Releasing ourselves from the prisons of our own making - with Sandy Rinko-an Chubb

Sandy Rinko-an Chubb is the guiding teacher at the Oxford Zen Centre, UK, in the Sanbo Zen lineage. She began Zen practice with Master Yamata Hogen in 1987, then continued her study with Sister Elaine MacInnes (founder of the Oxford Zen Centre) and John Eiun-ken Gaynor, and was appointed Zen Teacher in 2013. For ten years, Sandy was director of the Prison Phoenix Trust, an organisation that offers meditation and yoga to prisoners and prison officers in the UK and Ireland.

In our interview, she shares her delightful warmth and illuminating wisdom on dealing with troublesome buddhas, gleaned from years of working with prisoners and zen students of every shape and size. She emphasises the Buddha’s first noble truth that everyone suffers, and that, in the end, “if you let it bother you, you’ll go mad!” She makes the parallel between prison inmates and those who may be on the outside but put themselves in prisons of our own making by desperately wanting things to be different (i.e. the Buddha’s 2nd noble truth that we suffer because we cling). She describes the wisdom of just sitting, facing yourself, coming to know yourself (even like yourself!), and tasting the sweet and bitter equally. This acceptance, she says, is the key to finding the stillness and peace beneath the noisy, busy, uncomfortable, difficult environments and interactions we face every day. Not only that, but it shows us how to find the utter perfection of every moment, just as it is.

Towards the end of the interview she cites part of the great Zen master Torei’s Bodhisattva Vow, which I commented was an excellent summary of the essence of a troublesome buddha:
“Who can be ungrateful or not respectful to each and every thing, as well as to human beings!
Even though someone may be a fool,
be warm and compassionate.
If by any chance such a person should turn against us,
become a sworn enemy and abuse and persecute us,
we should sincerely bow down with humble language, 
in reverent belief that he or she is the merciful avatar of Buddha,
who uses devices to emancipate us from sinful karma
that has been produced and accumulated upon ourselves
by our own egoistic delusion and attachment
through countless cycles of kalpas.”