KWAN SEUM BOSAL – Global Kwanseumbosal Kido for Peace

KWAN SEUM BOSAL

Kwan Seum Bosal, known as Avalokitesvara in Sanskrit, is the Korean name for the bodhisattva of compassion. Kwan Seum literally means "perceive world sound," which is also translated as "one who hears the cries of suffering of the world”. Bosal is the Korean translation of bodhisattva. The bodhisattva of compassion hears the cries of the whole world and responds with compassionate action.

Global Kwanseumbosal Kido for Peace

Dear Global Sangha,

We will be having a three hour Kwanseum Bosal Kido for the Ukrainian people and for all of humanity on Sunday, March 6th, 2022.

Let’s visualize our moktaks as being the impact that ends all wars, and our voices as being the Big Love that can be received by all beings. We must try. We just do it 100%.

Yours in the dharma,
Bobby

March 6, 2022
8 AM EST / 2PM CET / 3PM EET / 10PM KST
Click here to see this in your time zone

Join Kido: Zoom link
Meeting ID: 884 1103 0213
Passcode: 934993

 Imbalance is our world’s sickness: how can we cure it? Balance means understanding the truth. If you have no wisdom, you cannot become balanced. It is very important for everyone to find their human nature. That is why we sit Zen, to find our true human nature. So we are in a very important position, sitting in meditation. We must find our human nature, then together help each other become world peace. As human beings, we are all equal. We all have the same love mind. We must find the primary cause of this world’s sickness, and remove it.

- Zen Master Seung Sahn

---

Keeping Quiet - by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about…

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with 
death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead in winter
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Extravagaria : A Bilingual Edition

by Pablo Neruda (Author), Alastair Reid (Translator) 
Noonday Press; Bilingual edition (January 2001)
ISBN: 0374512388
page 26

UPCOMING: "Illuminating the Heart: Art Can Show the Way" with Lizzie Coombs JDPSN

Join us live or via recording for "Illuminating the Heart: Art Can Show the Way" as Lizzie Coombs JDPSN guides us through two classes about how artistic works can speak to our own spiritual life. 

Session One / October 4 / 12 PM Eastern
See this event in your time zone
Hokusai: “My Master is Creation”
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), best known for his print ‘The Great Wave’, was a prolific and highly accomplished artist with a life-long devotion to spiritual practice. We will see how the two connect and how his work speaks to our own spiritual life. We will also look at the materials and techniques he used and how they inform his work.

Session Two / October 18 / 12 PM Eastern
See this event in your time zone
Mirror and Moon: Yoshitoshi, Hiroshige et al
A look at how other 19th century Japanese artists articulated their response to all aspects of human life and to the natural world. A selection of prints and drawings expressing humour, compassion, wonder and all the drama of the world.

About the teacher: After receiving a B.A. in art history, Lizzie Coombs JDPSN trained as an art conservator specializing in the preservation and restoration of Japanese woodblock prints and other works of art on paper. She worked in art museums and then in private practice for 28 years. She absorbed much of what she knows about Japanese prints and paintings from the connoisseurship of her late husband, the art historian and scholar of Japanese prints, Roger Keyes. Lizzie started practicing Zen in 1987 and received inka from Zen Master Soeng Hyang in 2018. She is Guiding Teacher of York Zen Group and The Peak Zen Group in the U.K.

All classes are recorded so you can choose to join live or watch the recordings later, at your convenience. Recordings of each live session will be available within 48-hours for those who can't attend in person. The cost of the two-class series is $30 USD. Find out more and sign up below.

[ATTENTION Members of the 360 Zen Study Series: There is no need to purchase this class as it is already included in your subscription.]

We Have A Big Job To Do - Podcast with Lizzie Coombs, JDPSN

This is the episode from 26th January of Sit, Breathe, Bow with Lizzie Coombs as guest - a podcast produced by Ian White Maher:

Each week leading Buddhist teachers share life experiences and insights to help guide your meditation practice as well as your life off the cushion.

Lizzie Coombs JDPSN started practicing with the Kwan Um School of Zen in 1987. In 2010 she moved back to the United Kingdom, her country of origin. In 2018 she received inka, or permission to teach, from Zen Master Soeng Hyang. She is the Guiding Teacher of the York Zen Group and The Peak Zen Center and the Buddhist Chaplain at the University of Durham.

Sit, Breathe, Bow is hosted by Ian White Maher
https://www.theseekerstable.com/

Sit, Breathe, Bow is sponsored by the Online Sangha of the International Kwan Um School of Zen
https://kwanumzenonline.org

What's the Rush?

This piece was written by Tim Lerch, teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen, for the Providence Zen Center newsletter in August 2005, reproduced by permission. It’s the essence of Zen.

---

What’s the Rush?

