Sunday, April 27, 2025

Thank you. All right. Well, it is my pleasure. And Anton, thank you for helping us secure our speaker for today. I always appreciate your good work on that. Karen, I might butcher your last name — is it DeCotis? Perfect. It's my pleasure to introduce Karen DeCotis, who's going to be speaking with us this morning about working with koans. And given our practice, we tend to be very Shikantaza oriented, so this will really be something new for some of us — koan practice. Karen is a transmitted priest in Suzuki Roshi's Soto lineage. Her teacher is Sojun Mel Weitsman. She has practiced at San Francisco Zen Center, Berkeley Zen Center, and Bozeman Zen Center group, which is where I think she's logging in from. And she is currently the guiding teacher at the San Antonio Zen Center. Really looking forward to hearing from you this morning, Karen. Welcome. Deep bow.

Thank you so much. Thank you very much for this invitation. And thank you to Anton for befriending me at Tassajara last summer when it was crowded and so hot. We had a very nice connection. We got to sit next to each other on the floor, and he helped me as I struggled to get up off the floor. But it was fun to be there, and I'm really glad to know him and to get to be with all of you.

This is a great opportunity for Don't Know Mind, because I only met Anton for a short while and I don't know any of you, so I don't really know what I'm speaking into or who. Hopefully we will connect in some meaningful way through our practice.

I'm also Shikantaza oriented, so the fact that I am doing anything with koans — well, you're in good company if you're a beginner, so don't worry. I'll tell you about how it is I'm working with them these days. I'm actually in San Antonio right now, but I was in Bozeman for a long time. Actually, I'm at my sister's house outside of San Antonio, which is why the Wi-Fi is sometimes glitchy, so if we freeze we'll just breathe and wait till it unfreezes. But I think it's going good so far.

As I was saying, I barely know Anton, I don't know you. I loved the service this morning — it was so beautiful. It was different than what we do, but a lot of it was recognizable. It always occurs to me that as a Zen student, I like to bring up Katagiri Roshi's two books of essays, or talks that he gave. The first one that came out was Returning to Silence — that's what we do, right? We sit down, we return to silence. But his next book was titled You Have to Say Something. So that's what I feel like as a practitioner: we sit in silence, we get very intimate with ourselves, but then we must come forward. So that's what I'm doing today — into what I don't know. But again, I hope it's useful.

I would say that lately my practice has been about questions. About a month ago, when Charlie Percorini gave a talk, I attended because at that same trip to Tassajara I also got to know Charlie a little bit. He talked a lot about questions, and I brought a question about questions for him. For me, in our practice — what are we doing? What is our quest? Why would we take our Sunday morning and come to a place like this when we could be doing other things, drinking coffee, having croissants? Now, you may have done that before you came, but still, you're here now. So there's some necessity for us, some reason why we engage in what many people might call a very odd or silly or at least curious practice.

Many of you have probably heard Reb Anderson say — he's probably said it many times — he says, "I don't answer why questions." But that doesn't mean we don't ask why questions. So this "why do we practice, what are we doing" — it's just very big for me right now. And I've been practicing a long time. So it might feel a little unstable that someone who's practiced a long time is asking, "Why am I practicing?" And yet here we are.

When we practice, we confront things like, well, what is my goal, or what is my aim? Or even softening it a little, we might say, what's my intention? I'm not goal-oriented, but I have an intention. But all these are sneaky ways of asking, what am I going to get out of this? How's this going to help me? Will I feel better? Will I understand the world better? Will I suffer less? Will my family and friends suffer less? What will I get? And yet, even without responses or answers to these questions, we still show up.

Like yesterday at the San Antonio Zen Center — we have a similar size group on a Saturday morning — we didn't have a dharma talk, we had a work morning because the yards needed cleaning up. And people showed up. The person who assists me there said, "Well, usually for work mornings we get three or four people." We got ten people. We got a lot done, and it felt so good to be a sangha cleaning up together. So showing up is a big part of our practice.

With koans, we are working with questions. Those of you who are somewhat familiar with koans know that they are stories. I want to read a couple of things that experts have said about koans. The stories are both ancient — from the Buddha's time through Tang Dynasty China, through the Song Dynasty into Japan, and into today. Some of the koans in a collection of stories about women called The Hidden Lamp are very current, and they're very helpful stories for our practice.

