My Zen Group
Sep. 1st, 2003 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
percivalTwo people from ship-of-fools wanted to know more about my Zen group and my sitting history, so here we go:
It all started in Bonn, Germany, in May 2000. I had just had a small breakdown during Christian meditation and was looking for a meditation group that did not require visualisations, because I am crap at them. Tell me to visualise sky, and I see the word. Tell me to visualise a beach, and I see maybe a printed paragraph in front of my eyes. OR a blurry grey picture. Then, I get furious with myself for only being able to produce blurry grey pictures and not shiny technicolour ones. To top it all, somebody will TYPE, or EAT (the two types of sounds that I HATE WITH A VENGEANCE, and I'm not exaggerating the caps here), and I will snap back to reality ready to kill.
Anyway, no visualisation for Percival.
But I digress :)
In May, I found a Soto Zen group who practised shikantaza, just sitting and being in the moment. That group was affiliated with AZI, the Association Zen Internationale founded by Master Taisen Deshimaru. The headquarters of the AZI are in France. As Deshimaru died without granting any of his students a Dharma transmission (read: conferring on them teaching privilegees), the AZI was slightly rudderless after the master's death. There's now a group of monks and nuns running the show who eventually got transmission from another master in Japan. The home page of the Bonn AZI group (in German) is here
I got along splendidly with my AZI group, and when I moved to Edinburgh, I decided to look for another group from the same organisation. And lo and behold, there was one in Glasgow. I tried an Interbeing Sangha meeting once, but they used visualisations and meditated on sutras. Cue failure, difficult texts, panic, not for me. The Glasgow setup felt cozy: chanting the well-known Heart Sutra, a central Buddhist text. However, the Glasgow group was less ritualistic: the end-of-sitting ceremony was *far* less elaborate, and the two periods of sitting lasted 25 minutes each, as opposed to the Bonn group's bone crunching 40.
John Fraser, the "godo" (i.e. leader) of the a href="http://www.glasgowzen.org.uk">Glasgow group was also unhappy with the lack of spiritual direction that the UK branch of the AZI exhibited. He's a cerebral guy who values thoughtful, no-nonsense discussion of key texts. He found a teacher in Mike Luetchford, who had established the Dogen Sangha in Bristol.
Mike has received transmission from Gudo Nishijima, who was a fellow student of Master Taisen Deshimaru in Japan. Mike is a brilliant scholar. He's fluent in Japanese and Sanskrit, and spends quite a bit of his time translating and editing key texts. He's also very good at banishing smoke screens - the version of Soto Zen he teaches is pared down to the bones, just sitting.
However, the AZI people disliked Mike. Because John increasingly studied with Mike, they cut us off. Since then, we've been an independent group of practicioners.
There are 15-20 of us. We sit twice a week, on Tuesday evening and on Saturday morning. I can only make it to the Saturday morning sittings, which are usually followed by a leisurely coffee together in the basement of Rokpa House, Glasgow. It's a very friendly group attended mostly by middle aged women and men and thirtysomethings. The most frequent professions are social worker, lawyer, and IT person. It'sa very open group. Most of us integrate some form of body work into their practice, such as Yoga, Chi Gung, or the Alexander Technique.
Any further questions, feel free to ask!
It all started in Bonn, Germany, in May 2000. I had just had a small breakdown during Christian meditation and was looking for a meditation group that did not require visualisations, because I am crap at them. Tell me to visualise sky, and I see the word. Tell me to visualise a beach, and I see maybe a printed paragraph in front of my eyes. OR a blurry grey picture. Then, I get furious with myself for only being able to produce blurry grey pictures and not shiny technicolour ones. To top it all, somebody will TYPE, or EAT (the two types of sounds that I HATE WITH A VENGEANCE, and I'm not exaggerating the caps here), and I will snap back to reality ready to kill.
Anyway, no visualisation for Percival.
But I digress :)
In May, I found a Soto Zen group who practised shikantaza, just sitting and being in the moment. That group was affiliated with AZI, the Association Zen Internationale founded by Master Taisen Deshimaru. The headquarters of the AZI are in France. As Deshimaru died without granting any of his students a Dharma transmission (read: conferring on them teaching privilegees), the AZI was slightly rudderless after the master's death. There's now a group of monks and nuns running the show who eventually got transmission from another master in Japan. The home page of the Bonn AZI group (in German) is here
I got along splendidly with my AZI group, and when I moved to Edinburgh, I decided to look for another group from the same organisation. And lo and behold, there was one in Glasgow. I tried an Interbeing Sangha meeting once, but they used visualisations and meditated on sutras. Cue failure, difficult texts, panic, not for me. The Glasgow setup felt cozy: chanting the well-known Heart Sutra, a central Buddhist text. However, the Glasgow group was less ritualistic: the end-of-sitting ceremony was *far* less elaborate, and the two periods of sitting lasted 25 minutes each, as opposed to the Bonn group's bone crunching 40.
John Fraser, the "godo" (i.e. leader) of the a href="http://www.glasgowzen.org.uk">Glasgow group was also unhappy with the lack of spiritual direction that the UK branch of the AZI exhibited. He's a cerebral guy who values thoughtful, no-nonsense discussion of key texts. He found a teacher in Mike Luetchford, who had established the Dogen Sangha in Bristol.
Mike has received transmission from Gudo Nishijima, who was a fellow student of Master Taisen Deshimaru in Japan. Mike is a brilliant scholar. He's fluent in Japanese and Sanskrit, and spends quite a bit of his time translating and editing key texts. He's also very good at banishing smoke screens - the version of Soto Zen he teaches is pared down to the bones, just sitting.
However, the AZI people disliked Mike. Because John increasingly studied with Mike, they cut us off. Since then, we've been an independent group of practicioners.
There are 15-20 of us. We sit twice a week, on Tuesday evening and on Saturday morning. I can only make it to the Saturday morning sittings, which are usually followed by a leisurely coffee together in the basement of Rokpa House, Glasgow. It's a very friendly group attended mostly by middle aged women and men and thirtysomethings. The most frequent professions are social worker, lawyer, and IT person. It'sa very open group. Most of us integrate some form of body work into their practice, such as Yoga, Chi Gung, or the Alexander Technique.
Any further questions, feel free to ask!
