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UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud

UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud

By: Silent Thunder Order
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A podcast of original teachings and music by Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston Roshi, guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order.

Michael Elliston Philosophy Social Sciences Spirituality
Episodes
  • 182: Four Immeasurables part 2 -- Compassion

    182: Four Immeasurables part 2 -- Compassion
    Dec 3 2025
    The second of the Four Immeasurables of Buddhism, compassion is a term that is frequently bruited-about in Zen circles, the ubiquity of which extends to the customary reference to buddha-dharma itself as “the compassionate teaching.” Which begs the question, Compassionate to whom?When we look at the teachings of Buddha, beginning with the Four Noble Truths, they do not look all that compassionate at first blush, at least not in the conventional sense of coddling us poor babies, who,after all, are the ones who are suffering, here.Right out of the blocks, with no warning emoji, comes the shock of the raw, blunt, undeniable existence of suffering — and the charge that we are to fully understand it. This does not seem very forgiving if you ask me, not of the intensely personal nature of our birth, aging, sickness and death, nor of our personal comfort level in confronting it. No rose-colored glasses here. Take it or leave it. The origin of suffering — consisting mainly in our own desires, exacerbated by our own attachments to them,which we are to fully abandon — is not very user-friendly, either. Since they — beginningless greed, angerand delusion, to name a few — are inborn — indeed, according to the Repentance verse, arising naturally from body, mouth and mind — it does not seem fair that we bear all the burden for abandoning them. Whose bright idea was this, anyway? We are not God, after all.The third reality-check — that there can be a cessation of suffering, but wait,there’s more: its realization is entirely dependent upon each individual’s personalefforts — is equally cringe-worthy. Is there no interlocutor, no savior to whom we can turn for succor and salvation? At least a support group we can join?Lastly, that we must follow some righteous, prescribed Noble Eightfold Path, every day — in order to realize this cessation of suffering — seems insufferable. Can’t we just be done with it and move on?This is obviously a set of inconvenient truths, intended to place the onus for acting on them directly on us. So what, exactly, makes them so noble?Well, you could say they are ennobling, in that they remind us of the true meaning of compassion, “suffer with,” implying that we are all in the same boat, ultimately. Our woes are shared with all other sentientbeings, who are also subject to these truths, perhaps with the exception of the Eightfold Path, which is more within the human social realm of practice, though by extension, all sentient beings are on the Path, whether they know it or not. You cannot accuse chickens, cats, dogs and cows of talking the talk but not walking thewalk. Only humans can manage that.Of course, along with his description of unvarnished reality, Buddha offers certain prescriptions for practice, i.e. what to do about it. The Three Treasures may be interpreted as the highest values in Zen, butalso as the three legs of its practice stool: Buddha as right meditation; Dharma as right understanding; and Sangha as right action. Or you may want to substitute the tripartite model of right discipline, wisdom, and conduct, respectively.The implication that we can get this right doesn’t necessarily mean that we can get it wrong. Thenotion of compassion suggests that we have the right to be wrong. Fall down seven times get up eight, thank you Dogen. We have to allow ourselves to fail, in order to succeed. Master Dogen makes the point — no pun — that the arrow hitting the bullseye depends upon the preceding 100 misses. Also, place your oxygen mask on before attempting to help others. Okay, Dogen did not say that.We speak of “practicing compassion,” which doesn’t make sense when expressed as “practicingsuffering with others.” We are already suffering with others, so practicing what already is does not seempossible. What we can practice is ways of helping others. Which implies that what we come up with may notwork. It largely depends upon them. It does not help to suffer fools gladly. But that does not mean that we should not even try.So karuna, compassion, may mean something more like practicing loving kindness, engaging in selfless behaviors of a bodhisattva, without making a big deal of it. In spite of our obvious limitations, doing what we can to help others, but without any attachment to outcomes. Suffering the consequences of failed attempts with equanimity, and practicing the kind of patience that recognizes that this may not end well.Taking up the bodhisattva path of saving all beings begs the question, “From what?” Save them fromtheir own ignorance? Even Buddha could not do that. Also, how many are there? How long is it going totake? And Where do I begin? Living by vow, the bodhisattva vow, means embracing the possibility of eternal rebirth. The possibility, not a belief in inerrancy, nor even the probability. Buddha’s teachings are not arguments.Taking the long view of Buddhism means that issues arising in this lifetime may not be...
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    11 mins
  • 180: Four Immeasurables part 1 -- Loving Kindness

