Japanese spiritual leader enlightens KU about Zen
by Marian Weeks Kansan staff writer
For most people, Zen is an incomprehensible and mystical term. On Friday, one of the foremost Zen masters of Japan came to the University of Kansas to help people understand, and maybe even experience, Zen.
Fukushima Keido Roshi spoke to about 100 people in the Spencer Museum of Art His interpreter Alex Rubin Roshi at the temple in Kyoto, Japan.
The Roshi is the spiritual head of the Tofukuji Temple, a leading temple in Kvato.
The Roshi said that Zen is the religion of attaining enlightenment, the experience of living by "mu."
He said mu meant losing the distinction between self and other people, and self and all other things.
The Roshi said that he could not translate mu, and that he would like to have the word become part of the international language.
"Spiritually speaking, it means to die once. Spiritually speaking, it means to lose yourself completely once. It really very difficult to lose yourself completely, but please listen as if you had already done it." The word
Amid his explanations, the Roshi planted surprise jokes.
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'Enlightenment is the experience
of I myself becoming mu," the Roshi said.
The Roshi said that the distinctions between hot and cold, mountain and river, red and black, tall and low, cute and not so attractive, and life and death disappear in the experience of enlightenment.
But the Roshi said enlightenment did not mean living in another world. In fact, it meant living with 100 percent attention in this world, having surpassed the distinction of self-realization and the distinctions between opposites.
For instance, the moment one looks at the beauty of mountains and says, "That's beautiful," one loses oneself, he said.
And the Roshi said that the moment when one experiences hot and cold, one loses oneself.
He said that Americans might not understand this because they could go to Canada to escape the heat and go south to escape the cold.
"If you are a person who hates cold, obviously in the last two days, you've been in real hell." But he noticed that cold, you lose yourself.
"Be killed by the cold. That means be completely cold yourself. At this point there is no egotistical self left."
"In Zen, it is the fact that you lose yourself and completely lose yourself and completely be the cold," he
said.
"The mu of Zen completely teaches this attitude. In Zen the teaching of no hot and cold is a very important concern," he said.
The Roshi then discussed life and death as he had hot and cold.
"When you're living, you should kill the self that thinks about living with the fact of life. When you are dying, you should kill the self who thinks about death."
he said the goal is to live completely at this one moment, to string those moments into days and those days into years.
The Roshi said that thinking was part of living completely, but not a separate part of being.
"The path of enlightenment is not a short path. It's a long haul, folks," he said.
Shellie Bender, a member of the Kansas Zen Center in Lawrence, said that the Zen practice had the capacity to make time expand because it focused full attention on what was trying to be done. The more investment Therefore, without the mind wandering, more is achieved in less time.
She said that the Korean Soto Zen master who teaches at the Kansas Zen Center discusses how to integrate Zen practice into American life to attain clarity, focus and many transforming benefits.
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