Sangha Life
A Publication of the Missouri Zen Center
October-November, 2003

220 Spring Avenue
Webster Groves, MO 63119
(314) 961-6138

Visit us on the web at www.MissouriZenCenter.org
(pdf and html versions of this newsletter and the calendar are available from the website)

Events for October and November
• October 5
	Mindfulness Day
• October 11
	Movie Night
• November 1 & 2
	Tree planting
• November 8
	Movie Night

See the articles for more information on each of these events. Check the listserv or the closet door at the Zen Center for events scheduled after press time.

Zen Center Begins Planning 
For The Long Term
by Ando
During the September Board Meeting, we began discussions about the future growth, long term plans, and mission of the Zen Center. Since this is a task that requires considerable time and effort, a committee was created to forward the work. Ultimately, the purpose of the planning committee is to codify our goals, purpose, and mission statement, so that the membership will have concrete issues to consider. We are aware that we need improvement in this area.
We also ask that the membership become involved and communicate their ideas as to where the Zen Center should go in the coming years. Current committee members are Steve Taylor, Kalen, Tenmo, Rokan, and Matt Anderson. Contact any of the members to share your ideas or your interest in being part of the committee. Watch for meeting announcements to be posted to the listserv.
Because of the rain over Labor Day weekend, the proceeds from our fundraising activities at the Japanese Festival fell well short of the average.  If you are able, we ask that you consider increasing your donations this year in order that we might continue to operate the Zen Center in the fashion that we, as members, have become accustomed. The basic mission of the Zen Center is to promote the Dharma, and we require active
participation in practice, financial commitment, and work from the membership.
As most people know, we do have funds set aside, but these are being kept in reserve, as we pursue the possibility of procuring rural land for a monastery/training center. We try to avoid using these funds for day-to-day expenses. This is an ongoing activity being conducted by Yoshida Sensei and the Board and is one of the issues that will be considered by the long-term planning and growth committee.
Yoshida Sensei asks that all members please increase their efforts to practice the Awakened Way, on the cushion (zazen) and off the cushion (geza gyo: financial and work commitments). All are welcome to sit at the Zen Center, but with this comes a responsibility to help maintain our place of practice. We know that there are those who may not be able to contribute financially, but there is always plenty of work to do.
Please feel free to contact me or any other board member if you have ideas, issues, concerns, or questions regarding your Zen Center.
Ultimately, the Awakened Way IS our goal. Please come sit with us and help us spread the Dharma.

Mindfulness Day 2003: 
Buddhism Past, Present & Future
Each fall St. Louis-area Buddhists and other spiritual seekers come together on Mindfulness Day to celebrate the Way of Awakened Living taught by the Buddha. Sponsored by the Buddhist Council of Greater St. Louis, this year's Mindfulness Day will be held on Sunday, October 5th, from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm, at the Thai Buddhist Temple, 890 Lindsay Lane, Florissant, MO.  The event is free and open to the public.
Founded in 1999, the Buddhist Council of Greater St. Louis consists of 13 local Buddhist groups that meet monthly to discuss secular and spiritual issues and to organize year-round activities.  The Council is comprised of the Blue Beryl Dharma Center, Dragon Flower Buddhist Group, Hikoshin Ryu Buddhist Group, MABA Buddhist Monastery, Missouri Zen Center, St. Louis Insight Meditation Group, Sri Lankan Buddhist Group, Thai Buddhist Temple, Do Ngak Choling & Kagyu Droden Kunchab Tibetan Buddhist groups, Vietnamese Buddhist Association of St. Louis, Vietnamese Dharma Study Group, and Vipassana Buddhist Church.

Planting Trees as a Religious Act
At 2:00 PM, on Saturday and Sunday, November 1st and 2nd, the Missouri Zen Center will again join with the Jewish Environmentat Initiative, the Interfaith Partnership, and numerous religious organizations and individuals in planting trees as a way of healing the abused Earth. We plant trees as a religious act expressing our rejection of the destruction of the Earth for the sake of monetary profit. A short interfaith recitation of prayers (including Buddhist) and song precedes the work.
We have 500 saplings to plant; 250 per day. The work goes quickly and easily as the holes are pre-dug. You will want to bring work gloves, a trowel or small rake for backfilling the holes, and water for yourself. Since the trees will be waiting in pots, this event will be held rain, shine, snow, earthquake, or whatever.
The location is Route 66 State Park, former site of Times Beach. From St. Louis go west on I-44 to Lewis Rd. Follow the signs to the park. There will be signs within the park directing you to the planting area.   Please join us in this different kind of samu.

E-mail Discussion List (listserv)
To subscribe to the Missouri Zen Center’s e-mail discussion list, send an e-mail message to <majordomo@joethejuggler.com>, leave the subject field blank and in the message body type “subscribe mzc”. You will then receive a confirmation message (including instructions on how to unsubscribe). Please only subscribe  e-mail addresses of individuals. Also please be responsible for any information you post, including forwards.

