Quotes from teisho are run sequentially in the eMirror



"Doug", with her pretty pretty stones, portrait by Ven. Shikai Zuiko osho
    The text continues,
23 唯滯兩邊 寧知一種
Wei chih liang-pien, ning chih i-chung?
Tada ryõhen ni todokooraba, nanzo isshu o shiran ya?

If you swerve to one extreme or the other,
you will miss what this One is.
    It is to the left. It is to the right. It is right in front of you. It is behind you. You are this Oneness of Suchness and emptiness. And yet you can miss it with a slight flick of attention, let alone a lashing and reeling jumble of congealing and discursiveness. Grasping and avoidance, accepting and rejecting, hope and fear, too much pushing, too much relaxing instead of releasing; all of these are extremes even if they are just present as subtle movements of attention.
    If you enact these movements of attention you swerve from resting upright in balance point to leaning to left or right, forward or back. Don't do that. Sit up straight.
    If you are slightly rocking back and forth you are hypnotizing yourself. Unless of course there is physical infirmity in which case trembling and so on are part of how that particular bodymind sits in balance point. By "infirmity" I do not mean that you are merely uncomfortable or that because it is poor you there is a special posture just for you that can look enough like the real thing for you to get by in. It does not matter if you are sitting in a lotus posture, agura, seiza, or on a stool or chair the essential points of the posture are the same: a firm base for the lower body, hands in the mudra, ears over the shoulders, tongue against the palate with the teeth touching but not clenched, eyes over the navel, the belly relaxed, the chest up and open, shoulders back and open, the weight of the upper body resting just slightly back from a plumb line so that it falls into balance point.
    Don't swerve. Don't do that. Sit up straight, be without difficulty.
    Do not fall towards or away from things or from emptiness but fall open to all experiences and let all experiences fall open.


- Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi, beginning teisho 6: Don't Swerve, from the series "Without Difficulty: Commentaries on Jianzhi Sengcan's Xinxin Ming: Words on Trusting Awareness," Wednesday, February 15, 2006. (If strange characters instead of kanji appear this means that you need to enable UTF-8 in your Character Encoding settings.)


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     The White Wind Zen Community is the Sangha of students practising under the direction of Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi at the Zen Centre of Ottawa (Honzan Dainen-ji) and its branch practice groups or centres.

     The main purpose of the Community is to provide a context in which the Transmission of the complete teachings, practice and realization of the Way of Dogen's Lineage of Zen can take place. To this end, the Zen Community provides a comprehensive and integral format of practice that is structured so that each student may practise in a manner that is appropriate for him or her.

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