As we practice, this "for you" mind slowly becomes ours. It is the beginning and the end of the teaching.
Together with Zen Master Seung Sahn, Zen Master Su Bong brought Zen teaching to China, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia. He was the guiding teacher for the Hong Kong Sangha, the South African Sangha, the Seoul International Sangha, and the Queensland, Australia, Sangha.
Jane McLaughlin-Dobiszis a Guiding Teacher of the Cambridge and Cape Cod Zen Centers.
She is a financial advisor and lives in the Boston area with her family.
Even if you understand all the Buddha’s speech, if you cannot demonstrate this understanding when called upon, it is worth nothing. Dry cognition cannot help your life.
The common source of all suffering, concisely summarized by Zen Master Wu Bong. :)
Question: In many families now, both parents have to work. They also have children and social responsibilities. How can the parents make a living, raise a family and still have time to practice?
[on kong-an practice] Being clever isn't going to help you. You may have heard words like "spontaneous" used to describe what is needed to answer kong-ans, but that doesn't begin to get to the heart of the matter. Kong-ans are operating on a level that is far more fundamental than speech, far more fundamental than thinking.
If you have a question, ask it and don't worry about what kind of mind you're using.. If you have a question, just ask it and see how it unfolds. And don't worry about questions resolving. If a question resolves, then it's been killed, and it's not alive anymore.
But it’s in everyone’s face. Now this is in our face in a way that it’s never been before. So we have to meet that. We have to not hole up in our bunker it a way that’s about us — like those rich people flying their airplanes out to islands — that’s not the way to do it.
Don’t really think of Zen students or Zen teachers. I think of Zen practitioners. We are all practitioners, whether we practice a lot or a little. Whether as a student or a teacher, our job is to practice. For those of us who are laypeople, we will sometimes be able to practice a lot, and sometimes only a little. But we need to keep practicing. As students, that is the biggest gift we can give our sangha. As teachers, that is the bone of teaching. But how do we encourage each other?
If you have this category called helping people you can’t help anyone. It’s like if you’re a parent of a baby or a toddler and you hear them crying in the middle of the night you don’t sit there and say 'how can I help this person?'
Our minds are just insane. They're totally nuts. That’s what we do all the time. We go around making meanings, we make this good, this bad, something that I see as a lovely image of flowers and you see it as poisonous mushrooms — we’re both making something. We’re both doing that. It’s just exactly what it is.