This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Well, you know, as we were standing around upstairs, Judith suggested that what I do is grab the podium, shake it, get up and flee the building. But sadly for you, I'm not going to do that. In other news, Shui Feng was sitting up more or less like this, but he might have been sitting in a chair in front of a group of monks, and he says, you take up the world,

[01:05]

Hold it between your fingers and it's no bigger than a grain of rice. And he said, throw it down. If you still don't get it, like a lacquer bucket, I'll go and I'll beat the drum and I'll have everyone come and look. So, Given that I don't have a clue what I'm gonna say about this koan, does anyone want to take a shot at it right now before we get started? Okay, so. Can you repeat it? Absolutely. So, Shui Feng, is teaching and he says, you take up the world in between your fingers and it's no bigger than a grain of rice.

[02:08]

Cast it down in front of you. And if, like a lacquer bucket, you still don't get it, I'll go and I'll beat the drum and have everyone come look. That's what he said. who are like a lacquer bucket that doesn't get it? So he's comparing the student that doesn't get it to a lacquer bucket? Yeah, that's right, yeah. That's the whole thing with the lacquer bucket. We'll get into the lacquer bucket a little bit later. But yes, that's right, yeah. Is there like something about being lacquered, like a bucket with lacquer? Or a bucket that's lacquered? I think it's a kind of common metaphor for a kind of mute object or something like that, right? And again, we'll get into all of that, right?

[03:13]

But yes, that's right. So there's a lot of different... and explanations for the koan literature, right? The vast collection of stories that have been kind of accumulating since the Tang Dynasty and somewhere in the late Song Dynasty, somebody started saying, you know, we should really write all these down and then we should, you know, glue reams of commentary to them. and so on, but here's my explanation. Let's say that you were to invent a religion or a philosophical school, the primary tenet of which was

[04:27]

all of the teaching that we perform in this school is going to be without scriptural reference, and in fact, even worse, none of it can really be expressed in words, right? So you've set up a whole bunch of hopeful, diligent people who really want to use all the tools at their disposal to to bring forth this school and to hopefully, you know, save all beings from suffering, right? And you said, and, you know, furthermore, you really can't rely on scriptures or even actually words. It's this funny combination of the kind of revolt against, you know, the really massive mountains of scriptural material that were compiled during the early, you know, sort of Mahayana period or something like that.

[05:43]

And some weird, you know, budding of that up against Daoism. And you get this thing where the essential proposition is... It's not in the words and it's not in the scriptures, right? So eventually, if you say that, somebody has to ask, well, what exactly does that look like, right? How do you teach that way? How does that even work? And my take is that the Kohen literature was essentially collected and designed to demonstrate exactly that, right? It's like, you want to know how it works? Here's how it works. Shui Feng sits down in front of the assembly and he says, you take up a grain of rice, which happens to be the world, and then throw it down in front of you, and if you still don't get it, I'll go bang on a drum and everyone can come and poke around for it.

[06:45]

That's how it works. Or... A monk asks Yen Min, so what is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall off? And Yen Min says, body exposed in the autumn wind. That's what it looks like. So why does this even work, right? I mean, you can sort of see the part of it that has to do with encounters between teachers and students in the Koan literature, right? So a lot of the Koan literature is dedicated to stories of encounters between teachers and students, and you can sort of look at them as...

[07:50]

demonstrations of how people might want to talk to each other if they were doing this, right? But it goes beyond that. And almost all... Well, a lot of the koans also have this intriguing, make these intriguing references to things, right? So this one with the world and the grain of rice, right? Or... Somebody asked Dengshan, what's Buddha? And he says, three pounds of hemp. There's this guy named Ian Hodder. And I've already... He's one of my favorite people, so if I've already talked about him ad nauseum, forgive me for saying the same thing again.