    180: Four Immeasurables part 1 -- Loving Kindness
    Nov 5 2025
    From a downloaded document from one of my online dharma dialogs — dated June 8, 2016, but otherwise unidentified — we find the following definitions of the Four Immeasurables of Buddhism: Metta (loving kindness) Karuna (compassion)Mudita (sympathetic joy or empathy) Upekkha (equanimity) I have always felt that the immeasurables of Zen practice are more important than those aspects subject to measurement. For example, it is more important in doing meditation, zazen, to never give up, as MatsuokaRoshi would often encourage us, than how long we sit when we do, how often, how frequently, how regularly, etc. More important than the quantitative dimension is the qualitative.Folks bring this up in dokusan frequently, saying they know they need to “sit more.” I ask them when do they think they can do that. You cannot sit more in the past — it’s too late. You cannot sit more in the future, because it is not yet here, though you can plan to do so — and possibly set yourself up fordiscouragement by failing to live up to your own expectations — been there, done that. The only time you can do more zazen is when you are doing it. You can do zazen more by refraining from doing anything else while you are on the cushion. Such as daydreaming, worrying, planning, ruminating, regretting, and so on. Turn up the intensity knob. The list is followed by an extension of the definitions: The ease of equanimity, the full-heartedness of love, the tenderness of compassion, the radiance of joy. There follows a brief “prayer,” a term we do not often see in Buddhist teachings, a “short version” attributed to H.H. the Dali Lama:The Four immeasurables are found in one brief and beautiful prayer: May all sentient beings have happiness and its causes,May all sentient beings be free of suffering and its causes, May all sentient beings notbe separated from sorrowless bliss, May all sentient beings abide in equanimity, free of bias,attachment and anger.This sounds very similar to the familiar Metta Sutta, or Loving Kindness Sutra, from the Soto Zen liturgychanted often in Zen temples, though finding our “bliss” is not a term I would use as a goal or objective of Zen practice. While human beings are included in the panoply of sentient beings that we pray may be happy, it is also acknowledged that human beings can be a significant part of the problem, the cause of unhappiness and sorrow in their fellow sentient beings. Needless to say, we “pray” in the sense of earnestness — not to a god, to Buddha, nor to a specific bodhisattva. Our basic prayer is that we wake up, as soon as possible.It should be equally needless to point out that the prayer, or wish, for all beings to be happy does not imply a rose-colored, magical-thinking belief that somehow just because we pray for it, it shall come to pass that all beings will suddenly become happy, via some “spooky action at a distance” — thank you, Zen Master Einstein.We “transfer merit” at the end of our service because we don’t want to suggest that we actually believe we personally accumulate any real merit owing to our devotional activities. Whatever merit there maybe, it must already finitely exist, and can be neither increased or decreased by what we do.Likewise, the practical worldview of Buddhism and Zen dictates that if and when all beings actually do become happy, it will be happy with the causes and conditions of existence just as they are, or in spite ofthem: the unsatisfactory nature of life, being subject to aging, sickness and death, etc ad infinitum. Zen isnothing if not realistic.“Things as it is” is an expression David Chadwick attributes to Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in his charming book, “Crooked Cucumber,” as his condensed expression of one of the central truths of Zen. It does notmean “things as they are.” If it did, there would be no reason to engage in all the necessary discipline andwork of Zen, if it were only to result in things staying the way they are. That is, if our own perception and conception of our own reality did not undergo some kind of meaningful change as a result of our efforts, what would be the point of practicing? Which begs another central question, What kind of change is that?The kind of change that can come about through the practice and study of Zen, particularly itsmeditation, is pointed to in the Heart Sutra, chanted ubiquitously in Zen centers all over the world. The linethat declares, “Given Emptiness, there is no suffering, no end of suffering.” This Emptiness is capitalized tostress the unique meaning of the Sanskrit shunyatta. It is not voidness of existence, or devoid of meaning, but the dynamic nature of change that underlies all existence, the operative meaning of dukkha, usually translated as “suffering.” The suffering that can change through our coming to this insight that Buddha experienced and coached others to find, is of the unnecessary sort — that needless suffering that ...
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    11 mins
  • 179: Connecting the Dots Part 6