Zen Master Lin Chi said, “When students fail to make progress, where’s the fault? The fault lies in the fact that they don’t have faith in themselves! If you don’t have faith in yourself, then you will always be in a hurry trying to keep up with everything around you, you’ll be twisted and turned by every environment that you’re in and you can never move freely. But if you can just stop this mind that goes rushing around moment by moment, always looking for something, then you will be no different from the patriarchs and the Buddhas. Do you want to get to know the patriarchs and the Buddhas? They are none other than you, the people standing and listening to this lecture on the dharma!”

Lin Chi said this to his students over a thousand years ago, and this teaching is just as important for us today. Our tendency as Zen students is to approach our practice the way we do most things, by trying to get something from outside to make us feel better inside. But that very tendency is the origin of our suffering! Trying this mantra, trying that technique, going to see this teacher, going to see that teacher, we are always going around and around, searching outside of ourselves for a fix. Approached this way, Zen or any other kind of practice only results in more suffering and confusion. But Master Lin Chi gave us the key: “Just stop this mind that goes rushing around.” How do we do this? Thinking about stopping the mind only creates more movement, more turmoil. But when we look into the question “What am I?” this question leads us to our before-thinking mind, don’t know. This is how we “just stop this mind that goes rushing around.”

When we return to don’t know, our minds become clear. Clear mind sees, hears, smells, feels, perceives, and functions clearly just as it is. This is great substance and great function, our original job. Any environment, tumultous or calm, is just how it is - complete. There is no need to rush around and around looking for something. Everything is complete, moment to moment, just as it is. There is no fault and no progress. This is called having faith in yourself, getting to know the Buddhas and the patriarchs, and moving freely in this world. This is also called the great bodhisattva way.

A Bad Situation is a Good Situation

The Founding Teacher of the Kwan Um School of Zen, Zen Master Seung Sahn (1927-2004), used to say

“A good situation is a bad situation and a bad situation is a good situation.”

When I first heard these words I thought they sounded crazy. Being in a good situation seemed the only place to be: find it and hang on tight! How could that be bad?

But he was only pointing to the truth. As he would say: when life looks good it seems as though you don’t need to do anything. Just relax, no need to meditate. Why get up early for bows*, chanting and sitting? But, in an instant, everything can change, the things we’ve relied on to keep us safe, happy and apparently in control swept away. If we are only dependent on external conditions, not having cultivated a foundation of practice, then we may suffer greatly when those conditions disappear.

The Covid-19 virus has shown us just how this can happen. Living in the middle of the ancient city of York my husband Roger and I had a very good situation: beautiful parks, shops, cafes and restaurants, the cathedral, theatre, musical performance. Now, the whole city has been closed down unless providing essential services. We can’t even meet up with our family and friends. Our good situation disappeared very fast! And, for so many others, the virus has brought far worse: mass unemployment, terrible sickness, death and the loss of loved ones.

But, we have found, acceptance has been possible. Our daily Zen practice has become even more precious and focused. Meditation practiced daily gets us to be with things as they actually are, in each moment. It shelters and nurtures, giving focus and courage. So a bad situation becomes a good situation. We sincerely encourage everyone to try it and see for themselves!

York Zen has been transformed by the Covid-19 lockdown. Formed officially a year ago with the launching of this website, it was already becoming a strong and committed sangha but, apart from Roger and myself, had had no interaction with the wider Kwan Um School of Zen. Then, after our last in-person practice session, on March 16th, we moved to online meditation sessions and kong-an (koan) interviews and this has provided a great opportunity for members to explore the wealth of KUSZ resources online and meet teachers and practitioners from sanghas in other countries. As a consequence the sangha is flourishing and even more mutually supportive. Generosity and gratitude abound. And so, here too, a bad situation has become a good situation.

*we begin each day with 108 full prostrations.

Tametomo's kong-an and the climate emergency

View fullsize

Hokusai: Tametomo and the smallpox demon
(CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE ENLARGED)