[08:57]

But what he does is he runs the dig at a place in Turkey called Katolhöyük. It's an archaeological site, and it's very, very old, and it's one of the first large-scale human settlements that... anyone has ever really dug up. It's not the first, but at the time that it was discovered, it was really, really one of the first. And it's a remarkable place. It's huge, and it was clearly inhabited by a large group of people. And when it was originally discovered, there was a lot of fantasizing about what was going on there. And after a while, the fantasizing calmed down, and people kind of actually abandoned the place, and then sometime in the early 90s, I think, Ian Hodder sort of took it over and started working on it. He's very methodical and painstaking, and the writing in his books is not super great, but if you can plow through it, every now and again, he'll say these things that are just astonishing.

[10:11]

And the most astonishing thing that he says in the book that I first read of his, which is called something like, A Leopard's Tale, is he says, okay, if you look at the evidence of human prehistory from the Paleolithic up until presumably the present, what you see is this continual elaboration of entanglement between people and between people and things, right? Because it's as plain as the nose on your face if you look at it, right? And so in some ways what we are is we're the beings that are entangled with people, other people, with each other and with things, right? I once... mentioned this in a talk over at Hartford Street, and somebody said, you know, I'm Burmese, and so the word for humans in Burmese is the ones that are tangled up, right?

[11:20]

Which is pretty great. I don't know exactly how literal that is, but that's what she said, which I thought was pretty remarkable, right? But yeah, so we're the tangled up ones, right? And In particular, we're tangled up with things in this way that's, I think, probably unique, right? Because what do we do? We wear them, right? We wear them on our bodies. And there's this funny expression that people used to use back when it was okay to make references to men and assume you were making reference to everyone. And the expression was, the clothes make the man, right? Interesting. It's... It's a, or my late pop god friend Scott Miller wrote a song that says, clothes on the run, go out and make me someone.

[12:21]

Like that. So it's a reference to this peculiar relationship that we have with things, right? And There's a couple of other expressions like that. When I was a kid, it used to be common to say, and it was kind of a radical thing to say, and I think people said it because it was kind of radical. They would say, the hand teaches the mind, right? And the idea was that by using our hands, we'd become human in some ways, right? More to the point, I think, it's the things that make the mind, right? It's like we pick up a grain of rice. at that. Feel that. It's got a particular texture, solidity, and so on that make a whole world right there.

[13:25]

And furthermore, we eat it. It's an integral part of our lives. It's what we're made out of, particularly if we're monks that live in a monastery in Japan or China. eat rice all the live long day. We're made out of it. So we have this peculiar relationship with things. It's a mixed bag. If you read the metta sutta, it says, not to be submerged by the things of the world. Not to be submerged by the things of the world. It's not a... Things can be a trap, right? But something more like to be invited by the things of the world, right? Things invite us into an encounter which is kind of miraculous.

[14:29]

My favorite example, forgive me for... mentioning my favorite example, but it's a bicycle, right? So you get on a bike and initially it's just some piece of metal that doesn't really do what you want it to and constantly causes you to fall off and skin your knees or bang your head or something like that. But, you know, you give it a lifetime and what you discover is that this becomes more than a part of your body. It invites you to become a different being. It teaches you something about what the road feels like that you wouldn't experience any other way. And it teaches you something about effort and distance and

[15:34]

and the personality of material that you wouldn't learn any other way. And what people say constantly, who are around the whole field, is that every bike has a different flavor. It has a different spirit. And for reasons that are both obvious and subtle. You can take a couple of bikes that are similar from a technical perspective as the day is long, and they'll still feel different. It's amazing, actually. So the bicycle, if you bring yourself to it and meet it halfway or better, invites you into a relationship that's utterly beyond what you could expect, right?

