Category Archives: I Vow with All Beings

Being with my spouse and children

Image: 3 Spouse kids.
Mixed-media image Copyright©2024 Hoko Karnegis.

I vow with all beings:

Being with my spouse and children

BEING WITH MY SPOUSE AND CHILDREN,
I VOW WITH ALL BEINGS
TO BE IMPARTIAL TOWARD EVERYONE
AND FOREVER GIVE UP ATTACHMENT.[1]

There are few relationships that feel more important than those with our spouses and children. We want only the best for them, would do anything for them, and are happy to make them our priority. Attachment to our immediate families seems not only reasonable and understandable, but responsible and virtuous… and yet some of the most basic teachings of our tradition are about non-attachment as an antidote to suffering.

We are also affected in our understanding of family responsibilities by the influence of Confucianism on our practice. As we saw last month, parent and child is the first of the Five Constant Relationships, and filial piety is considered the root of virtue and humanity. Who would argue against partiality for those we love? Are we to turn our backs on them and walk away for the sake of practicing non-attachment?

Fortunately, no – at least, not in the context of modern Sōtō Zen practice in North America. It’s true that in the Buddha’s time, one literally left home in order to join the sangha and begin to practice, giving up the joys and obligations of social and home life. The family was considered a fetter, a hindrance and distraction for those who aspired to give up all attachments and focus solely on awakening. Shakyamuni himself climbed over the wall of his palace in the middle of the night, leaving behind his wife and son, in order to become an ascetic and search for the cause and ending of suffering.

This understanding that joining the sangha required homeleaving continued as Buddhism moved across Asia to Japan. There’s a Japanese proverb that says, “A child is a neck-shackle for the Three States of Existence, or the three worlds (ko wa sangai no kubikase 子は三界の首枷).” In other words, love for or attachment to a child will impede your spiritual progress through not only this world but the other two as well! It’s difficult to be a parent.

On ordaining, Japanese clergy gave up their family identity, including their surnames, until 1872, when the government ordered them to resume using their surnames, lowered their public status, and removed their legal privileges in an effort to modernize the country and keep control of the people. That same year, the government removed penalties for clergy who ate meat, married, grew their hair, or wore non-clerical clothing. Although the Sōtō Zen denomination continued to expect its clergy to adhere to its precepts and rules nonetheless, it’s estimated that by the end of the Meiji period in 1912, more than half of them were married. Debate over the issue of clerical marriage continued for decades, and it wasn’t until 1995 that temple wives (jizoku 寺族) were officially recognized in the Sōtōshū Constitution despite their crucial role in temple operations. It’s been challenging to reconcile the denomination’s key Buddhist teachings about renunciation with the reality of temple families as allowed and encouraged by the government.

These days, many Sōtō Zen practitioners in North America, including the clergy, have families and home lives outside of the temple, and consider these fertile grounds for practice rather than fetters and shackles.

Like most gāthās, this month’s verse is encouraging us to carry on with our concrete, daily lives while not losing sight of the absolute view. We don’t need to stop loving our families in order to practice with nondiscrimination, which is really the point of this gāthā. Nondiscrimination means that we treat each thing, being or situation we encounter with equanimity, wisdom, and compassion, seeing each element clearly and then taking care of it appropriately. We take care not only of our families, but all beings. There are two ways to view the teaching of this gāthā. One is that we should strive to hold all beings as dear as our own loved ones. The other is that we should recognize our karmic attachment to our loved ones as a source of suffering, albeit one we take on knowingly and with wisdom and compassion.

Rather than simply taking our attachment to our loved ones for granted, we can practice being aware of it and use it as a chance to investigate the nature of attachment itself. In Buddhism, there are four kinds of attachment: sense-pleasures, rites and rituals, views, and the self. Spending time with family is likely an opportunity to see all of these arise. We enjoy watching the kids learn and play, and hearing their laughter. The regular activities of the day – meals, favorite TV shows, bedtime – provide a comfortable structure to family life, and we feel discombobulated when that routine is upset. It’s likely that the family has a set of shared values and points of view that helps hold it together. Finally, we take a lot of our identity from the family; we’re parents, children, siblings, breadwinners, oldest, youngest, or the one in the family who always [your answer here]. Young people leaving home for the first time, parents who’ve become empty nesters, or those going through divorce experience a significant shift in their perceptions of themselves.