One of the things they say about practicing with koans — and if you're brand new to this you can ask more questions when this talk is over, and if you are familiar with this, please enjoy the fact that we are reviewing part of our practice as if we were doing zazen instruction — the word "koan" is a Japanese form of the Chinese word gong'an, which means a public case or public announcement, like if you were in a court of law. And you're sort of saying, "This is about me. I'm on trial here." These encounters often took place in the dharma hall, often in front of people, in front of the sangha — like if one of you stood up and we had a question and answer exchange.

Heinrich Dumoulin writes: "A koan therefore presents a challenge and an invitation to take seriously what has been announced, to ponder it and respond to it."

Ruth Fuller Sasaki differed in her view from an earlier thought about koans being paradoxes or riddles that you have to solve. Koans aren't so much about that. You don't so much solve them as resolve them, or dissolve them, or just sit with them. She writes: "The koan is not a conundrum to be solved by a nimble wit, nor in my opinion is it ever a paradoxical statement except to those who view it from the outside. When the koan is resolved, it is realized to be a simple and clear statement of the consciousness which it has helped to awaken."

So we're talking about awakening, of course. And I came up with all the words I could think of for what awakening is — liberation from what, enlightenment about what, realization, freedom, actualization. We do talk about that somewhat in our Soto lineage. We talk about enlightenment, but we also talk about delusion, and we also talk about just practicing just this.

So when we have a good question in our practice, we can bring our heart and mind to it. You might be considering, well, what is my question? What is guiding my practice right now? Maybe you're working with a teacher and you have something between you that you're working on. Maybe a question per se is irrelevant. Your life is your koan. That's what Dogen Zenji wrote in Genjokoan. Our life is our koan.

Some of you may know the story of Mahapajapati — the Buddha's stepmother and aunt, who was the first woman to be admitted into the Buddha's community. But she had to fight for it, really. She had to have an intercessor. Ananda had to speak for her and really say to the Buddha, "The women want to practice," and the Buddha kept saying, "Don't set your heart on this." And yet Pajapati's heart was set on this. So in our practice, we want to find the place where our heart is set on this discovery, on this life.

To keep examining my purpose keeps my life fresh for me. And as I age, it's important to feel like my life is still fresh. If you're young you might not have to do that so intently, but as I age I find I need to keep revisiting what is my question, what is my aim, and it keeps my practice authentic.

I was thinking about Pope Francis passing and how much response there is from the world — how many people were at Saint Peter's Square yesterday, the thousands and thousands of people who really took to heart that Pope Francis has passed, that a leader, a spiritual guide for them, has passed. And how it is bringing forth their own faith and practice. We can't do this by ourselves. We need each other. We need teachers. We need guides. And we need a good question.

So working with koans — some of you may be familiar with the Rinzai approach, which is kind of a koan curriculum where there's a whole battery of koans and you work with them with your teacher, and you have to, quote unquote, pass them. You have to exhibit great realization about that koan before you get your next koan. My teacher Sojin Roshi used to say, "Don't ask for another problem. Don't try to solve your problem — you'll just get another one. Be happy with the problem you have." So he was very much about the idea that you really have one koan, and that's your life.

I had a friend who was in a Zen tradition — a different place — where she had to pass a koan. And in that school, as in many schools, the first koan you get — and many of you may know this book, The Gateless Barrier — the first koan is Mu. "Does a dog have the Buddha nature or not?" And Zhaozhou says, "Mu," which means something like "does not." She worked with Mu, as many people do, for years and years. She never passed it. And she left Zen practice. And I find that's a shame. What does passing that koan mean? Did she not do an appropriate dance for her teacher? I don't know about that. But for us, in our lineage, it's not so much about passing the koan. It's about entering the koan and letting it work on you, and letting it bring forth your way-seeking mind.

Norman Fischer, in his introduction to this collection of women's koans called The Hidden Lamp — which I highly recommend, it's a wonderful collection of stories with wonderful commentary — he talks about having two ways of approaching this kind of practice: the grasping way and the granting way. The grasping way is very stingy. It doesn't really give you anything. It's like, "Here's the story, you work it out, and you pass it." But the granting way is more what we're doing here.

