Jun Po Roshi (Interview Archive)
You are drawing a new map. Think of it as laying down a fresh set of neurolinguistic markings, and you keep filling that map in as you go. Inside me there is pure listening, completely so, and when I open to it I find it seated at my heart. Once it rests in the heart, what shows up is fierce love and compassion. That is my ground. From there we ask the next thing: all right, so who are you now? That question only lands after the first truth has been named, admitted, and owned.
Granting that the truth has been established, I then ask: so who are you at this point? And this is where the fun starts again, because people answer with what they think or what they feel. I tell them, say it again, who else, where are you standing now? Good. Still not it. They hand you one answer after another, and eventually I say, well, it sounds like you have no idea who you are at this point. Then I ask, has listening ever spoken? There is pure listening, and there is the mind that has so much to say, which is the shallow part, the passing ego. That purity, that silence, it is always there inside you. Whatever gets said comes out through the ego, whether that ego belongs to someone reasonably awake and realized or to someone tangled up and anxious. Life was meant to be erotic, not neurotic.
Erik asked whether I really meant life is supposed to be erotic. I said yes, not neurotic. Eros, not Neuros. It is one of my little jokes.
Erik said that was a good one, and then he wanted to know where people can actually go to study something like this. He put it plainly: a lot of people would want this kind of training, so where is the real core and heart of Zen to be found now, somewhere that meets a person where they already are instead of handing them a seventeenth-century form of Zen.
We run a postmodern Zen school. The website is Mondozen.org, and the whole story is laid out there: a training manual, a basic sutra book, the structure of what we do and the reasoning behind it. We also have a Cyber Sangha program where people join in from all over the world and practice together for seventy days online, committing to the practices. We do one-on-one work over Skype and Google calls. Some people fly in and I work with them in person. And we hold retreats. In mid-May there is a small one in Colorado, a Mondo retreat, around twenty-six or twenty-seven people. So anyone can go online and look into it. This is only one school. The same question is being worked out all across the Buddhist world: how to carry the tradition forward into the circumstances we live in now. It is going on everywhere. I just happen to have found a particular way of doing it, and it works.