Ango Opening and Postulancy Acknowledgment Ceremony

Let your True Self manifest to the fullest! Participate in Spring Ango to Explore the Great Way of the Buddhas.

Ango is a time of increased focus on our vow to fully Awaken for the sake of all beings. During this special sutra ceremony to kick-off Spring Ango, participants offer incense and sign the Ango scroll. During this year's Spring Ango Opening Ceremony, we also mark the grand opening of the Great Heartland Sangha Seminary and acknowledge our first postulants, Shoken students who are discerning the path of priesthood.

Members, guests, and first-time visitors are welcome. First time visitors please arrive at 10:10am for beginning instruction in Zen meditation.

The theme for 2017 Spring Ango is "The Whole Works: Undivided Activity." We will explore Dogen Zenji's "Zenki (全機)." Ango participants will receive a special version of the Zenki with several translations for comparison. Dogen Zenji (19 January 1200 – 22 September 1253), also known as Eihei Dogen, is the founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism in Japan, and is directly in the lineage of our teachers at the Great Heartland Sangha.

From the Zenki:
"Life is like boarding a boat. Aboard the boat, I use a sail, hold a tiller, pole the boat along. Yet the boat carries me and without the boat I am not there. Riding the boat is what makes it a boat. You must study and penetrate this very moment. In this moment, the whole world is this boat. Thus 'life' is what I live and 'I' is life living me. Getting aboard the boat, this bodymind and all that is around are all the complete activity of the boat. Both the whole world and the vast sky are the boat's complete activity. This I that lives and the life that is I is just like this."

Ango -- intensification of our zazen, Buddhist practice and participation in the life of the sangha -- has its roots in the earliest gatherings of the Buddha's disciples. During the rainy seasons in India some 2,600 years ago, mendicant followers of the Buddha would seek shelter in caves for 90 days, and there they would practice and study together with their teacher.

Along with Zen communities across the world, we continue a modern incarnation of this ancient tradition at the Buddhist Temple of Toledo.