Okay. So now you're free to unmute on Zoom. Oh yeah, I need to mute. Ruminium has indirect gaps.

[18:28]

uh Hello, hello. Oh, great. Better for my right ear.

[25:30]

Yeah. Okay. This is a whole new world we're living in here with all our hybridness. Well, good evening. So nice to be here this evening with you. And my name is Ed Sadezon, and it's my pleasure to share the seat with my good friend, David Zimmerman. I have the mic, so I'm introducing him. And yesterday, for those of you who are not participating in the practice period, we opened the fall practice period here at City Center with an opening ceremony in the morning, and then we had an orientation last night. And David and I are sharing the practice period.

[26:42]

And so it's been a pleasure to do both those ceremonies with him. And we're sharing this talk. The title of the practice period, need to get a little closer here. I can't see this. Yeah, let's try that. We're gonna keep experimenting here. In my old age, In my old age, my eyes have gone crazy on me. Oh, yeah, that's much better. Thank you for your patience. Actually, the best thing is just to sit here and listen to the chiming clock. Maybe that's what we all should do. Gives me a chance to look around and see my old and new friends. And my friends online, we have quite a few attending this practice period and welcome to you and appreciate your participating from afar.

[27:51]

So the title of this practice period is an appropriate response, encountering Suzuki Roshi's teachings on the Blue Cliff Record. Our study for these 10 weeks will be to select koans from the Blue Cliff Record, and accompanied by Suzuki Roshi's insightful commentary. Our endeavor will be to turn and illuminate these koans and bring their ancient teachings to life. How might our study of them help us meet the challenging circumstances of our contemporary times with wisdom, compassion, and an appropriate response? The title comes from a koan in the Blue Kiff record, Yun Min's An Appropriate Response. And this is the koan. A monk asked Yun Min, what is the teachings of a whole lifetime? Yun Min said an appropriate response.

[28:58]

Some translations are an appropriate statement. The teachings of a whole lifetime refers to the teachings given by Shakyamuni during his lifetime. So the question was, what are the teachings of Shakyamuni's whole lifetime? So Shakyamuni taught for, I think, 49 years, I believe. Didn't take any vacations to Hawaii, just continuously teaching. I think the Tripitaka has, like... 20,000 pages. So what is a good summary of all of that teaching? And Yun Min, famous for his short responses, said an appropriate response. So I think that typifies Chinese Tang dynasty teaching, Koan teaching, summarizing

[30:03]

a vast amount of teaching into something short and incisive that we can work with. So they had a very good way of sort of turning all of that into a phrase or two words that you could carry with you and wonder, what is an appropriate response? Is that an appropriate response to this moment, this place? Well, that's good. I understand that I should... make an appropriate response to my circumstance and my time, but that's not so easy to do. So how do we do that? And is that the entire teaching of Buddha's way? So obviously there's more to it than that, and I'll say some more about that later in tonight's talk after David talks a little bit about the Blue Cliff Records. summary of something important characterized this Tang Dynasty period in China.

[31:10]

But it also is true today. We have little sayings that come up that are current. I remember a famous saying from the early days of Tassara. This is from David Chadwick after a lecture that Suzuki Roshi gave. He said, Suzuki Roshi, I've been listening to your lectures for years. But I just don't understand. Could you just please put it in a nutshell? Can you reduce Buddhism to one phrase? Everybody laughed. Suzuki Roshi laughed. And then Suzuki Roshi said, everything changes. And then he asked for the next question. Not bad, right? How can you summarize? Buddhism in its entirety, in one phrase, everything changes. Earlier this year, I taught a class, an eight-week class on impermanence.

[32:14]

Really a deep subject. We spent a lot of, this is eight 45-minute lectures on impermanence. Everything changes. Everything's impermanent. And yet, somehow, this story of David Chadwick and Zuckersh's response, runs in my head more than those lectures on impermanence because it's like everything changes everything what does that mean every part is there anything that doesn't change i mean it's simple enough and yet kind of a profound thing to live with so it's a becomes a koan to the extent that you notice that going on is everything is changing all the time so um Another example of koans from this period is Vimalakirti's Gate of Nonduality. So I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Vimalakirti Sutra, a wonderful sutra. It's about 160 page long, very beautifully written, complex.

