2008 Woodie Awards
Buddhist Zen master brings his self to U.
Jyotsna Mullur
Issue date: 10/14/08 Section: Campus News
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Bob Mammoser, who became an ordained Buddhist monk in 1978, said it was essential to understand the current self in order to address life's difficulties.
"The self that I need to understand is the self in this particular moment," he said, because "the self is dynamic and changing."
Mammoser is a follower of Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, a master in the Rinzai sect of Buddhism. They practice a unique form of Zen known as Tathagata Zen, which emphasizes the understanding of self to solve problems in life.
He began studying with Joshu Roshi in 1974 at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center in southern California. Mammoser today is the abbot of Albuquerque Zen Center in New Mexico, which he founded in 1989. Friday's event was sponsored by the Brown Contemplative Studies Initiative.
Mammoser put Zen teachings into a modern context for Friday's gathering. He discussed the challenges of life: the choices people make on how to live, the difficulties and problems that confront them and the challenge of determining our priorities. Zen Buddhism, he said, is based on the insight gained from evaluating our situation, seeking to answer the question, "What fundamentally am I?"
The primary way to study one's self and understand one's experiences, Mammoser said, is meditation. Moreover, one cannot consider oneself as one meditates as just an object, Mammoser said, because that would be removing oneself from one's experiences. Rather, he advocated a more self-aware, introspective meditation.
"What am I experiencing in terms of the world around me?" he asked. "What am I experiencing in terms of the world within me?"
Through this process, Mammoser said that one can come to a consciousness of how to make a decision in life. "Consciousness is essential for human experience," he said.
Mammoser also delved into the more philosophical aspects of Joshu Roshi's teachings.
He described experience in terms of three aspects: the subjective, the objective and awareness. The subjective, he said, consists of the thoughts, memories and inner self, whereas the objective is the rest of the world. "You cannot have experience with just one or two of these components," he said.