The Trace of the Moonbird

On Tuesday 7 January Zen nun Maddie E Shin Parisio from Norwich visited us at the Old Street Zen group and gave us an insightful introduction to the Cheng-dao ke (Japanese Shōdōka) - The Song of Awakening - a famous Zen poem by the Chinese Zen teacher Jongjia Xuanjue (Japanese Yoka Daishi.) Maddie has been practicing zazen for many years. She has received bodhisattva ordination from Jean Baby in 1998. Ten years later she received the nun ordination from Philippe Reiryu Coupey - a close disciple of Taisen Deshimaru. Despite having practiced for such a long time, Maddie only recently began to formally study Zen texts. She came across the Shōdōka for the first time a few years ago when she volunteered to transcribe a bunch of old typewriter transcripts of a commentary of Taisen Deshimaru about the poem. Maddie got intrigued and wanted to learn more. She picked up the French translation of this commentary on the poem and has not put it down ever since. What impresses Maddie most is th...

The six pāramitās are essentially a set of virtues or practices that a Buddhist should follow in order to progress towards awakening. They are mentioned repeatedly in major Mahayana sutras such as the Lotus sutra or the Vimalakirti sutra. The pāramitās guide bodhisattvas - mythical Buddhist protectors who have vowed to become Buddhas and to save all beings - as they live through many, many cycles of birth and death. On the way they progressively refine the virtues to ever higher degrees of perfection. The unknown authors of the Mahayana sutras most commonly refer to six pāramitās (Williams 1989): Dāna (giving) Śīla (morality) Kṣānti (patience) Vīrya (effort) Dhyāna (meditative concentration) Prajñā (wisdom) As a programme of recommended practices, the pāramitās are an alternative to the famous eightfold path that Buddha Shakyamuni has revealed in his first teaching following his awakening (The Buddhist Society 2019). So why are there two different paths in Buddh...

These mountains and waters of the present are the expression of the old buddhas. This opening sentence of the Sansuikyō chapter of Shobogenzo, the principal work of Eihei Dōgen, the grand master of Soto Zen, has lost nothing of its mysterious and intriguing beauty over the past 800 years. To this day it captivates followers of the Zen way and nature lovers alike. It also appears to be more accessible to the general audience than many of Dōgen’s other writings. In Sansuikyō Dōgen seems to talk about concrete things in the natural world as opposed to abstract topics like “being”, “time”, or “mind” like in other parts of Shobogenzo as Isho Fujita explains in the foreword. But as soon as we start reading the original, we quickly get a taste of Dōgen’s usual concoction of crystal clear logic and outrageous absurdity, of polemic and poetry. We meet the mountains that walk swifter than the wind and dance over water. Dōgen shows us drops of water full of buddha lands and palaces inhabited b...

Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt, ed. The Essential Dōgen: Writings of the Great Zen Master. Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2013. Available as paperback, Kindle edition and audiobook. In Zen, experience is more valued than intellectual understanding. And it is an unusually direct experience of the teachings of the 13th century grand master of Japanese Zen that the Essential D ō gen offers us. This collection is packed with many of D ō gen’s most famous passages, quotes and poems. The translations and commentary offer deep insights into D ō gen’s thinking whilst matching the poetic style of the original as good as possible in the English language. The book will be welcomed by those who want to read D ō gen but who are not (yet) ready to tackle the full Shobogenzo which is also five times more expensive. It will also be of interest to anybody who is worried about increasing levels of fear and aggression in 21st century Western societies. In the excellent introduction A Walk with D...