Living the Global Ethic: Sustainability and Voluntary Simplicity
Part 3: Part 3: Reducing Our Ecological Footprint
by Kuryo
By now you may have had a chance to use the spreadsheet on Redefining Progress’ website www.rprogress.org to calculate your personal Ecological Footprint (the amount of land required to supply all the resources you use in a year). As I mentioned in the last issue of Sangha Life, Meiku and I have a footprint of about 9.8 acres per person. While this is less than the average footprint of US residents, it is well over the amount of biologically productive land available per person worldwide (about 4.7 acres). I encourage you to download the spreadsheet and use it to evaluate your own situation and changes you can make, as I do for Meiku and me below. The August-September issue of Sangha Life has directions on how to access the spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet shows the distribution of acres within the six categories of food (13% for us), housing (43%), transportation (26%), goods (2%), services (14%), and waste (3%) for our current levels of consumption. To reduce our footprint, we should concentrate on the housing and transportation categories. The first challenge is the size of our house (1200 sq ft) and lot (40,000 sq ft). If we used the house size and lot from our former house in Jennings (900 sq feet for the house, 5000 sq ft for the lot), our footprint would drop to 8.0 acre. We are not planning to move, but we intend to grow much of our food on-site, which will reduce our food footprint.  
The next challenge in the housing category is our footprint for energy usage. Our house is drafty and underinsulated, raising heating bills in the winter and cooling costs in the summer. While we have replaced both the furnace and central AC unit with highly efficient models, we have yet to caulk and seal openings and add insulation to the attic, walls, and ductwork. In addition, we have not replaced the large, inefficient electric hot water heater, although we did replace the refrigerator and clothes washer with very high efficiency units. Assuming that we might be able to reduce electricity use by 50% once we caulk, insulate, and replace the electric hot water heater with a gas water heater, and assuming that the caulking and insulation reduce use of the gas furnace enough to offset the increase in gas use from the water heater, this would reduce our footprint from 9.8 to 8.4 acres. If we were to obtain that electricity from a rooftop PV solar array, our footprint would drop to 7.8 acres. However, this is beyond our simple living budget. Our goal will be to caulk, insulate, and add a glassed-in porch to the south side of the house (made as much as possible from reused materials) to try to reduce our energy use to a minimum.
Looking at transportation reveals another set of challenges. Meiku and I do our best to reduce car use by walking, bicycling, and using public transportation whenever we can. For instance, we use a combination of buses and bicycles to get to MZC most Tuesday evenings, when Meiku is doan. Also, we are both retired from paid employment, so we don’t need our car for commuting to a job, and we only have one car for two adults. We don’t fly anywhere, and we rarely visit my out-of-town relatives and friends. Even so, we still average about 760 miles per person per month using our car, which gets 18 miles per gallon, and about 200 miles per person per month on the bus. This accounts for about 25% of our total footprint. If we were to purchase a car which obtains 50 miles per gallon and drive the same amount, our footprint would drop to 8.5 acres. However, our simple living budget precludes purchasing and insuring such a car. We will need to reduce our car use by using the train or bus to visit my out-of-town relatives and friends and find ways to cut down on trips within St. Louis, or get by without a car and rent a car only when necessary, to reduce our transportation footprint. Assuming we got rid of the car, visited out-of-town relatives once a year by bus or train, and rented a car occasionally for local use, we could reduce our total footprint to about 7.9 acres.
Putting together the possibilities discussed above for reducing electricity use by half and for going carless, we could reduce our ecological footprint to about 7.4 acres. We have other possibilities for reductions in foods and services, but they will not have as much impact as the changes above. But even with these changes, we will not reduce our footprint to that commensurate with the amount of land available per person. We need to consider structural factors, factors which have to do with how our society is organized, to understand what makes it so difficult for all of us to live ecologically sustainable lives. We’ll look at them in the next issue of Sangha Life.