What happens when you take on leadership of a group activity in which your child or spouse is involved? Maybe you coach a sports team, lead a youth group, run a small family company, teach a class or chair a committee that includes a family member. On one hand, of course you want your loved one to shine, to take home all the prizes, or to get the best position or assignment. On the other hand, as the group leader you must remain impartial if you’re to have any trust or credibility with the entire membership. It can be difficult, especially if your loved one expects special treatment – perks for himself or retribution for his rivals. But I deserve favors, he wails. I’m family!

Does our attachment to family members really mean that they are more deserving of our wisdom and compassion than other beings? Are they actually special, or simply special to us? While they certainly don’t merit less care than others receive, do they merit more? Or is it that we’re responsible to and for them in a particular way?

The Mahaparinirvana Sutra makes the point over and over again that Buddha views all beings as he does his own son Rahula. We as bodhisattvas are also to see all beings as we would see our own children. This is not easy; people question the Buddha about whether he can really do this. This or that person did this or that bad thing; can you really see him as your son? Yes, Buddha says, it’s true. I really do.

In the sutra, he says:

Should I see but one person falling into Avichi Hell, I would, for the sake of that person, stay in the world for a kalpa or less than a kalpa. I have great compassion for all beings. How could I cheat one whom I regard as my son and let him fall into hell? Seeing a person falling into hell, I cause repairs [to be made] and bestow the precepts for good deeds.[2]

Buddha could have seen people making mistakes and falling into hell realms and just written them off or become angry. Instead he provided teachings, guidance, and precepts the way a parent would care for a child.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that compassion is an emotion and that only people we like or agree with deserve our compassion. We can generate compassion for the family and friends with whom we’re intimate, but not for people we don’t know or don’t like very much. However, we know as bodhisattvas that there’s no one outside of our compassion. That’s because compassion is based on our understanding of interconnectedness. Intimacy with other all beings is already there, even though we put up barriers and choose to ignore it. Our original mind sees interconnectedness within this one unified reality and knows that there’s nothing outside of it. This is how we go beyond picking and choosing who receives our care and get to impartiality.

A Japanese word for impartiality is byōdō 平等. We can add the word onshin 怨親, in which the first kanji means to be resentful or jealous and the second can mean a parent or relative, someone with whom one is intimate, and we have the phrase onshin byōdō 怨親平等. It means that the enemy and the ally are equal, or that we treat hate and love alike, and it’s important in Japanese Buddhist culture. For instance, in Japan there are stone monuments and memorial services for people who died on both sides of a battle. The point is that the living need to transcend hatred to help the dead be reborn in Amida’s pure land, where everyone is treated equally and impartially. When two samurai fought a duel and one died, the other would bow to the corpse and pray for him. After a battle warlords prayed not only for their own fallen soldiers but also for those of the enemy commander. During the conflict people had to fight each other, but afterward they took the larger view that intimates and enemies are equally important. They are all loved by others, and their lives are unique and individual. Friends and enemies are all living one interconnected life. The practice was to let go of picking and choosing based on personal emotion and care for everyone.

While we certainly have to recognize individuality and the particulars of various circumstances, or sabetsu 差別, we also have to recognize byōdō, impartiality or equality. Sabetsu and byōdō are two sides of one whole universe. Okumura Rōshi frequently uses the image of the complete interpenetration of five fingers (individuality) and one hand (universality). Seeing how everything is different and independent on the one side and equal and interconnected on the other side is the basic view of Mahāyāna. One name for Buddha’s wisdom is byōdō shōchi 平等承知, wisdom which sees the nature of equality.

Impartiality is difficult when we feel that need to make a distinction between our families and all other beings, but if we can’t see any other kind of byōdō, we can at least acknowledge the four noble truths. All of us who have this human form have delusion and suffering; we have that as common ground if nothing else. My suffering is not identical to your suffering because our karmic circumstances are different, but nobody is free from suffering, no matter what kind of front we put up. Our families and other families aren’t identical, and we don’t have to pretend they are. We just have to be able to see that in addition to being different from each other, there is also no difference.

When we’re spending time with our spouses and children, let’s vow with all beings to realize that they and the feelings we have for them are very special, and all beings are also very special. Everyone is deserving of our care and attention, and no one is outside of the Buddha way. Let’s remember to practice what Buddha taught.

