This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Good morning. And you all are welcome to wave also if you can't hear me. My voice tends to be quiet, so... You can hear me. Yeah. All right. If we get too many waves, you might try the headset. So here we are in the heart, sort of the center of our intensive. This is the place where things, breakdown and the place where things break through.

[01:03]

And in this last stretch of time, since last time in the first week, we have been studying the poem, the Xin Xin Ming, for those of you who haven't been following with us till now. And in the first week, we were really looking at the of how it is that we prefer, how it is that we suffer based on the fire hose of sensory experience coming in all the time, some of which we like, some of which we don't like, some of which we experience as pleasant, some of which we experience as unpleasant and which we, I think I see a mic coming at me, which we grasp and push away.

[02:10]

I don't think this will work for the whole Buddha hall, but it will make the hearing assistance devices work. Okay. Can you hear me in the headset? Can you hear? So perhaps we have a preference for being able to hear the talk. And I certainly have a preference for hoping that you're able to hear the talk. But all of this technology also allows us to record. So if you can't hear today, it will be recorded and you can watch it later. So we've been really looking so far at this phenomena of grasping and aversion of the constant reverberation of our reaction to our sensory experience.

[03:22]

And this week, so those of us who are in the intensive, I've divided the poem into three parts completely arbitrarily. So we've completed the first part, and this next week we'll be moving into part two. And in this second section of the poem, we'll be looking at how it is that the binary mind creates dualism, creates self and other, me and you, us and them, and how our thinking mind and our language causes us to feel this pain of separation from our experience. And the opening lines of this second part of the poem begin to point us in this direction.

[04:24]

Sung Sang says, although all dualities come from the one, Do not be attached even to this one. Many other translations are much more pointed in saying if you want to abide, understand, rest into this one, which is what? Even the 10,000 sages don't know. I can't say what it is. I can only speak and point in the hopes that we experience something that's always and already here. And we begin to understand the confusion, the delusion, the clutching and rejecting that causes us to become separated, to lose contact with others.

[05:33]

our Buddha nature, our true nature. So some of the translations, actually most of them, speak more about don't reject, don't despise the many, the arising of objects, because everything comes from one. Everything. Me and you and the Zafus and the windows and the sound of the fountain and the light coming through the window. All of this is a manifestation, an expression, actually a celebration of one thing, which is not a thing. And the mind, the binary mind, sees objects, names them, puts them in a box, and says, I know that.

[06:52]

That's Azafu. And this is very useful. It's especially useful for functioning together as a collective, right? It's really good that we all don't have a different opinion about what red, yellow and green means at a traffic light. It's really good that we have a sense of not walking out of the hall and putting on someone else's shoes. So there's a usefulness in these distinctions. But when we hold them, when we forget that it's all an expression of one, then it's so easy to have preferences, to believe our preferences, and round and round we go. As I was preparing this talk, I kept having this phrase.

[07:59]

I don't actually know where it comes from, but I've heard it described as a Zen phrase, which... of sums this up it says in all the world regardless of the shape the color the texture large and small dark and light tall and short whatever varieties of expression are being expressed in all the world there is no place to spit gives you a feeling for what's being pointed to. Or, as the late, great Allen Ginsberg, I date myself, says, holy, holy, holy, all ground is hallowed ground. All beings, all beings, all animate and what we call inanimate objects are worthy of our full respect.

[09:04]

our full attention, our full care, our full love. So there's a set of sentences, the opening of a book that I heard here, I think actually at Green Gulch Farm, at least two decades ago, maybe more. And I believe that I heard this from Tenshin Roshi in a talk. And these words have stayed with me all of these years. And they are the opening lines of a book called The Famished Road by the Nigerian author Ben Opry. He says, in the beginning, there was a river.

[10:07]

And the river became a road. And the road branched out and covered the whole world. And because the road was once a river, it was always hungry. So we have a mind that takes this fluid aliveness of our life and freeze frames, chops and dices and boxes and says, this or that or me or you. And again, we don't want to be aversive even toward that capacity. It's useful. But when we forget When we forget the river, we are hungry.

[11:10]

It's good to have roads, but if we're always trying to get somewhere, we forget that no matter where we go, what we're looking for is here. In the Theravadan tradition, there is a framing of awakening, of having deep, clear insight into the truth of impermanence, into the truth of our non-separation, into the truth of the no-separate-solid anything-ness of our life.

[12:18]

And the phrase that's used is called stream entry. And one way of understanding stream entry is that it means you become part of this lineage, this stream of many, many, many, many beings over time and place and culture and language who, like you, have woken up to something that's always and already here. I always think, I borrow this a bit from Dogen, who rephrased in the Parinibbana Sutra, not all beings have Buddha nature, but all beings are Buddha nature. And I think of stream entry or entering the stream really as we become a stream. We become, we reclaim our true nature.

