"It's a Cookbook!"

No. Not really. The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi which I've been studying every day during this practice period/ango is not a cookbook...

And yet. And yet. 

I first absorbed it around 50 years ago. It was a Dharma Transmission poem/document, yet I understood it was chanted by all at the zendo at the City Temple in San Francisco where I was at the time, and I couldn't quite understand the purpose or merit of chanting it. So often that's just uncomprehending rote practice. It's not particularly meaningful.

And when I see so many people struggling with this teaching during the practice period -- oh my yes -- I think that chanting the teaching every day or whenever is possibly what's getting in the way for so many. 

For something Zen, the teaching is very straightforward and simple. It's like a quick sketch, though. Part of Dharma Transmission, it's not the Dharma transmitted but an outline of it in one sense, the essence of the Dharma in another. A memory jog for someone who's been in Dharma Training for years and years. Or for someone who hasn't been in monastic practice, like me, it's a crystallization of the Dharma Essence. The core of the practice. The essence.

But of course, as a literary construct, it isn't the actual Thing, for there is no Thing in actuality. As a construct, it's a lot like a recipe, ergo in a sense, it is a cookbook. 

When I stopped sitting zazen regularly, I was living in San Francisco. This was during the Jim Jones/People's Temple era. There were a lot of nascent cults and cultists around. It was post-Hippie, but there was still plenty of Counterculture, much of it by then a kind of money-making grift or in some cases outright crime. Now of  course that definition will change with time, so I'm not being judgmental. It's merely a case that the Counterculture, for all its merits and good works was also the hothouse of so much that was not merit or good works. It was, for its time, the epitome of selfishness and self-absorption as well.

Unfortunately, in those days, I saw the City Temple of the San Francisco Zen Center in the same way -- an epitome of selfishness in the guise of Zen from ages past. This was judgmental, and I'm not sure it was either appropriate or useful, but it kept me away from there, away from the form while still continuing the practice on my own. I had a Zen corner in my apartment just as I had had pretty much everywhere I'd lived, and I sat zazen at least once and often twice a day for 20 minutes to half an hour at a time. Longer, in those days, seemed like overkill. 

But much as I recognized the zeitgeist of selfishness in others and the context of their lives, I too was being selfish. For heaven's sake. If you're seeing it in someone else, you're seeing it in yourself. You are seeing yourself. So as I sat my selfish zazen, recognizing my own selfishness, and sitting anyway, something changed. Sitting zazen one day, I entered what I came to call The Void. This was not the calmness of counting breaths, or contemplating a koan (which you don't do during zazen anyway) or a meditational state (samadhi). No, this was something else, very much something else, a state of both oneness and nothingness, a unification with what we might call The Ground State of Being. There was no there there, there was no not-there there. It was all One and all Nothing. 

Magical in some ways, maybe. Terrifying in others.

And Zen practitioners had been warned about this. It could happen, this entering The Void, at almost any time in one's practice, and if it did, don't take it as Enlightenment, because it probably wasn't. Though it might be. Instead, let it happen, don't try to manipulate or control it (you can't) and get with a Dharma teacher to help understand or grasp or accept what happened. 

Well, my Dharma teachers were the texts I studied frequently but not rigorously -- it wasn't scholarly study at all -- and memories, you might say, of Suzuki Roshi who had brought Zen as I knew it to America. 

Suzuki Roshi had died not long before I moved to San Francisco, but around the same time as his death, a collection of his talks was published -- "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" -- that I gravitated to and therein found the purest, clearest essence of what is I could imagine. 

So those were my Dharma teachers, and to a one, they said to me: "Don't get caught up in Experience, whether that Experience is The Void or something else. Don't be caught up. Let go. Come to know your nature and your purpose, but avoid getting caught up them, either." 

Let go.

It's all so much more and larger than you are. Let go.

After some experience with sitting and The Void, I let go of them. Every time I would sit zazen, I would enter The Void, and then I came to realize that The Void was a constant. It wasn't happening just when I sat. It was always. The Void was never not there, but I was in and part of the material world, not The Void, and thus had a purpose and that was To Serve. 

How we get to the point of recognizing the purpose To Serve, I still don't know, but it happened, and the Jewel Mirror Samadhi was a part of it. In fact, it pointed the way and was the foundation of a pretty fundamental change in my life. 

I've described the "dream" of leaving my apartment, walking to Union Square, sitting zazen on a bench with an old Chinese gentleman, walking around the Square, and then to Market Street, and back up to my apartment on Geary, and having the whole scene repeat during zazen practice last year. This actually happened after my encounter with The Void in the '70s, and it was part of what led to changing my life.

That it came back so clearly and stunningly last year was startling to say the least, and it's been something of a struggle to suss out why. I don't necessarily have an answer, but it is what it is. 

I left San Francisco and dedicated whatever remained of my life to finding out and acting on the needs of others in my immediate realm. 

And absorbing the Jewel Mirror Samadhi was key.

A cookbook? Sure, why not?

The raccoon roars like a lion. Kitten purrs in my ear.