Next time:
WHEN ATTAINING MY DESIRES,
I VOW WITH ALL BEINGS
TO PULL OUT THE ARROWS OF LUST
AND REALIZE ULTIMATE PEACE.

[1] Translations are based upon Thomas Cleary’s translation of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, and have been recast by Hoko in the form of standard Sōtōshū gāthās.
[2] The Mahāyāna Mahaparinirvana Sutra, Translated into English by Kosho Yamamoto, 1973 from Dharmakshema’s Chinese version. Edited, revised and copyright by Dr. Tony Page, 2007 p. 58. Retrieved 06/03/2024 from http://www.shabkar.org/download/pdf/Mahaparinirvana_Sutra_Yamamoto_Page_2007.pdf

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Commentary by Hoko Karnegis

The Dōgen Institute offers a monthly series of posts by Hoko Karnegis, Senior Dharma Teacher at Sanshinji, in Bloomington, Indiana.

— • —

For further study:

See Dogen Institute’s related study page.

> Other posts from this series

Practicing with gāthās

*Ningxia_Museum_Tangut_manuscript_C.jpg*

Practicing with gāthās

In April 2024, Dogen Institute began offering a monthly series of posts on gāthās by Hoko Karnegis, Senior Dharma Teacher at Sanshinji. The following is an introduction to the actual practice of working with gāthās, provided for contemporary practitioners.

Okumura Rōshi has characterized our practice as seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides in one action. We forget neither the true reality of this moment, which is beyond our limited thinking, nor the necessity to manifest awakening in the concrete activities of carrying out our bodhisattva vows. Living fully in this intersection allows us to understand impermanence and still grieve when a favorite cup breaks, to understand interconnectedness and still take responsibility for our individual actions, and to understand that there is no “I” while still appreciating the unique personal qualities of ourselves and our friends and family. We can’t get so caught up in emptiness and nonduality that we fail to notice the difference between a red light or a green one, or between medicine and candy. Neither can we become so narrowly focused on our own day to day activities that we fail to notice that they’re part of the functioning of the universe as a whole.

One way to remind ourselves of that intersection is to practice with four-line verses (Skt. gāthās , Jp. ge) for various specific activities and situations that remind us that everything is practice. The eleventh chapter of the Avatamsaka (Flower Ornament) Sutra, “Purifying Practice,” contains 140 gāthās that cover everything from waking up in the morning to brushing the teeth to eating a meal. These are given by Manjusri in response to another bodhisattva’s question about how practitioners can attain the best qualities of body, speech and mind.

In the sutra, these verses are a set of instructions, but in our tradition we use them as opportunities to remember to practice what Buddha taught. In Japan, some of these verses are chanted or posted in the training temple, and some North American dharma centers do the same. You may wish to choose several and post them at home where you will see and remember them while doing a particular activity. A sticky note on the bathroom mirror or at your desk is a simple mechanism for mindfulness.

For the purposes of these essays, I’ve slightly modified the form of the gāthās as they appear in the Thomas Cleary’s translation of the sutra to match the form of those we used in the training temple. The first line indicates the activity or situation. The second is always the same: our vow with all beings. Lines three and four are about the particular thing we’re vowing to do and the hoped-for outcome. Thus the gāthā isn’t simply a reminder for ourselves, but a vow with and for all beings that we will undertake to complete this everyday activity as well as we can while not losing sight of the larger picture. We have the opportunity to practice with vow and repentance throughout the day, as well as maintaining a balance between peace of mind and progress in the world, one of the six points of Sanshin’s style of practice.

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^[1] Translations are based upon Thomas Cleary’s translation of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, and have been recast by Hoko in the form of standard Sōtōshū gāthās.
^[2] Confucianism’s Five Constant Relationships are parent and child, minister and ruler, husband and wife, older and younger brother, and friend and friend.
^[3] Okumura, Shohaku. Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. Wisdom Publications, 2012. p. 38–39.
^[4] For more on the Absolute version of the Three Treasures, see this commentary by Okumura Rōshi.
^[5] Shaw, Miranda (2006). Buddhist Goddesses of India, Princeton University Press. p. 166.