[16:39]

Just based on the specifications, you know, a tube this long, and a tube this long, and a tube this long, right? The same is true for most of the things of our life, right? So Shui Feng... when he was a student in monasteries in China, he was the rice cook, right, typically. He'd show up with a lacquer bucket and a big bin and a wooden spoon, possibly also lacquered, and cook the rice, right, prepare the rice. And when he was with Dongshan, Dengshan comes in the kitchen and says, so what are you doing? And he says, well, you know, I'm cleaning the rice. And Dengshan says, so what are you doing? Are you separating the rice from the grit or the grit from the rice?

[17:43]

And Shui Feng says, both the rice and the grit are removed together, right? And... And Tungshan says, yeah, but what are people going to eat? And Shui Feng turns the rice bin over and spills it all out. And Tungshan says, you know, I think you should go visit Dershan. And he sends him off. And so he goes and he spends all this time wandering around China, right? What they say about him is that he... he crossed over the same mountain range a thousand times while he was poking around trying to figure out what was going on. And finally, one day, he was with his friend Yendo, and they were snowed in somewhere. And Yendo was kind of sitting around and snoozing and so on, and Shui Feng was like...

[18:50]

sitting staring at a while meditating. And after a while, Yen Tö goes, come on, give it a rest. And Shui Feng says, I can't, my heart isn't at rest. And so Yen Tö says, here's what we'll do, let's go through what you think you've learned. And one by one, Shui Feng mentions all of the kind of insights that he's had, and Yen Tö says, forget about it. Henceforth, from this moment, never speak a word about it. And finally, the last one, he says, you know, when I went to visit Dershon, we had this encounter where I asked him if I had any part in the great way. And he jumped down off the podium and he said, why are you saying? And he whacked me. And at that moment, I kind of had this insight. And Yento finally goes, don't you get it?

[19:53]

What comes in through the front door is not the family treasure, right? He says, henceforth, let it come from your own heart and cover the whole world. And at that point, you'll maybe have a sliver of awakening, right? At that point, Schweifeng kind of got it. So he kind of bounced around the room a little bit and then he bowed to his friend and said, oh, elder brother, today I've found the way. So that's good, good for him. So that's the other side of how this works. So the things of the world come forth and they invite us. And what's required of us is to is to give ourselves completely to the encounter.

[20:55]

That's true if the thing of the world that's coming forth is another person, if it's a blade of grass, a bicycle, or a grain of rice. If it's birdsong on a clear morning. To... to bring yourself wholeheartedly to whatever encounter is there and to let the world in all its various facets and in all of its conditioned, mysterious and inconceivable greatness speak its peace and to take it in thoroughly and without reservation. That's what's called for.

[21:58]

That's what it means when Shui Feng says, you take up the world between your fingers and it's no bigger than a grain of rice. It's like that encounter, to really experience that is It's the awakened life. To cast it down in front of you, it's gone. That world that was created in that moment is gone without a trace. No amount of monks groveling around the floor looking for it is going to make it appear. When Bodhidharma left the Emperor Wu and... stormed across the Yangtze River and sat himself down at wherever he went.

[22:59]

That's why he would never return. No amount of groveling around on the floor was gonna reproduce that moment. Something else could happen, something wonderful could happen. In fact, something wonderful did, right? So the Emperor Wu was like, you know, I think I missed it there. And that in itself was a marvel, right? But the moment was utterly effaced because each one of those encounters with that world is unique in all the history of of the universe from the Big Bang till the heat death of the universe and from one side of it to the other. There's never been this encounter with this grain of rice before or since. It'll never happen. So to let the things of the world invite the encounter and to meet them wholeheartedly

[24:13]

So we talked about entanglement with other people, right? And talk about entanglement with the things of the world and with the stuff of conditioned existence, right? There's also this other part, which is, and I... Ian Hodder didn't say this, but it seems pretty clear that at least if you look at human history, there's been a tremendous amount of entanglement with the self. Dogen says, to study the way is to study the self. Supposedly over the door of, I think it was Plato's school in Athens, it said, know yourself. So that's the other kind of encounter we can have.