I sort of stole this from the Zen teacher Joan Sutherland. She is a pioneer in a new way of working with koans in the West. She would have koan salons, and that's what I have now — a koan salon. I'm doing it with a group online from Bozeman, and I'm doing it with a San Antonio group. It's where we just get to know the characters in the stories, maybe their backstory a little bit, and we sit with it and we write poems about it or talk about it in small groups. We let it work on us.

Now, the grasping way — the way where you have to pass the koan — comes from the Rinzai tradition, which came from Linji, a giant of Zen whose lineage is still in existence today as the Rinzai school. They worked on passing koans and having this curriculum. I believe it died out for a while, and then a monk — Hakuin — some of you may know Hakuin Zenji. He's known for many things. He was a beautiful artist and calligrapher, and he did a lot in the Zen school. But he also sort of reintroduced this hardcore koan practice and the passing of koans.

You might remember his famous koan — especially if you watch The Simpsons. Many people have heard it: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" But that's not the actual koan. The koan that Hakuin invented — and in fact he thought it was better than Mu, better than Zhaozhou's "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" — his koan was: "Two hands clap and they make a sound. What is the sound of one hand?" That was his koan. "Two hands clap and they make a sound. What is the sound of one hand?"

And so even though he brought back the more rigorous form of working with koans, I sort of fell in love with this koan — because I have to confess I only recently heard that that was the actual koan. I thought it was "What is the sound of one hand clapping," but it's not. It is, "What is the sound of one hand?" This is an invitation to us, right? What is the sound? What is your sound?

So in our koan salons, we take something like "Two hands clap and they make a sound. What is the sound of one hand?" and we sit with that and we talk about it. Maybe we talk a little bit more about Hakuin and how he came to this koan and what he was like. Or maybe we talk about how frustrating koans are. What good are they? Or maybe we write a poem about it. What is the sound of one hand? What is being asked here? How does this help my practice? What do you say? What sound do you bring forth? How do you bring forth Buddha nature?

Stephen Batchelor, in his book The Faith to Doubt — I just read it, it's right over there — his very first line has been a wonderful help to me. The line is: "The Buddha way is a living response to a living question." So you can read all the books you want, you can study the sutras, you can read the stories, you can learn all the different terms and the different teachings of the Buddha, and we should — but the Buddha way is a living response to a living question. So what is your koan, right? What is your practice? I love that so much.

And right now I'm going to share a quote by someone — his name is Barry Magid. He wrote a book on koans, about twenty-two of them, and the book is called Nothing Is Hidden. He's a psychoanalyst and a Zen teacher, and he writes wonderful commentaries on some of our most familiar koans. He writes:

"The question of why we practice evolves out of our initial desire to attain some goal, out of our secret practice of escaping some part of ourselves or some part of life as it is, into a desire to fully and compassionately express who we are. We must take our own sound into the world, a sound that goes forth from our realization, a sound that reverberates out across the gap of separation."

I thought that was pretty good. This is what we're doing — what is the sound of one hand? And when you chant — we chanted this morning from the Jewel Mirror Samadhi — that line "inquiry and response come up together" is perfect as a guiding post, a way station, for working with a koan.

So now a little bit about me. I'm going to share a koan with you that some of you probably know. It's one of the favorites, and it was given to me four different times — so clearly I have work to do on it. Twice it was given to me by my teacher. He might have forgotten he gave it to me the first time. The first time he gave it to me, we had a lovely email exchange — that's how we worked with it, back and forth — which gave me the opportunity to cheat and look up commentary by experts as a way to fluff up my emails back to him. But it was a very warm and wonderful exchange. The second time he gave it to me was when I was just struggling, and he loves this koan.

And then another time I was given it by someone whose name you chanted — Wendy Egyoku Nakao. It sounds like she's on a well-being list or something. Is that right? No? Just keeping her in our memory as our home guiding teacher, our leading teacher who passed away?

Question: So she's his teacher, I see. Well, thank you for that. It's always good to keep our parent and grandparent and great-grandparent ancestors alive.

Karen DeCotis: She gave it to me, but she kind of worked in the grasping way. I would go in and present this koan and she would ring me out before I could take a breath. She could just tell I was going to come up with something. I failed anyway.

But this is Nanchuan's "Ordinary Mind Is the Way," and you may have heard of it. It's lovely for me because of where I am with it now. So our great ancestors — Zhaozhou, or Joshu in Japanese, and his teacher Nanchuan, or Nansen in Japanese — I'll use their Chinese names here because they're from the Tang era in China.

