Eon Zen Dharma Holder Geoff Shōun O'Keeffe shares about the Three Tenets of Zen Peacemakers: not-knowing (not holding onto ideas or positions) bearing witness (not turning away), and taking action that arises from not-knowing and bearing witness.

He offers Roshi Eve Marko's recent reflections on the violence and fear in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine as a profound practice of the three tenets. As she writes “woe unto us if we have lost the ability to feel another’s pain.” How do we include everyone and everything in our empathy and compassion? How do we take action without taking a fixed position? 

Read Eve Marko’s blog post here: "Where Am I Living?"

Learn more about the Three Tenets of Zen Peacemakers

The antidote for the poison of ignorance of delusion is wisdom, or clear seeing into our true nature. But this wisdom is not something you can attain — and there is no shortcut. It arises as embodied experience through the practice of not-knowing or not-abiding in anything. Including not abiding in not-abiding. No one to abide. No one to not-abide. Not getting stuck anywhere.

In the Shobogenzo, Dogen encourages us to “simply release and forget both your body and mind and throw yourself into the House of Buddha.” Releasing our ideas about the ways things are, our preferences, opinions, and truths, and our desire for clarity, "then there can be no obstacle in anyone’s mind.” This spirit of practice is essential.

Ignorance is one of the three poisons that the Buddha taught which create all suffering, and it’s also the root of all three. Our ignorance or lack of awareness and unconsciousness of our true nature creates a false sense of self. Instead of living in reality, we live in denial or fantasy, which perpetuates the other two poisons, craving and aversion.

To counteract ignorance, we have to choose to live with what is, including our confusion — to radically accept everything, including ignorance itself. Master Joshu said “I do not dwell in clarity.” This is the spirit of the Holy Fool, the grace of foolishness. Can you live like this, and also not attach to ignorance either? To live without any contrivance?

As lay practitioners, we are called to explore our relationships with self, with others, and with our work in the world. How do we tell the difference between the egoic voice and our deeper voice — the voice of our true self — in these relationships?

How do we let go of our self-centered motivations and step into our true calling? If my practice is to let go of everything, when I have let go, what happens next?

In Zen retreats, we practice walking meditation. We carry the same focus and awareness of our sitting meditation into movement. Thich Naht Hahn said to “walk as if your feet are kissing the Earth.” What did he mean by this?

For many of us, we dash about, always in a hurry, scarcely conscious that we are walking the Earth, always thinking about the next thing we have to do. Our feet might be kissing the Earth, but we don’t know it. We’re missing the most intimate thing. How can we connect with our lives in the deepest way possible?

When we turn the light inward and become a lamp unto ourself, we find our true power, our agency. In our delusion, we often give this power away.

Peter Doobinin, co-founder of New York Insight Meditation Center, wrote that “Mindfulness, according to what the Buddha taught, is a practice of conscious decision making — it’s a practice of making choices, beginning with the decision to put our mind on the breath, which leads to true happiness.”

What type of wisdom and power unfolds when we make the decision to practice? How does agency differ from willfulness? How do we take responsibility for our actions, for our life?

The Buddha taught “Be a lamp unto your self.” To study the self, to become fully intimate with our life, we practice not resisting or grasping at anything we experience. Through this practice, we fundamentally shift our relationship with ourself, and find our true power — our agency — in our life, in our relationships and in our work in the world. This is the path of Zen.

(apologies for the poor video quality due to technology issues that evening)

Eon Zen Senior Student and Practice Leader Lisa Gakyo Schaewe shares her experience with the 7th Grave Precept along with excerpts from Nancy Mujo Baker’s book “Opening to Oneness: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to the Zen Precepts.”

Often we react to a situation by elevating ourselves or blaming others arises when we feel fearful and vulnerable. Making ourself bigger or more important is a self-preservation mechanism. With our Zen practice, we can see this tendency and how it comes from a feeling of separateness. What is happening when we blame others? Can we accept that we don’t have to defend anything?

What is delusion? Zen Master Dogen said "To carry youself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is enlightenment." Do you experience yourself as experiencing things? Or is life just happening?

Our view of ourself as a separate self and our ideas often get in the way of seeing this, creating a contraction in the body-mind that is self-reinforcing. This is why not-knowing is such a big part of our practice. In zazen, if we're truly practicing, we can explore this edge. Can we let go of our contracted, deluded view and allow experience to experience itself? Can we wake up to reality?

