Summary: Episode Description: With the help of vivid exercises, Upaya's Joshin Byrnes shows how three "Dharma seals" pervade all our experience. In one exercise, the assembly eats apple slices, contemplating how this momentary apple came to be: namely dependent on circles that widen throughout past space and time (farmer, farmer's family, seed, soil, mountains and rivers that make the soil...), as well as into the horizonless future: will this eaten apple contribute to a moment of poetry in us, of protest...? Thus we see that the apple has no "birth or death": no juncture where its dependencies begin, or where they end in an essence called apple. This is the first Dharma seal of emptiness, of boundless contingency. Continue the exercise long enough -- starting from any point -- and you must inevitably include the whole universe; nothing is independent of anything. To examine the second Dharma seal of transience, Joshin asks everyone to chat casually and meanwhile to appreciate their neighbor's momentariness -- how s/he appears today only on a long stream of time, change, impacts. Finally, Joshin says of the third seal, Nirvana, that it's nothing other than the total pervasiveness of the first two seals (impermanence and boundlessness), experienced with a limpid thoroughness where the "ox's tail" doesn't get "stuck in the window." Bio: Joshin Brian Byrnes is a Dharma Holder and student of Roshi Joan Halifax, having receive Hoshi from her in 2014. He is a Zen priest and currently serves as Upaya's President and point person for the Upaya's residency program. He is also the director of Upaya's Chaplaincy program and is a core faculty member with a focus on systems theory. Joshin has a long background working in social service nonprofits and community philanthropy. He worked in the AIDS epidemic throughout the 1990s and since 2003 has led a variety of community foundations focused on social change and community leadership. His academic background includes undergraduate and graduate work in philosophy at St. Meinrad College and Archabbey, theology at the Aquinas Institute at St. Louis University while he was a member of the Dominican Order, and then early music performance at New England Conservatory of Music, and doctoral work in medieval musicology at New York University. He is ever interested in finding ways of life that are both deeply contemplative and fully engaged with the world.
