Washing The Bowl - Zen Talk With Daizan Roshi

One day a monk came to Zen master Joshu and said: “I am a new trainee in the temple, can you give me some teaching?” Master Joshu said, “Have you eaten?” and the monk said “yes,” Joshu replied, “Then wash your bowl.” In this talk, Daizan Roshi explains some of the ways that this famous but very simple little interchange can be looked at, in terms of digesting and cleaning the ’stuff’ accumulated in our life, and how it can nourish us.

Transcript

So around about 1200 years ago there was a very highly regarded Zen master who didn't start teaching until he was age 80 and lived to 120 years old.

His name was Joshua and he was very famous for his teaching using words.

His style of teaching was called lip and mouth Zen.

He was very clever with words and he could open up the truth for people through using his words very powerfully,

Very successfully.

One day a new monk came to him and said,

I'm a new monk in the temple,

A new trainee in the temple,

Can you give me some teaching please?

And master Joshua said,

Have you eaten?

And the new monk said,

Yes I have.

And Joshua said,

Then wash your bowl.

Simplest thing,

You eat your meal and then you wash your bowl.

Now there are lots of ways that this very simple little interchange can be looked at.

One of them is from a symbolic point of view.

Within Zen the meal time,

The eating,

The act of eating has a kind of a symbolism around it.

Your bowl,

When you eat,

The main dish is usually in your bowl and the bowl represents you.

You and your bowl in the sense are one,

Are the same thing.

So when you've got your food,

Your bowl is filled.

Now when we go through life,

When we experience the process of growing and developing as human beings,

Our bowls naturally get filled.

They get filled with experiences from the past,

With world views,

With a sense of who we are,

A sense of how the world is,

How other people are.

They get filled with opinions,

They get filled sometimes with senses of suffering,

Senses of burden,

Things that we're carrying about.

Now if our bowl over fills,

As it were,

Gets too much,

Then we have problems in life.

We can start to get sick.

If somebody is carrying too much around,

Either on a physical level or on a psychological level,

They get ill.

The burden just gets too great.

Most of us don't get to the point where we actually get sick,

But we can get to the point where we're carrying so much around that we essentially don't have much room for anything new in life.

Look,

There's a spot right there,

And one right here.

So an important part of practice is learning what it means to begin the process of emptying our bowl,

To learn to eat what's within our bowl.

When we do that in the right way,

Then the stuff,

The food that fills our bowls,

Can actually nourish us.

That which causes pain,

Causes suffering,

Causes us to feel blocked and closed,

When it's treated right,

Actually will nourish us,

Will make us stronger,

Will make us actually more able to do what we're here to do.

An important part of practice is learning how to digest that which has ended up in our bowl.

When we do this,

We can get to the point where we,

As it were,

Begin to empty our bowl,

And we come to Master Joshua and we ask,

What do we do next?

And he says,

Then wash your bowl.

And in the Zen Mealtime ceremony,

Which we've done many times here and many of you are familiar with,

We wash the bowl using tea.

So once the bowl is empty,

Then tea goes into the bowl,

And we clean the bowl using tea,

And then we drink that as well.

The tea represents what in Japanese is called Kanro.

Kanro is very similar to what we would call in English Ambrosia.

It's the nectar,

The sweet food of the gods.

There's a kind of blissful,

Sweet flow that we experience when we empty our bowls,

When we,

As it were,

Make enough space within our body and mind for things to begin to move and come alive.

And the tea represents this blissful nectar.

So the tea washes out any last aspects of this closure or blocking,

If you like,

And then we drink this as well,

And so everything is clear.

So we eat our meal,

We wash our bowl.

And this process of purifying the body and mind is very central within our practice.

Now,

Shinzan Rishi,

Our teacher in Japan,

He told me years ago how when he was a young man,

When he left university,

He had great plans to be a kind of a business tycoon.

He wanted to build a business empire.

He invested all the money that he had and all the money that his parents had invested into a couple of businesses that he was developing.

He had great hopes for these businesses.

But he wasn't the most successful businessman going,

And he managed to lose not only all his own money,

But all his parents' money as well.

