Week Two, I Don't Know

Yes, it's already starting to feel as if this is something that we do! People were anxious to talk about their experience. During the week, two people emailed me. One had accidentally found the Yunmen koan while she was reading The Mind Of Clover. Somehow this koan made her think of the precepts so she went there to read about them again. Then she was inspired to take The Blue Cliff Record out of the library to see more about the koan. The other person looked it up in his copy and wanted me to be aware of the different translation and also a different one in Secrets of The Blue Cliff Record too.

I started tonight by asking if anyone had anything they wanted to share about their experience with the koan from last week. One woman talked about the parts of her life that felt like sickness and her difficulty in seeing the medicine. In the end somehow the medicine translated into her baking cookies and putting them in individual little bags for all of us. The musician made up a little dance with his hands and arms which he showed us and we all did it together, a sort of mini personal sun salutation on sickness and medicine, culminating in "what am I" reaching towards the sky. The woman who was reluctant last time about doing koans forgot about the koan but then at the last minute remembered and related it to the line in the Precious Mirror Samadhi: "the meaning does not reside in the words but a pivotal moment brings it forth". She was wondering about where "it" comes from and about the inadequacy of words.

Then we went around the room to share about the koan this week Bodhidharma's Vast Emptiness. Another jazz musician talked about how knowing and not knowing are both necessary to do jazz. He's a relatively new and younger guy and we seem to be getting a bunch of them coming around lately. He brought a friend who has never been here before and his response to what his favorite color is was to put his hands on his heart and then he opened his arms outward to show who he is. Musician #1 talked about learning to play piano, not his instrument, when we were talking about not knowing, and how that was a not knowing for him to have to forget all he thought and thinks he knows to take on this new instrument, his instructor coaxing him that he knows what he needs to know just let go and let it happen.

Ejo told a Daniel Pinkwater story about him making a deal with his teacher (not sure what kind of teacher) that he could do whatever he wanted but he had to come to all of his appointments, he couldn't miss any, that was the only condition. Each time he came, his teacher laid out the tools (?) in a different pattern. It goes something like then he asked his teacher why everything was laid out in a different pattern each time and the teacher answered that he (the teacher) was allowed to do whatever he wanted to do as well.