Jun Po Roshi: An Interview
In the training, I'll circle back and ask again: tell me, who are you at this step? They answer, and it's close but not quite there. So they try something else, a whole range of responses, until eventually I point out that it sounds like they don't actually know who they are at that step. And then I ask a different kind of question. Has listening ever spoken? There is pure listening, and there is the part of us with plenty to say, and that talkative part is the surface mind, the temporary ego mind. Given that, the purity and the silence are already sitting inside you. Speaking always comes through the ego, whether that ego belongs to someone reasonably awake or someone tangled up and anxious. Life is meant to be erotic, not neurotic.
Erik: Life is supposed to be erotic?
Jun Po: Right, not neurotic. Eros, not Neuros. One of my little jokes.
Erik: I like that. A lot of people would want to go through training like this, I think, and I keep wondering where someone finds the actual core of Zen now. Where can a person go to meet Zen on their own terms, rather than some 17th-century version of it?
Jun Po: We're a postmodern Zen school. The site is Mondozen.org, and the whole story is laid out there. You'll find a training manual, a basic sutra book, an explanation of the structure, what we're doing and the reasoning behind it. We run a Cyber Sangha program too, where people from all over the world join in. We practice together online for 70 days, everyone committing to the practices. We do Skype calls and Google calls one-on-one. Some people fly in and I work with them directly. And we hold retreats. This coming mid-May there's one in Colorado, small, a Mondo retreat, around 26 or 27 people. So someone can go online, dig into the material, and find us there. This is only one school, though. The same thing is happening all through the Buddhist world: figuring out how to carry the tradition forward into present circumstances. It's going on everywhere. I've just landed on a particular vehicle for doing it, and it works.
Then the next question comes. Once you understand this much, I say: all right, now I want you to not know a not-knowing, and get the body in on it. First I'll ask who you are and have you answer 'I don't know' from the ego. Who are you? And make a fist as you say it. Who are you? I don't know. Feel the psyche react. Who are you? I don't know. Now let's cut the head off the beast, drop the eye, and answer 'not knowing' straight from the heart. Who are you? I don't know. Feel the contraction, then the release. You can genuinely feel the psyche working in there, the ego function. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. We play with it like that, so the body gets drawn into the process. Once we've done it, I ask: got that experience? Can you feel the difference? And the answer comes back yes, I can feel the difference in how receptive I am, physically, emotionally, philosophically.