[13:24]

River nature. We reclaim the aliveness that gets freeze-framed out when we only believe the binary, dualistic mind. And this river nature that's just waiting here for me, for you, for all of us to say, oh, hello. It feeds us. It helps relinquish, calm our hunger. It allows us to rest where we are instead of imagining that we always have to get someplace else. So this last week,

[14:25]

as I've been, like many of you, reading this poem and kind of chewing on the words, the phrases, the pointing that Sang San is doing, I have sort of taken up this koan. How is it that we see and see through the binary mind? How is it that we are liberated from duality without rejecting duality, without making it into a bad object. And last week I spoke about some of the ways I think we can do that begin to open the door. You know, Bodhidharma's not knowing. This is a posture that begins to allow us to soften, to unfreeze brain.

[15:34]

Is that so? This willingness to question and to wonder about the experience coming at us, the experience arising in us, and our views and opinions about all of it, which is happening all the time. So can we take a posture of curiosity, of questioning? This is the story of the Buddha, ardent, adamant about waking up. Who wonders, might there be another way? This is an invitation for all of us. You can use those questions, but you can take this posture of openness, of receptivity, of wondering. And as I've been reflecting on how to engage with the phenomena of the binary mind, the dualistic mind, this quality of wonder has continuously kind of bubbled up for me.

[16:48]

So we start with openness and curiosity. And then we meet our experience with wonderment. And the only way that we can do this is when we recognize that our freeze framing, that our labels, that our naming, that our dividing, though useful, it is always limited. We never see the whole. If we're limited to this. And there's an image that I've used for many, many years of us. And it comes also from a Zen story. And I looked it up this time. It turns out that this image comes from a Dharma sibling of Sung Sung. Someone who was also a Dharma heir of Kui Ke or Eka.

[17:50]

And in this person's poem, they introduced this image of it's as if we're all walking around looking at the sky through a lead pipe. I often say we're looking at the sky through a straw. And the point in this is to recognize that while what we see may be true, it's not the whole sky. And it's fine to have your slice of sky. It's celebratory for you to say blue and some other slice of the sky says black and some other slice of the sky says star-filled or sunrise or sunset. When we hold our views, we bang up against one another. When we are humble enough, curious enough, filled with enough wonder to say, oh, the only way I can see the whole sky is by being open, being curious, being receptive to other spices.

[19:05]

It's like that story of the men who are blindfolded, each of whom is holding a different part of the elephant. And each of whom has a very different experience of the trunk or the tail or the leg of the elephant. And if each one insists, no, I know what an elephant is. An elephant is this long tube or this little tail or this giant trunk. I'm right. You're wrong. There we are. But of course, it takes everyone to know what an elephant is. It takes everyone. be able to rest in the sky. This is one of those other phrases that has stayed with me for decades.

[20:10]

This is from somewhere in the middle of the Genjo Koan. He says it this way. When you sail out in a boat, to the middle of the ocean where no land is in sight and you view the four directions. So imagine you're in a boat, you're in the middle of the ocean and all you can see is water. When you sail out in a boat to the middle of the ocean where no land is in sight and you look around, you view the four directions, the ocean looks circular and it does not look any other way. This is us. Here's the change in metaphor. Sky, ocean. You get the idea. It looks like this. But, Dogen says, the ocean is neither round nor square. Its features are infinite. This is an invitation.

[21:13]

Its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as your eye of practice can see at this time. And my favorite line in closing, he says, all things are like this. So this is a practice of remembering that whatever we see is just the surface. Maybe some of you like me have had the experience Looking out across the ocean, it looks one way. But if you look down into the water, it happens to be sunny and you have some goggles. Whole worlds are there. So again, this is invitation for us.

[22:16]

We aren't being... slapped on the wrist for only seeing our circle of sky. We're being invited to open. Sometimes I talk about this as this ocean, this river that we are gets, it's like it gets put by the binary mind, the dualistic mind, We end up, each of us, in our little ice cube tray. So we have our little box, and we say, hi, I'm here, and you're there, and all of those other ice cubes are over there, but I've got my spot. And then we wonder why we're cold and lonely and hungry. And just like the image of the ocean or the sky, this image of the ice cubes, it's pointing us toward the direction.

[23:24]

The direction of a practice is we soften and open, we melt. And the mind of great faith is the great faith that allows us enough confidence that if we let go, of our precious views and opinions and ideas and I, me, mining that not only will there be something there to hold us, but that something is like a palace. It's like a jewel. to be careful today because I went long last time and we're going to have a little, after I'm done talking, we'll have a little break and then I will come back and take in a more casual way, questions, discussion, comments.

