Merry Christmas!

メリー　クリシマス

Mehri Kurisumasu!

Form Guide

As you'll have seen if you subscribe to the StoneWater RSS feed - or have visited the site from today on - the SWZ board have released the final version of the Form Guide (you can find it at the link at the bottom of this article). This has been produced mainly by John Suigen Kenworthy supervised by Keizan Sensei with input from Tenshin Roshi and others at Yokoji ZMC.  So it's as definitive as something like this could ever be!

Form (the ritual elements of Zen practice) is one of the aspects of Zen practice that sometimes surprises people new to Zen.  There's a story told by Kapleau Roshi that he was with a companion visiting a monastery in Japan.  The Roshi greeted them and lead them into the Buddha hall, where they were surprised by being asked to bow & office incense at an altar.

"Why would we do that?  Didn't the ancestors spit on statues or burn them for firewood back in the day?" asked Kapleau's companion (though prob not in those words!).

"You can spit," replied the abbot.  "I choose to bow."

We often feel more comfortable with the iconoclasm of Zen than its traditions... which is odd, because iconoclasm is supposed to be challenging and unsettling.  Instead, we're challenged by tradition, by the inverse of iconoclasm.  Perhaps it needs a name - "icon-servation" or something!

Anyway...

Over the next weeks & months we'll try to ensure that we stick to the form as laid down in this guide.  Where individual circumstances mean we can't practically follow a certain instruction, we'll do our own thing of course... but there's value in surrendering our own fixed views about what's right to do.

Form Guide:
http://www.stonewaterzen.org/uploads/images/Form%20Guide.pdf

Xmas & New Year closing

Just a quick note to confirm that the last zazen of 2012 will be on 17 December.  The following two Mondays are Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, so we'll not meet then.

2013 will start with zazen as regular on Monday 7th January, when we'll start looking at The Platform Sutra properly.

What are you doing for Rohatsu?

There's really only one 'high day' that has been imported from Japanese Buddhism into Western Zen - rohatsu.  Though the name simply indicates "8th December", rohatsu is the most high-profile observance on the zazenka's calendar: the anniversary of the enlightenment of the Buddha.

In the Lake District, a rohatsu retreat is about to start that will culminate on the weekend of rohatsu, and this pattern is echoed all over the world in Zen centres everywhere.  For those who can't manage a week off at this time of year, how do they mark this occasion?

In Liverpool, I'm running an all-night sit to follow the regular Saturday zazenkai (this year on rohatsu itself), and I hope a few hardy folk will join me for that.  It's not as tough as it sounds, we sit in shifts and do some sleeping too!

What might you do?