[33:20]

It's one of the great Mahayana Sutras about Laman Vimalakirti. And those wonderful Tang Dynasty teachers came up with a koan, which is the following. Bhimala Kirti asked Manjushri, Manjushri is the Bodhisattva of wisdom, what is the Bodhisattva's method of entering non-duality? Manjushri said, according to my mind, in all things, no speech, no explanation, no direction, and no representation, leaving behind all questions and answers. This is the method of entering non-duality. We always talk about non-dual thinking. How do you experience non-duality? Then Manjushri asked Vimalakirti, we have all spoken. Now, you should say, good man, what is Bodhisattva's method of entering into non-duality? Vimalakirti was silent.

[34:21]

So that's the whole koan. That's their summary of the Vimalakirti Sutra. They call it Vimalakirti's thunderous silence. You can't say anything about the method of enduring nonduality. Even Manjushri, the wisest of them. I mean, of course, what Manjushri said was wonderful, but Vimalakirti was even better. Well, that's something to ponder, this whole question of how do you enter the Dharma gate of nonduality, a summary of a beautiful chapter in the Vimalakirti Sutra. So we know what a koan is. It's become sort of part of the English language. A paradoxical antidote, a riddle used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logic and reasoning, leading to usually a deeper insight into your own nature. So the Japanese term koan actually comes from a Chinese word koan.

[35:28]

which means public case. So the Chinese were very practical. So they adapted terms in Chinese to the spiritual language. And these were public cases. And it was kind of an expansion of court cases. And in court cases, you have commentary on court cases. We have an original ruling in commentary on court cases. So these koans are sort of like something that's public. It was an interchange between a student and a teacher, two students or two teachers, that then got written down as a public thing that was more than just this personal interchange, and people added commentaries on it, and then it became kind of part of the Koan literature. And David's going to describe how that beautifully occurred over several centuries in China to create the Blue Cliff Records. So... But I want to talk a little bit before he gets into that about encounter dialogues between teachers and students, because the encounter dialogues are really where the koan started, an interchange between a student and a teacher.

[36:41]

And these encounter dialogues, I gave you one, David Chadwick talking to Suzuki Roshi about everything changes. Here's another one from Sashin Atasara. During one sashin at Tassara, it was very cold. And in the unheated zendo, after a lecture, a student said, Roshi, I thought you said that when it got cold, we'd figure out how to stay warm within our zazen. Probably most of you don't know the old zendo down at Tassara. It burned down and they built one up in the nice sun by the garden. The old Zendo at Tashara is where the student dining room is now, for those of you that have been to Tashara. In the winter, it had a linoleum floor that was basically just sitting on the ground, you know, very close to the stream. It was freezing in there in the wintertime. So I can really understand the student asking that question. And what did Suzuki Roshi say?

[37:44]

Suzuki Roshi answered, it's just not cold enough yet. When it gets colder, you'll start to figure out how to get warm in your Zazen. Well, that's a very, like it was an encounter between a student and a teacher, a very reasonable question that turns into a Zen question. And this also happened in the old days. This is a very famous koan in the Blue Cliff Record, which I think I'll be giving a talk in one of the classes down the road. I'll explicate on this talk. This koan. So here's this koan. This is Dengshan. He was the founder of Soda Zen in China. And he said, a monk asked Dengshan, when heat and cold come, how can we avoid them? Same question. When it's too hot, how do I solve that? When it's too cold, what do I do? How can we avoid that? Dengshan said, why don't you go to the place where there is no heat or cold? The monk said, what is the place where there is no heat or cold?

[38:47]

Dungshan said, when it's cold, the cold kills. When it's hot, the hot kills you. So again, same thing. Monk is too cold sitting in the zendo. Ask the teacher, what do I do about this? And he tells you, go to that place where there's no cold or heat. Where is that? When it's cold, the cold kills. Well, we'll... deconstruct that a little bit at the class but just another example this is just a kind of an encounter between a student and a teacher of a very real thing but what it turns out to be is there's a whole issue of preferences and why do we always want the world to be different than it is it's too cold it's too hot my soup is too spicy it's too sugary it's whatever it is it's never exactly right is it Or is it? Maybe it's always exactly how it should be.

