Plastic Slippers!!Re: [Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Toni J Sethi]

Plastic slippers or any for that matter, to go to the toilet, instead of 
going in bare feet, is quite an "Indian" thing to do as well...!! :)

>>
>> 
> As far as I know the style at Mount Baldy where Sasaki Roshi teaches belongs 
> to clone-category. Our group in Oslo, Norway, had for some years one of 
> Sasaki Roshi's students, Genro Osho as our teacher, so our style was similar 
> to if not exactly the same as Genro's in Vienna and so in many ways following 
> the Mount Baldy way of doing things. Now that Genro is not allowed by his 
> doctor to go by plane to Norway we had as a visiting teacher so to speak 
> another of Sasaki Roshi's students at our sesshin last year and he will come 
> this year as well. We do not use plastic slippers for the toilet or eat 
> noodles very noisily, but yes, we chant, not in Japanese but in Chinese the 
> way it is done in Japan. (I remember the chanting of the Heart Sutra in the 
> movie "Lost in translation" - it sounded very much like us.)
>
> But we also believe that things can be changed. At certain times we chant the 
> Heart sutra in Norwegian, we once added plastic spoons to the chopsticks for 
> a sesshin since we thought that might make it easier to eat porridge for 
> breakfast - but the spoons tended to break, and it is fairly easy to eat 
> porridge with chopsticks, so we dropped that innovation. We have also added 
> time for a walk/hike in the forest to our daily program for sesshin. This is 
> probably a very Norwegian thing to do.
>
> So does this Japanese clone-style work? For me it does. There are other zen 
> groups in Oslo which explicitely wish to follow Western (or Northern) 
> European customes and languages, and I believe that people join the group 
> which works for them.
>
> Espen Ore
> Oslo/Holmestrand, Norway
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