Carolyn Hoshin Jikai Dille has been a dedicated student of Buddhist practices for over 30 years in the Soto Zen, Early Buddhist, Insight, and Tibetan traditions. She is currently a Guiding Teacher at Jikoji Zen Center* and the Floating Zendo online in San Jose. She has taught in dharma communities since 1996 and has practiced and studied intensively with several teachers in the United States and Asia. She holds dharma transmission from Angie Enji Boissevain in the Phoenix Cloud lineage, is a graduate of Spirit Rock’s CDL program, and has presented and facilitated Dharma and Art seminars and the Dharma and Art Whole Life Path course at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Massachusetts.

Carolyn is a poet, writer, and founding editor of Leaping Clear, www.leapingclear.org, a digital magazine of the arts featuring artists with meditative and contemplative practices. On occasion she offers retreats and workshops that integrate meditation and artistic expression.

Full Transcript

Good morning, good friends. I feel like I know you. I have met some of you in person and feel like I know you from the wonderful stories that Pamela has shared about your sangha. So it's a real joy to be together here with you on this beautiful, just past the Equinox spring morning, wherever you are. It's a beautiful morning to discuss the Dharma together. I thank you Pamela and Monica for inviting me to be with you on your Saturday meeting. And I thank all of you for everything you do to make the arrangements to manifest all this through this wonderful technology we have that we can be together. We can be together even though we're separated by distance. It's almost like a story in early Buddhism, like from the Lotus Sutra. Here we all are.

I did have a thought that went through my mind as Pamela was reading that little bio of me. I thought, I wonder what all those things are. I wonder what the necessity of having, I mean, I do see it, but it's sort of funny.

I've been thinking a lot about joy because it's an easy season to do that. It's spring and joy just is everywhere. Joy is a natural part of this time of year. So it's easy to tune into. And also thinking about equanimity and how they work together. Because there's also a lot of things that are happening in these moments in this world that we live in, this planet that we live on, that aren't joyful at all. So how do we meet those and how do we put those together? Joy and equanimity.

Those two are also part of the Brahma Viharas from early Buddhism. The dwelling places of the gods is the literal translation or the celestial beings or the devas. So the ones that have maybe a little wider, larger view of everything that's going on. And you may be familiar with these two, metta, great friendliness, karuna, great compassion, mudita, joy, often called empathic joy or joy in the happiness of others. And then finally, upeka, equanimity. As usual in early Buddhism, these kind of groupings and lists have relationships to one another. It's not random the order in which they are. They're considered perhaps stepwise, but it's more of a natural flow. One aspect of our heart, mind flows into another, because these are all not only aspects of our heart, mind, but we can actually feel them in our body, heart, mind. So all these qualities - great friendliness, compassion - one opens to another and it's a mandala, so they keep on going on around.

I'd like to begin with a quote from Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, philosopher and visionary from late 19th and early 20th century in Bengal. He says, "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and beheld service was joy." I was fortunate on one pilgrimage in India to go to the place, this community that Tagore founded. Called Santiniketan, it still exists in a form, and it was his vision. It was the way he brought joy into the world, his service. A large community, radical in its time with equality of all castes and classes, women and children were also treated as equals. Sort of a really radical view, particularly in the India of that time. And still in the world today, actually. And he was well off and he used his means to find this property and create this whole community that included everyone and everything. Farmers, gardeners, artists, musicians, poets, philosophers. And had it for many years actually, until the first World War, I believe, that was thriving and functioning. And his wife was an equal part of this as well.

So what does that mean, life is joy? Maybe in our discussion, that might be something you would want to share, what that means for you. One meaning that I found is that we ourselves are joy. Another is that joy is all around us. And we, when we look for it, or when we just are aware of it and can recognize it. So here that awareness is a key, as it is to my understanding of all forms of Buddhist practice.

Spring, again, we just look around and I'm sure you're all aware I could see when I came onto the zoom that everyone was pretty joyful. Pretty happy to just be together and feeling the spring energy, even when it's really cold. And living if you get to live in a cold climate or where it snows regularly, pretty much every winter. Then you can even feel the more subtle levels when spring starts to come. You don't even have to see the obvious when the trees leaf out and hear the crickets and the frogs. And as we do here in California, all the beautiful outer manifestations, the little bulbs popping up and the flowers opening. It just goes on and on. There's that joy everywhere. And tuning into it, it actually changes our mind and our bodies, physiologically, psychologically.

