ZEN: The Buddha's Birthday (Sunday, April 6)

Wisdom Quarterly; Jeff Albrizze (PasaDharma.org); Zen Center Los Angeles

ZCLA Gateless Gate entrance, residential area near Wilshire district (Wisdom Quarterly)

 

Boy mesmerized by baby Siddhartha (ZCLA)

Join in celebrating the birth of the Buddha, and all of the baby future buddhas, in the Zen Center garden. A small arbor house decorated with flowers will be erected, and Dokai Dickenson will officiate the special service. Afterwards, the Birth Story of the Buddha and his first steps in the world will be told.

 

Birth of the Bodhisattva

Everyone is invited to bring a small bouquet of flowers as an offering for the service. Children, friends, and family are all welcome. The Sunday schedule will include a chanting service, sitting meditation (zazen), and a celebration of the Buddha’s birthday, followed by a light lunch. Plan on arriving at ZCLA by 8:15 am to get a parking space and be ready for the Sunday schedule:

• 8:30am-9:00am Chanting Service – The Gate of Sweet Nectar (please bring a can of food for the altar offering to help local needy families)
• 9:00-9:35 Zazen (silent seated meditation)
• 9:35-9:45 Kinhin (walking meditation)
• 9:45-10:20 Zazen (silent seated meditation)
• 11:00-12 noon Buddha’s Birthday Celebration in the garden
• 12:15-12:45 Snack

Lunch during sesshin, ZCLA dining hall, main building next to gift shop (zencenter.org)

 

If driving, make sure to arrive at ZCLA early, as parking is at a premium. Attend any or all of the activities, and leave at any of the activity change breaks, or stay until the end (about 12:45 pm) for lunch.

Please wear loose, comfortable clothing, preferably dark in color, with no distracting colors or logos. Please refrain from wearing excessive jewelry, perfume, or cologne. Participation is FREE. Donations at the Center are accepted. The ZCLA bookstore will be open for books, incense, and meditation cushions.

Zen Center of Los Angeles 

Secondary rear meeting room (WQ)

The Center was founded in 1967 by Taizan Maezumi Roshi. ZCLA Buddha Essence Temple has provided the teachings and practice of Zen Buddhism to all who come and go through its temple gate. Its mission is to know the self, maintain the precepts, and serve others. It serves by providing the Dharma, training, and transmission of Soto Zen Buddhism. Its vision is an "enlightened world" in which suffering is transcended, all beings live in harmony, everyone has enough, deep wisdom is realized, and compassion flows unhindered.

The Center affirms its intention to honor diversity and actively welcome all people, regardless of religion, age, ethnicity, gender, physical or mental ability, race, sexual orientation, or socio-economic background.

ZCLA observes a daily schedule of zazen, Buddhist services, and mindful work. The Center's programs include introductory classes, sesshin, workshops, and training periods, as well as face-to-face meetings with Abbot Wendy Egyoku Nakao and other Center teachers. The practice of zazen and koan training is in the Maezumi-Glassman lineage.

Native American Herb Walks (April 5, 2014)

Xochitl, Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Moonbeam (FollowYourHeart.com)

Bee harmlessly collects nectar and sunflower pollen under an approving Surya (S-K)

The Heart Center, (818) 348-3240

Follow Your Heart (FYH) and Wisdom Quarterly invite everyone to join in a very fun, beautiful, and informative Herb Walk through Bee Canyon.
 
Our guide William Broen will identify and talk about medicinal and edible plants of California. Broen will focus particularly on the traditional Native American and modern uses of 2-30 different native and introduced plants including: elderberry, mugwort, yerba santa, milk thistle, nettles, black sage, and many more. Our guide will also discuss folklore and legends associated with many of the plants. The three-hour walks will be on easy trails well suited for people of all levels of hiking experience.

• FREE, Saturday, April 5, 2014
• 11:00 am-2:00 pm + 3:00-6:00 pm
• O'Melveny Park, Granada Hills

Wear comfortable shoes, dress in layers, bring hat and sunglasses and sunscreen. Water and trail mix will be provided by FYH.

 

O'Melveny Park: Bee Canyon (AllTrails.com), O'Melveny (Yelp reviews), O'Melveny (LAMountains.com), O'Melveny (LA Trails), O Melveny Park (LA Times), Lookout Loop (Nobody Hikes in L.A.)

 

Sacred lands

Follow Your Heart on Pinterest, Facebook

Indigenous Tongva (Los Angeles) and Chumash (Malibu) and Tataviam (NW LA/Ventura) and Acagchemem (Orange County) peoples were lovers of Nature, lovers of flowers, lovers of herbs and herbal cures. Plants cure what ails human beings and other earthlings. But with the loss of Native languages, lineages, the lore, plant knowledge is disappearing only to be revived by Americans passionate about what was lost/displaced when we overran the original inhabitants' subsisting on their native lands.

