This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Okay. Remember, if at any point... You can't hear very well. Make yourselves seen and heard. Wave arms. Call out. Is this as high as the lights go? That's okay. I'm mostly using my iPad. Thank you.

[01:08]

Most people think that technology is for young people, but we know that technology is really for the older people. It allows us to see. We don't have to remember things. We can just look it up. So how are we doing? Let's do the thumb thing in the air. Pretty good. Pretty good. Good. Some variation, which is always good, but on the good side, that's nice. So I saw Venus this morning, but I couldn't see Jupiter. I didn't have time to go and look. But yesterday I saw Venus and Jupiter. Just, you know, when I got a little bit, I walked down a little bit toward the garden, I could see both of them in the morning. But this morning, I couldn't see Jupiter.

[02:08]

It could be that even though they're getting closer together, Venus and Jupiter, and they'll be conjunct on Sunday, it could be that they're each night too low in the sky. So we may have to exert ourselves to climb a mountain. And Norman and I were walking up the road the other day, and I saw what I'm pretty sure is liverwort. And I was very excited because I've rarely seen liverwort except in pictures. It's very common in some places, but it's not so common where we live. We have a lot of moss, but not much liverwort. And the thing about liverwort is that it's really, really old. Liverwort and moss, The mosses are the first plants to evolve on Earth. They're the first plants, land plants.

[03:10]

And that means, I don't know, 400 million years old, something like that, a long time ago. So when I see mosses and liverworts, I just feel the legacy of life on Earth. Wow, they're still here. So... Get out there and look for a liverwort, my people. Well, you know, sashin in many ways reminds me of scuba diving. And I'd like to tell you a few of those ways. Most of my diving, I told you that I've... I've been diving for 20-something years, and I dive a lot. And most of my diving has been in Monterey. I've traveled all over the world to dive in warm water, which is lovely, to see the bright, colorful fishes. But mostly, I dive in Monterey, where the water is cold and you can't see much because the visibility is usually poor.

[04:19]

And... In Monterey, unlike in the tropics, we generally wear a dry suit. So a dry suit is a big piece of equipment that requires a lot of... It requires a heavy weight belt, which means a lot of lead. So we put on this big piece of equipment. A lot of lead strapped around to us are... tanks and trudge into the water. It's reminiscent this morning when the wake-up bell went by. I felt, oh, it's time to go diving. I'm putting on my dry suit and trudging to the zendo. And then once you get in the water,

[05:23]

everything changes. That which is heavy on land is appropriate in the water. And that which is floppy and cumbersome walking to the zendo is appropriate in sitting. And the other day I told you about Issan and the Let's get naked and go driving in a big black car. And I do think of my Coromo as a big black car. Actually, it's a little bit more like a truck. And a dry suit compared to a wet suit is like a truck. You're driving this truck. So it requires a lot of attention. You can't just hop in the car and drive away. There's these sleeves and there's all these... There's all this fabric everywhere, and it has to be organized and folded up and tucked in in order to settle in.

[06:28]

And then there's the visibility. Monterey never has great visibility. We get very excited if we have 30 feet. What do you think the length of this room is? 30 this way. So on a day when I could see Hyakshou, it would be an amazing dive day in Monterey. And if I can see 30 feet, it doesn't mean that I can see clearly to 30 feet. The way we measure is we mostly dive in buddies, and one buddy swims away, stops, holds up their hand in their giant, you know, black glove. And where the other person can actually see that there's five fingers, that's considered the visibility. So that means that it's misty, but you can just barely make out the five fingers.

[07:34]

So in the Zendo, you know, I've got this Orioki set, which is all black lacquer. There's the bowls. There's the placemat. There's the chopsticks and spoon. I can't tell where anything is. There's the folds and the placemat. The chopsticks go rolling around, and I don't know where they went. And the spoon. So I'm experiencing a dive in poor visibility every time I have a meal. We go diving probably down to three-foot visibility, which is not much. When you dive in three-foot visibility, you look at things up close because that's what you got. And we have a shark joke because, you know, there's great white sharks in Monterey on our coast.

[08:42]

I mean, they live there. Our shark joke is... someone will come from out of town and say to us, do you ever see great white sharks? And we say, no, we never see them. That's the joke. And then there's conditions like surge, a lot of surge, and a lot of timing. limitations. You know, you have a certain amount of air, and so you have to keep track of that. So the timing of a dive is extremely important, the depth of a dive and all of that. I'd been diving in Monterey for, I don't know, maybe 15 years or something like that. When we were coming out of the water, it was pouring rain. There had been a lot of surge.

[09:43]

We couldn't see a thing. Somebody probably lost their flashlight. And we were coming out of the water, and I turned to my dive buddy, Kira, and I said, you know, it just occurred to me that what we do here is an extreme sport. So it took me 15 years to figure that out. So here in the Zendo, you know, remember that when... When you have a tough time, just say to yourself, extreme sport. I wanted to talk, first of all, a little bit about pain in our practice. Physical pain as well as mental and emotional pain. And in my experience, just tell what has helped me.

[10:51]

The first point is when we sit, talking about physical pain, please don't injure yourselves. That's number one. Don't hurt yourselves. I think it's possible to... Do injury to yourself if you sit in the same position over many hours a day over many years. I think Norman and I did a little bit of harm to ourselves doing that. And we kind of got a clue about it, you know, 10, 15 years in or 20 years into sitting. Nothing major, but just be careful. Don't hurt yourselves. And the next is, as you, you know, we've all been sitting a lot here, you have probably discovered that the pain, physical pain in the body, is usually accompanied by muscle tension around the pain.