[25:35]

It's a lot slipperier because we have this weird kind of multimodal consciousness and being. You have a self as normally defined, which is this construct that we make out of nothing, but which by the time we're, you know, three or four is pretty well developed, right? And that... separates itself out from the world, wants to consider the world in such a way that the things of the world are well-ordered and low on mystery and significance, right?

[26:46]

So that we can kind of control them, right? And that wants to consider other beings on a scale that's kind of like, how useful or useless are you to me and how can I play that? So there's that self. It's crucial to know that self. But that's not all we're talking about here. Simultaneously, constantly and without interruption, there's also this other mode of being that's running in the same body that doesn't so much do that. It's not like that mode of being isn't subject to conditioned existence.

[27:49]

Of course it is. It takes in the world through the same sensory apparatus as the the constructed self. In fact, it is utterly inextricable from your self-construct. But everyone who does this practice eventually meets the other self. This other mode of being that lives in our body and breathes the same air, looks out the same eyes. And that's not all. The body and mind are full of these interacting entities, very peculiar, right? So to know yourself is a big proposition and it takes, it's a lot of work and takes a lot of study, right? What Dogen suggests when he says to study the way is to study the self is that the

[28:53]

the self can be treated more or less the same way as other beings and as tiles and pebbles in this enterprise of waking up. It's just the world presenting itself through this body and the kind of... massive, uncontrollable force of life presenting itself in this body and mind. Nothing special. Just that. Which is to say something miraculous, but not special. The reason why it's tricky is that while it's possible to... have our attention cycle back and forth kind of smoothly in between the activity of self-construction and this sort of unconstructed activity, it's very... It's a tremendous effort to control that cycling, and it might not even be a particularly good idea, right?

[30:17]

It's like to... The... probably the most fruitful way to pursue it is not to abide in thinking and self-construction, not to abide in non-thinking and unconstructed awareness. Just to let the two take hold and let go in the way that they naturally take hold and let go and stay with it. Over time, what happens is that the... particularly if you sit a session and you give yourself seven days or something like that to let it come down. Often what happens is that the boundary becomes substantially less distinct and the cycling of attention becomes, instead of some kind of binary on and off thing, it's more like, you know, it isn't a big hop from here to here, right?

[31:20]

And that relationship, you can carry that relationship out into the rest of your life, you know, where sometimes important events over here, you know, encounter with a vexing person or, you know, a... dropping a large lump of coal on your foot or something like that, triggers some kind of coming forward of unconstructed awareness. Some sort of spaciousness and what the ancients in the commentaries on the koan literature call space to turn around. That's enlightened activity.

[32:23]

There isn't any such thing as enlightenment. It's just that activity, to live that way. Doesn't mean you never make mistakes. It doesn't mean, in fact, what it means is you constantly make mistakes. It doesn't mean that there's anything special. It just means that that opportunity presents itself naturally and of its own accord moment by moment. And the only, your only option is to step in. To hold the world like a grain of rice or hold the whole universe in here.

[33:28]

So, does anybody have any questions? As long as we're sitting around here. Go ahead. The whole world is a grain of rice. What is in his other hand? The whole world. The whole world, you can pick it up anywhere. It's like a net, right, that spreads from the beginning of time to the end of time and covers the whole thing, just like your life is like that, right? So to pick it up anywhere is to encounter the whole world. You're holding a... node in a net that is directly connected to every single thing. But as it happens, another node is here.

[34:35]

It's just that when we bring our attention to it, something remarkable and and unique happens, right? That is, there's a kind of reflecting back of the inconceivable nature of nature right here because there's consciousness and the whole world meeting there, right? And then he knocked the headset out of his ear. Did you have a question? I forget. Yeah, sure. That Dongshan Guifeng? Is that the name?