DIRECTIONS: From Follow Your Heart [21825 Sherman Way, Canoga Park, CA 91303, (818) 348-3240] take Topanga Canyon Bl. north to Hwy 118 East. Exit Balboa going north for about two miles to Sesnon Ave. (just past Crozco). Go left on Sesnon and drive about 1/4 mile until reaching the O'Melveny Park parking lot on the right side of street. Group will meet at the far end of the lot at 11:00 am and again at 3:00 pm sharp.

WILLIAM BROEN attended Pacific School of Herbal Medicine in Oakland, CA. He works as an educator for Herb Pharm (Herbal Healthcare Products), a company which produces high quality organic and wild herbal supplements sold at FYH. He is also the Herbal Expert at FYH, working Fridays from 4:00-9:00 pm.

How to solve Zen koans (cartoon)

CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Gia Yesu, Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly, with instructor Betsy Enduring Vow (ZCLA) and Grayson and Roshi Jeff Albrizze (PasaDharma.org)

IF koans (Zen Buddhist "riddles" from the Japanese word for "public case") are not for intellectually "solving" or "deciphering," what are they for?

ZCLA is an oasis of diversity (Obon)

We went down to the Zen Center of Los Angeles today with Roshi Albrizze (PasaDharma.org) to see Roshi Tenshin Fletcher (zmc.org) and took ZP-1 (Zen Practice, Module 1, ZCLA's intro class). 

Noah Levine (breitenbush)

Author and Theravada insight meditation (vipassana) practitioner Noah Levine, co-founder of Dharma Punx/Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society, was on hand with us for basic training. We learned to sit up straight, bend down to bow fully, hold our hands with opposing thumb-tips on our laps, walk as slowly as humanly possible, and were given some insight into "working with koans." Fortunately, Noah pressed and pressed to get at the point of koan practice. The example Betsy gave was:

 

Yes I do, Joshu! We all do.

A monk asked Zen master Joshu, "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" The Zen master replied, "Moo!" (Japanese mu, negation, "not," "nonbeing").* Betsy went on to explain that this would be like the Archbishop of Los Angeles asking the Italian pope, "Is there a God?" and the pontiff answering, "Hell no!" A paradox, because surely a figurehead like the leader of the Catholic Church believes in his deity, so why would he negate the archbishop's question? Thinking will not arrive at an answer, but there is a way to find out. How does one solve it and, moreover, what would be the point of solving it?

 

*This famous question comes from a fragment of a koan (Case 1, The Gateless Gate). Paradoxically, another koan (Case 18, The Book of Serenity) presents a longer version, in which Joshu answers "yes" in response to the exact same question asked by a different monk.

Noah, did it blow your mind? It did ours, like a rake in a rock garden! (buddhistmedia)

Homer goes to hell for a day (Avici), and Flanders is the devil.

 

How to solve koans

Pick a finger (Gutei)

There is no thinking, grappling, ruminating, or pondering involved. That is surely a dead end. An answer/solution arrived at in this way, if it is good and particularly pithy, will "stink of Zen." The bell will ring, and the interviewer (for dokusan or face-to-face meeting) will yell, "Next!" 

 

Of course, "Next!" is what s/he'll yell even if the Zen practitioner gets it "right." But s/he won't do it with a twinkle in his or her eye acknowledging that you were onto something this time, and it is now appropriate to move on to the next public case.

Instead of "thinking," a koan is successfully resolved by grokking, that is, by a semi-subconscious remembrance of the case without straining to get anywhere in an effort to solve it. Rock/grok it gently like a baby at heart level. In this way, illumination dawns, an epiphany (satori) occurs, and a deep certainty arises that one has understood what the conscious mind could never have hammered out by mere reasoning.

Roshi Jeff Albrizze (PT)

So when Bart Simpson was asked, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" the answer was not to slap his digits against his palms producing a muted clap. It was, instead, a way of opening the boy up to a world of conscious possibility, an awareness or knowing beyond thought and wit and reason. 

 

"Intuition" is a name for it, but it is very misleading due to the connotations we've layered on. "A knowing that surpasseth all understanding" is a Christian translation for the phenomenon that seems to approximate the wordless experience. "Direct knowledge" unmediated and unencumbered by the thought process might be a New Age way of stating it.

Budai: Fat, Happy Homer "Buddha" Simpson statue (Kidrobot)

 

"Japanese Yosemite" (Kamikōchi), Nagano Prefecture, altitude 4,900 ft. (1,500 m). The kami or kanji 神垣内 of Kami-ko-uchi are the shapeshifting mountain monsters of Japan. This water soaked site resembles the flooding Yokoji ZMC near Idylwild, California, experienced after a wildfire annihilated the earth-retaining forest all around the center.

  

Dharma talk: Zen Mountain Center to rebuild?

Fire dragon of flames (privet.ru)

Abbot Tenshin, Yokoji Zen Mountain Center (ZMC): Tenshin's "Dharma" talk was brief and to the point: There was a fire, but a fire crew made up of convicts/volunteer firefighters, who had learned to meditate at Yokoji, refused to give up when ordered to abandon ZMC by the fire department.

