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students but this is a matter of finding ways to bring students out into the moment, rather than
distracting oneself and others.
We tend to drift into associations about everything we see or hear. Even a sensation can
trigger the memory of an event that might have occurred ten years ago. And often we find our
own stories so entertaining that we feel compelled to convey them to people around us. While
interacting with Sangha members, particularly during a formal practice period, such as a sitting, a
retreat, or a Dharma Assembly, one should be practicing, feeling the tongue against teeth, the
breath becoming sound, and expressing oneself clearly.
Students at Dainen-ji often hear it said that the Zen Community is not a social
organization. We interact with each other for one purpose to do this practice and realize the
Transmission of the Buddhas and Awakened Ancestors. So before or after a sitting, it is important
to recognize and release the ways in which we ordinarily propagate discursiveness as it comes up
and our compulsion to add these to the general clutter of conversation. There should be little to no
talking in the hallways, changing areas, and cloakroom. We can just sit, walk, and stand with
each other, without words.
However, small groups of students will often congeal together to chat about matters that
really have nothing to do with our purpose for coming together. It would be best for all of us to
discuss these things outside of the monastery, or meet elsewhere to do so.
Dainen-ji is a Zen monastery with perhaps one of the subtlest and masterful of Zen
Teachers in permanent residence. Our responsibility (our response to having been accepted as his
students) is to actualize what is presented as fully as we can, in each moment. And so for senior
students it is very noticeable when students become so engaged in conversation with each other
that they lose all sense of where they are and what is going on around them. For monks this is
particularly true, and whether in the building or elsewhere, they have committed themselves to be
mindful of speech, to take care of words and meanings. For this reason, if you meet a monk on
the street, or perhaps in a shop, they will seldom say more than a few words and then will go
about what they need to do. Which is to practice and to support the practice of others, such as
yourself.
Practicing mindfulness of speech helps us to sift through the vast number of thoughts that
can come up about any given subject to select only those that are relevant to the matter at hand.
Again, this certainly doesn't mean that one has to become stiff or edit every sentence as they form
in one's mind. In fact, what we need to learn to do is to just relax within the forms and use them
to embody our practice of this moment of opening. We really just need to keep things as simple
and as clear as possible.
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