Dharma talk delivered April 26th, 2019 by Christopher Kakuyo Sensei at the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship 

Excerpt from Intimacy with All Things, 

If I am a stranger to my own mind carried away by the rise and fall of thought and feelings I am going to be blind to see the grace that abounds and the final aspect of intimacy that I want to talk about is, the cultivation of the practice of intimacy with “all things”  as Dogen teaches

When we forget ourselves then we are awakened by the myriad of things.

This is because as one teacher puts it,

The myriad things communicate their wisdom with their forms and sounds, and the emptiness, harmony, and uniqueness of the ephemeral self and the world are understood clearly. 

I see this as a call, as an integral part of our mindfulness practice. Through our practice we are invited to become intimate with the sunrise and sunset, slow days basked in boredom, days shorter than a heartbeat. We are invited by the silence to turn our attention to the dance of bees and butterflies, of the color blue or that scent of lilac, the sound of thunder or the crash of waves, to turn our attention to the soil, the sun, to each leaf helping us to breathe, and to become aware of the grace of clouds and their gift of rain. We are invited as we let go of the primacy of self to become aware of the support of the universe sustaining us in each thing on our plate for dinner – In this awareness, in the cultivation of intimacy with these things we can learn their wisdom  we can learning from them oneness, It is in the myriad of things that we can meet in the absence of the idea of each another. That is where true intimacy is found.

"Our aspiration is for awakening but If we decided to wait until we are awakened to help others, what good would that be. Our vows are the vows of ordinary human beings sparked by love, we vow to become wounded healers. Our awakening is in the vow itself "

- Christopher Kakuyo Sensei

"I don’t know" also applies to our practice. When we think we Know with a capital K what mediation is, what Buddhism is, what awakening is, even who we are, we cut ourselves off from what these really are and by so doing we keep them from manifesting in our lives naturally, unhindered by our silly meddling."

Christopher Kakuyo Sensei

In this Dharma Talk, Christopher Kakuyo Sensei looks at how we can get stuck in the past and how doing so pulls us away from the ground of being that can only be found in the flow of "Now".

From What are you Carrying,

" My biggest reason for visiting the past was to find the answer to the chant-like question that echoed in my heart and in my head, "Why me?, Why me?"  Why me? is ultimately an unknowable question. Maybe it is the first "koan" we are ever given. In my own experience, wrestling with that questions, caused me to spend so much time in the past that I missed so much of what was in front of me. The flow of Now carried me along regardless and I discovered that when we get stuck in the past we become nothing more than spectators looking backward. Our lives are so much more than that. At the heart of every living thing is its innate suchness, an inherent beingness that can only be found in the flow of Now.  Ultimately everything else is either wake or illusion." 

Christopher Kakuyo Sensei

Hello everyone,

I have gotten behind in my recording schedule and I am working on getting back in the groove.  So here is a guided meditation that I wrote for our Summer Retreat in the Uinta Mountains. This meditation was inspired by a book written by Hideo Yonezawa where he talks about when we breathe we have no control over it - we just breathe and with each breath, we touch the inconceivable. 

So the idea behind this meditation is to help cultivate our awareness of our interconnectedness to all things and through that awareness realize how much we are supported every day by the world around us. And this awareness opens us up to a profound and transformative gratitude. 

Transcript

In this practice, we’ll be cultivating awareness of our interdependence –

“During quietness, you breathe together with the whole world. We breathe as one.” – Gyomay Kubose Sensei

GUIDED MEDITATION

Breathing in, Breathing out

Feel the air filling your lungs

as you breathe in and out feeling the air fill your lungs,

Honor them for allowing you to breathe.

Now think the of trees and plants and all the processes that make breathing possible.

Acknowledging your utter dependence on them for being here right now

Breathing in, Breathing out – be aware of your breath, aware that you are breathing in unison with all living brings –

Now say to yourself,

With each breath I become awarethat the very air I receive into my lungs has been shared

by trees, and flowers,

by bees and bears,

by wolves and whales.

Let us now sit together in this awareness

Now be aware of your breath

feel it fill your lungs

notice the wave-like motion of your breathing

Be aware of how your very life has been, gifted to you,

by the stars that make up the very elements of your body,

by the earth's ocean,

that lives in your in your blood,

gifted to you by soil,

moss and light.

Now sit gently in this awareness.

Breathing in

Breathing out

Feel the air coming into your lungs

Now say to yourself

I am so grateful for all the causes and conditions

allowing me to breathe and share breath with all living things,

in this very moment

Now while centering your attention on your breathing

opening your heart

Say thank you to the stars,

the sea, to the moss and light.

