I met Charlie Kōrin Pokorny in about 2010 at a Boundless Way Zen sesshin. We both had a history in Soto Zen training and I remember James Myōun Ford Roshi remarking that we walked alike—e.g., quietly entering the room for dokusan.
Charlie trained within the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) system and receive koan-teaching authorization from a Diamond Sangha teacher, Daniel Terragno Roshi. Charlie and his wife, Sarah Dojin Emerson, are now co-teachers at Brooklyn Zen Center.
Interviewing him about kōans generally and this kōan specifically (i.e., The Record of Going Easy, Case 12: Dìzàng Planting the Fields) was a delight. But because San Francisco Zen Center is well-known for their non-kōan, non-kenshō approach to Zen practice, you might be surprised that Charlie trained there and received transmission from Tenshin Anderson Rōshi. So I asked Charlie,
“What about kensho? Jiryu Rutschman-Byler, one of the current abbots [of San Francisco Zen Center], before he was Abbott, said on social media that his institution was rabidly anti-kensho.”
Charlie responded,
“That was not my experience. My experience was that there is extreme carefulness around how one talks about kenshō or an opening, because of the grasping put out there. [Talking about kenshō] can activate a lot of grasping in the sangha, and so I think there is a kind of reticence about it from the point of view of care. Sometimes I felt that people didn’t want to talk about attainments to avoid their own disappointment at not having that attainment […]. But I never felt that with Tenshin Roshi. We would have conversations about this and about grasping after attainment. And also about being clear about what kind of attainments had happened or not. And clearly when big things happened in zazen, what were they?”
Indeed, once again, reality is more complex than reputation would lead us to believe. Charlie is one of several teachers who were trained (and are training) at San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) who are doing kōan work or who are authorized to teach kōan. Recently, SFZC hosted The Joys of Koan Practice: A Soto Zen Teacher’s Panel, a panel discussion with Kokyo Henkel, Mushin Antoinette Parekh, Korin Charlie Pokorny, Heather Shōren Iarusso, and Robert Reese about this topic.
As for kōans, Charlie defined the word “kōan” as follows:
“When I call something a kōan, you can’t get it with thinking. So what are you going to do with that? What do you think about that? How are you going to work with that? How are you going to work with this kōan? And I really like that. Embodied awareness. There’s a way of embodied awareness itself as a form of inquiry. A kōan can kind of weave into embodied awareness into coming into intimacy with self and other. Kōans can weave in a really beautifully productive way.”
“How does this compare to us farming and eating lots of rice?”
To assist you in viewing the interview, below are the main case and the verse we discuss:
舉
Dìzàng asked master Xiūshān Zhǔ, “Where are you coming from?”
Xiūshān said, “Coming from the south.”
Dìzàng said, “How is the buddhadharma doing in the south these days?”
Xiūshān said, “Discussed extensively.”
Dìzàng said, “How does that compare to us farming and eating lots of rice?”
Xiūshān said, “How can one help the three worlds?”
Dìzàng said, “What do you call the three worlds?”
Verse
Mediocre common knowledge is forcefully exhausted.
Transmission from mouth to ear dissipates skillful means.
Planting fields, cooking rice - the matter of everyday life.
Not eating until full, you don’t know.
Only if you’ve eaten until full do you fully know that there’s nothing to seek.
In the end, Zǐfáng was indifferent to being made a marquis.
Free from worldly concerns, he returned the same as fish and birds.
Washing his feet in the misty Cānglàng autumn.
Here is the first post in this series with an overview of this case:
Dìzàng Planting the Fields: How Do You Pass Your Days?
With The Record of Going Easy, Case 12: Dìzàng Planting the Fields, we all might sink in the muck together. Wànsōng, you see, ends his introduction to the kōan with a question that tempts us to do just that: “How do you pass your days?”
The next interview here at Shake Out Your Sleeves and Go
“‘I Will Be the Stone Against Which You Sharpen Your Blade:’
An Interview with Rinzan Pechovnik”
Over at Vine of Obstacles Zen
A Treasure from the Ancient Trailblazers: Nine Stages for Calming the Body-Mind
My gratitude
goes again to Martin Kaku’on for editing the audio and video as well as adding some new music at the end of the interview. Thank you, MK!
