is already presumed to already have
innate wisdom.
So it’s a facilitative style of teaching as opposed
to traditional, but tradition happens in both conventional
teachings and also in big mind. The facilitative aspects, you
might call it positing out of helping the student actually
identity in their own awareness, something like the infinite
nature of mind or the relationship of form to emptiness. To
actually use the process to bring those teachings home really lays
out in a way like Buddha dharma, so people can really grasp it.
So I was the first person he gave transmission of
studying with people in that particular method. I still use that
method quite a lot in my own teaching. So it’s more than what I
said in the beginning. I’m a teacher now due to his influence
because I remember a meeting that I had with him one day. I just
have so much appreciation for him as I’m talking. I had an
audience with him and I had gone for a particular reason. I was
going as a meditator at the time. I was really interested in
something like meditation because by its nature it is dualistic.
It is always something that’s transpiring between you and me.
There’s always a subject object spilt and I was interested in what
would happen in negotiation if the parties were capable of
accessing the same mind and quality of mind. So I had that really
deep question, and that’s part of why I went back to studying Zen.
After a period of time he called me to have an audience with him
and he basically asked me what my intention in practice was. I
told him that I felt like I had received what I had really come
for – the depth of the sitting and his pointing out and my
realization through the big mind process. He looked at me and said
what about others? And it was the first time that it had ever even
occurred to me to support other people in their practice or
teaching was even something I would be thinking about, even though
I had been practicing dharma for many many years. It was only at
that moment that it had actually occurred to me that I might have
a karmic obligation – this is a way to say it. I actually mean
that in a non dualistic way that it was simply a ripening of my
own practice and to extend it to other people.
Jeff Foster A Year of Prose and Poetry on Radically Opening Up To the Pain and Joy of Life
As we open up to life and love and each other, as we
awaken from our dream of separation, we encounter not just the
bliss of existence, but its pain too; not only life’s ecstasy, but
also its agony. Healing doesn’t always feel good or comfortable or
even ‘spiritual’, for we are inevitably forced to confront our
shadows, fears and deepest longings – those secret parts of
ourselves that we have denied, repressed, or deemed ‘negative’ and
unworthy of our love. How can we find the calm in the midst of the
storm? How can we rest, even as the ground falls?
Falling In Love With Where You Are invites you to
discover a deep YES to your life, no matter what you are going
through; to see crisis as an opportunity to heal, pain as an
intelligent messenger, and your imperfections as perfectly placed.
Through his prose and poetry, Jeff Foster will guide, provoke,
encourage and inspire you on your lonely, joyful, and sometimes
exhausting pathless journey to the Home you never, ever left: the
present moment.
“Even in your glorious imperfection,” Jeff reminds
us, “you were always a perfect expression of life, a beloved child
of the universe, a complete work of art, unique in all the world…”
Go to this page to download an extract and to
purchase a copy:
Jean Metzinger, Le goûter, Tea Time, 1911, 75.9 x
70.2 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Ken Sanes on Facebook writes…
“When this painting was first shown at the 1911
Salon d’Automne in Paris, the prominent art critic André Salmon
dubbed it ‘The Mona Lisa of Cubism.’ While Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque were moving even further toward the
dematerialization of the figure in their canvases of 1911,
Metzinger remained resolutely committed to legibility in Tea Time,
where a seated woman, holding a teaspoon suspended between cup and
mouth, is clearly discernible within a geometric environment. The
artist does, however, show the teacup in profile and from above to
demonstrate the new art’s mobile perspectives.” — philamuseum.org