[39:50]

It's certainly exactly how it is, but we don't ever seem to exactly be willing to settle into that. And these koans sort of point you at that fact. What's going on in your mind that you never can actually be completely satisfied with your life as it is, even for a moment? So I thought I'd share one encounter I had with Suzuki Hiroshi. This is a kind of encounter story. There was a, in the old days, the baths were across the stream, and you would cross over that nice bridge, and there was a room which had a big tub in it that was like a big bathtub, and you would wash off in the bathtub before you went into the big plunge where all the hot water was. And when the students would wash off, you'd all sort of jump in three of you at a time in the tub because you'd all wash off real quickly and then go in the hot tub.

[40:59]

So I'd been there maybe three days. I was an absolutely new student. I'd just driven my VW van in there. I was a new student just trying to figure out what was going on. But Suzuki Roshi was there the whole time and I was totally fascinated by him. He was just somehow seemed so present all the time. So I was on a different schedule that day because I was doing dishwashing, one of my favorite things to do. So I was off going to the baths early, and I rushed to the baths and turned around the corner, and there, right in front of me, was Suzuki Roshi, completely undressed, sitting on a little wooden stool he had, and he was filling the tub up with water. And I was so struck, I just, like, wow, it's right there. And he looked up to me and he said, do you want to take a bath? Well, I said, yeah, because that's what I was there for. But I wasn't sure, am I supposed to go in there and wash with him like all the others, like we used to do as students together?

[42:03]

So I said, well, I could just go over into the plunge. And Suzuki Roshi said, well, we usually wash off before we go into the plunge. Or usually we do. So I said, well, he's inviting me in. Just like I do with the other students, we'll get to know each other a little bit. This will be great. I go in. I'm taking off my clothes. He's puttering around. The tub is filling up. I've got all my clothes off. Still, I'm not too certain what to do. So I look at him, and he motions. Get in the tub. So I jump in the tub. I'm just getting into the tub, and I look up, and all of a sudden, she's completely dressed. And walking out of the room. And it just hit me like I have kicked Suzuki Roshi, the Zen master, out of the bath he was drawing for himself.

[43:03]

Now, I was raised by a mother who, you know, I'm an Eagle Scout. I don't do things like that. You know, I'm supposed to follow the rules, you know. I don't run around kicking Zen masters out of the baths that they draw for themselves. I am just in terrible shape. He's walking pretty fast. This is all happening really fast. He turns around. It's like I'm looking at him, walking out, and all of a sudden he pauses like he has a second thought or something. He turns around and he looks at me and he says, don't worry. around left. And he said it in a way that I didn't worry. And he said it in a way that somehow don't worry has been a koan in my life. The don't worry koan.

[44:08]

All the worrying you do about all the different things that happen. So it became a don't worry koan. So, of course, I'm sharing this not because I'm really proud about kicking the Zen master out of the bat. but I'm showing you how any circumstance can be turned into something that's a teaching moment. Suzuki Roshi turned that into a teaching moment because, I don't know why, because maybe that was more important to him than having a bath, which I would say was a great act of kindness. He could have easily said, son, this is the private dining time, the bathing time of the abbot. Why don't you come back later? Possibly. I really don't know whether it was the private dining time, private bathing time of the abbot, or whether it was just that he happened to be alone that afternoon there. Encountered events became the basis of all these stories in Zen. And I'm thinking, David, that I have...

[45:15]

I was gonna go into a long discussion about the Genjo Cohen and how the Genjo Cohen is essentially part Cohen of the present moment. And it's the same as these, these Coens are all examples of the Genjo Cohen, but I don't think we have time for that tonight. We'll have to do that at the class on Tuesday. So I think I'll give David a chance to tell us all about the Blue Cliff record or anything else that occurs to you. No, I'm done. I'M SITTING IN A BATH. YOU PROBABLY WANT MY MIC TOO. YOU CAN LEAVE THEM THERE. everyone.

[46:49]

Even though I never met Suzuki Roshi, I am encountering him every day. So thank you, Ed. And for my contribution tonight, I'm going to provide a brief historical introduction to the Blue Cliff. And Ed just provided us a little bit of a background on encounter dialogues, which were the forerunners to koans. And it's interesting to know how the trace, how hundreds of rather personal, idiosyncratic, and in many instances, just baffling exchanges between students and teachers or Dharma peers over thousands of years ago were collected and passed on down through history as teaching devices. So these conversations, these personal relationships 1,000 years ago are now teaching devices for us.