— • —

Commentary by Hoko Karnegis

The Dōgen Institute offers a monthly series of posts by Hoko Karnegis, Senior Dharma Teacher at Sanshinji, in Bloomington, Indiana.

— • —

For further study:

See Dogen Institute’s related study page.

> Other posts from this series

Serving my parents

*Mixed-media image Copyright©2024 Hoko Karnegis.*

I vow with all beings:

Serving my parents

In the training temple, there are four-line verses (Skt. gāthās, Jp. ge) to be chanted for a variety of daily activities. Everything from waking up in the morning to brushing the teeth to eating a meal is an opportunity to remember to practice what Buddha taught. These gāthās are based on teachings from Volume 14 (Purifying Practice) of the Avatamsaka Sutra. Hoko takes a look at these sutra verses to investigate what they’re pointing to and how we can include them in our own daily practice.

Serving my parents,
I vow with all beings
to serve the Buddha,
protecting and nourishing everyone.^[1]

Whether or not our parents are still here with us in the physical world, this verse gives us something to work with in our practice. Toward the end of the jukai or zaike tokudo ceremony, the preceptor declares, “Surely, you are a child of Buddha!” When we return to the temple each month to renew those vows during the ryaku fusatsu ceremony, we hear Dōgen Zenji’s Kyōjukaimon read aloud. Its explanation of the tenth precept, not ignorantly slandering the Three Treasures, says,

“[The Buddha] manifested his body and expounded the Dharma. [These Three Treasures] are the crossing point of the world. The virtues [of the Three Treasures] return to the ocean of all-knowing wisdom and are immeasurable. We should respectfully accept, attend, and serve the Three Treasures.”

Clearly, the Buddha is considered to be like a parent for us, and as dutiful children, we’re engaged in serving him. But what does that really mean? To understand, we’ll need to consider the nature of parents, Buddha and serving.

Our Sōtō Zen tradition originated in Asian countries with strong Confucian cultures. Parent and child is the first of the Five Constant Relationships,^[2] and filial piety is considered the root of virtue and humanity. The reciprocal nature of these relationships is important; the more powerful person is responsible for directing and guiding, but the less powerful person is responsible for providing support and care. When children are little, parents raise and teach them, providing for their material needs as well as their development as healthy and competent individuals. When parents become old, children look after them with respect and kindness, continuing to make offerings to them even after their death. The point of identifying and considering these relationships within Confucian culture is not to point out a difference of status but to explore interconnectedness between the people in the pair. Each is responsible to and for the other.

Lineage is also an important element of our tradition, but that too has a larger cultural context. In Japan, skills in traditional arts are passed down from generation to generation through the iemoto 家元, or family foundation, system that began in feudal times. The iemoto is the head of a school, family or house of a traditional art such as tea ceremony, ikebana, theater or calligraphy. The iemoto is the master at the top of the hierarchy who has inherited the secrets of the tradition from his master before him and is charged with preserving and transmitting those secrets accurately to students. He’s considered the final authority on everything related to the school, including who is qualified to teach and to succeed him as iemoto, and he chooses ceremonial names for the most advanced practitioners.

This may sound familiar if you’ve practiced in a temple, received the precepts, or entered into an ordination and training process. You’ve become part of a dharma family with an identified lineage made up of a chain of teacher-student relationships beginning with Shakyamuni and ending with your teacher and yourself. You’ve joined the other practitioners who have received the precepts from your teacher in being brothers and sisters in the dharma, with your teacher at the head of that family. Your teacher has also given you a robe and a name and, if you train as clergy, will decide when you’ve gained a level of dharma mastery suitable for you to receive dharma transmission. Your job is then to pass along that dharma transmission to at least one person in the next generation before you die. This is how the lineage remains alive, and it was a key point of Dōgen Zenji’s teaching.

Thus we have biological parents as well as parents in the practice, you might say. Our teachers and the buddhas and ancestors make up our dharma genealogy just as our great grandparents and their great grandparents make up our family trees. If any one of them had broken the chain, we wouldn’t be here in this form today. It’s a graphic demonstration of the reality of causes and conditions. We didn’t arise on our own. We inherited everything from our ancestors. On that basis alone, gratitude and the desire to be of service show up naturally.