With brush and ink the Japanese artist Hokusai (1760-1849) shows how the legendary warrior archer Tametomo protects the islanders of Okinawa from the deadly demon smallpox. Since the demon cannot be killed he subdues it with his centred energy. Smallpox demon submits and vows to leave the island, stamping its inky handprint as testament.
Hokusai’s drawing is the visual equivalent of what we Zen students do in kong-an practice (Jap: koan). We are given an apparently baffling question which does not yield its answer through conceptual thinking. We must use deep, focussed attention and patience to find our way through the fog of delusion, then the answer will appear as if by itself.
Tametomo is successful because he uses the power of the non-moving mind to win through. We are witnessing a moment of interaction between true self and small self. True self partakes of the energy of the whole universe, not making self and other. Hokusai shows him not separated from his adversary. Small self is inherently limited by the delusion of separateness: I, me, my. Its demon nature is revealed in the glimpse of a clawed foot.
While Tametomo looks down on the creature with single-pointed concentration, the smallpox demon faces us with blind eyes; a shrunken, tattered figure. Perhaps Hokusai is inviting our compassion: how can we share space with what we fear? How is transformation possible?
How we respond in kong-an practice also shows us the tactics we deploy to meet the challenges of daily life: procrastination, complicity, aggression, complacency, flight, to name a few. But when we patiently stick with it and perceive the core issue many a situation can get shrunk to a manageable size and resolved.
Hokusai shows us this work in progress: a perfect visualization of what each of us encounters in our human lives. A situation appears and we must respond. It cannot be resolved unless we do. When we feel threatened we tend to follow our usual habits of coping, such as running away, pretending it doesn’t exist, getting busy elsewhere, getting someone else to intervene, using emotional or physical violence to try and make it go away. But in this drawing Tametomo is not doing any of that, he is simply using the creative wisdom of his non-moving mind, his true self, to dispel the demon. When we do the same we are unblocked and free to respond to any situation with energy and clarity.
How does all this speak to the complicated and overwhelming challenge of the climate emergency? Because of its scale and ubiquity it’s hard to believe that the same principles apply. But both Hokusai’s Tametomo and kong-an practice show us that we have an opportunity here. We can wake up to the part we play and to how we are responding. We can see how our behaviours affect sentient beings everywhere, since we are all connected. We can look with unwavering gaze at our grief and fear and anger, then get centered and act with an open and questioning mind, free of the filters of preconception and pre-judgement. And return again and again and not give up.

Hokusai says

Hokusai says look carefully. He says pay attention…

Roger Start Keyes, art historian, Hokusai scholar, and co-founder of York Zen, wrote his poem “Hokusai Says,” featured on our York Zen Welcome Page, in Venice in 1990. It appeared suddenly as he was making notes for the “Young Hokusai” paper he was to give at a symposium on Hokusai the following day.

He says keep looking, stay curious. He says there is no end to seeing…

Roger describes how he was writing in one of his daily journal books when he experienced a sudden “raising of tone” and found himself writing out a continuous text until the impetus finally died away. On reading the piece through he felt it had the rhythms of a poem, organized it into lines, and made a few minor corrections. He took the title “Hokusai says” from the first line that had appeared.

He says everything is alive…

View fullsize

Hokusai self portrait

Back in California, Roger showed it to artist friends. One was Connie Smith Siegel, who shared it with W.S. Merwin’s daughter, Susan. Susan wrote it out in beautiful calligraphy and drew a border around it with motifs taken from a Hokusai woodcut.
Connie also showed it to Joanna Macy, scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. Joanna started reading it in her workshops and, when later asked about its influence, wrote that “she enjoyed reading it aloud and feeling the impact it consistently had…for the masterly way the words convey a state of grateful and rapt attention that brings one more fully alive to the everyday mystery of life.”

Everything has its own life…

Its influence spread. It was reproduced in the Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Center newsletter (1996) and in a number of books, including Mark Williams and Danny Penman’s Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World (2011). It also started appearing online in blogs and YouTube videos.

Roger Keyes

He says live with the world inside you…

Realizing that none of the online recordings of the poem was by Roger, his friend and curator of The Laurence Sterne Trust, Patrick Wildgust, generously intervened. In 2015 he arranged for a recording to be made of Roger reading “Hokusai says” by sound engineer Jez Wells at York University. You can listen to this recording on our York Zen Welcome Page (and online).

Contentment is life living through you. Joy is life living through you. Satisfaction and strength is life living through you. Look, feel, let life take you by the hand. Let life live through you.

Who knows where “Hokusai says” will next appear?

The Blackbird and Sven

Watching you work, completely focused, single-minded, bringing all you are to make this one thing alive, creating meaning, beauty and function in one whole piece; generated through instinct, and coming into being as we watch, though still invisible to the wider world. Meticulous, patient, bit-by-bit becoming until there it is, in the light: complete, unique and perfect. (And so it is with each of us: one by one each thing has it, one by one each thing is complete.)

As Sven’s fingers move over the keyboard building this website with colour, fonts and photographs, an about-to-become-a-mother blackbird inspects the corner of a shelf against the white-washed wall of our city yard. She hops and settles, repeats. Is this the right place to build a nest? She moves aside some clematis vine to make a space behind it, flies off, and returns with her mate. He looks too and they agree, and so she weaves a bowl of feather, leaf and twig. When Sven and the blackbird each have finished building, he the website, she the nest, you don’t see either of them anymore, but each is present in their creation.

Thank you, Sven Mahr, for building the website for York Zen Group and taking the brilliant photos. You have completely realized our vision, laying out the warm welcome we want to give to all who already enjoy Zen meditation and all who might like to begin. Sven Mahr is based in Leipzig and can be contacted via his website here.

Sven's impressions of York Zen Group