I'm going to start over, because someone said to me once, "When you read a koan, just read it through the first time before you say anything." So I'm going to do that, and then I'll go back.

Zhaozhou asked Nanchuan, "What is the way?" Nanchuan said, "Ordinary mind is the way." Zhaozhou asked, "Should I try to direct myself toward it?" Nanchuan answered, "If you try to direct yourself toward it, you betray your practice." And Zhaozhou asked, "Well, how can I know the way if I don't direct myself?" And Nanchuan said, "The way is not subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion, but not knowing is blankness. If you truly reach the genuine way, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can this be discussed at the level of affirmation and negation?" And with these words, Zhaozhou had sudden realization.

"What is the way?" "Ordinary mind is the way."

I think this koan is what inspired Norman Fischer to name his group Everyday Zen, because another translation is "everyday mind is the way" or "everyday life is the way." This is Case 19 of a collection called The Gateless Barrier. It's more in the insider tradition, but we love a lot of these koans. The practitioner Wumen put together these koans, and then he wrote comments and wrote verses to go with them. So koans often have structures to them. Different koan collections may have different commentators and different people writing poems and commenting on the poems. They get very wordy — for a silent tradition, we have a lot of big mouths. They just like to talk about stuff.

But anyway — "What is the way? Ordinary mind is the way." I used to focus on that part of it: ordinary mind, direct myself toward it, if I don't, how can I know? But more recently, Nanchuan's final words kind of got to me — that "the way is not subject to knowing or not knowing." That's not what we're talking about, knowing or not knowing. And then: "If you truly reach the genuine way, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space." That's the line that's been getting to me recently. It's vast and boundless. There's no particular location. There's no particular person. Nobody's right about what's going on — maybe nobody's wrong either. We're in a time of what seems like harm and confusion and reactivity. Who's right, who's wrong? That's not even the level we're talking about, according to Nanchuan.

So even though Zhaozhou has this great realization, Wumen says Nanchuan lost no time in showing the smashed tile and the melted ice, where no explanation is possible. So though Zhaozhou had realization, he could only confirm it after another thirty years of practice. This brings to mind Dogen's saying — continuous practice. We just keep practicing. Practice and realization go together.

I think I'm getting close to time. Is that right?

Question: If you have more to say, we have a bit more time. We usually end here about noon, so take as much time as you need, and then we'll have Q&A.

Karen DeCotis: Okay, great. So that is both encouraging and discouraging. Zhaozhou had realization, but he could only confirm it after another thirty years of practice. So if you are going to dedicate yourself to thirty years of practice, start with the realization you have right now. What do you understand about your own mind, and the way, and your good heart, and the world? Spend thirty years stabilizing that, refreshing that.

The verse that goes with this koan goes like this:

Spring comes with flowers, autumn with the moon,
Summer with breeze and winter with snow.
When idle concerns don't hang in your mind,
That is your best season.

That to me is so helpful. The season is what it is. Here in San Antonio, we're having a moment of spring, a moment of reprieve from 100-degree weather, which is right around the corner. "When idle concerns don't hang in your mind, that is your best season." How great is that? So simple. It's very touching to me.

Zhaozhou in this koan is young — he's only about eighteen or twenty years old. He went on to practice with Nanchuan for another thirty or forty years. Nanchuan dies. Then Zhaozhou starts teaching. Zhaozhou lived to 120, it is said, and he started teaching at age eighty. So we all have a little bit more time to refine what we're doing and start expressing ourselves.

But Zhaozhou has so much necessity in this exchange. He so wants to know how to practice. He really wants to know. So this level of necessity is something I feel is important to keep visiting and revisiting as Zen students. Do we have necessity? Or are we just getting, "Oh, this is what I do"? Is Zen a hobby? Is it on your to-do list? Or is it the way you live your life? I'm advocating for it being the way we live our life. That's what I'm here for.

And so I have two more things to bring forth. Just the story of Zhaozhou and Nanchuan has been given to me so many times that I feel very intimate with it — all the different commentaries I've read, what I've written about it, what I'm trying to say about it, what you may say about it back to me in a few minutes. It's like I'm giving it to the world. The world already has this koan, but I'm giving it to the world. That's how I'm relating to it now. I want everyone to realize the vast and boundless nature of our own minds.