Regaining Our Sovereignty From the Corporations
by Ando           
“Come on, come on, listen to the money talk”
                                                                   — AC DC 
Is money speech?  Are corporations persons? These are questions we should address as we strive to regain our democratic sovereignty from the corporations. As I discussed in the last article, democratic activists and reformers seeking to limit corporate power find themselves confronted with the legal fiction that corporations are persons, entitled to the same second amendment protections of free speech and due process as you or me. In fact, given that judge made laws have determined that money is speech, the corporations with their huge financial resources have MORE second amendment protections than you or me. Corporations, as entities, do not have consciences,  souls, or compassion. They are not persons.
Most citizens of the United States have been raised in the corporate culture, conditioned by parents, teachers, the corporately owned media, and the government to accept, without question, that to work for the corporations so that one will have money to consume is the proper way to live. This colonization of our minds by the corporate culture makes it difficult to see the roots of corporate power and to work for effective changes.
As we work to reclaim our democratic sovereignty, we must remember that modifying the current system, without dealing with corporate personhood, money as speech, and judge made laws, is like treating the symptoms of a disease without trying to effect a cure. Debating the ways that corporate money should be allocated legally to politicians is like treating the sneeze, but not the flu. That politicians receive any corporate money is still corruption.
What are some of the things we can do as ordinary citizens? First we can increase our awareness of and become informed about the problems. The seminar that I and several members of the Zen center just completed, “Challenging Corporate Power, Asserting the People’s Rights,” will give anyone a quick education on how the Corporations took power with the assistance of  all three branches of the government and the media. You may find the seminar literature and other information on these issues at the website of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (www.wilpf.org). There is also a wealth of information on the website of the Program on Corporation, Law and Democracy (www.poclad.org) These sites contain information on ways to become active in the process of reclaiming a true Democracy, as opposed to a Corporate Oligarchy.
We can become aware of how our actions and lifestyle contribute to the problem. We can learn to live more simply and become less dependent on the corporations and what they produce for consumption. It will be helpful to read Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin if you are interested in freeing yourself from the “more is better” paradigm and learning how to use your money to live, rather than living to make money. [ed.: The Zen Center library has a copy.]
The Zen Center offers classes and seminars on Voluntary Simplicity.  Contact Kuryo to learn about these courses that teach ways and methods to live more simply. By living more simply we reduce our consumption, depriving the Corporations of the money they need to control the political and social arenas, and more importantly, we preserve and conserve the resources of our planet. In addition, let me add, TURN OFF YOUR T.V.!  This is the number one way that Corporations control the information we receive, create our desire to consume, and colonize our minds. [ed. note: See www.tvturnoff.org]
Finally, COME SIT. To become more fully aware of how we are manipulated and controlled by habits, desire, and aversion, it is necessary for us to stop, be still, and cease karmic action. As we experience the “zero state,” we begin to take that experience with us off the cushion. In our everyday lives we naturally, spontaneously, and instinctively act in ways that are more simple, more ethical, and more free.

Live Free Life!
Rosan Daido                    
Freedom is priya-dhaman (beloved domain) in Sanskrit. It is the familiar relationship, not licentiousness, selfish alienation and aggression. It requires cultivation in awakening in the truth and action according to it. One attains freedom by familiarizing with flora and fauna, animals and anything in flowering and fruiting, working and wondering. Listen to pines regarding pines. Carrying the self around to cultivate dharmas (phenomena) is delusion. All dharmas advancing to witness the self is awakening.
We attain true freedom only when we are freed from the three poisons of delusion (of self-same, self-sovereign self), attachment (greed, etc.) and aversion (anger, etc.). Self shuts in samsara (fleeting) life; attachment ending in suffering; aversion resulting in destruction. We must be freed from fictitious selves of nations, corporations, media,religions, education institutions to live in truth, freedom, equality, love and peace.

Universal Peace Day        
 Rosan Daido (9/21/03C.E.)
Good morning! Today is International Peace Day. It falls on the autumnal equinox. We in the East celebrate higan (pronounced he-gun), equal day/night, the other shore, beyond shigan (pronounced she-gun), this shore of vain vicissitude, i.e., nirvana, unconditioned peace. Anyone can be in absolute equanimity in solid sitting, complete cessation of all karmas and calamities (delusion, bondage, discrimination, exploitation, extermination).
Did you see the morning glories on the front yard trellis? If you had been told or were already aware, you could have appreciated the big beautiful flowers even in the dusk. Otherwise, you just pass by not noticing. Nirvana is right here and now, neither the other shore nor this shore. It's beyond the three poisons of ego, he-she and gun. If only without them, we witness it anywhere any time in blisses (truth, freedom, equality, love, peace).

Regular Zendo Schedule

Sunday
     6:20-7:00 am Zazen
     7:00-7:20 am Service (sutras)
     7:20-8:00 am Zazen
     8:00-8:10 am Kinhin
     8:10-8:30 am Zazen
     8:30 am  Talk/discussion, work period, tea

You are welcome to come throughout the morning, but please do not enter the zendo during zazen. Enter quietly at other times.

Monday
     6:00-6:40 am Zazen
     6:30-7:00 pm Instruction
     7:00-7:20 pm Zazen
     7:20-9:00 pm Discussion/questions

Tuesday
     6:00-6:40 am Zazen
     7:00-7:40 pm Zazen
     7:40-9:00 pm Tea/discussion

Wednesday
     6:00-6:40 am Zazen
     7:00-7:40 pm Zazen
     7:40 pm  Writing Practice

Thursday
     6:00-6:40 am Zazen
     7:00-7:40 pm Zazen

Friday
     6:00-6:40 am Zazen
     7:00-7:40 pm Zazen
     After sitting:  Dinner out

Saturday
     8:00-8:40 am Zazen
     8:40-9:30 am Discussion

Work periods may be scheduled following zazen.
Any changes to this schedule: please contact the Zen Center.