Talk #4 from Term 1 of our Online Zen Group for 2020. / Talk #1 from the Melbourne Zen Group online Sesshin 2020
Teacher: Roshi Susan Murphy
Date: 25 April 2020
Playlist of talks for Term 1, 2020
This self is a question, an ever opening question.
Roshi Susan Murphy
Click on the recording below to listen to this talk now. We will upload a transcription when it becomes available. ()
by ~ Ric Streatfield
Academic Note: No-one is/was quite sure/un-sure whether Bu Yi actually existed/didn’t exist, or whether he/she was male/female, or something else. Otherwise, the reader can be certain of everything else.
by ~ Lizzie Finn
on a day of human crisis
sweeping fallen pollen,
a carpet of yellow
on the ground by the tree
……waking up slow-ly
to the vibrant buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
of hundreds of bees
swept up… swept clean away
in this sound of rapid wingbeats
a doorway to our shared home
where time stands still
just buzzzzzing ….
full and complete
the deep hummmm of the earth
no crisis here for bees
serving the tree that serves them so well
gentle visitors moving deftly
each twig and leaf lightly touched,
each one working with single purpose
no effort or complaint
Just This….. collecting pollen for the queen bee’s nest
obeying the careful law of mother earth
my heart is warmed
….all is well in this endless bee moment
and now as I return,
a great tenderness and curiosity
I wonder where they live….?
….it must be nearby………
Talk #3 from Term 1 of our Online Zen Group for 2020.
Teacher: Roshi Susan Murphy
Date: 12 April 2020
Dedicated to David Englebrecht (Dharma name: Harbour Star)
Click on the recording below to listen to this talk now. We will upload a transcription when it becomes available. ()
by ~ Ric Streatfield
Click here to download as PDF
How can you be lonely, with no gap between you and all there is?
Roshi Susan Murphy
Now that the Covid-19 virus has caused many of us to isolate ourselves from the normally frenetic modern world it may be a good opportunity to take time to explore at least little bits of the infinity of the Buddha’s Universe. No need for trekking boots and backpacks. No need for Four Wheel Drives or speed-of-light spaceships. All that is needed is an inquisitive mind….and, a black pencil and a sheet of white paper.
As the story goes the Buddha was born into a high status family in a small rural, non-Brahman, republic, in contrast to the surrounding Brahman (Hindu) kingdoms. It is now thought that the Buddha was contemporary with the Greek philosopher Socrates (470-399 BCE) with his famous claim that ‘…..an unexamined life is not worth living’. More than a hundred years earlier the original of the Sophoi, or the seven Wise Men of ancient Greece, was Thales of Miletus on the Ionian Coast of Greece. Thales, besides correctly predicting an eclipse of the sun, some credit as being the originator of the profound Delphic Oracle advice of – ‘Know thyself!’.
Well into his young adult life Gotama the Buddha became dissatisfied with his understanding of the causes of suffering in the world around him. The prevailing Brahman view at the time was based on a cosmology of belief, a super-natural world with Brahma as the creator, the all-pervading Universal Consciousness. The life-force or soul (atman) was the individual Brahma spirit in all living things, and the re-incarnation cycle of life was this spirit of Brahma leaving the mortal body at death and then re-entering a newly forming body at conception, to be re-born into the world of suffering unless the ‘good’ kharma accumulated in the previous life or lives far outweighed the ‘bad’.
The Buddha spent six years in searching and practicing the traditional yoga and ascetic practices until, as the story goes, he gave up his searching, relaxed and sat in meditation under the Bodhi tree. It is there the understanding of the origins of suffering came to him. The methodology the Buddha used in gaining his insight or ‘Enlightenment’ is set out in the Buddha’s own words to Ananda, his personal assistant, almost hidden away in the Pali sutras, in the Paticca Samuppada.
A poem I wrote after the recent death of my 92 year old father pre-Covid.
