SUSAN MURPHY ROSHI

The founding teacher of Zen Open Circle is Susan Murphy Roshi, who is also the teacher together with Subhana Barzhagi Roshi for the Melbourne Zen Group, and Associate teacher with John Tarrant Roshi of Pacific Zen Institute in Northern California, as well as being a member of the Diamond Sangha Teachers Circle, stemming from Robert Aitken.

The line of descent of our teacher passes down from the Japanese Sanbo-Kyodan, branching to the Diamond Sangha through John Tarrant and Ross Bolleter from Robert Aitken, branching again (since 1999) to Pacific Zen Institute and John Tarrant.

Susan is a screen and fiction writer, freelance radio producer for ABC Radio National, and film director, as well as teaching and mentoring writing in private consultation, and working with embodied dreamwork and embodied imagination together with Dr Robert Bosnak. She taught film for many years at the University of Technology Sydney and has co-written three books on film, and directs the highly successful annual Buddhist Film Festival in Sydney establishehd in 2003.

Her most recent book is Upside-Down Zen , published by Lothian Books (now Hachette-Livre) in Australia in July 2004, republished by Wisdom in the USA in 2006. She is currently working on a book exploring ecological issues in the light of Zen.

In 2006 she invited apprentice Zen teacher Dr Mari Rhydwen to begin to assist with teaching at sesshin and on some Friday evenings.  Mari is an author and curriculum development specialist in Aboriginal languages for the NSW Department of Education.

THE STUDENT-TEACHER RELATIONSHIP

At the heart of the Zen path is the relationship between teacher and student, a relationship unlike any other, although perhaps the old relationship of master and apprentice come closest. It is not a guru or psychotherapy relationship but a long-standing intimate and respectful process of dialogue that closely observes, encourages, enlarges and challenges the student’s every attempt to experience who they really are.

A Zen student meets a teacher at different levels of recognition and self-recognition over the years of this relationship. And yet every stage of this process is touching Buddha-mind, the awareness that can receive each thing just as it is.

Accord in this matter deepens until student and teacher are of one mind and freely share and work and play in one clear awareness.  At such a point, transmission of the Dharma can be said to have become an open matter.

This is not a matter of growing versed in the teachings, or of taking on the mind of the teacher.  It is a matter of student and teacher gradually becoming able to freely meet and seamlessly share in one mind inseparable from everything that is.

A teacher cannot give you what is yours already, your own essential nature. What you are looking for is the actual nature of the one who looks. Fortunately, you cannot take hold of it and you can never lose it. Realizing and actualizing your fundmental nature is a lifelong practice.  It never stops opening.  Teacher and student are the same in this respect.

But teacher and student differ in their relationship to this fact. The long and subtly changing relationship with a teacher is dedicated to helping you give gradual and sudden birth to complete equality of awareness by any skilful means available. When you come to see it for yourself, you find that you have always shared the likeness of your teacher, the likeness of the universe, and of its smallest and most humble details. Teacher and student were never any different in this respect.

The relationship with the teacher sits right at the core of Zen practice and is tended with care, respect and gratitude.  Dana (donation of money, time, and work) is the traditional way of supporting the teaching, freely offered, that supports your practice.