He went bust,

And feeling totally a failure,

Feeling despondent,

He actually attempted suicide.

He got very low and feeling like his life was worthless.

He managed to even fail at committing suicide.

And in this place where he just felt a completely useless being,

He felt like his whole life was a failure,

Was worthless.

He was driving one day past a railway station and he noticed a nun waiting for a taxi.

He pulled in and offered her a lift.

He took her to her home temple.

This nun was very cheerful and very positive and very kind and had a real brightness and energy about her.

He found that he had no interest in religion of any kind previously,

But something about this nun really struck her.

He began to ask her about life and explain to her what he had experienced and this sense of being a useless failure that he had experienced.

She wouldn't actually answer many of his questions.

She didn't pretend even to be any kind of a teacher,

But what she did do was she gave him a book.

The book is called Shinzenroku.

It's a Zen book.

It means the record of purifying or washing the heart.

Shinzenroku took this book away and it took a little time because he was pretty anti-religion in his young life.

Eventually he found himself reading this book and it just completely spoke to him.

Suddenly he could see a point,

A purpose within life.

He went back to this nun.

He talked more with this nun and also he met some of her fellow nuns.

They were Zen nuns from the Rinzai Zen school.

They were very kind to this rather lost young man.

Eventually he decided that what he wanted to do was to enter a monastery and practice full-time.

The nuns were quite fond of him by this point and they made his robes for him,

Fitted him out,

Kitted him up and basically got him into the local Zen training monastery.

His career as a Zen practitioner really went from this point.

This text that was so important for him,

Shinzenroku,

The record of purifying or washing the heart,

Came to mind recently because when we were in Japan just a couple of weeks ago,

We celebrated Shinzenroku's 80th birthday.

When you're born in Japan you're counted as age one.

In Europe it would actually be his 79th birthday but in Japan counted as his 80th birthday.

A big number like that of course causes one to look back and I think he was probably looking back over the half century or so of his Zen practice.

One of the things we did when we were over in Japan was I proposed to Shinzenroku that we celebrate his European 80th birthday 12 months time over here in London.

I proposed an art exhibition amongst other events.

He's quite a well-known Zen calligrapher and he agreed and he's created a series of Zen calligraphies that we're going to exhibit as part of this exhibition.

There was one I wanted to particularly show you.

He's done a series of this one here.

This character here is the character for heart or mind and this here is the character for purifying or wash.

He's thinking back to this Zen Shinroku,

This book that really changed his life.

This Zen book really changed his life back in nearly 50 years ago when he began all this work.

So he's done a series of these amongst some others that have come over to Europe to be photographed and then they're going off to be turned into hanging scrolls.

They're going back to Japan but I wanted to show you this and this aspect of practice of purifying the heart,

Of actually emptying the bowl and allowing the blissful nectar to flow through us,

To wash through even further.

I wanted to kind of bring this aspect of practice to our attention as it's obviously something on Shinzanroku's mind at the moment.

Now,

How does this process go on?

How does this purification go on?

Well,

What we learn to do is firstly we learn how to let go,

Secondly we learn how not to pick things up,

Not to accumulate.

When we come to practice for the first time,

In my experience,

People come mostly for two reasons.

There are people who come to practice because they've had a lot of success in their lives,

They've perhaps achieved what they want to achieve in their lives and then there's an inevitable sense of,

Well what now?

That can't be it,

Surely there's more.

And then some people come to practice because there's a sense of,

Well life has been not so brilliant so far,

Surely there's more,

There must be a better way to live,

There must be more I can find within life.

So in a sense both groups of people come with a sense of potential,

This sense that there must be a better way to live and I want to find it,

I must be able to find more happiness,

More joy,

More peace in my life than I have right now.

When we act on this sense of there must be more,

A kind of invisible door opens.

When we step through this invisible door we're brought face to face with ourselves.

When we genuinely come face to face with ourselves we have a choice.

Most people,

To be really honest,

When they come to this point,

They run away,

They avoid genuinely facing themselves.

A few people keep on looking.