The week before he died I visited him every day
Fussing
turning off the lights
Bullying him into eating and drinking
Until I let him be
He didn’t want the fuss
Sitting with him till he was sick of me
All this waiting
This hard waiting
So what is it you need to say when there is nothing left to say
When your living body is coming to an end
When you no longer care about everything you should care about
What is this life that is memory upon memory laid down
And those memories hazed
It is now time to dig the clods of earth and bury
the black box now lowered into the neat earth hole
I pick up some clods
With my bare hands
Pink skin
On bare clay
Throwing this earth onto the black casket
Your shell lying still
Your spirit clean peeled away
We all take our turn in this way
()
Love Maxine.
by ~ Tessa Priest
Paintings which came from koan practice… snake appeared in my dream and then coiled onto wooden boards
I finished the paintings in the middle of the dark night and the next morning opened an old edition of Resurgence and found this poem.
Spring is coming in many places in the world as we are asked to quieten and be more still.
Our snakes may be readying to sleep in the cold, and yet snake appears – perhaps in our Spring we too may emerge with a lithe newness and a transformed earth body…
Skin
Everything has a voice, even the skin
Laurie Kutchins –
the black snake left beside the house
the day the golden tulips bloomed
and overpowered the sun. Never seen,
that snake leaves its skin behind
each spring lie a secret gift
no longer dark or urgent without
its body. Oh
look at me, I’ve grown
and grown more beautiful, its voice
thralls from the grass, all
its language new and moving
in the skin like thunder
gathering into a noon
yet to form:
Have you heard me
down in the ductwork
of your house
living on mice?
Have you lived yet
a day without fear?
If not skin, what
will you come to shed?
chosen for Resurgence magazine March/April 2009
“powerful poetry sings of the hidden complexity of things”.
If lives are fraught and contradictory, fraught with unexpected turns that result in unruliness…The god Lir (Ireland) created the world by speaking the names of everything in it. Because he had only half a tongue, his words were only half understood. Half of creation, therefore, remained unspoken.
That’s why we need poets: to “sing the hidden side of things” (Andrea Hollander Budy)
Blessings to you in this time of transformation with its quietude. May you wriggle anew as the spring unfurls – here it is autumn
Warmth
Tessa Priest
~ by Anita V
Dear friends,
Greetings from Ashfield / Sydney.
So appreciate connecting!
A ‘pop-up’ Sangha!
Dharma Doodle …
Reflections on Bright & Dark …
Play of light
On the windowsill –
In the neighbours’ carpark.
Surprise!Black biro shining bright
()
By ~ Roshi Susan Murphy
Human beings have suddenly been forced to discover exactly how much we touch our faces. Very interesting. And how much our hands are our primary interface not just with the world but with each other’s worlds, in the general run of everyday life.
And then these highly receptive fingers of feel reach like tendrils for our faces… partly searching in space to prove we exist, is that at least partly it?
When I first heard the anouncement of ‘Don’t touch your face!’ as a mutually life-saving slogan for our sudden new world, not only did I begin to notice that soon after hearing it how frequently I did touch my face, I also heard it as a koan.
Face… such an interesting word. What we ‘face’ things with. The face we put upon things. The face behind which we hide. The face that draws the eyes to meet another pair of eyes and begin to read the lineaments of another human being’s soul. The tiny set of variations – minutely particular miniscule differences in shape and position of eyes, nose, mouth – that generates currently nearly 8 billion instantly recognizable personal faces.
As Maxine was suggesting on Sunday afternoon, one way we can locate a very good practice point in ‘Don’t touch your face!’ is most directly a keener noticing of what we are doing and being in this very moment. As Taylor Plimpton suggested recently in Tricycle, “… just because you feel an itch on your face does not mean you need to scratch it.” Instead, experience it fully, and let its sensation keep you present, awake, alive. Notice your desire to solve it, fix it, respond to it—but don’t. Keep your hands settled and calm. Let the itch rise and fall. What’s the worse that can happen if you don’t scratch it? Will that tickle on your nose kill you? No, but apparently, scratching it in the era of COVID-19 might.”
And then if you must, scratch your nose with your sleeve or the back of your hand … before going crazy.
But there’s another way to turn this koan in the light of the Dharma, touching (excuse the dangerous word) into the koan, ’What is your original face, the one you had before even your parents were born?’ In the light of this koan, is it even possible to avoid the touch?
Let’s inquire into this matter of face, and touch, at our next gathering, on Sunday.