About Us
SZC's resident teachers are Subhana Barzaghi and Gillian Coote (see Our Teachers) together with apprentice DS teachers Paul Maloney and Maggie Gluek. We are a lay sangha (community).
Our city zendo is located at 251 Young Street, Annandale, a short bus ride from the city, where we offer weekly zazen and orientations to Zen Practise on Monday and Wednesday evenings between 7 and 9 pm.
We also offer Precept recitations and Full Moon Ceremonies, study groups, Buddha's Birthday ceremonies, workshops and city-based non-residential sesshin. Zazenkai with dharma talks and dokusan are held on the third Sunday of each month from 8.30 till noon. Residential sesshin and other retreats are held in Kodoji, Ancient Ground Temple our wilderness zendo, approx. two hours north-west of Sydney, beyond St. Albans.
What We Offer
At the Sydney Zen Centre, guidance and instruction in zazen (seated meditation) and kinhin (walking meditation) are offered, as well as opportunities to hear teisho (Dharma talks) and meet the teacher/s in dokusan. Samu (work practice) is held at our zendo in Annandale and at Kodoji, Gorricks Run. Jukai, the ceremony of personally taking the Precepts, is also offered.
"On the Zen path, we seek for ourselves the experience of Shakyamuni. However, we do not owe fundamental allegiance to him, but to ourselves and to our environment. If it could be shown that Shaykamuni never lived, the myth of his life would be our guide. In fact, it is far better to acknowledge at the outset that myths and religious archetypes guide us, just as they do every religious person. The myth of the Buddha is my own myth. The path is personal and intimate. We must walk it for ourselves. In this spirit, we invest ourselves in our practice, confident of our heritage, and train earnestly side by side with our brothers and sisters. It is this engagement that brings peace and realisation." Taking the Path of Zen by Robert Aitken Roshi.
Zazen or seated meditation is a path to discovering insight and wisdom and realising our true nature. It helps us overcome greed, selfishness, negativity and worry, cultivates intimacy and closeness with ourselves and all of life, gives us a foundation for ethical and noble aspirations in this life and a basis of peace, relaxation and inner joy. Our practice is to actualise our realisation in the world, to embody the Buddha's Way.
Breath Counting
Breath counting - becoming intimate with each inhalation and counting from one to ten on the exhalation - reveals how jumpy and restless our minds are, hence the term "monkey mind". Whenever we lose the count, having drifted off on a thought, and more significantly, when we notice we have lost the count, we just return to one without recrimination or judgement.
Over time, as a firm practice base is established - with regular daily zazen, sittiing with the group on a weeknight, and attending sesshin, students may find that in the midst of this busy world, there is peace and ease. They may choose to investigate one of the primary koans with the teacher, and/or take up the practice of shikantaza.
Kinhin
Between each sitting period of 25 minutes, there is kinhin, or walking meditation, a practice where we continue to count the breaths, keying our breath to the steps. We are present with our footsteps as we walk slowly round the dojo clasping our left hand over our right at waist level. Kinhin is halfway between the quality of attention demanded by sitting and the quality of attention demanded in the everyday world. Kinhin can be practiced in our everyday lives as well, for example, as we walk along the street, with thumb and forefinger lightly touching.
Shikantaza
Although shikantaza means 'just sitting' it is far from meaning 'just to sit'. Having established a firm practice base with breath-counting, we let go our focus on the breath, and sit with moment-to-moment awareness, as though we were in a jungle clearing, aware that a tiger is somewhere nearby. With this alert practice, in the immenseness of all that is, the individual self inevitably finds itself reduced until it disappears altogether. Inside and outside become one.
Koan Study
Zen Buddhist practice makes use of various kinds of training in bringing students to the experience of realisation and maturing that experience: zazen, daily life and the study of koans. which, wrote Lin-chi master Chung-feng, "represent the highest principle which cannot be understood by logic; cannot be transmitted in words; cannot be explained in writing; cannot be measured by reason. The koan is a torch of wisdom that lights up the darkness of feeling and discrimination, a golden scraper that cuts away the film clouding the eye, a sharp axe that severs the root of birth-and-death, a divine mirror that reflects the original face of both the sacred and the secular."
Primary koans include Chao-chou's "Mu" and Bassui's "Who is hearing that sound?" Students inhabit the koan until it resolves itself, and students then take up a series of selected koans designed to establish a perspective for the practice. Students may then continue sitting with further anthologies of koans.
Ritual
Ritual helps us to deepen our religious spirit and to extend its vigor to our lives. As well, it is an opening for the experience of forgetting the self as the words or the action become one with you, and there is nothing else.
Gassho - the act of placing your hands palm to palm, with the tips of your forefingers an inch from your nose - is a sign of joining together in respect.
We bow with our hands at gassho as we enter or leave the dojo, and before zazen, we bow in this way twice at our seats, once to our sisters and brothers on the opposite side of the dojo and once to sisters and brothers beside us, and to our cushion.
Raihai - a full prostration - is done before and after sutras. We bow to the floor and raise our hands a few inches, lifting the Buddha's feet over our heads, throwing everything away, or pouring everything out from the top of the head. All our self-concern, all our preoccupations are thrown away completely. There is just that bow.
Our Altars
On the main altar at Annandale, there is a Burmese Buddha figure, given to the sangha by Robert Aitken Roshi. His hand is touching the earth, calling it to bear witness. Beside the Buddha are small Kwan-yin and Manjusri figures. On the side altar is Jizo, the guardian of travellers and children, from the island of Sado in Japan and Tara. Anne Aitken's ashes are held here in a small Chinese ceramic box.
