I so enjoyed meeting and interviewing Valerie Forstman. She is yet another demonstration of the depth of kōan teachers who are now available to help wake up this world.
Valerie is an Associate Zen Master of Sanbo Zen and Guiding Teacher at Mountain Cloud Zen Center. I spoke with her about The Record of Going Easy, Case 11: The Old Woman of Táishān. The title for the interview, “From the Chasm of Now to the Boundlessness of Now,” reflects how Valerie characterized her Zen practice and the fruits of the kōan process.
Valerie came Zen when her life as a professional musician had a lingering sense of “the chasm of the now.” I asked her how it was for her now, and she said:
“This boundlessness of the now! […] Lately, something has been happening in my own experience coming from way back in my days as a professional musician. I don’t know why, but I’ve been being visited now and then by these little memory incursions. If you’re sitting in an orchestra, you never forget a mistake. And all of a sudden, I was driving along, and I remembered playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and having this part where I had to come in, completely exposed during the third movement, and I was a little flat. [This memory penetrates] like a dart. That happened a few times over some days. Then it was suddenly like everything that has ever happened is happening right now. And whatever will happen, it’s this now. It’s this straight ahead right now. And the moment that shift came, the dart dissolved.”
If you’d like to learn more about Valerie, in addition to what she shares in this interview, see the recent Mountain Cloud interview, “Who is Valerie Forstman?”
For those of you interested in the relationship between Zen meditation, zazen, and kōan work, Valerie summed it up nicely:
“Zazen can stand alone. This sitting, this willingness to sit in silence in a balanced way, however one finds that posture, and do nothing. What a subversing act! So, yeah, [zazen] is really the root and the wellspring [of kōan work]. And into that soil for those for whom it seems fitting, you can drop the seed of a kōan […].”
I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did when I participated in it.
Comments welcome.
If you’d like to learn more about this kōan:
The Old Woman of Táishān: Completely Seen Through!
With this post, I begin the three-post cycle for Record of Going Easy, Case 10: The Old Woman of Táishān.
Thanks
go to Martin Kaku’on, our audio-video editor, for his work with this podcast!
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