[47:53]

So your relationships now with each other, with your teacher, they may be teaching devices, future koans, for people 1,000 years from now. So how will you act? How will you meet each other? How will you encounter each other now knowing that that might be the case? You're giving birth to Zen of the future. And the Blue Cliff Record, the Heikigan Roku, as it's known in Japanese and in Chinese, it's Biyan Lu, is in many ways a collective effort. It's a culmination of a historical process over several hundred years. And... The collection was assembled and composed by two great Zen ancestors, Shuedo Changzheng and Yuanwu Keqing, I believe it's pronounced.

[48:58]

They actually never knew each other. They lived 100 years apart. And Shuedo, his Japanese name is Sechou Jikan. He was born in 1980, 1980, sorry, 980. and died in 1052. He was the fourth patriarch or the successor in the Yunmun school. So there were five principal schools of Zen at the time. And he lived in Southeast China. He had a Confucian education before he became a Buddhist monk. And that Confucian education instilled in him a very deep appreciation of literary scholarship. And Shuedo's enlightenment experience, it embodies his approach to Zen. And you'll often see this in many of the koans. Someone has enlightenment experience. The flavor of their enlightenment carries through their teachings over and over again.

[50:01]

So according to the description written on his funeral pillar, one evening he was just hanging out with his teacher, having a cup of tea. His teacher's name was German. Guao Zhou, and he asked his teacher, the ancient masters didn't produce a single fault. So where's the problem? And German, as Zen teachers did at that time, hit Shuedo with his ceremonial whisk. You saw this morning, Ed had a ceremonial whisk. I had one yesterday. So he hit him with this fly whisk. And when Schwedo opened his mouth to respond, like, what? What are you doing? What are you hitting me for? His seizure hit him again, right? And those two whacks of the whisk triggered Schwedo's awakening. Now, it was just that easy all the time, right? You know, Ed, would you hit me twice on the head and maybe I'll wake up now?

[51:04]

Yeah, too late. Okay, he's ready. He's ready. Maybe tonight it will happen. So in this story, we see how Suedo lived out his own encounter dialogue, right? He asked his teacher a precocious question, like I'm sure all of you do. You go into, you know, you're hanging out with your teacher, maybe in the courtyard, maybe, you know, docus honor, practice discussion. And in response, the teacher hits him. And... The purpose of the hit is to interrupt Schwede's habitual and intellectual thinking. So this is the characteristic, a lot of the Tang and later somewhat the Song Dynasty engagement. How do we cut this intellectual thinking that we get ourselves stuck in and get to the immediate moment? And so it was through Schwede's own active participation, and you can say in a real life experience,

[52:08]

koan encounter, a living koan, that he gained his insight. And again, his insight became the basis of his Dharma writings. And you'll see it flavor throughout his commentaries in the Blue Cliff Record. So in the early Song Dynasty, this song started in 960, the previously early transmitted koan encounter dialogues, these were all just passed down orally, from the Tang era before, where they were written down finally. So the teachers and maybe the students took notes and they wrote them down and they collected them over time. And they were grouped together in a collection of basically biographies of the various Zen teachers. And so the first iteration of the Blue Cliff record took shape when Schwedro carefully collected a hundred of these brief excerpts of the biographies of Zen teachers, including these encounter stories.

[53:14]

And he not only collected these 100 cases, he preferred cases, that term, but he also wrote a verse, or you could say a poem for each of the case, which in Japanese is called jokugo or capping phrases. So you've probably heard that, capping phrases. And his were typically very succinct. They were acerbic and often very humorous. And kind of trying to illuminate certain points in each of the cases. And they were also very complex because Schwedow's writing style, he used a lot of symbolism and allusions to Chan history and Chinese secular literature of the time, which makes it very hard for us to Now, in contemporary times, I actually understand a lot of the references that are in the cases. In those days, they'd get it just like that. You know, we'd say, you know, anyhow, they would get it very quickly.