And that's kind of where the equanimity, which is in my understanding or my view of it, is that service to actually move out of just the joy and the appreciation of joy, but into waking to what we might do in our lives to enact the joy. In a way, it's not like we have to do anything because it's just being joyful. Other people pick it up, even with the masks on. We radiate that and we're all sensitive beings, even the most deluded of us, we could say. We humans are just constituted to be sensitive to our outside world through our sense doors. And we're especially attuned to other animals of our nature, the other humans. And people see that and smile when you smile. And they can see the smile even under the mask, if you have a mask on. So that's just the really that's maybe all we need. And that's enough.

But we also often feel that there's more, especially when we look at that other level of reality, which is the reality as well, of wars going on, the Ukraine of internal divisions in our own country, of a pandemic, of a plague virus, and climate change. All these things are all going on, too. And sometimes they can be overwhelming or even if not overwhelming, we don't know exactly how to meet them except to kind of shut down or turn away in a way and say, oh, yes, well, I know that. Or maybe a better way to say that is we just frame it in an intellectual box like, okay, we know abstract, we know that this is going on and maybe we contribute some money if we have the means to do that, to help. But to really connect with what we might do in this world, in whatever sphere it is, I think that's really where the joy and equanimity can work together, can kind of reinforce each other as our life flows on.

And we can think of something to do. An idea will come to us, oh, I can do this, this is something I can do. And I know in sangha there's always so much that we all do just to, just showing up for being together. Amplifies the joy. Sometimes I think of these little sanghas, which mostly I've been connected with in my life, and sometimes somewhat larger ones. But there is constellations in the net of Indra and they glow and pulse in a constellation way with their own energy of joy and service and all the beautiful qualities of being a human being that we're born with. That's not denying that we're born with these other qualities too, of course.

But another of my views and my understandings actually, and my direct experience in my life as it's unfolded, of seeing how moving in the world from a positive place, a place of joy, is what truly creates and advances my own understanding, my own being, and also helps the being, helps others. So that each of us figures that out, what we can do. But there are always more opportunities.

So I really also want to emphasize that I do see this as a discussion. Like many things, a dharma talk is a form, and of course we have form and emptiness, but really who holds the wisdom? We each hold the wisdom, and we each learn the wisdom from one another. We're the ones who are here now. That's from the Native American tradition, and I mentioned that. I've mentioned this one phrase that stuck with me over the years. We are the ones, and Pamela looked it up right away and said, where does that come from? And she found the actual quote, which I don't remember now. It's from the Native American tradition, the Native U.S. American tradition. But just as we learn from Shakyamuni Buddha and all of our ancestors, Bodhidharma, Shantideva, Nagarjuna, Dogen, of course, and our preceptors, our teachers, we also learn from one another.

So circling back to being aware of joy, I'd like to quote, as I do from poets, this awareness is the foundation of joy, and that's where we have the choice to see the joy and to enact whatever we need to enact from that place of joy. And this awareness is also the basic human quality that holds everything. So one way that I like in a poem of expressing this is from Izumi Shikibu. She's a 10th century Japanese courtesan attendant to the Empress of Japan. And she was a courtesan and a Buddhist nun. And her haiku goes, "Watching the moon at dawn, solitary, mid-sky. I knew myself completely, no part left out." There are also from the early Theravada nuns, there are poems like that.

So knowing the whole, knowing the joy, and also knowing one can hold everything, can hold the suffering, the seeming contradictions in the world that we live in. Knowing that we are whole and united, unified, integrated, is what gives us the actual physical and mental energy, I believe, to enact in the world. And I think that's the most important thing. And that's each of us. Each of us has that.

So from an American poet, 20th century, Wallace Stevens, "I was the world in which I walked and what I saw or heard or felt came not but from myself. And there I knew myself more truly and more strange." It is miraculous and a wonderful mystery how this all goes on together.

But sometimes we do find joy hard to feel. And our human animal bodies, animal human bodies, we can become fearful. And that's the big cause of our suffering. Or maybe not a cause, what's fear? It's just, it's a natural part of us. It's when we crystallize around the fear, hold onto it, like we know, as we know when we cling to anything. It's from the early Buddhist text, nothing whatsoever is worth clinging to. Nothing whatsoever, including equanimity and joy. It all flows through. But it's so, it's this question we have, Koan, perhaps, of knowing that and holding that and feeling that and moving as we also do in humans. We are also deeply creative beings. We want to create, we want to share, we want to enact these beautiful qualities.