The kyosaku, or waking stick, is used only on request.
Dress
For zazen, we dress in colours that will not be distracting. It is better not to wear tight fitting jeans or belts to ensure circulation of blood in your legs. When sitting with the group, avoid patterned clothing, perfume and noticeable jewelry.
The Ten Grave Precepts
The Ten Precepts formulate the realisation of inherent good. This is not the opposite of bad but rather it is self nature, Buddha-nature. The Precepts are a guide from self-centred delusion and attachment to the Buddha's own complete realisation of truth and compassion, pointing the way to our own Buddha nature.
Each month on the Full Moon, the sangha pays attention to the Precepts, either chanting them together, or reflecting on one particular Precept in a Full Moon Ceremony. Students may take the Precepts in a Jukai ceremony, sewing their own rakusu and personalising the Precepts.
The Ten Precepts are: no killing, no stealing, no misuse of sex, no lying, no dealing in drugs, no speaking of faults of others, no praising yourself while abusing others, no sparing the Dharma assets, no indulgence in anger, and no defaming the Three Treasures - Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.
Zen Buddhist practice: recent thoughts on the matter by Robert Aitken Roshi
What is zazen? "The seated practice of focused inquiry and attunement, in relation to a single matter" is a definition that needs taking apart, for virtually every word is loaded. Understanding the freight, one understands the container. Without such understanding, it might seem that zazen is like reading or listening to music. Well, it is indeed like reading or listening to music, but the simile is not the metaphor.
Though it is often called "meditation," I've come to question that usage. Certainly zazen is not introspection. It is not a close examination of what is happening in body or mind. It is not the samatha and vipassana practice of Theravada, or psychoanalysis, or interpersonal problem-solving. It is not itself any of the arts it might have influenced. It is not available by explanatory devices intended to make it accessible.
The words must be examined one by one, then experienced in their inter-related sequence, and finally put into practice. The first definition of 'seated' in the Oxford English Dictionary is 'fixed in position.' The Buddha Shakyamuni was fixed in position under the Bodhi tree, in his bodhimanda, his dojo, his 'place of enlightenment. You are seated in practice. There are two kinds of practice. One is ongoing action as a way of life, as a doctor practices medicine, or an attorney practices law. The other is action intended as a means for improvement, like practising the piano. The two meanings elide. The doctor becomes a better doctor; the piano student is Mozart with each arpeggio.
The engine of practice is bodhichitta, literally 'enlightenment thought,' better translated as 'aspiration for enlightenment.' 'Enlightenment' is a grand word which I prefer not to use. The Sino-Japanese expression kensho, literally 'seeing into (true) nature,' is instructive, implying a peep into the empty, interdependent and infinitely varied makeup of things. I like the simple English word 'realisation.' Bodhichitta is the aspiration for realisation, the aspiration to under-stand the wisdom of the world and to take it upon one's own shoulders.
Practice is ongoing. The most enlightened sages of the past sat daily in their dojo. 'Not yet, not enough, not enough yet.' Inspired by your bodhichitta, you muster body and mind to focus your practice, not just with attention, but also with a receptive spirit--and this is important.
The Buddha Shakyamuni asked, 'Why should there be suffering in the world?' All his teaching and all the texts of Classical Buddhism grow from his focus on this single question, and from its resolution.
For Zen students, the Buddha's inquiry is further encapsulated as 'Why?' - a solitary interrogative on the Buddha Way. Other traditions offer analogies. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth century Christian manual of contemplation, recommends that you take up a single word of a single syllable 'and clasp this word to your heart,' whatever happens. Centering Prayer derives its method directly from this injunction. Ira Progoff draws parallels to this old European method with those found in Yoga, Zen, Hasidism, and Sufi.
The single point that is our focus in zazen is a door to the world and the self so tiny that it has no dimension. You learn in geometry that the point has no dimension, no magnitude. 'No dimension' is truly expansive. There is the vast and fathomless mystery itself, and there it is again, and again. We learn how attunement is the twin and co-worker of focus. Be careful. You are not practising emptiness. You are facing the point. 'The solitary light shines brightly; it never darkens,' wrote Keizan Jokin. It is like the morning star above the Bodhi tree.
What happened when the Buddha glimpsed that point? That is the matter. Like the word 'practice,' 'matter' has two important implications. First, it is the stuff confronting us, the object of our focus, the subject of our attunement. The old masters took their beginning students in hand and showed them breath-counting. This is the way of facing the mystery of the single point of no dimension: just 'one,' just 'two,' just 'three' - patiently returning to 'one' with each distraction, centering upon each number as a task.
The second implication of 'matter' is, of course, the 'Great Matter.' This is what brought tears and laughter around the charcoal fire in the old days. When the object of focus, which is the subject of our attunement, is clear, imprinted, and part of one's moment-to-moment consciousness, then the question remains, what is that solitary light? Zen practice is not an intellectual process, but it experiential, and the solitary light opens the way to a galaxy.
It is 'out there,' but 'out there' is not objective or even subjective. It is the realisation of the teaching, which happens as the student. It is the Buddha's understanding of the Dharma, as the Sangha. Sangha links Buddha and Dharma and encloses them, like a bubble, with inside and outside the same. It is the student who realises intimately how things are, as the self. It is the power of realised students in synergy that erects and maintains the true temple, to be venerated by Ma-ku and by the world. It is Indra's own sanctuary, Kuei-tsung's own pagoda, 'like a great tree shading the many beings.'