[54:15]

They wouldn't have to kind of go back and study like we have to do. So Shweta, while he wasn't the first to write an ode or a verse to the cases, he was a very skilled and original writer. And this made his commentary stand out. So they became very well appreciated. And like many of Zen teachers, Shuedo keeps grappling with how to express truths that go beyond words and concepts. How to express immediate truth, direct truth, suchness, in other words. And his approach was to challenge conventional thinking. So a lot of his writing is meant to throw the reader off, you know, unsettle the reader, to plunge them into a sense of uncertainty, of immediacy and urgency. And when you read the koans and the commentaries and the verses, you have a sense of that. You know, it throws you off.

[55:17]

It's kind of like you're thrown off a cliff, falling through space. You have nothing to grab onto, you know, and this is a deliberate approach. that actually many Zen teachers at the time would take in their writing and their commentary. And he did this again through his use of poetry, elusive symbolism, imagery, irony, sarcasm, misdirection, all the things that as we study the koans together, we'll see how that is done in the languaging. So he completed his encounter stories or cases. He called them 100 oaths. And this was sometime, he completed sometime between 1026 and 1038. And it's understood that they were widely circulated at the time throughout China and well regarded. And there was also some concern that their popularity brought some risk that people would actually focus on the writing rather than the deeper message of the koans and the cases themselves.

[56:20]

So it said that as Shuedo lay dying, one of his disciples requested a final teaching verse. Your poor teacher is dying. Please give me one final teaching for your last breath. And Shweda replied, my only regret is talking too much. It's the bane of every Zen teacher. The minute you open your mouth, you've said too much. You might as well just throw in the towel. The second iteration of the Blue Clef Record, and the one that essentially what we've inherited today, was the work of Yuan Wu Keikun. His Japanese name is Engo Kokugan. And he lived approximately, again, like I said, a century after Shuedo. And he was also a successor in the Rinzai School. or not also, but he himself was particularly a success of the Rinzai school, which is the later iteration of the Yunman school. And Yuan's own awakening experience also was brought about by a encounter dialogue with his teacher.

[57:29]

But in this case, it was unique. It was just not an encounter dialogue, but it was actually with a classic koan. So the two of them together triggered his awakening. So the story goes like this. Yuan was grappling with the meaning of a love poem that he had overheard, a particular love poem. And this love poem was about a noble woman who calls out to her maid just so that her lover can hear the sound of her voice. So she wasn't calling her maid. She was just using this calling out to her maid as an excuse so her lover, whoever they were, could hear the sound of her voice. And as Yuan Wu was thinking about this, contemplating, and asked the question, why this? His teacher shouted at him a classic Zen koan phrase. Why did Bodhidharma come from the West, the cypress tree in the courtyard? Right?

[58:32]

What's going on there, right? And so... the heart of Yuan's awakening was realizing that the true meaning of both the love poem and the koan phrase, which his teacher yelled at him, wasn't in the words themselves, but they were actually, but was transmitted in the tangible, physical sounds of the voices. In other words, the immediate experience of both the noble woman and his teacher. And so his insight was later something that informs his commentaries, his way of reflecting on the various cases in the record. And Yuan Wu later wrote, if you use language and words to interpret language and words, you merely get the benefits of understanding, intellectual understanding, more. But you do not cross the Dharma gate. You do not enter into the Dharma gate. Here, clearly, the words...

[59:35]

outside the voice. Do not seek anything in the meaning. So Yuan Wu studied Shuedo's work assiduously and in time he gave a whole series of talks that were elucidating Shuedo's original collection of 100 Encounter antidotes and verses. And he, as he did, he would compose a pointer or a prologue as well as two commentaries for each of the cases, along with a company verse. And so the Blue Cliff Record, the original, came twice long, in some cases three times as long as it had originally been. And he never actually intended to publish his Dharma talks, his writings here. But some students begged him, you know. So eventually that happened. And they were... you know, shared more widely then. And Yuan Wu, he delivered these talks on Mount Chia, what's in modern-day Huan province, and at a temple called Blue Cliff, because it has a blue cliff.