It’s a common human tendency to overthink, to have and hold onto opinions, to seek meaning, to categorize and analyze. Our brains do what brains do. And ideas and concepts are very enticing. They can also be useful, at times. Our practice is to hold them lightly — to not identify with our thoughts or to get too caught up with them. To keep it simple.

In his book, “Seeing One Thing Through,” the late Roshi Sojun Mel Weitsman remind us that "the practice of zazen is just 'to be’… If you can settle on just being, you can experience your completeness.”

How simple. We have all we need to practice being who we are.

LISA GAKYO SCHAEWE | Reflecting on her life as an artist and her experiences working with people displaced by the fires on the island of Maui, Eon Zen Practice Leader Lisa Gakyo Schaewe invites us to look deeply into the bardo of our own lives.

Who am I? Who are you? Where am I in relation to space, time, intention? Where are you? Am I ok? Are you ok? What is ok? How do you know?

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Impermanence is a primary seal of Buddhism -- it is the reality of life. Everything is always changing. We’re always in transition from one state to another. Our habit patterns of our mind are not very oriented to appreciating this constant transformation. Bardo practice help us to experience this at the most intimate level.

If we feel each moment deeply, then we also feel everything always changing. Realizing this is an opportunity to really deepen into our true nature, our awakened mind. Trungpa Rinpoche refers this as the “island in the stream.”

What is the ground beneath the changes? What is it that experiences these changes? What doesn’t change?

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Faith, Doubt and Determination are the Three Pillars of our Zen Practice. Together, these qualities can serve as a firm foundation for our practice and as a useful guide to see where we may be out of balance. Faith is the experience that we are fundamentally awake and that we can actualize that nature through the practice of zazen. Doubt is the inquiry into this reality. What is this? Who am I? Who is awake?

The more your faith, the bigger and deeper the questions. When we return again and again to this experience of awakeness through deep absorption, we fully internalize our identitification as that awakeness. No matter what arises, we sit in “the condition of openness,” as Maezumi Roshi called it. Does your faith diminish when things go differently than we expect?

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Our karma is perpetually giving life to our life, and surrendering parts of our life into death. This is how we live-and-die. Eon Zen Senior Student and Practice Leader Lisa Gakyo offers words reflecting on this from Pat Enkyo O’Hara Roshi, Pico Iyer, and Taizan Maezumi Roshi.

How are we actually being with this reality, here, and now? Am I fully living?

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Be still

Look and don’t turn away.

Listen to what your heart tells you to do.

We can always embrace the Three Tenets, moment by moment, but certain times are very rich practice fields. With terrorism, war, violence, fear, and uncertainty in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, and ongoing with Russia in Ukraine, now is one of those times.

The Three Tenets are a core Zen practice. It is about waking up to the reality of the oneness and interconnectedness of all life, and then doing everything we can to relieve suffering in a suffering world.

In the words of Bernie Glassman, from a letter he wrote following the election in the United States in 2016:

“Honoring differences while seeking common ground is the challenge facing us. This is the best time to invoke the Three Tenets and bring forth the mind of Not-Knowing, Bearing Witness…. and to honor the Response that comes forth from this present moment. Please use whatever practice grounds you in this space, be it meditation, mindfulness, ceremony, or prayer. Grounding our perceptions and actions in our experience of the wholeness of life rather than in fear and bias. May we serve this whole with strength, patience, humor and determination."

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In our life, we make and cling to distinctions, alive and dead, dreaming or awake, enlightenment or delusion — but it’s not like that. Everything seems to have a real existence, but when we look deeply and see reality as it is, we realize the line from the Lotus Sutra: "this fleeting world is like a phantom, like a dream.” And yet, it is also real.

Can we truly appreciate our life as the Bardo of formless form, of waking dream? Can we surrender to the mystery of what is?

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Tibetan Teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote about the experience of the Bardo as being both confused and awake at the same time, of the possibility of experiencing both absolute sanity and complete madness simultaneously. Both/And.

This bothness is the quality of awakeness, of Zen -- to have all of our experience present at the same time.

Can you invite this both/and into your awareness?

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Our Head Trainee for Fall 2023 Ango shares the Taoist story of the Farmer to explore the experience of the Bardo. The Farmer goes through a series of events that might be judged as fortunate or unfortunate. Rather than looking at each event as good or bad and being caught in the suffering of this view, the Farmer sees life as an ongoing stream flux and flow, without certainty, where everything is an integrated process of becoming.

How do we live in this way? Can we see our life — not just look at it — truly see it, fully, directly, without identifying with it or labeling it as one thing or another?

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