When we’re children and our brains are developing, we’re naturally self-centered. Between the ages of about six and thirteen, we start realizing that we and our needs and impulses are not the center of the world, and that there are other beings out there who are affected by what we do. We still struggle with selfishness even when we know better, but our parents’ reminders help us build the social skills to get along with others.

Our dharma teachers sometimes serve a similar purpose. Our ego attachments as adults can be more subtle and deeply ingrained than those we had as children, and it takes spending time in a dharma family, with others also determined to follow Buddha’s way and exercise wisdom and compassion, for us to continue to refine our habituated thinking. Mindfulness, or remembering to practice what Buddha taught, can help us loosen our attachment to our five skandhas and become grown-ups.

In the Tenzo Kyōkun, Dōgen Zenji recommended that a person working to benefit all beings should maintain three mental attitudes: magnanimous mind (daishin 大心), nurturing mind (rōshin 老心), and joyful mind (kishin 喜心). Nurturing mind, literally “old mind,” is akin to the attitude of a kindly grandmother or parent who delights in caring for others. It is the spirit of the bodhisattva, the fully mature person. Okumura Rōshi writes,

“It is especially important to have this attitude when we practice in a community. The attitude of parents is to take care of others. When we live [or practice] together, caring and being cared for are the same. The reality of what is happening is the same. The inner attitude of the caregiver, however, is very different from that of the one who expects to be cared for. This difference determines the quality of the community. A place where people want to be taken care of is very different from a place where people care for others. We should understand that this small difference in our inner attitude has very large effects on the world around us.”^[3]

But what does it mean to serve Buddha, who doesn’t have any physical needs we can satisfy 2500 years after his death? And how does that turn into protecting and nourishing everyone?

It seems important that this verse isn’t asking us to serve Shakyamuni, the human being. It’s talking about Buddha, specifically the absolute Buddha Treasure.^[4] Buddha in this form is reality itself, the complete functioning of the universe, with nothing left out. With this understanding, we can see how serving the Buddha means serving everyone. We can certainly find meaning in making offerings at a Buddha altar, and in taking care of the representations of Buddha that we encounter, like statues and pictures. We can also see that we serve Buddha in living by the precepts, engaging in zazen and studying the dharma, in not creating hindrances and suffering for ourselves or others because we’re fully aware of what’s going on around us and responding appropriately.

Making effort in our practice in this way is necessary, and yet in the largest possible view, we don’t need to do anything at all in the service of Buddha. Dōgen ultimately concluded that buddha-nature isn’t a thing, a state, a potentiality, an essence, a power or a substance. Buddha-nature is being, but not in the sense of existing or not existing. It’s functioning; anything that is, is changing and functioning. This kind of being is not a static condition. Buddha-nature is all beings or all dharmas simply doing what they do as part of universal functioning, so the ultimate truth is not some timeless principle, but what is actually going on around us.

The root of the word “parent” means to bring forth. One of our “parents” in the practice is not a human being at all, but wisdom itself, or prajñā pāramitā. Sometimes we anthropomorphize prajñā and call her the “mother of all Buddhas.” It is because of prajñā that we understand emptiness, experience awakening, and fully manifest buddha-nature. According to the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā,

“She is the Perfect Wisdom that never comes into being, and therefore never goes out of being. She is known as the Great Mother…. She is the Perfect Wisdom who gives birthless birth to all Buddhas. And through these sublimely Awakened Ones, it is Mother Prajñāpāramitā alone who turns the wheel of true teaching.”^[5]

Thus, without prajñā, Buddhas would not exist, just as we would not exist without our own parents. Pranja makes possible, or brings forth, awakening.

We can’t know all the streams of causes and conditions that brought us forth in our karmic human form. Often we uncover surprising incidents and circumstances when we start to research our family histories. Some of these are fun and amusing, and some are disturbing. When I began looking into my genealogy, I had no idea that I had roots in the deep South and came from slaveholding families. It took me some time to come to terms with who that made me; I lived in a relatively comfortable way now because two or three hundred years ago, my people owned other human beings. I can’t change that; the only venue we have for action is here and now. However, it’s become part of my own personal vow (hotsugan 発願) to make the best use of the karmic circumstances brought forth for me by the suffering of those people to free all beings.