 

Their heroic efforts saved the Yokoji. Proving there's no such thing as karma, or that there is such a thing as karma, but that it rarely -- as happened here -- turns around to benefit one so clearly and tangibly.

 

However, karma works in mysterious ways: What fire could not do, Nature obliged the rains to take care of: Five days of California monsoon weather (due, we think, to climate chaos and our deteriorating environment) washed down tons of muddy debris on ZMC, covering most of the site under three feet of silt and ashes. Maybe it will be dug out, maybe it won't. Trees' lives hang in the balance.

Tenshin Fletcher (zmc.org)

Although the trees are all hearty redwoods, they cannot bear to have their trunks sunk underground. Donations of time, effort, and funds would help, but Tenshin is reluctant to say so. For the one thing he has learned through all of these ordeals is that he and his family will survive. Life may be full of ups and downs, but we can remain relatively steady in the ebb and flow, wave and trough, high and low. Abbot Tenshin Fletcher -- who received helpful advice from Tassajara in Big Sur (San Francisco Zen Center), which famously survived a California forest fire -- previously lived and worked at ZCLA years ago and has remained a vibrant Dharma friend of the current ZCLA Abbess Wendy Nakao and many of the center's older and disproportionately Jewish-Buddhist (JuBu) residents.

ZCLA: Field trip to Zen Center Los Angeles

Roshi Jeff Albrizze (PasaDharma.org), CC Liu, Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; ZCLA video 

The Los Angeles/Mexican Day of the Dead/Japanese Obon Festival, ZCLA, 2012 (filmed and edited by Nicholas Tana and Denise Acosta, posted Oct. 29, 2013).

ZCLA

PasaDharma Zen sitting group will carpool from Pasadena (Del Mar at Hudson) at 7:45 am, Nov. 10, 2013, to the Zen Center of Los Angeles (ZCLA, 923 South Normandie Ave., 90006-1301) in the Miracle Mile district just west of downtown to see the British-born Abbot Charles Tenshin Fletcher Roshi (Yokoji Zen Mountain Center, California).

• 8:30-9:00: Chanting "The Gate of Sweet Nectar" (please bring canned food offerings for hungry ghosts and to benefit needy families in the area)
• 9:00-9:35: Zazen (silent seated meditation)
• 9:35-10:20: Kinhin (walking meditation)
• 10:45-12:00: Dharma Talk by Roshi Fletcher
• 12:15-12:45: Snack (usually bagels and locks)

ZMC

Drive or carpool. Wear dark, loose, comfortable clothing free of distracting colors or logos. Please refrain from wearing excessive perfume, cologne, or jewelry. FREE. No fee for participating but donations to the center are accepted.

(ZMC.org) Year-round Zen Buddhist training center located in SoCal mountains east of LA

Tenshin Roshi (zmc.org)

Zen Center Los Angeles (ZCLA), Buddha Essence Temple, founded 1967 by Taizan Maezumi Roshi, has provided teachings and the opportunity to practice Japanese-style Soto Zen Buddhism in an American context for all who come through the temple's (gateless) gate. The mission of the institution is to know the self, maintain the precepts, and serve others by providing the teaching, training, and transmission of Zen Buddhism with a vision of an enlightened world in which suffering is transcended, all beings live in harmony, everyone has enough, deep wisdom is realized, and compassion flows unhindered. ZCLA honors and actively welcomes diversity with regard to religion, race, gender, age, mental ability, physical ability, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic background. ZCLA programs include introductory classes, sesshin (sitting intensives), workshops, training periods, and face to face meetings (dokusan, interviews) with Abbot Wendy Egyoku Nakao and other center teachers. Zazen and koan training in the Maezumi-(Bernie) Glassman lineage is practiced.

(ZMC.org) Short film: "Yokoji Zen Mountain Center" day-to-day life prior to the forest fire and flooding at Yokoji ZMC in the San Jacinto Mountains, Southern California.

Insight Meditation Society (East Coast)

Seven, Wisdom Quarterly, Insight Meditation Society (Dharma.org); BCBSdharma.org

Insight Meditation Society (IMS) is a Buddhist meditation center (open to all people of all traditions).

 

On Valentines Day in 1976 a small group of young Buddhist meditation teachers (including Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield (West Coast), and Sharon Salzberg, all friends back from Asia) and dedicated staff opened a retreat center outside of Boston.

They found an ideal place in an old, stately mansion in idyllic Barre, Massachusetts. Armed with few resources and imperfect operational knowledge, but passionate about the Buddha’s teachings, they set about creating an environment where the Dharma could flourish and take root in the West. 

Teachers at IMS like Myoshin Kelly, Sharon Salzberg, and Leigh Brasington (Dharma.org)

 

And so began IMS, now a large and successful short-term Retreat Center with a Forest Refuge center for instensives.

Over its history, IMS has become a spiritual home to thousands of practitioners. It is now regarded as one of the Western world’s most respected centers for learning and deepening meditation practice.

 

The organization operates two meditation retreat facilities and also promotes a growing school, the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Two are set on about 200 secluded acres in the quiet woods of central Massachusetts, and the third is right next door. More