What Dogen says in Genjokoan — in the famous section — is what comes up for me, because constantly we are being given zazen instruction. So I will read this, which may be familiar to many of you. It's part of the Genjokoan — "Actualizing the Fundamental Point":

"To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind and the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly."

So we are given again encouragement into the vast and boundless nature — if we can drop our identities, drop our conviction that we think we know who we are, and open to what is arising before us and respond, body and mind will drop away. That was apparently Dogen's great realization: he had an experience of body and mind dropping away when Rujing — when he was in China — Rujing said something like "drop body and mind," and apparently Dogen did, or it happened, and his mind opened up. And this is what he brought back to Japan. From that — ninety-five fascicles later, a million talks later — great Dogen. What would we do without him?

So we often focus on "to study the Buddha way is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self." Okay, good — I'll forget the self. But what does that mean? To forget the self is to be confirmed by the myriad things coming forward at you right now. You are me, because I'm coming at you. That's what you are — listening to me. I'm a head on a screen, a talking head. But actualized by this, your body and mind and my body and mind can drop away. And this realization can leave no trace, and it continues forever. This boundlessness that we are being invited into is not a place to remain, but it is a place to remember, because it brings forth compassion. When this boundlessness is who we are, how can anything other than compassion arise?

So I've done a lot of koans here. This is the cliff notes of koan practice. I want to read one that I'll leave you with, and we can talk about it. I'm just introducing you to characters. Some of you may know them all really well. Some of you, they're brand new. You don't have to remember any of this. What we want to do is just experience each other together here this morning.

This is also from Tang Dynasty China. This is from the Layman Pang family — Layman Pang, Lady Pang, and their daughter Lingzhao. They also had a son, but he doesn't figure very much in the stories. Lingzhao, the daughter, does. And what I love is — someone gave me the sayings of Layman Pang, and there are pictures, drawings, in there. Layman Pang is like eight feet tall and his daughter Lingzhao is really petite, and they look funny together. They used to work together making baskets and selling them. They were apparently very rich, and they gave away all their riches to live an enlightened life as lay disciples of the Buddha.

But here's a wonderful story. Layman Pang was sitting in his thatch cottage one day studying the sutras. "Difficult, difficult, difficult," he suddenly exclaimed, "like trying to store ten bushels of sesame seed in the top of a tree." "Easy, easy, easy," his wife, Lady Pang, answered. "It's like touching your feet to the floor when you get out of bed." "Neither difficult nor easy," said their daughter Lingzhao. "It's like the teaching of the ancestors shining on the hundred grass tips."

So maybe I will stop there and we can have a little conversation. Thank you very much.

Question: Aaron, thank you so much. We're taking a deep breath as people get their questions or comments into form. Does anybody want to get us started with dialogue here? I'm happy to start, if you'll allow.

Karen DeCotis: Sure thing. I'm going to pin you so I can see you.

Question: Hi. I'm Delia, and this is actually my first time visiting the Santa Barbara Zen Center. I'm so excited, because gosh — listening to what you had to share, and also participating in the service, has been just so nourishing to me. And what you said resonates with me completely. I love that you gave us the more accurate version of the two hands clapping, because just earlier this week I was speaking with friends who were talking about burnout and how we can continue to help and show compassion. It's very real, because I've been there — I'm there often, I guess — but what always helps me is that I'm able to recognize, first of all, that we're all one. That has been natural to me since I was probably an elementary school kid. And it always worried me that there was conflict, because we're essentially fighting ourselves. But the two hands clapping, for me, suggests that it's in the connection that pure sensation and beauty transpires. This makes perfect sense to me, because that's applause, you know? It's beautiful, it's rejuvenating, all those positive things. But it can't happen unless both are participating. This hand can't do it and this hand can't do it — it's the same motion, but it's the coming together. And so I've been rattling around in my mind the metaphor of a social synapse. In a brain synapse, the cells connect — there's an empty space where neurotransmitters are released here and they're accepted over there — but any number of things can happen that will misalign that. Sometimes it's the wrong transmitter. Sometimes the receptors aren't open. And so whenever I'm in an interaction that has challenge, I try to say, "Okay, where is the alignment issue here?" Because when the channels and the communication are clear and pure, then the signal gets through. But we're imperfect, so that doesn't always happen. It's the importance of that gap, and the crossing of that gap to connect. So I really appreciated you sharing that koan, and the accurate version of it, because now I can share that with other people. Thank you.

