I currently hold the cedar burner role, whose title may seems misleading, because what I mainly do is to prepare the equipment for burning cedar—a bowl of torn up dried cedar leaves, a candle and a repurposed small tea strainer with a long handle placed on a rock slab on the floor. There is a person who makes offerings to the Buddhas at the zendo altar in the chanting ceremonies by putting some cedar in the strainer and burning it over the candle. As the head teacher, Soryu Forall always does that when he’s present.
A few days before a silent weeklong retreat, as he was kneeling in front of the cedar kit holding the strainer, he looked in my direction with a slight frown and furrowed brows, not angry but puzzled. I went over immediately to see what was happening. He told me that the strainer was too hard to clean. The mesh had a hole in the middle, which I and the cedar burner before me tried to deal with by squeezing it shut, deforming the mesh and making the surface quite rough. He asked me to replace it.
I said okay, while feeling reluctant not knowing what exactly to do, having many other tasks on my plate. So I put it off, even knowing it might be the wrong thing to do. Sure enough, on the first day of retreat he brought it up during an interview, and asked me to get more creative.
Even though I was still unsure how to do it, I tried to make progress everyday, and report it during interviews. Each time, he patiently told me to continue making an effort on creativity, letting me know that he knew how to fix it, but he wanted me to do it.
In the exhortation on the 5th day, he explained this teaching to the group. When a teacher gives a student a task, it has to meet four criteria:
- The student can do it. The teacher has to set them up for success. If the student fails, it has to be 100% their fault.
- It’s something truly beneficial to the community, not meaningless busywork, so the student learns “I matter, but I’m not special. I will do things that really do good, and if I don’t do it, that really will harm others. I’m being counted on to do this. If I don’t do it, it’s a big problem for the community. If I do it, it’s a great benefit.”
- There has to be a clear demand, that is measurable within responsibility, that the student develops exactly the skills they need for awakening. Whatever the problem is in awakening, the task in responsibility has to help cultivate what’s needed for resolving it that day.
- Finally, as the student gathers these skills, they become capable of correctly creating and dismantling the world.
All the tasks we do here that we think are so mundane, such as cooking and cleaning, meet all of these criteria.
In the case of the cedar strainer, I was forced to learn to be more creative, which I could do, but thought I couldn’t. The dirty, broken mesh is like the mind that needs to be cut away–literally. I had to do it fully for something better to take its place, and in the process, gain a new level of creativity and courage needed to transform the world.
With the support from him and the community that gave me the material and spiritual resources needed, I was able to fix the strainer by the end of retreat, having gained much faith and confidence.