Soul in Zen - Lecture by John Tarrant, Roshi

　　Tonight I”ll talk about trying to meld two great currents in late twentieth century western thought. One is depth psychology, which varies from being a passion to a cult, I suppose, but is very often usually important in the way we see the world. And the other is the perspective of the zen tradition--the Buddhist tradition generally, I think, and my particular branch of that is the zen tradition--which I think is also a great current in western thought now, I hope becoming a greater current, and offers some resolutions to some of the issues we”re really grappling with as a culture and inpidually. My interest in this talk is to talk a little about the more inpidual aspects of that crossover, that confluence of currents of thought and feeling and passion.

　　The way I did it. I trained first in the Buddhist tradition, actually I started out in the Tibetan tradition and ended up in zen, for many years; and then I went to the psychological tradition because I wanted to flesh out some things that I felt I didn”t understand and I felt that having another place to stand would help me understand some things about the zen tradition. So I”m in a really different position from the many people who have gone from psychology to zen to try to heal psychology. I was more interested in healing zen and so I feel like that”s my perspective and my main interest because I function as a zen teacher.

　　I”m writing a book on this material. I recently wrote an essay and I started out with two quotes and I”ll start this talk with these two. The first is a quote from Lin-chi, or Rinzai, who says:

　　Officially even a needle cannot enter; unofficially you can drive a horse and cart through.

　　This was my experience of zen. I spent much of my time in zen doing things my teacher told me not to and somehow trying to find ways to make them work. I felt it was very important that he told me not to do them, and it was very important that I did them. Both things were necessary.

　　And the other one is Prospero”s speech, the opening of the epilogue to "The Tempest". Now my charms are all o”erthrown, And what strength I have”s mine own, Which is most faint.

　　If you know that play at all, it”s the play about the magician who is finally throwing away the tools of his trade so that he”s not going to live by magic any more. He”s going to live as a mortal, as a human on the earth. I feel that that”s a classic zen position. That people tend to take up meditation for many reasons. The reason I took up meditation was for insight. I wanted to see how the world was put together. I also thought that I was kind of crazy and I thought it might help. I guess it did. But I wanted insight. I wanted to understand my life and find meaning in my life. I think many people took up zen for that reason, took up the meditation. At least in my tradition, what you do is you work very hard at meditation, and typically you put aside times and have retreats, and sooner or later something dawns on you, some change happens, some inner shift in your life happens, which we call by fancy names like enlightenment or kensho or satori. The term I like most, which is an old Chinese jargon term, is intimacy for a spiritual experience, which I think is nice and has that sense of the warmth and the connection to the universe that belongs to true spiritual experience. True spiritual experience is not an isolating or grand thing, but a very near, close kind of thing.

　　I went through the dark and dreadful zen mills and sweated very hard doing it and it was a good experience for me. I found that on the way certain things, I felt, were being taught officially and certain things were being taught unconsciously, and I became very interested in what those things were, the seco…

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