Karen DeCotis: You're welcome, Delia. And to remember — both are true. We can't have two hands clapping without one hand, right? So both are there. I appreciate your response. Thank you very much.

Question: Of course. Thank you. And I'll come back to Santa Barbara Zen Center — it seems like a wonderful place.

Karen DeCotis: Yes, it's very welcoming. And thank you all for allowing me to be a part of this. You're most welcome, Delia, anytime.

Question: Michael? Karen, thank you so much. There were a couple of other Zen practitioners here with us over the last couple of months, and one of them — I was talking to him afterward — said, "Oh, I'm going to work with koans." I said, "I've heard of koans but I haven't heard of practicing with them. I don't even really know what they are, to be honest. What is that?" And he said he was going to write koans that whole afternoon. I asked him, "So are you coming up with these?" And I kind of understood what they were, basically. He said, "No, no, no. I'm not creating them. I'm working with them." And so I was really looking forward to this today, to maybe put some pieces together. My question is: what's your commentary on the writing component of working with koans, if there is any?

Karen DeCotis: Well, thank you — a wonderful question and a wonderful practice. Like I said, when I worked on "Ordinary Mind Is the Way" with my teacher, I was in LA at the time and he was in Berkeley, and we did it through writing. That may not be traditionally accepted as authentic meeting, but it was for me. We had a wonderful exchange because I knew him and we felt each other's warmth. And I had people writing last week — I'm going to try it again, because they were very timid about it. Writing, especially with a pencil or pen and paper instead of the computer — as Delia was pointing out about our brains — is a special relationship to the brain when we write. And so responding to a question or a koan through writing engages parts of the body, mind, and heart that maybe just sitting doesn't. So I think for me I'm working with them like they are stories, or dreams, or poems. Just: what is this telling me about my own practice?

When we work with koans as a group, it's so funny what happens. We're working with this book of women's stories, and people would respond really differently. It was very clear that their response came from who they were. Someone was mad that the woman bested Hakuin — in fact, she thought the girl was being snotty. And someone else was like, "No, he was being that way." You come from your own stuff when you work with these koans. And that's what they're for — for us to reveal ourselves to ourselves. So journaling and poetry and all that is a way to do that. One hundred percent — it's a good way to work on it.

The Rinzai masters are now shooting down lightning at me, but I'm dodging it. I'm dodging it.

Thanks, Michael. Good. So — go write about everyday mind. "Everyday ordinary mind is the way." What is that?

Question: Hi, my name is Erin. Thank you.

Karen DeCotis: Hi, Erin.

Question: Really inspiring to hear you talk about it in such a relaxed way. I had an interesting experience where I used to live — I was touching into koans, I don't know much about them, several years ago. Because I was friends with someone connected with another area of my work, and he's Native American. I was talking to him about koans because he was curious. And he looked at me, and we were also having a conversation about how the heart is a perceptive organ — that indigenous peoples come from that perceptive organ first, rather than the mind. And so he's kind of smiling at me when we were speaking. I really resonate with the power of that as well. Even scientifically, they can show that the energy and the intelligence given off by the heart field is stronger than the mind. We were having this little exchange — I was actually telling him about the Mu koan — and he smiled and said, "This all sounds so mind." He said, "Does anyone ever in this tradition you're talking about speak about how to perceive these things from the heart?" And I said... and he's not talking about the heart in a westernized, romanticized way. I didn't even say "love." It's this perceptive field. And I'm curious if you feel like there are ways that you come across where they're interrelating with the koan from a different space. Because whenever I approach them — and quite frankly, it made me just want to turn in the other direction — my mind just goes, "Oh yeah, right." And maybe that's the point. Maybe it's just like, what's the point of doing this? Right, right. As if life doesn't present enough frustrating things — we have to go looking for them in ancient texts that are indecipherable. It's not that I want to devalue them. It's more — has it ever been spoken about from a different way? It was very fascinating to hear him speak to it. And he wasn't denigrating it. He just kind of smiled and felt like, "This mind thing you guys are always toward everything with — have you ever tried moving at it from here?" And again, it wasn't about love. It was about perceiving it through the heart.