[24:31]

But I have a few more things. So One of the ways that I'm suggesting that we begin to melt this belief in separateness, this belief in duality, is through wonder. And I've learned a lot about this from a woman named Robin Wall Kimerton. Some of you may know, author of a book called Draiding Sweetgrass. And she's someone who carries a dual lineage. She's a... botanist and a professor, scientist, and she's also a member of the Kota Watami Nation. So she carries this lineage of indigenous wisdom. She tells a story about when she was applying to graduate school.

[25:32]

She was asked why she wanted to be a botanist, and she said, I wanted to understand why it is that goldenrod and aster, two different flowers, one purple, one yellow, why it is they look so beautiful together. And she was told, if you're interested in beauty, you should go to art school. But she didn't listen, she persisted and she went on and she got her degree. And she said that later when she became a professor and she was working with her own students, she said, I realized at some point I was teaching my students the names, but I was forgetting or ignoring the songs of the plants that she was teaching about. And she describes how it is that for her, Western science, she says, polishes the gift of seeing

[26:37]

We have microscopes and we can see deep into the particularities of how things work. It's a beautiful gift. And she says that indigenous wisdom teaches us how to listen, how to hear. And seeing is much more active as in going out of our awareness. Hearing is much more receptive. We take in. we receive. And she talks about how it is that the naming, the using of language, this kind of freeze framing that we do with objects is a process of deadening. It's a process of once we've got something packaged and labeled and tied with the bow that we don't really have to pay so much attention. We think, I know what that is. We stop listening.

[27:38]

And so she proposes that we consider shifting our language, that rather than calling the things of the natural world it, that we re-imbue what we think of as objects. Basically anything other than me is an object. But certainly we think of what we call non-animal objects, objects. This is an object. And we take that objectification, of course, and we place it on living beings as well, sentient beings. So she proposes that we borrow from her native language and we, instead of calling things it, that we call them kin. Comes from that language that's used as ki, K-I.

[28:54]

And the plural of a thing, which is alive, a ki is kin. It's so beautiful. How would it be if we related to everything as kin. Because it is. Because everything is made of one thing. And when we remember that, when we remember the truth of this deep connectedness, then in all the world, there's no place to stay. So this is a practice of wonderment, of inviting ourselves out of our familiar, safe sky circle, ocean circle, I, me, mine circle, us, them, they circle.

[30:02]

It invites us to soften those lines. The softening of those lines of division, this is what we call intimacy. And I mean intimacy from the place of how it's described in Zen. We know in the opening, the sort of seminal lines of the Genjo Koan, Dogen says, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self. is to forget the self. This is the melting of our edges. To forget the self is to be intimate with all things, not separate from all things, to remember the oneness of all things. When those lines soften, melt, begin to fade, when we don't hold them so tightly, our life becomes more fluid, less fractured, more whole.

[31:28]

And I've been watching in my own practice this week, practicing with this, that If you pay very close attention, if you are in fact intimate with your direct experience, not so much your thinking experience, which is fine, it can be there. But if you pay direct attention to what's happening, where are the lines? Where is it that an inhale begins and an inhale ends and an exhale begins? We make these, we draw these lines in our experience for usefulness. But when we really start to notice, we see, when is it that day, that light turns into night? Is there a moment? Our life is fluid. It is alive.

[32:38]

This is Robin Wall Kimmerer's wish. is that we reimbue the things we call it, the things we call other with animacy, with a life force. So in order to make sure that we have time for questions, I will close in just a moment and leave you with the closing lines from Suzuki Roshi in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And amazing, he speaks directly to this in this evocative, poetic way, which is how we find that sense of wonder, which is how we remember the truth of this intimacy, of this deep,

[33:41]

connectedness that is at the heart of our vow. He says, we must have a beginner's mind free from possessing anything. We must have a beginner's mind free from possessing anything. A mind that knows everything that is in flowing change. This is the mind that remembers the truth of our river nature. We must have a beginner's mind free from possessing anything. The mind that knows everything is in flowing change. Nothing exists, but momentarily in its present form and color, One thing flows into another and cannot be grasped.

[34:44]

Before the rain stops, we hear a bird. Even under the snow, we see snowdrops and some new growth. In the east, I saw rhubarb already. In Japan, we eat in the spring. In Japan, in the spring, we eat cucumbers. So this today is meant to be an invitation to notice the useful making of distinctions, the drawing of lines, the naming and labeling that we do automatically all the time, but also to remember that there is this sense of wonderment, that there is more, and that when we allow ourselves to enter that doorway of wonder, that we can begin to see for ourselves

[36:08]

this quality of intimacy, this quality that what looks like two things can come together as one. Thank you very much for your kind attention. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[36:47]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.02