[60:48]

And sometimes it's called Blue Cliff Cloyster. And this is how we get the title, Blue Cliff Record. Originally it was called Blue Cliff Collection. And so it was published in 1128, and it took about a decade for it to receive wide attention. But when it did, it said to cause a stir among Zen students, right? So many people who read it were very excited about it. They were very inspired by the collection, and it actually inspired other collections, such as the Book of Serenity and the Mumong Kong, who came approximately 100 years after the Blue Cliff Record. The success of Yuan Wu's blue clove collection actually didn't please everyone, and especially one person in particular, one of his students. And his student's name was Dawei Zhang Gao. And Dawei was also a successor in the Linji School of Zen.

[61:51]

And he became to be known as a fierce critic of what he called the heretical Chan School of Silent Illumination. of the Saodong, the Saodong school, which is the Chinese precursor to Japanese Soto. So basically he didn't like Soto Zen. He was a big critic of Soto Zen. And his other claim to fame was introducing Huato practice. And Huato is a method of meditating on what's called the head or the core word or phrase of a koan in a way to become one with it. And so you've heard of the phrases mu, right? You know, what is mu? Or just someone, you know, Rinzai students, that's usually the first koan that they're given. And they walk around just kind of, you know, yelling and embodying mu as much as possible. And there's other phrases, huato phrases, such as what is it? What is this? Who am I? What was my face before my mother and father were born?

[62:54]

and things like that. And this is still a very common practice in Rinzai and Korean Zen. So the story goes that sometime after Yuan Wu's passing, his teacher died, he noticed that students were engaging in too much intellectualization and literary commentary about the koans of his master. So rather than delving into the heart of the koans, to try to find their own meaningful encounter and insight with them, many of the students would simply memorize Yuan Wu's interpretation and then recite them verbatim, which was apparently kind of the fashion of the time. That's what you did with classics. You just memorize them and verbatim and recite them verbatim. So what did Dawei do? Well, he burned the original woodblocks of the Blue Cliff Record. And then he collected as many of the copies of the Blue Cliff Record as he could, and he destroyed those too. So this would be like, you know, Ed, student of Suzuki Roshi, takes Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, too many people referring to it, they're hoarding it out, they're reciting it, and so on.

[64:06]

So Ed destroys the original copy of the Blue Cliff Record, or sorry, of Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, and every book that he could find, every copy he could find. Pretty radical, right? It would. It would. And he did this. He was saying he did this to rescue his disciples from delusion. And it wasn't that he was throwing koan practice away by burning the blue-cloth record. He was rather attempting to help practitioners to access the true power or jewel of each of the koans. which is their capacity to point us back to our true nature. So it's not up here, it's in your heart of being. So how do you get to that? And so regardless of what you think of Dawi's approach, apparently Yuan Wu's collection of koans was banned about 28 years later by the government and subsequently disappeared from public discussion.

[65:14]

But Like many banned books, it went underground. And then it surfaced again for 150 years. So in 1300, due to the efforts of layman Jiang Mingyuan, and Jiang collected all the surviving manuscripts that he could find out the Bleu Pleif collection. And he restored the book to basically its near original version. There were a few of the pointers of the introductions that Yuan Ru had wrote about 20 cases that couldn't be restored. But otherwise, it's pretty much back to the same. And then not too long after, what was the timing? Oh, but actually, this was in 1227. Jogen was the first person to introduce the Blue Cliff Records to Japan.

[66:18]

And he was 26 years old. He had just completed four years of study in China. And he was preparing right the night before he left. And I think I had mentioned this yesterday. He stumbled upon this. He was so impressed with the Blue Cliff Record that he decided to stay up all night hand copying. It's a thick book. Hand copying all that. So if you believe that story, there may have been some help, some supernatural help with that. And his collection is known as the Ichiya Hikigan. So the One Night Blue Cliff Record. Oh, dear. I think I'll stop there because we're at our time. So I have more to say. Ed had more to say, but words are just words. And we have 10 weeks to say all the things. Okay.

[67:23]

So we're going to continue to climb the blue cliff together, find our way to scale these koans to enter into the cliff itself. The blue cliff you could say is not only the teachings, the ancestors' words, there are also the blue cliff is reality, and the blue cliff is our own being. So how do we enter into the heart of our own being and discover the jewel waiting for us within? And then once we have encountered that jewel, How do we share it with the world? How do we share it with each other? So this is what we'll be exploring over these next 10 weeks. Thank you very much. We are sorry for having gone a little over. Thank you, Ed, for sharing this talk together.

[68:36]

this is Thank you.

[69:18]

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