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. ()
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)
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Talk #1 from Term 1 of our Online Zen Group for 2020.
Teacher: Roshi Susan Murphy
Click on the recording below to listen to this talk now. We will upload a transcription when it becomes available. ()
If you have a Zen practice you’ll already have a pretty strong sense of the value and productivity of difficulty. And especially of sticking with what is difficult. Of not turning away, not denying but actively including even the most messy and difficult matters, feelings, circumstances that arise in awareness.
I want to take up this aspect of things today, following on from where we were last time, talking about deep fears and the forms they can take, including the strong escape attempts that a lot of feelings can inspire. Such feeling can be as simple and obvious as fear, but fear can also be compounded by shame, anxiety, even envy. Envy in the sense of ‘Why does this have to be happening to me (not that other luckier person)!” And deeper in from that, possibly the fear that wonders, “And why should it not?”
Let’s look into this matter through a case from the Record of Dongshan, the 8th century figure from whose name and whose practice the Soto School of Zen derives…
I am humbled and honoured by the invitation to offer the opening keynote address to such an important and luminous gathering of women!
Twenty minutes is a very short time in which to address the obvious fact and impact of the silencing and marginalizing of women in the Buddhist tradition for the last several thousand years — and its studied indifference towards the venerable enlightened women who actually managed, against the odds, to break past such formidable barriers to practice, teach and inspire others.
It is of course impossible to reconcile this act of deep injury to the lives of hundreds of generations of women, with the actual core insights of the Buddhist path itself – which is waking up into direct awareness of the undivided and indivisible nature of mind and reality. This we find to be the very source of the natural flow of un-self-conscious compassion that cannot help but respond to the cries of the world!
Talk #1 from Spring Sesshin 2018. You can listen to other talks from this sesshin here.
Speaker: Roshi Susan Murphy
Click here to download a printable transcript of this talk [PDF]
Roshi Susan:
“As everybody knows who has attended sesshin before, this is the night of not knowing – of not knowing as our most intimate practice-realization.
‘Intimate’ is a way of saying: awake, complete, present, not even a speck of difference, as intimate and close in to unabridged reality as that. And I love the fact that the word intimate also offers the tenderness of being, because that is what awake-ness is.
I was tempted to call this talk, “Awake in the dark”, since it is the dark of not knowing in which we awaken and of course at this moment it’s night as well. But I actually think I’ll call it, “Yes, we have no bananas”. I always loved the fact that there’s such a triumphant “Yes!” before the completely sanguine, “We have no bananas”. The idea that no bananas is so joyously proclaimed, recognized, as a welcome matter in some way.
What would a no-banana taste like?
‘Mu’ is of course this one syllable short of complete silence with which we practice letting go of the mind-road. The mind-road is not the kind of open, empty road we can easily love, accompanying you with no-birds, no-trees, no-insects, and best of all, no-you. The mind-road is more like the pressured highway, whizzing with traffic, burdened with noise, shouting at you with signs, and always making the false promise of ‘somewhere to go’.