Karen DeCotis: You may know this, but the character for "mind" in Japanese and Chinese includes the heart. It's heart-mind, right? So to me, it does include love — because I think we don't know what love is, but maybe we know what it isn't. I think I'm approaching these stories from who I am. And when I look at some of the collections and some of the commentary, I just want to tear my hair out. It's awful. I read it and it's like the koan was hard enough — this commentary makes it worse. I don't know what they're talking about. They're referring to things I don't know about. They're using metaphor and poetry. But somehow, if I can relax and just let it wash over me instead of trying to understand it — like Nanchuan said, "The way is not subject to knowing and not knowing" — letting myself read these commentaries or these stories and be confused, be befuddled, think, "These people, what is their problem?" — just really being me with them. There's freedom in that. And that freedom, I think, is what your friend is getting at — this sort of open-hearted flow, instead of a solution, instead of solving, instead of getting it. Although we love to get it, don't we? When I'm with a koan and a few things fall into place — "Oh, that's what that means" — that's a wonderful feeling. I love that. But that's me loving being right, or me loving understanding something. That's fine. But is that liberation? What's liberation is me going, "Oh, this is what Karen does. She really likes understanding things." Yeah, I get it, Karen. You like to understand things. Good for you. Okay — now the next problem of life comes forward: the dog, or the family, or the taxes, or whatever. And then who am I? So, Erin, is that at all responding to what you're asking?

Question: Yeah. I think also — when I sat there with him, he said, "You know, let's sit here with Mu a minute." And what I thought was interesting: when I came up to perceive it from that place, one of the things I can remember that came up was just simply — and I don't know if this sounds odd — I just said out loud, "I choose love." And kind of everything just dissolved. Not because I was focusing on "oh, in my heart, I need to be in the love space" — just once I went into that space, it kind of moved, it directed itself in that direction. I don't know if that would have happened had I been perceiving it from a different space. But it's just moving the energy, directing the energy to a different space. That's all.

Karen DeCotis: Well, it is what happened, right? So something else could have happened, but this is what did happen. When we talk about bodhisattva action, bodhisattva vows — which are impossible, of course — I remember Reb Anderson finally saying, and he appears to be very much in his head, he's just very analytic, brilliant, he can talk about consciousness in all these amazing ways, and it's really helpful for some of us to get cerebral about these things because it organizes our thinking. For some people it calms them down if they can be more cerebral about it. For other people, it makes them crazy. But one time he just said, "Well, you know, this is just about love. I mean, that's all we're doing here. All this investigation into consciousness, all this wisdom, all this no-self, all this emptiness — it's just about love." And coming from him, it was almost heartbreaking. It was so beautiful because it was so real. He teared up one time in an interview when I was one-on-one with him. And I could see how all the work of the mind softened the heart. That's how it was for that kind of person. For another person, opening the heart may give us the courage to engage the mind and go, "Well, I'm not very intellectual, I don't understand it, but I'm going to give it a try." And that's why we need each other. We're going to do this together. You're not going off and solving koans all by yourself. And even if you are — nobody cares, right? That's a beautiful story.

Delia, I see you've raised your hand. Did you want to jump in?

Question: Yes. I just want to say that love is that connection — it's that openness and that connection. It's when you see and appreciate one another, or whatever it may be in your presence, and you take the time to connect and be open to it. I think that's what it's all about. And there's — yeah.

Karen DeCotis: Yeah. And it's not either/or. We all have both brain and heart. We can't just use one or the other. We're integrated, just like we're integrated into the broader wholeness. And so it's when we're able to empty our preconceptions — let our mind and body fall away — and have that pure connection, which to me is love, that we become part of this incredible numinous and luminous vastness that doesn't comprise concepts or anything. It's just the whole. And it's pretty spectacular.

I think that's why we practice, and it's important that we practice. One of the things we talked about this morning in my koan salon — we were working with a koan that had to do with identity, gender identity, female and male — and we talked about getting into that space, Delia, that you are describing: a place of love, a place of non-attachment, of openness. It's very wonderful and beautiful, and it's the truth. But there's also the relative truth of people identifying in certain ways, and it's important to them. They can't just let go of that, because there may be harm happening, there may be something they need to express in being who they are. So one of the koans of a social life, of a political life, is both having what you were just describing, Delia — being in this open, vast, boundless place where we can connect and dance and not be attached to our identities — and at the same time serving in these worlds where people who have certain identities are being harmed. And the people harming them are also being harmed by doing harm. So both sides are being harmed. Does that make sense?

