If you generally hate Soto, don't like personal experiences, or want to be insulting please consider not commenting in this thread. Or whatever.
There are two zen centers in my local area: one is a Golden Wing branch (kind of a mixture between Korean Zen and Pure Land Buddhism), and the other is a Soto group. Since I'm not interested in the former, I decided to go try out the latter yesterday (Sunday).
The services were held in an Akido center, which makes sense given there is a natural intersection between the two communities. There were a few asian people in attendance but most of the attendees were Caucasian, with a wide variety of ages but no children. M/F was about an 80/20 split (although the Kyoko was a woman and she had an awesome voice for it).
The session were divided into 1 hour meditation, 1/2 hour teaching, and 1/2 hour "services".
The meditation was 25 minutes sitting, 10 minutes walking, and another 25 sitting. It was exquisite. I've never meditated in a group setting before and for some reason being in a room with other people helped me keep my focus. The room was fairly dark with some faint incense and, particularly during the first sitting session, someone would beat on the wooden block with a hammer (I'm sure there is a term for this but I don't know what it is) every 5? minutes or so. At least for me the sound was good to stay in the "present" and not get sidetracked into my thoughts. I got in pretty deep, especially during the second sitting, and had a sense of periodically circling back to the breathing while going into deeper states. The walking was something I had not done before and was interesting, although I don't think I was in a meditative state because I was focused too much on maintaining proper posture and not falling over (my legs were a bit numb after the zazen).
The dharma talk was meh. It wasn't the regular teacher, so they had a guest come in and basically read modern beatnik zen poetry (from a guy named Gary Snyder, I believe, although there were one or two from an ancient Chinese master, don't recall which one).
The services were interesting and not what I was expecting. I was thinking that chanting would be kept to a minimum, but we chanted quite a few things including the entire Heart Sutra in English and the one you do 7 times while bowing to the ground every other line. The bowing was not something I was accustomed to and took a bit of doing!
Overall everyone was very polite, although the guy who read the poetry was initially standing next to me while chanting then abruptly moved away. Since I had showered that morning I guess he found my noobishness disrupting or something, struck me as a bit rude. The Kyoko especially was very nice, although it seemed like it was kind of her job to welcome newcomers as well.
Overall I like it but would probably not go every week. As I'm getting more into Dogen right now, I would like to focus on my individual practice, with occasional group support to keep in the right framespace.
Submitted March 06, 2018 at 02:27AM by NonEuclideanSyntax http://ift.tt/2FTZtu1
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