Ultimately, because of the interconnectedness of causes and conditions, we are supported by all beings and we support all beings simply through our daily functioning. In that way, we are all parents and children for each other. Serving our parents and serving all beings are not separate.

When we’re taking care of our parents, whether or not they’re here with us, let’s vow with all beings to realize that this is not separate from taking care of Buddha. Within the reality of interconnectedness, let’s see all beings as our parents and children. Let’s remember to practice what Buddha taught.

—•—

Next time:
Being with my spouse and children,
I vow with all beings
to be impartial toward everyone
and forever give up attachment.

—•—

— • —

Commentary by Hoko Karnegis

The Dōgen Institute offers a monthly series of posts by Hoko Karnegis, Senior Dharma Teacher at Sanshinji, in Bloomington, Indiana.

— • —

For further study:

See Dogen Institute’s related study page.

> Other posts from this series

When I’m at home

I vow with all beings:

When I’m at home

In the training temple, there are four-line verses (Skt. gathas, Jp. ge) to be chanted for a variety of daily activities. Everything from waking up in the morning to brushing the teeth to eating a meal is an opportunity to remember to practice what Buddha taught. These gathas are based on teachings from Volume 14 (Purifying Practice) of the Avatamsaka Sutra. Hoko takes a look at these sutra verses to investigate what they’re pointing to and how we can include them in our own daily practice.

When I’m at home,
I vow with all beings
to realize that “home” is empty
and escape its pressures.[1]

The first verse in the sutra starts where we all start—at home. What could be more basic and foundational? Chances are, you haven’t considered simply being at home as a practice in itself. Yet, of course, there is home and “home”—the home made up of doors and dishes and dresses, and the “home” we inhabit when we settle into non-attachment.

When we receive lay precepts, the ceremony is sometimes called zaike tokudo 在家得度: staying home and acquiring (the practice). That’s in contrast to ordination as a novice, which is called shukke tokudo 出家得度: leaving home and acquiring (the practice). Traditionally, laypeople did their practice in the context of family and job responsibilities, while the clergy left those obligations behind and devoted the entirety of their time and attention to sitting and study. Today in North America, few practitioners live in a temple full time; almost all of us are managing home lives for ourselves regardless of what kind of commitment we’ve made to the Three Treasures. If we don’t do our own laundry, cook our own meals, go get the mail and cut the grass, those things aren’t going to happen. The cat box isn’t going to clean itself.

The daily round of home life is made up of both tedious chores and special memories. It’s where the den is full of keepsakes and the basement is full of clutter. It’s where your toddler learns to crawl and where you wait up on prom night. Taking care of infants and elders, taxes and temperatures, guinea pigs and groceries becomes a moving, changing mosaic of activity. Days are full and closets are full and mouths are full. But wait—”home” is also empty?

Home, like everything inside and outside of it, is the very embodiment of emptiness, or suchness. Emptiness in this case means that none of it has a permanent self-nature to which we can cling. That’s because nothing comes into existence randomly. Everything arises from causes and conditions. Some kind of energy moves somewhere, or karma unfolds, and there’s the potential for something to arise. However, without the right conditions, things will go in another direction. If you try to plant a seed on a rock, it won’t grow and flower. If you have a patch of lovely soil but no seed to plant, again no flower will grow. Both causes and conditions are necessary for any particular thing to happen.

The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent, including causes and conditions and the things to which they lead. If causes and conditions are themselves changing, it stands to reason that the things that arise from them are also constantly changing. That means we really can’t cling to anything—even as something as important to us as home.

We take a lot of our self-image from our homes, and we likely consider our homes and home lives to be both expressions and explorations of who we are. Not clinging to the beliefs and belongings we associate with our homes is a tall order. There’s little more personal to us than where we live and what we own. I think it’s no accident that the sutra verses start here. If we can see the emptiness of home, we’re on our way to seeing the emptiness of this one unified reality.

But why would we want to do this? Why disenchant ourselves from something as wholesome and comforting as home? Why seek another “home” when this one seems perfectly fine?

