Roshi Pat Enkyo OHara - Most Intimate: A Zen Approach to Lifes Challenges

Roshi Pat Enkyo OHaras Most Intimate is exactly that: deeply forthright in its wisdom and fully at home in the body of her direct experience. Filled with precise instruction and insight, informed by the rigor of Roshis years of dedicated practice and service, her authentic voice speaks boldly and without compromise on these pages.

Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness

Warm-hearted, clear, precise, and deeply loving, Most Intimate beckons newcomers and old-timers alike back to the cushion of their own lives to live them with awareness and appreciation. Roshi Enkyos voice is deeply personal and her teachings deceptively simple, for they manage to address our strongest needs for relationship, joy, confidence, and freedom from fear.

Tetsugen Bernie Glassman, author of Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Masters Lessons in Living a Life That Matters

We often think of Zen as a practice of stillness, and this book shows us the other half of mature spiritual practice: intimacy and expression. This is the kind of Zen that is loyal to both the monastery and the streets, and so the lessons here are vibrantly appropriate for this new century of dharma. Roshi Enkyo OHaras voice is alive, bright, and welcoming.

Michael Stone, author of Awake in the World and Yoga for a World Out of Balance

ABOUT THE BOOK

For Roshi Pat Enkyo OHara, intimacy is what Zen practice is all about: the realization of the essential lack of distinction between self and other that inevitably leads to wisdom and compassionate action. She approaches the practice of intimacy beginning at its most basic levelthe intimacy with ourselves that is the essential first step. She then shows how to bring intimacy into our relationships with others, starting with those dearest to us and moving on to those who dont seem dear at all. She then shows how to grow in intimacy so that we include everyone around us, all of society, the whole world and all the beings it contains. Each chapter is accompanied by practices she uses with her students at the Village Zendo for manifesting intimacy in our lives.

ROSHI PAT ENKYO OHARA is a Soto Zen Priest and Zen Teacher in the White Plum lineage. She received priest ordination from Taizan Maezumi Roshi and dharma transmission from Bernie Tetsugen Glassman. She is the founder and abbot of the Village Zendo in New York City.

Sign up to receive weekly Zen teachings from Shambhala Publications.

Or visit us online to sign up at shambhala.com/ezenquotes.

MOST INTIMATE

A ZEN APPROACH TO LIFES CHALLENGES

Roshi Pat Enkyo OHara

Foreword by Roshi Joan Halifax

SHAMBHALA

Boston & London

2014

SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2014 by Roshi Pat Enkyo OHara

Cover photograph by Timo Kosenko

Cover design by Daniel Urban-Brown

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

OHara, Pat Enkyo, author.

Most intimate: a Zen approach to lifes challenges / Roshi Pat Enkyo OHara; foreword by Roshi Joan Halifax.First edition.

Pages cm

eISBN 978-0-8348-2970-1

ISBN 978-1-59030-974-2 (paperback: alk. paper)

1. Spiritual lifeZen Buddhism. 2. MeditationZen Buddhism. 3. Intimacy (Psychology)Religious aspectsZen Buddhism. I. Title.

BQ9288.O44 2014

294.3444dc23

2013023141

This book is dedicated to Sybil Myoshin Taylor
June 5, 1933February 29, 2012
Who conceived it in association with herfriend and teacher, Roshi Pat Enkyo OHara

Contents

My gratitude extends to so many who have touched my life and made it possible for these ways of living to be shared. Naturally, I offer appreciation to my Zen teachers, Roshis Daido Loori, Taizan Maezumi, and Bernie Glassman, each of whom turned the Dharma vessel in different ways, showing its many facets. And to my Dharma sisters, Roshis Joan Halifax, Seisen Saunders, and Egyoku Nakao, who have shown me subtle aspects of the Way.

In my day-to-day life I have benefited from my life partner and Dharma companion, Sensei Barbara Joshin OHara, who always seeks the deepest level of the teachings.

This book is dedicated to my dear friend and sangha member Sybil Myoshin Taylor, who conceptualized and prodded me to write it. Reid Boates, Sybils literary agent and now mine, kindly and smoothly guided us through the world of publishing.

Without the help of editor and Dharma student Howard Thoresen, we never would have completed this project. His intelligent questions, skillful suggestions, and overall encouragement and structuring were essential to the task.

And to the Village Zendo sangha and all the Dharma students Ive known, thank you for your practice.

I have had the joy of practicing with Roshi Enkyo OHara for many years, both in New York and at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We are often suitemates when she comes to my Zen center for Rohatsu sesshin. In the early mornings before zazen or late in the evenings, we find ourselves chuckling over the absurdity of our lives, joking about our continuous failure, and appreciating the depth of our friendship and the richness of practice.

She and I have traveled many paths together, not only across the zendo but also across the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayas. We have circumambulated Mount Kailash together, like Han Shan and Shih Te, two old monks struggling along at altitude. As we have gotten older, we find ourselves more comfortable on horseback, riding narrow mountain trails and peering down at the Karnali or Brahmaputra rivers, as we remember that our lives are also passing from us at a similar rate.

Now she has written this marvelous bookMost Intimate, a perfect title for a life that continues to be lived intimately and authentically. All the pieces of Roshis life seem to come together in this most intimate phrase: her practice, her laughter, her service, her scholarship, her love of others, her diligence, her courage, her truthfulness and testiness, her wisdom and wit, and her caring.

In Zen, we make our okesa (monks robe) out of pieces of discarded cloth. That pathwork robe, or Buddha robe, is our life; it wraps around our life and the life of this world. Most Intimate is about our wholeness in our whole life, all the pieces of it, how to realize intimacy within it, and how to make a whole cloth of it.

In this book, Roshi Enkyo explores not just regular intimacy, but radical intimacy. She sees it as the ultimate path and realization of liberation. This path she invites us to open is not only about our lives; it is also about the life of this world in which we are embedded. Each other, our work, our society, our earthnone of this is separate from practice.

Our wholeness includes the truth of suffering and the discoveries we can make when we see suffering with unafraid eyes. Roshi tells us that this is healing. This is also our practice, which is to turn into the skid, to find our way to stillness in the midst of rough seas, to swim in the flood, to find sustenance in the desert. Roshi also calls us to stillness, even as our technology and obsession with work endeavor to entice us into a tangle of distractions.