So we tend to become fearful by just the way our DNA is structured. By ideas, we can become fearful of ideas. And by death, even though we know that's one thing we also know, there is life and there is death, but we can become afraid of that. Or the idea of death. And certainly directly by threats, if we're threatened directly. And that is the world we live in at one level of reality. But it's not the only reality. And it's not the actual reality of being in our bodies, being embodied creatures, sitting here breathing and living our lives, our lives flowing through us and flowing together because we're exchanging our energy of speaking and listening and hearing. That's so kind of above, below and all around us that is this reality that contains all those realities of fear and the actual names and situations that are fearful. War, death, cruelty, but above and below and beyond all that is just the simplicity of being alive now. It's so simple. It eludes us really. That's, I mean, it eludes me sometimes. I just like, oh yeah, well, there's just this. I'm just right here right now.

So that's our practice. That's why we sit down and let this life flow through us. So allow the simplicity, our whole body, mind, heart to be integrated. And our particular practice, shikantaza, is our bodies resting in life. So allowing ourselves to rest, so important in our culture, which is a busy, busy do-do, hurry, hurry kind of place. Dogen says we sit, we experience the ease and joy of zazen. So we let life flow through us as we sit and particularly about thought without clinging to thought or privileging thought. We also really tend to privilege thought in our culture and divide the world into this kind of vijnana world, the discriminating thought world as distinct from prajna, the big picture kind of understanding that includes thought. It includes all abstraction and thought, but we tend to fixate and cling.

As I remember when I first started practicing zen, which I came to after a lot of insight practice, that and reading Dogen, whom I just, I went, wow, this guy's really onto something. That was a thought I had. But reading his phrase, think not thinking, what could that mean? I like Uchiyama's metaphor of opening the hand of thought. It's also back to early Buddhism. It's all in our deep lineage. Nothing whatsoever is worth clinging to. Just open, open the hands, open the heart, open hands, open heart. I think that's actually a kind of a logo of a service organization.

So, another question is what is fear? Maybe you could look into that more. If there's time. My sense is that a big part of it, certainly for myself, is that you've seen this. We don't want to face the radical impermanence that's separate from everything. There's just no getting around it. Everything is changing all the time. And everything goes into some other form or shape. And we, and when we die, many of us don't even know what that form would be. Some of us have ideas about it, held lightly or held, or held openly or, or hung onto, clung onto. But everything is always coming and going.

So, we think that by trying to be in control or, or fixating on things that that's going to stop the fear or push it away. But, but the very effort of, of that trying to get things right, fix things, be in control, causes the fear to linger and clouds our vision. And it freezes our hearts or it can freeze our hearts. So, the poet Blake, "He who binds to himself a joy, does the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity's sunrise."

So, Shakyamuni Buddha recommended and sort of part of his whole when he did the Dhamma chakra, the turning of the wheel, recommended, you know, looking at, looking at the fear, looking at the suffering that's, that fear causes. And getting to know it directly how it, how it feels, how we sense it, even though we don't may not have the words to describe it, or well, it's really impossible to articulate it completely, or maybe even at all. But we try because language is also our great gift and way of being together as humans. So, look at that directly and then accept that. And there's where, as Buddha pointed out, there's where we have choice, there's where we have real agency and action, possibilities to move with equanimity and see clearly and decide what our, what our embodiment will be, how we will show up and be in the world.

And just a little reminder that he saw this with the help from some friends. So that's why we're all together here. Because it wasn't like it just he was sitting there and all of a sudden at the end of the night and morning, like the vision occurred and then, you know, and then here we are 2600 years later, his friends, you probably all know the story, but for me, it's worth repeating, he needed the friends to encourage him to not just, not just say, I don't know, I don't think they'll get it. You know, he said to his friends, I don't think they'll get it. And they said, no, you have to just put it out there.

Whoever will get it will get it, you know. So in his teaching and in the teachings that have followed from that to us, the ones we study the most, Dogen is really beautiful and brilliant at this. And he saw that just recognizing that and being in tune with that and even not clinging to it was not enough. It needed more. There's our friend Shanti Deva and there's Thakur, you know. Life is joy and service is joy and service is life.

So I think that's enough for me, except I would like to read one poem to you that I wrote actually many years ago. I shared this with Pamela and she said, "Well, would you share it with the sangha?" And I said, yes, I'd be happy to. The poem is called "Field" and it begins with a quotation from Richard Feynman: "A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven."

Vast, rich, stony, deep, the field is

where all seeds open sooner or later.

Thistles, blue and whitening.

Stargazer lilies face up.

Peaches and plums blossom and ripen.

Endless the ocean where life floats or swims or clings.

The jelly, the shark, the limpid,

no deeper than fathoms and they have never been alone.

The sky is blue and gray and black.

It covers the world while clouds and stars take shape,

dissolve, disappear.

It holds the light and darkness in the yes and no of truth.

What we are born knowing we must recollect.

Everything is always happening and trust is beyond belief.

So I thank you very much for your attention and I'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to offer on this subject or anything else that's up for you now.