Front row: Shuso Chikyo Ryunin, Yuji Koryu Terri Clark, and Chris Reath; and back row Chris Middleman and Myoshin Kate McCandless, after the ceremony.
Photos by: Reverend Genzen Ed Cadman

A unique collaboration of regional Zen teachers led practitioners in the SP24 Practice Period six-week practice period this spring. The April 6 to May 19 event included an online class on five Tuesday evenings, plus an in-person half-day and full-day zazenkai at Dai Bai Zan Cho Bo Ji, the Rinzai Zen temple on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

The Cho Bo Ji zendo is a wonderful spacious space with polished floors and many windows, looking out on a beautiful green and flowery garden. The zendo’s very air is scented from years of incense offerings,

The series was hosted by Seattle Soto Zen, in collaboration with  Portland-based Mountain Rain Zen Community. Guiding teachers were Shinmon Michael Newton, and Myoshin Kate McCandless. Serving as shuso or head monk was Reverend Chikyo Ryunin Ewan Magie, leader of Prairie Mountain Zen Center just north of Boulder, Colorado. He was invited by Seattle Soto Zen resident teacher Kanshin Allison Tait.

Study during the SP24 Practice Period focused on “The Taste of Silence,” a poignant and deeply personal spiritual memoir by Belgian writer and Zen practitioner Bieke Vandekerckhove, subtitled “How I Learned to Be At Home With Myself” (2015). Participants understood up front that this short book centers on Vandekerckhove’s diagnosis with ALS at age 19, while she was beginning her studies at university and entering adulthood full of hopes and dreams. As a spiritual memoir, her narrative shows her direct experiences of suffering, similar to the raw edge of the Buddha’s own encounters with old age, sickness, and death.

Vandekerckhove’s own first encounters with Zen lead her to state, in characteristically direct language, “Never have I encountered such intensity of silence.” The raw encounter with suffering that Vandekerckhove experienced with her ALS diagnosis mirrors each Zen practitioner’s own direct encounters. Cracking open our body-heart-mind, enables each practitioner to enter a life of practice in noble silence. This silence and stillness allows everything to arise: our greed, anger, and delusion; our desire, hatred, and ignorance.

The SP24 Practice Period enabled practitioners from the Pacific Northwest and beyond to meet their own deepest suffering, and transform it into wisdom insight, and deep, abiding compassion for self and other, for all beings. Meeting this suffering directly in silence and stillness, allowed practitioners from Seattle Soto Zen, Mountain Rain Zen, and Prairie Mountain Zen Center to let go deeply, allowing equanimity to manifest, and peaceful wise understanding to emerge.

Students in the class would hear a short talk from Shuso Chikyo Ryunin, then share openly around a series of reflection questions structured to elicit responses from their own lives and practice. Early in her book, Vandekerckhove relates the story of her despair, how everything fell apart until suddenly, after three years of darkness, her illness unpredictably went into remission.

It was then that a friend invited her to attend a weekend retreat at a local Trappist monastery in Belgium. Emerging with laughter in her heart and a smile on her lips, she found herself surprised into a life of practicing in noble silence, the silence of deep monastic practice, as practiced both by the desert fathers like Anthony of Egypt, and Zen ancestors like Bodhidharma.

During Seattle Soto Zen’s SP24 Practice Period, participants were encouraged to make a list of commitments to deepen their practice and engagement with Zen. Some of these commitments included devoting more time to zazen, practicing art more day-to-day, meeting for tea and conversation with Shuso Chikyo Ryunin, and attending the opening and closing zazenkai retreats, whether in-person or online.

Practitioners also met with fellow participants to start and end the sustained, concentrated time of practice known as practice period, whether at a local café or online via Zoom. These conversations accomplish many purposes. First, at the start, meeting and conversing with a practice period partner establishes and personalizes one’s commitments as listed, making them real, specific, detailed and concrete. Second, at the end, a concluding conversation allows for honest reflection regarding how thoroughly each practitioner met their stated goals. Finally, each practitioner can reflect more deeply upon what unfolded in the scope of intensified, concentrated Zen Buddhist practice during this time.

 Often, as in the case for the shuso himself, there are unexpected deepenings of practice that unfold in the course of everyday life, as in the supporting of a partner, or daughter, or an aging single parent who lives far away.

The shuso responded to each practitioner’s deeply personal dharma question, clarifying with follow-up responses when needed. Together, the shuso and the sangha raised the dharma, and opened like an udambara flower the extraordinary teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, the practice of the middle way that leads to peace and ease, compassion and deep transformative understanding.

Mountain Rain Zen Guiding Teachers Myoshin Kate McCandless and Shinmon Michael Newton hosted and guided the concluding Hosenshiki dharma inquiry ceremony, along with the shuso.

Class participants came from across the Pacific Northwest, including Reverend Jundo Steve Given from Portland, Reverend Genzen Ed Cadman from Seattle, Megan Adam from British Columbia, and reverends Anka Rick Spencer and JiEn KoDo Adriana Argelia from Mexico City. Shuso Reverend Chikyo Ryunin Ewan Magie flew out to start the SP24 Practice Period on April 6 and drove out to conclude it on May 19. During the weekly classes he joined by Zoom from the small town of Brush, Colorado, where he also serves as assistant priest for Prairie Mountain Zen Center, under founding teacher Jodo Cliff Clusin.

As the flower petals of mid-May unfolded, practitioners from many sanghas across the Northwest manifested the dharma and expanded our inter-sangha connections. May we long continue!