Not having a place to call home can indeed be disconcerting. I lived in the Twin Cities for the first 45 or so years of my life. Then all at once I rented out my house, put everything I owned in storage, quit my government job of 16 years, and went to train in Japan. I didn’t know how long I’d be there or what I’d be doing when I came back. When I returned I immediately went to run the Zen center in Milwaukee, I city in which I’d never lived before. From there, two years later I went to work at Hokyoji in southern Minnesota, just off the Iowa border, and after another three years I came to Sanshin in Indiana. Along the way, I realized that I felt like I no longer had a permanent home. After nearly five decades in one place, suddenly I was pulling up sticks and moving over and over again.

Not only was I now leading a nomadic life, when I went back to the Twin Cities I didn’t recognize the old, familiar places I was used to. Time and people had moved on. Buildings had been put up, renovated and torn down. My old office building was now a condo. The house in which I’d grown up had long since been sold to another family. Rural residential areas were now zoned for higher density housing and urban sprawl was worse than ever. My old home was well and truly gone.

That bothered me some for awhile. If we don’t know where we come from, we lose some sense of who we are. My family isn’t from Minnesota originally, but it was the only place I knew for many years. I envied those of my friends who had several generations in the state and felt a real connection to Minnesota culture. When I began work on my genealogy at the age of 14—long before the age of the internet, when everything had to be done by paper letters—I suspect I was trying to get a sense of where I come from. As it turns out, I had to go back six or seven generations to find ancestors and their families with deep roots in any one place. Even so, their places weren’t my places. I’d never been to them and hardly felt like I could lay claim.

After I’d been in Indiana for about a year, a sangha member asked me whether Bloomington felt like home now. I had to say no, but I also couldn’t say where home was for me now. It’s become a moment-by-moment concept for me. In Japan, home was the storage room above the kitchen in the training temple that my roommate and I cleared out for ourselves. In Milwaukee it was the lovely little teacher’s apartment up on the second floor of the turn of the century house that serves as the temple. At Hokyoji, I lived entirely in a room of about 170 square feet over the workshop and tractor garage. All were home briefly before it was time to follow the dharma somewhere else.

All of those places are part of my story, but I don’t think I take any identity from them now. Looking back, I can see that the universe has been handing me a teaching about the emptiness of “home.” We can exist without the need to pin down home as a physical location, and on that basis we can “escape its pressures.” We can be equally at home in samsara and nirvana, living with equanimity whether we encounter shrieking cats and leaky sinks or comfy beds and perfect cups of Keemun Black. Home is where our feet are right now, because there’s nowhere else we can be.

Nonetheless, home is a charged concept. We carry a lot of shoulds about home. It should be a place of safety and security, a familiar “comfort zone,” a manifestation of self-respect, a place where we belong because we’re surrounded by other like-minded people. If we don’t associate some or all of those things with the situation in which we find ourselves, then home is somewhere else—somewhere we long to reach, where everything would be better. There’s no place like home, and this sure isn’t it.

One way to define suffering is that we want things to be other than they are, and we can’t settle down anywhere while we’re chasing after what we want and running away from what we don’t want. These are the pressures we escape when we realize what and where “home” really is. In his Zazen Yojinki (Points to Watch in Practicing Zazen), Keizan Zenji reminds us, “The Buddha said, ‘Listening and thinking are like being outside of the gate; zazen is returning home and sitting in peace.’ How true this is! When we are listening and thinking, the various views have not been put to rest and the mind is still running over. Therefore other activities are like being outside of the gate. Zazen alone brings everything to rest and, flowing freely, reaches everywhere. So zazen is like returning home and sitting in peace.”

Finding the way “home” is as simple and as difficult as opening the hand of thought. That’s when we can deeply understand that we’ve never really left the place where we belong, nor do we need to in order to find some perfect place to settle. “Why leave behind the seat in your own home to wander in vain through the dusty realms of other lands?” asked Dogen Zenji. “If you make one misstep, you stumble past what is directly in front of you.”

When we’re at home, whether in the midst of family uproar or focused solitude, let’s vow with all beings to realize that our actual “home” is empty of all of our ideas about it, all of our shoulds and attachments and stories. Let’s escape the pressures of home that come either from clinging to the one we have or restlessly looking for another. Let’s remember to practice what Buddha taught.

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Next time:
Serving my parents,
I vow with all beings
to serve the Buddha,
protecting and nourishing everyone.

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[1] Translations are based upon Thomas Cleary’s translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, and have been recast by Hoko in the form of standard Sotoshu gathas.

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Commentary by Hoko Karnegis