For each inhale and exhale.

Now Breathe in,

Breathe out

Feel the air coming through your nose past your lips,

feel it filling your lungs.

Bring to your awareness of how your very life has been, gifted to you,

by all your ancestors.

Acknowledging that you are breathing in the very same air, that all your ancestors both

human and non-human down through the lineage of time

– each sharing the same breath,

their first breath, and their last breath.

Now with each breath say to your self,

“I am breathing in the first and last breath of my grandparents,

Great-grandparents, even back 100 generations,

The same air that filled their lungs is now filling mine.

Their first breath and their last breath gifted to me.

I now sit in that awareness.”

Now with each breath be aware that the earth.

You are breathing in the same air of the lineage of all our teachers even back to the

Buddha himself, breathing in and out, first and the last breath of the Buddha –

With each inhale and exhale the Buddha breathes through you

Now – In this still moment as your breath in and out

feel the whole world breathing with you breathing as one.

Feel that endless connection that supports your existence.

Sit in that awareness.

Now slowly open your eyes

Kakuyo Sensei continues this podcast with ideas of the Four Graces of Won Buddhism and looking how Naikan reflection relates to this grace. 

Excerpt

"Gratitude is born out of the realization of how much is given, up until now we have not been able to see the abundance. The small egoic-self’s constant craving and its relentless state of perceived scarcity is finally permeated by the reality of so much grace; by a new understanding of the oneness of life. This is only magnified when we realize that a similar grace surrounds us because of the many others that support us."

Kakuyo Sensei continues talking about the Path of Gratitude. In this podcast episode, he shares his thoughts on oneness and the Four Graces of Won Buddhism and how we can cultivate our awareness of our absolute interdependence will all things. 

From the podcast

"So understanding the truth of our interdependence our mutual resonance as Soga Ryojin writes, our very being is relational; this is oneness – and our natural response to oneness is an appreciative humility. We become aware of a daily grace – something that is beyond self-power, self-conceit – an inherent gift, something beyond us that is also us. The whole, the one.  These simple insights offer us an invitation to take notice of the grace we receive every day."  - Kakuyo Sensei

Kakuyo Sensei on the Four Graces of Won Buddhism

"Contemplation and practice with each of these graces open us up to the reality of our interdependence or as the Buddha taught Pratītyasamutpāda translated as dependent origination dependent co-arising – and as we reflect on each of these realities, each of these intersections, we begin to cultivate a deep awareness of each of these graces, and by doing so affirming the universal self as our habitual primacy of the small-self begins to dissolve in to the very ground of gratitude."

Enjoy the podcast

In the podcast episode, Christopher Kakuyo Sensei talks about the problem with the ideas of deserving and not deserving, and how we all can aspire to transcend the dualism and suffering inherent in these concepts. 

"We love our concepts of deserving and not deserving, it gives us a sense of controlling our worlds., I am not saying that we do not need to “earn” a living or do the things that we need to do to be responsible for our families, what I am saying is that our sense of “deserving” is skewed. "

This podcast is based on a Dharma talk given at the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship on 7/8/2018

 Over the years we have talked a lot about our stories of self and how these stories are rarely examined, and how our sense of a solid, unchanging self is really a creation of these unexamined stories – today I would like to talk more about this –

As a child I was raised to be a martyr – my mother being Catholic, unconsciously had sewn the book of martyrs deep within her heart and when I came along, into mine also ...it too became my story, a dubious one at best.  Guy Claxton has written, 

 “..consciousness is a mechanism for constructing dubious stories whose purpose is to defend a superfluous and inaccurate sense of self. "

So begins our podcast about our stories of self and our need for introspection, as Haya Akegarasu wrote, to identify which ones are ours and which ones were stolen, borrowed or painted on so we can give them back or scrape them off to touch our true selves.

 Over the years we have talked a lot about our stories of self and how these stories are rarely examined, and how our sense of a solid, unchanging self is really a creation of these unexamined stories – today I would like to talk more about this –

As a child I was raised to be a martyr – my mother being Catholic, unconsciously had sewn the book of martyrs deep within her heart and when I came along, into mine also ...it too became my story, a dubious one at best.  Guy Claxton has written, 

 “..consciousness is a mechanism for constructing dubious stories whose purpose is to defend a superfluous and inaccurate sense of self. "

So begins our podcast about our stories of self and our need for introspection, as Haya Akegarasu wrote, to identify which ones are ours and which ones were stolen, borrowed or painted on so we can give them back or scrape them off to touch our true selves.