What a Joy

I am interrupting our meanderings from space through place to legacy for some important news. At least, it’s important to me.  

I’ve been thinking in the last year of the brevity of Jishu’s moment in my life, barely five years. Have I been exaggerating her importance? It’s a sad thought. Have I made her an important teacher only out of my grief?

Happily, no. Just this summer, in working with students to identify the Zen teachings which transformed me, I realized how profoundly important my study with Jishu was. Not all of it. I began koan study with her but did not get far. I’d make my early morning drive to Yonkers in the months before Bernie and Jishu left for Santa Fe. I’d present my koan, and it seems now, inevitably, that Jishu would say, “Go deeper.” I had no idea what she meant when I got back in my car to drive to my job in Brooklyn, but I see now that Jishu had taught me to go deeper, wonderfully so, in the Ox Courses that I took with her.

Bernie developed his Ox curriculum early in his return to New York. By the time I arrived in Yonkers, he had turned the actual teaching over to Jishu and Nancy Mujo Baker. I got to take the first three courses -- on the skandhas, the precepts, and the paramitas -- with Jishu. In the first course, on the skandhas, she introduced me to a life-transforming way of working with my experience. It was less importantly, a way to learn some Buddhist lingo and, although I didn’t realize it at the time, a deep dive into the Heart of the Perfection of Great Wisdom Sutra.

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, doing deep Prajna paramita, perceived the emptiness of all five conditions and was freed from pain. Although I chanted these words weekly during services, their meaning eluded me. For years, I didn’t realize that Jishu had been showing me what they meant. The skandhas are the five conditions, the elements from which we build our experience. I wouldn’t have believed it at the time if you’d told me, but Jishu was showing me, in the Skandha classes, how to do deep prajna paramita. She was moving me toward the perception of the emptiness of experience and eventually to the realization of freedom from pain.

The way of the Ox program was not philosophical practice. The skandhas became ways of looking into ourselves, of going deeper, mirrors for reflection of experience. In those classes and in the daily homework practice, I began to see the emptiness of my experience. It remains my most important Zen experience.

Can you begin to imagine the joy that I am feeling at being given the opportunity to share this course on the Zen Peacemaker platform? So many of today’s peacemakers never met Bernie. Many had not yet been born when Jishu passed. What a joy to share this gift which I received from Bernie and Jishu. We will keep the class small so the Ox experience can be replicated. Are you interested? Do you know anyone who might be? Here’s the link to register.