    179: Connecting the Dots Part 6
    Oct 1 2025
    APPROACHING THE SINGULARITYSiddhartha Gotama, the founder of Buddhism, known as the Buddha — as well as the Ancestors of Zen — struggled mightily to express the essence of the practice, meaning, and implications of Zen's meditation in the language and idiom of their time, throughout the countries and cultures of origin: India of 2500 years ago; China from around 500 CE; Korea and Japan a half-century later. As Master Dogen reminds us in the closing section of Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation:The Buddhas and Ancestors all preserved the buddha-mind and enhanced Zen trainingAnd then goes on to give us our marching orders: So you should devote yourself exclusively to and be completely absorbed in the practice of zazenTheir instructions were and are quite clear when it comes to the personal dimension of practice — just sit. But when we enter into the social arena, we face the same kind of dilemma that they did in attempting to express a direct experience of fundamental reality that is beyond the scope of conceptualization, let alone the reach of language. Buddha and Dogen used parables and analogies to illustrate their point, and along with other masters conjured various models and inventive paradigms to help their followers picture the reality they had intuited, which often contradicted the received wisdom of the period.In our modern context, the closest analogy that I have come across to the process and effects of sitting still enough, upright enough, for long enough, is that of the black hole, or rather the description of what occurs to matter in thrall to the gravitational field of one.Firstly and perhaps most obviously, we align ourselves with the planet by sitting upright. Our backbone comes to approximate a one-to-one correlation with the force field of gravity, visualized as a vector running from the crown of our head through the spine and spinal cord, straight to the center of the Earth. Like a mountain settling into place after the collision of two tectonic plates, our body enters into equilibrium, equipoise. With all forces equally balanced, maintaining the natural posture of zazen becomes relatively effortless. We experience a sense of floating in space, which is what we are doing. Once we have become physically comfortable in the posture, the body goes through its natural process of sensory adaptation, resulting in a blurring of the boundaries of our senses usually taken for granted. Beginning with the tactile sensations of the body, the adaptation extends to seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting. Eventually even thinking, the activity of the brain, adapts and settles into a profound stillness as well. Again, vintage Dogen:In stillness, mind and object merge in realization and go beyond enlightenmentDogen's choice of the verb "merge," it seems to me, captures the essential dynamic of the process of realization. Merging of mind and object, of self and other, of subjective and objective interpretation, of inner and outer — the resolution of all seeming dichotomies — and the non-separation, or nonduality, of the four fundamental spheres of activity and influence from my model of the real-world context in which we live: the merging of our personal sphere with that of the social, natural, and universal spheres. "Realization," in this context, points to a transformative event that is not the same as conceptualization, or even within the realm of recognition, as Dogen points out elsewhere. It is literally the "becoming real" of subjective and objective reality within the personal realm of intimate experience, known as the "hard problem" of philosophy. From our friendly online AI:The "hard problem of consciousness," a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers, is the challenge of explaining how physical processes in the brain, such as neural activity, give rise to subjective, qualitative experiences—like the feeling of redness, the taste of sugar, or the experience of pain—which he calls qualia. Unlike the "easy problems" of consciousness, which involve explaining cognitive functions, the hard problem focuses on the subjective, internal feel of "what it's like" to be a conscious being, something that cannot be fully captured by objective scientific explanations alonehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5DfnIjZPGw&t=7s So we can take it from this that the process of merging that will ensue — when and if we sit still enough, straight enough, for long enough — is not something subject to our control. Which is why we do not try to control what happens in Zen meditation, other than exerting a modicum of discipline on the physical level, relinquishing our usual, restive proclivities for lounging around and fidgeting. In particular, Master Dogen does not suggest any mental regimens or disciplines for controlling the monkey mind, in his manuals of meditation (a key point made by Carl ...
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    15 mins
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