It takes a lot of courage,

It takes a lot of commitment,

Sometimes it even takes a level of of desperation.

But when we continue to face ourselves without avoiding the issue,

Without looking elsewhere,

Without getting distracted,

Then we start to see more and more clearly how we've lived out of harmony with who we really are and how life really is.

If we continue facing ourselves in our meditation,

In what we do within our lives,

Then we see more and more ramifications,

More and more aspects in which our life has been out of harmony with who we really are,

With what we're really about.

How does this out of harmony aspect manifest?

It manifests in physical tensions in the body,

It manifests in emotional blockages within the body,

It can manifest in in many different ways but typically in the area of closure,

Block,

A sense of restriction,

A sense of not being fully who we could be on whatever level that manifests.

So when we keep looking,

We keep facing all of this stuff,

Something amazing happens.

Our attention,

Our awareness itself causes these blocks to begin to melt,

To dissolve,

To release.

And in this attention,

In the field of our awareness,

We start to let go,

We start to release.

We can do this in our sitting meditation but we also do this in our action,

In the way that we live.

We start to see more and more clearly what we do that's out of harmony.

We see it because it leaves traces.

And so as we do this,

Our life automatically begins to come back into harmony with who we are,

Who we really are.

From the external point of view,

In terms of our behaviour,

Our action within life,

We have the Zen precepts,

The code of behaviour,

Which offers a kind of a description of a life that's in harmony with our true nature.

And as we practice more,

As we face ourselves more,

Then automatically we start to live a more upright life,

A more genuine life,

Because we see clearly how it is when we don't,

What gets left behind when we don't.

In terms of our inner work,

Our sitting meditation,

We come to face ourselves every day.

We practice even 10,

20 minutes of meditation every day and we start to see more and more clearly.

Typically,

Initially,

The gross ways in which our life has been,

As it were,

Out of tune.

But there's a kind of a refinement that goes on.

We start to more and more bring our lives into tune.

It happens by itself,

Just through our courageous awareness,

Our willingness to keep looking.

And as we do this,

We digest what's in our ball.

We create more and more space in our lives.

We create more and more freedom in our lives.

Those things that tended to lock us down,

To close us up,

To make us feel separated and imprisoned,

Stop working,

Stop affecting us in the same way.

We become more and more free and a moment comes when we start to directly experience the blissful flow.

We move from digesting our meal to the tea.

We start to wash our bowl in a whole new way.

And the refinement continues still.

The refinement goes on.

We become more and more in tune with what we're really here to do.

Our life becomes,

In a sense,

A force of nature.

We,

As it were,

Become able to surrender all our thoughts and ideas and opinions about what our life should be.

And we become able to allow our life to take the shape that's been waiting all this time to happen.

This needs a lot of courage.

But what we find when we do this is beauty,

Bliss,

A sense of deep rightness.

Those of you who were over in Japan with me last week will very strongly recall how Shinzan Rishi a number of times said,

You reach a point where you deeply nod.

There's a deep yes in the heart.

You know from the depths of your being that you're leading the life that was here for you all the time.

And still we go on.

Life is ongoing.

It's a dance.

So we refine even further our ability to harmonize with the truth of our lives.

So this washing,

This purifying of the heart carries on and carries on.

So it's the beginning of practice,

But it's also the middle of practice,

It's also the end of practice,

The endless end of practice.

There's no limit to how beautiful,

How satisfying,

How extraordinary your life can become.

And all of this comes out of this very simple exchange of when you've eaten your meal,

You wash your bowl.

And the one essential thing that you need for success in this work is the willingness to face yourself a hundred percent.

If you have that,

Your success is assured.

Reviews

🙏 for this teaching, for sharing that powerful visual!

Thanks

🙏🏼 Thank you 🙏🏼

Thank you for this wonderful and important talk.

Beautiful words for deep inspiration. Gassho 🙏🏻❤️🙏🏻

Thank you for this clear and insightful interpretation of the koan. 🙏

So interesting and amazing speaker thank you Namaste 🙏🏻

thanks for all the advices and information! 😘😘😘