Our Place of Practice has a name! Kōryūji / Bright Stream Temple

Aren't names curious? We humans probably began naming each other and the things around us very early in our development of language. It's how we distinguish one thing from another when communicating across distance. Names give cause for endless precision and confusion. Like everything, they are provisional, subject to change. 

So how to refer to our new practice location on Sherbrooke St. has not been an easy question. Is it a temple, even though it doesn't look like one from outside? Can we call it a temple not knowing if it will be sustainable? Our founding teacher Zoketsu Norman Fischer advised that it's not appropriate to call a rented storefront a temple, but when we asked about the new house, he said sure, it can be a temple. Somehow having stewardship of the actual land and house makes a difference. 

What to call it? The street it's on was most likely named after a former Governor General of what was then called British North America after the War of 1812. He had a distinguished military and very colonial career. You might be interested to learn how disproportionately white, male and colonial Vancouver city street names are.  Though 38 are named after trees and plants, there is no Red-cedar St. or Salal St. (CBC The origins of all 651 street names in Vancouver). Onsen Colleen looked up the etymology of the name Sherbrooke and learned that the name in Old English means either brook/stream of the shire, or bright stream.

Bright Stream - it resonates with the Branching Streams network of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi sanghas, named after the line in the poem by Shitou Harmony of Difference and Equality, "branching streams flow on in the darkness". Our sangha is one branching stream of many, and each of us a tributary. Last week in Santa Cruz we felt this strongly when attending a conference of Branching Streams sanghas, small, medium and large. Maybe in adopting this name we can return the name Sherbrooke to its origins, a bright stream flowing through a valley, a village, on its way to the sea. 

Recently, the Mountain Rain council moved to formally adopt the name Bright Stream Temple (Kōryūji in Japanese). We hope you will like it. You can refer to the space by those names or simply the Sherbrooke St. zendo or practice house. Just as the City Center of San Francisco Zen Center is often just called City Center, and more formally Beginner's Mind Temple, or Shoshinji, remember that all names are provisional and subject to change. 

Warm bows,
Myoshin Kate and Shinmon Michael (Words from the Teachers October 2023)