Joan Halifax: Rohatsu: Green Dharma (Part 1)

Sensei Kaz Tanahashi and Roshi Joan Halifax open the first full day of Rohatsu Green Dharma sesshin with their dharma talk on Indra’s Net and what it means to hold this mindset. Due to technical difficulties, the first part of this talk in which Sensei Kaz Tanahashi speaks is unavailable. In the second part of the talk, Roshi talks about awakening as excluding nothing, just as the Avatamsaka Sutra, which is the central text studied in this Rohatsu, which Kaz translates as the “Flower Splendor Sutra,” seems to exclude nothing in its 1643 pages. We can get lost in this sutra, just as we can lose ourselves in the “pressure cooker” that is sesshin. Roshi reminds us that “the practice is to get lost so that we can find out who we really are.”

Roshi references the image of the lotus flower several times throughout the talk, noting that it would not exist without the mud. She asks us: “How do we let mud nourish us and not disable us?” Roshi offers Francis Cooke’s description of Indra’s Net to describe the perfect interconnectedness of everything, a view that holds everything as relying on everything else, making all things valuable, making “everything count.” This mindset of interdependence is the mindset that can transform and liberate our small suffering and turn us toward the suffering of the world with compassion, a practice that neuroscience and social psychology confirm “lights up our lives.” Roshi quotes Okumura Roshi saying that “our vows are endless” and that “we will never graduate” from what Roshi describes as a finishing school designed to “finish a mindset that is destructive and nourish one that is loving.” She gives examples of ways that we “actualize this sensibility awkwardly” during Rohatsu, “cogenerating the net of Indra.”

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