31 Fundamental Teachings of Zen

While looking for something else, I came across several pages of notes I had jotted down ten years ago. The notes are in the form a 31 bullet points followed by a short passage from the medieval Chinese Zen teacher Hongzhi. The title of my notes is ‘The Single Flower Way’. Single Flower Sangha is the name my teacher gave to the group he gathered around himself after he left the organization his teacher had gathered around himself (the Kwan Um School). His teacher had left a prestigious position in the hierarchy of Korean Zen (Son in Korean) to come to America and teach a group of hippies and intellectuals in the mid-1970’s. My teacher followed his teacher’s footsteps in the 1990’s and stepped away from a senior position in the world-wide organization based in Providence, Rhode Island that his teacher had created.

The Single Flower Sangha had no fixed geographic location. The only property it accumulated were the two-dozen pamphlet-style chant books that one of his students had made. My teacher carried these chant books and a few bells around in his suitcase as he led silent Zen retreats in people’s homes around the country, including here in the Boston area. There would be anywhere from six to twelve people who would come together for a weekend or week of intensive Zen training. Lots of sitting and silence. Simple food eaten in an informal style. One meeting with the teacher per day in the afternoon and one long Dharma talk in the morning. (Those were the good old days.) My teacher was uncomfortable with large crowds and suspicious of ongoing institutions, so this small and constantly vanishing community of students worked pretty well for him.

From the beginning my teacher encouraged Melissa and me to lead the group we were already leading. At first it was just four of us who gathered weekly in the back room of our house to sit quietly together. After a few years, with his permission and with the permission of the teacher Melissa was then studying with, we turned our weekly gathering into a Zen group and began giving short talks.

My teacher’s permission to me went like this: Me: ‘Would it be OK for Melissa and I to turn our meditation group into a Zen group and begin giving short talks about Zen?’ My Teacher: (after a short pause to look at the floor) ‘Well, I guess if you make sure to only speak from your own experience, you probably won’t do too much damage.’ So began my career as a Zen teacher, first with this informal and cautionary approval, and then, ten or so years later, with his formal (and still cautionary) approval.

My teacher was suspicious of all teachers and all organizations, including himself. He was right to be so. Even his small organization was subject to the conflict and blindness that run through all human affairs—just as we have been here at Boundless Way Temple—just as the Buddha’s first community was.

But my recently rediscovered notes on ‘The Single Flower Way’ are a series of 31 bullet points about the Zen way as I understood my teacher taught it. Most, but not all, the points have some phrases or sentences bolded for emphasis. I remember mentioning to my teacher that I was working on a list like this. He was utterly uninterested and even actively skeptical that there would be any value is a list of his particular Zen teachings.

As I look over the list, what I see in those bullet points this morning are the topics I come back to again and again in hundreds of Dharma talks I have now given. Reading each point, I smile and nod in recognition. I don’t know whether these are indeed my teacher’s teaching or my teachings. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that they are simply the teachings of the Zen tradition that have come down to and through me.

The one that catches my attention this morning is this:

• There is no road-map. There is no system – only the trackless love of the universe. Burn your rulebook. Beyond form and emptiness, beyond koan practice, beyond Zen. The point of our practice is not Zen – it is aliveness.

I love this! (Of course I wrote it, so I may be biased.) Maybe tomorrow I’ll explore what it might mean. Maybe these 31 points are something that might be useful to share in some manner.

P.S. – I was taken by the idea that there were 31 of these bullet points (I counted carefully) but did not make the association, until I went to post this on my blog, to the 31 Prayers for January 2021 which I posted on the first day of this year. Hmmmmm….