Sunday April 25. Ceremony begins at 2pm and lasts until about 5pm. Potluck dinner and celebration to follow.
Registration option for Zoom attendance, but registering will add you to the email list for updates and reminders.
Join us for this milestone event.
To raise funds and establish a temple is no small undertaking, as you now well know. I am full of admiration for you for doing this. Having done it, whether you intended this or not, you have provided a foundation for the dharma in the future, when all of us are gone and new generations occupy the space that we now hold.
A building, a “seat,” that represents the faith of many many people who have provided it, is necessary to preserve the dharma, but it is not sufficient. A temple is just a building unless it is occupied by a Buddha, the illuminating consciousness that brings it to life.
This illuminating consciousness is traditionally represented and embodied in the person of an abbot, who takes the seat in a solemn ritual, the Mountain Seat ceremony.
Here is the subtle part. The part that none of us are capable of understanding because we don’t yet know how it will work out. In Japan abbots more or less control temples and guide, according to traditional norms, their destinies. But here in the West abbots are not hierarchs. They are spiritual guides. And they are understood to be normal and ordinary people, even though they are stand-ins for the Buddha. As such, they are supposed to be guardians of awakening. Without awakening there are no Zen temples.
So the trick is, how can we foster authentic abbots, and therefore authentic temples, while we fully empower each and every practitioner to find his and her and their own way, and to participate fully in the vision of temple life? I guess you at Red Cedar have been doing this, blazing the way, as are other groups here and there in the country. When Nomon Tim is installed as abbot you will all take, together, another giant spiritual step in this direction.
