Lisa Beth Hammer, October 16th 2025
Beginning our weekly chant of Kwan Seum Bosal at NLZC’s Wednesday night practice, as we individually called out the names of loved ones or circumstances in our world to begin our chant of compassion which Kwan Seum Bosal teaches us, I heard my teacher, Terry Cronin JDPSN, say, “and Kwan Seum Bosal chanting for Lisa.” He knew there was a deep pain in my life that I was currently suffering from but I was unprepared to realize that this personal suffering might receive the compassion of my sangha and the bodhisattva of compassion, Kwan Seum Bosal. I had felt I was suffering alone, yet was jolted by this naming, by this inclusion in the ones who suffer. What occurred during our chanting of Kwan Seum Bosal was that I was not the one who was “okay” or “had it all together,” the one chanting for the suffering of the other individuals we named or the rest of the world’s suffering; I became the sufferer. I became the one that others were chanting for. As this realization – or experience – sank in during our chanting, I became suffering itself, by letting go into suffering and also accepting the compassion of my sangha who were chanting for me along with all the others who are in need of Kwan Seum Bosal’s compassion. And I saw, or experienced during our chanting, Buddha’s truth of suffering, like a vast space of pure, undifferentiated suffering, while also experiencing that suffering itself is what connects us all in the course of human life. Suffering is intrinsic to the buddhadharma; suffering in its raw form is suchness itself, as totally the way things are. Becoming one with suffering, not as if “I” am chanting for others, separating into subject and object, the self or ego-self that creates the separation, falls away; so no-self is the immediate experience of Universal Suffering.
My gratitude to my sangha is beyond words. Living compassion and love surrounded me that night in my personal pain, while I was able to merge with universal suffering and realize suffering is part of the interconnected nature of the causes and conditions our lives are held within. In many ways this was a manifestation of the teaching of the bodhisattva way: we do not aim to leave samsara FOR nirvana, but to find nirvana within samsara and transcend or come-and-go in both, with the realization that neither one actually “exists,” rather are empty themselves.
Lisa Beth Hammer is a member of the Northern Light Zen Center Sangha
