Dokusan

So during this initial phase where they're mostly doing breathwork, are they...

So what do you guys call private meetings? Dokusan or...

Dokusan.

Yeah.

Dokusan.

Are they meeting with you in Dokusan during the breath period?

Yes.

Breathwork period? Okay.

Yeah, and I couldn't find it.

I was going to bring that up today, and maybe Kanchen can bail me out here, because we talked about it in Dokusan quite a while ago, is that he's talking, the Pure Land Buddhists believe that if you chant Amitabha's name, and you meditate in that fashion by chanting, that you will be reborn in the Buddha land, which is...

I guess they say it's in the West, right? It's backwards from what we'd say.

But Huening says it's here in your mind.

Yeah, and then sanzen is a word for the one-on-one meetings with a teacher.

And so that Sanzen, and Dokusan is another word for it.

I think Dokusan is actually used more often in Sotozen, and Sanzen is more often in Rinzai, but I don't know.

But this one-on-one meeting with a teacher, and that means a Dharma-transmitted teacher.

So a Dharma-transmitted teacher, whether they're lay or ordained, can offer Sanzen or Dokusan.

if somebody, say, in ZCO is a Dharma holder, they might be able to sit down with you over a cup of tea and, you know, talk about your practice, but would be careful not to call that sansan or dokusan.

And Yoli just asked, what's the distinction? What's the distinction between between just like kind of informally discussing.

the arts.

How would that manifest kind of concretely in the individual Kwan students' experience? Like if I was a Pacific Zen Institute Kwan student, what would I be doing different in Dokusan within that framework than I might do, say, at like ZCLA or something like that, or even at like Diamond Sangha? Well, Diamond

Sangha, so Yamada used to have 60 people in session.

Mm-hmm.

So anyway, he described this in a Zen retreat.

They have these very brief interviews called Dokusan.

And it's a sort of interchange between the teacher, the roshi, and the student.

And so he goes in to have dokusan with the roshi, and about three or four days into this sesshin, the retreat, and the roshi asks, how is it? And he says, very good.

The Reverend Shudo was always telling me, if only you will be completely honest, follow the Roshi's instructions without fail and you will be able to awaken.

So when going to Dokusan, this is like Sanzen, I was honest about how things were going and would always return empowered.

However, when I held my hands as instructed, it felt like it was going so slowly and without realizing it, I was clutching them into the fists.

She was really trying so hard.

I could just please come right away.

So I met with Michael and Dokusan, and I shared both the joy and the heaviness of this news.

I'd found this spiritual community here that I felt deeply connected to, that I wanted to be a part of, and it was deeply satisfying.

Now a year later, I was intending to move away to this dark, cold, unknown place.

... yeah.

There's Dokusan and-

Yep

... do you guys, do you guys do Oroki?

My teacher Tenshin Roshi recently left Green Gulch in his mid-80s to the the Zen retirement community north of there that they set up.

Just, you know, every day, just being around a teacher like that and having access to a meeting in Dokusan so regularly, that was a real gift of the Zen-style community.

That one-on-one meeting is, in addition to group classes and teachings and talks, is a great gift of the Zen tradition.

It's