Lost Coin San Francisco
Meeting notes for June 14, 2010

Doen taught about a koan:
A koan is a question teachers ask that students have to answer out of their experience, not thoughts. The answers accepted in the 8th century became the standard and they remain so to this day. They are simple, but deep.

Zen practice is about forgetting the self. For example, if you really look at the water, you forget yourself, you become that experience. The ability to become that which comes in and out of your senses allows you to see what others need.

In Zen, to be realized, to be enlightened, is to forget the self. Who is that being when you meet that experience (the water or the stone)? That being is you, the self.

The koan is about a teacher from one of two Zen sects. The key part of his teaching is, “there is a true person of no rank”, then the teacher suddenly grabs the student, the “person of no rank”, who quickly loses his confidence because the student is thinking of being the one who is “up” in status vs. being the one who is “down”. The teacher is asking you to forget everything about yourself, about who you are personally, including asking yourself who you’re better than, worse than… The real you is not who you think you are, but what you experience.

Sitting is the process of letting the entire self settle down. There’s nothing you must do to see your true Buddha nature—can you believe that you are the person of no rank? The preaching of life is what the preaching of the dharma is.

An exercise for this week: Think about the preaching of insentient beings, i.e., the rocks, the water. Nothing you need to know is outside inanimate things.

Notes from group sharing:
Be the “I” or “I am” that knows what you want to do. (We may have doubts about it, but that doesn’t mean the “I” is not there.)

Remember to embrace “not knowing”.

Listening to the preaching of the insentient is listening to the preaching of the absolute. The preaching is not taught in words.

The absolute is not a deity, yet it is what runs the world.
