Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘At the temple, especially a mountain temple filled with experienced practitioners, it is easy to fall into silence. I have a great fondness for sitting amongst a group of serious Zen students in a big zendo where the energy of the room and the intentions of people honed over time creates a magnetic pull into silence. But at the end of every retreat, most of the participants will talk about sadness as they contemplate the sense of loss that occurs when the silence is lost.  

When we talk about making Zen relevant to people, I think the most fundamental question is: how are we ever going to deliver awareness of and connection to stillness to people when and where they need it?    

This is why we gather downtown and meditate in the noise. We could go to the mountain, relieve our stress, and get some rejuvenation, but then when we go back to work on Monday we tend to dream about a place where enlightenment is possible and forget that it is always with us. And as it turns out, this is nothing new or the result of the peculiar facets of our modern lives. If fact, in the year 1227, Dogen warned his readers that traveling around looking for peace somewhere else was problematic at best, and suggested that the real noise problem was the sound of all the liking and disliking that we do. It seems that the source of our trouble has nothing to do with the sounds outside.  

This noise we hear, does not actually take place outside of our heads. Without getting into the arising of phenomena, the twelvefold chain of causation, or any of the sutra, we can understand the cause of the noise we hear by answering a simple question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”    

The answer is also simple. The tree falls, air moves, eardrums registers it, and a mind creates a sound for it. There is no intrinsic sound that the tree makes. The sound we hear is actually little more than a symbol, much in the same way something we call “BAM” arises from three letters. And it might be helpful to notice the little visceral response that arises just from seeing BAM. 

It’s not the sound that makes a bad or good noise, it’s our not wanting the sound that makes the difference between noise and music. Music happens when we allow ourselves to sit back in wonder and let ourselves glide along with harmony and syncopation.  

In the midst of sound it is easy to forget about the silence. In forgetting the silence, the sound loses meaning and its ability to connect us to a larger world.’ (from the Pop-Up Zendo blog)