[35:36]

So Guifeng was the guy that picked up the grain of rice. Dongshan was the guy who said the Buddha is three pounds of hemp, basically. Yeah. I'm talking about the guy who turned over the . That's from . That's where I've heard it. It's a kind of famous story. So maybe it's in other locations. I sort of feel like I've been working in the kitchen. We would stop on that passage and discuss it. dichotomy in how to interpret that, or how it might be seen. On one hand, there's this guy who's somehow performing this expression of awakening at that moment by doing this activity. On the other hand, there's somebody who's throwing a temper tantrum and is not being a mature person. It's understandable that the teacher would say, you've got to go.

[36:37]

We can't tolerate this kind of behavior. It's actually disruptive. So then you go to the studies of someone else down the road and have some sort of awakening, but I guess I'm sort of wondering if you can talk about that a little bit. Sure. I always think it's such a fascinating thing that you've neither put down or condemned. Well, you know, one presents that that Dengshan said, you know, you should go really study with Dershon, but first, pick up every damn grain of rice, put it back in the bin, wash it off, and serve it up to the monks, right? And, you know, why not, right? And furthermore, I think Dengshan probably thought, he's awesome. That's just not the way we do things around here, you know? I think it's okay.

[37:37]

You don't want to... you don't want to go around making a mess of things. People are already too supremely talented at that, right? They're better at making a mess of things than any other beings on the planet, bar none, right? So you don't want to go around making a mess of things if you can possibly help it. But it's exactly this thing that there's a... We... We get... So Shui Feng was the rice guy, right? So of course he has a metaphorical relationship with a grain of rice. It's his thing, right? Somebody else might have said three pounds of hemp because he was the hemp guy, who knows, right? But Shui Feng was the rice guy. The things of the world take on metaphorical and

[38:38]

and we take on metaphorical significance, and we developed this complicated relationship with him, and he was just acting that out. Was it a good thing to do? Well, if he didn't clean up the rice, it was a bad thing to do. My guess is he probably cleaned up the rice, right? Why did Deng Shan say he had to go? Totally not clear. One of the things that's clear from the story where he goes and meets Dershon is that Dershon might have been a little harder on him. If he jumps down off the podium the first time he sees him and whacks him, maybe that speaks to a different relationship or something like that. But I don't know. That part I don't know about. My take is don't make a mess. Use what's in your hand. I'm wondering if he is asking us to consider the grain of rice and look at it and conceive of what he's telling us, or if the second he tells us that we should immediately talk to the grain, if one should contemplate or if one should be immediately prepared.

[40:07]

Yeah. That's a great question. It's clear that what he's not doing is he's not asking us to have a whole bunch of ideas about the grain of rice. I've completely gone and ruined everything for you by coming up with 45 minutes worth of ideas about the grain of rice. Both the three pounds of flax thing and the grain of rice thing are asking for something different than that. They're asking for the they're slipping a metaphor through your speech hardware into your body and asking you to really sense and experience what it's like to hold the world in your hand in the form of a grain of rice, right? Or three pounds of flax. Three pounds. Somebody actually, when I taught that con once, and a friend of mine who was in the audience,

[41:09]

went and bought three pounds of flax, and he put it in a cloth bag, and he mailed it to me, and he said, so now you have a sort of demonstrator model that you can use for the rest of your life if you like. So I keep it in a drawer in case I ever really need to know about three pounds of flax, I can take it out and toss it around in my hand, right? It's pretty nice, actually. But, yeah, so it's... He's clearly not asking for a whole lot of ideas about the rice, but as long as you can just let that world come into being, let it flower, and then drop it, that's good. Anybody else? on the floor could really be an actual dropping.

[42:10]

Yeah, I would say. Perhaps a little too much dropping, but yeah, that's right, exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's not, it's not, it's not, the two stories have this resonance, right? Absolutely, yeah. And it was probably one of those, you know, startling acts or something like that, right, you know, for everyone, including presumably Shui Feng. depending on how his teacher responded. Well, thanks very much for listening. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[43:13]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:16]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_91.6