Question: No, no, absolutely. And I think it's that grasping for identity. And believe me, I'm a woman of color — I know about identity and attacks and non-recognition and all that other stuff. And ultimately, just let us enjoy the tapestry of life, which is rich with colors and hues and textures. It's only when it doesn't get fully unfurled, or where there's fraying in threads or disconnection of the threads, that we aren't able to appreciate the fullness of humanity. But I agree — the appreciation for who each person is, and their lived experiences and their history, is critical. So I wasn't trying to imply that we blend.

Karen DeCotis: No, I know. Yeah, right. And that's on my mind because of this conversation this morning — the importance of realizing that we are living a koan all the time. And there are things that will not be resolved. And how do we live with that?

So I'll leave you with this koan, and then if there's one last question or whatever — I don't have the names handy, but a monk asked a teacher, "What is the teaching of a lifetime?" And the response was — I'm going to just stumble right through this. The student asked, "What is the teaching of a lifetime?" The master responds: "An appropriate response." Sounds like Reb Anderson — it's older than that, but that's the teaching in our school anyway. We talk about it a lot, to the point where a friend of mine called her coaching business "An Appropriate Response," because sometimes what looks like what we call compassion is not the appropriate response. Sometimes you need a sword, right? So — taking and giving life, as they say. Thank you.

Question: Karen, I'll just look to the room here and see if there's yet another comment or question.

Question: Just real quick. Hi. This is Bob. It was my honor to be the chanter today. I want to give a little background. Our head teacher, Gary Koan Jyoji Cabrode, learned and studied with Wendy Egyoku Nakao at ZCLA. And so he considered that our mothership. As you can see today in our service, we don't have a head priest because he passed away in October. And as far as I know, Wendy is still doing well, but I use her name when I say the third dedication — "May her life be lengthened" — it better be somebody alive. I mentioned Mel once for Joel, and then I found out Mel had already passed away. So you can't give somebody a lengthy life if they've already gone. That's all background. I have one quick comment. Today we did a service which was the Heart Sutra, followed by "Identity of Relative and Absolute," and then the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, and then the Shosaimyo Kichijo Darani. You know, even days we do the Heart Sutra in Japanese and then "Identity of Relative and Absolute," followed by the Enmei Jukku Kanon Gyo. So — how is your service different? You said it was a little bit different than what we do.

Karen DeCotis: If I were following what I learned at Berkeley and San Francisco, I would have a much longer service. And they do that too — they change things, like on Saturdays they do a lengthier service, and in the mornings they'll do the Heart Sutra and one other thing. In San Antonio, I'm the only priest and I'm new there, and so I'm following what the priest before me set up. I'm trying not to be too directive and start changing everything right away. So in the mornings we just do — we don't really do a full service. We do the "All My Ancient Twisted Karma" and taking refuge. In the afternoons we'll do a chant — one day it's the Heart Sutra, one day it's something else. And then on Saturdays, we do the Heart Sutra and the Enmei Jukku Kanon Gyo. But there's a lot we don't chant, and we don't chant the ancestors. What I loved about your chanting was how you did the Jewel Mirror Samadhi — the tones you gave it. We just do flat chanting, which is so boring by comparison, and that was beautiful to hear. I wonder if I can steal that. I wonder if I can really change things up. Anyway, it was lovely, and your chanting was lovely too. And I know Joel.

Question: I was just going to say, I could listen to you all day long. The sense of humor that comes through — that's what our priest, Gary Koan Jyoji Cabrode, got me into Zen with. The sense of humor. And you have that.

Karen DeCotis: Thank you so much. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you all very much for your kindness and your listening and your practice. And thank you, Anton, again.

Question: Thank you, Karen. Deep bow from everyone here. We're going to transition into our announcements and then take our room apart. So I'm going to stop recording, and you're welcome to stay and listen to us prattle on. And Delia, thank you for joining us.

Question: Yes, Delia. And Anton, great to see you.

Question: I think we can end with the four vows, page 41.