[12:08]

Could be muscles right around the pain. Could be the neck and back. could be any number of things. But the pain that is caused by the way that we're sitting, we have a response to it. So the first thing is to identify that and see if you can find a way to relax those muscles. We can direct our attention to breathing. Sometimes when we're in pain, our breath gets really shallow and short. So redirect our attention to deep breathing can be helpful. And the next thing we can do is don't name it pain.

[13:16]

Pain is a word that has a lot of hype for us. If someone says pain, it's what you don't want. You don't want pain. So naturally, we try to flee from pain. The word itself has a kind of scary, fearful impact on us. So don't use the word. kind of dial the whole thing back and just go to the sensation. And if you want to name the sensation, you can name it with kind of flat descriptive words like pressure or heat or cold, sharp or dull. These kinds of words... don't have quite the, they don't kind of amp up the experience for us quite as much.

[14:25]

And allow space. Allow space for the pain. Or the sensation in whatever way you describe it. So let's do a little meditation on this. First, feel the Earth's gravity fall into the Earth. Fall into the Earth's gravity. from the inside out like an amoeba when breath is needed breathe in from the inside out lift up from the inside out with the vitality of breath of air

[15:53]

Exhale, falling with gravity. When breath is needed, inhale, lifting up. If a strong sensation needs your attention, go there. Make your meditation body large enough for that sensation. You can hold or sit by the pain like you would a sick child or a sick friend.

[17:03]

Nothing you can do to fix it or remove it. So just stay close. Breathing in. Exhaling. Falling into the earth. When we experience mental pain or emotional pain We can do the same. Notice how the mental or emotional pain changes our breathing, our heart rate.

[18:17]

Allow it space. Allow it its own dignity and just stay close with respect and acceptance and openness. The other day I mentioned that science, which we think of as a way to discover and learn about the real world, is an expression of the human mind.

[19:26]

And I wouldn't say that science is not a way to discover and learn about the real world. But I would say that if birds did science, or if sponges did science, or if amoeba did science, which they may, we don't really know, it seems reasonable to think that they would come up with a different model of the world than we do. They might ask different questions than we do. I don't know if birds would be that interested in going to Mars. even though they fly already. Their investigations might lead them in different directions, to different conclusions and different theories. So, that's my corollary to the teaching found in Vasubandhu's 30 verses on...

[20:42]

consciousness only. So in the book that was written by Ben Connolly, excellent book by Ben Connolly, he says, he makes the very important point about Buddhism, that we can't know what reality is. We can only know what our experience of reality is. And that is defined by our senses as we find them at this time in our human evolution. We all know that we don't have the best senses. Our ears are not as good as our dogs. A dog hears the ambulance and starts howling before we can. And a cat can see in the dark cat can catch a mouse in the dark I can't even catch a mouse in the light insects have chemoreceptors which allow them to read the chemicals in the air to find food to find a mate and to avoid danger we don't have that

[22:11]

Fish have lateral lines, which is a sense organ for detecting movement and vibrations and pressure gradient. So if you've ever seen pictures or if you've been underwater with schools of fish, it's astonishing. A school of fish, and then all of a sudden, everybody turns, right? And then they turn again. what's actually happening is that the fish in front is perceiving a small change in pressure or possibly vibrations from perhaps a large animal moving their way, say an orca who wants to eat them. And just that little tiny bit of change of pressure stimulates the first fish to turn away, to turn to the right. And the Water, that little tiny current that's created by that fish turning, hits the next fish and the next fish and the next fish.

[23:24]

And this happens so quickly that we cannot see it. We cannot see it with our eyes. So this, you know, it's like a wave, you know, like at the baseball game, a wave that goes through the school of fish. Everybody turns. We don't have anything like that. But it gives you a picture of how sensitive other beings are to their environment, how sensitive and how different they go about their lives. Sharks have what's called ampullae of Lorenzini. I guess somebody by the name of Lorenzini discovered it. They are electroreceptors for sensing prey and other things. So if you've ever seen a picture of a shark, there's little dots all over their snout.

[24:28]

And when they swim along, they kind of swim like this, and they're kind of, you know, operating their ampullae of Lorenzini. It's hard to study sharks, especially the big guys. They just don't like to hold still very much. And you don't want to get all that close anyway. But scientists can figure out how to detect their electrical impulse. And it seems as though they can perceive prey up to a mile away. That's how sensitive they are to their environment. That's why visibility doesn't matter in Monterey to us. What are we going to do if there is a shark? So we can think about the world we live in. We have our own assumptions, our own perspective, our own, well, as humans, and what I have learned from science is our own deep arrogance about being human.

[25:44]

But we're walking around in a world in which other beings know a lot more about some things than we do. When we hear a mosquito buzzing around, that mosquito has probably been lurking around, making a plan for a half an hour before we know it, before we can hear it. Animals are very, very sensitive to their environment. So our five senses are not that impressive. Our mental sense, by which we make sense of all the sensory input and respond to it, might be uniquely developed in humans and is a major focus of Buddhist practice. That we form mental concepts which obscure enlightened reality. And what we are going to do about this conundrum is the main topic of the Platform Sutra, most koans and much of Dogen's teaching as well.

[26:52]

So, Huynang addresses the assembly. This is possibly his first address, but we don't know. We don't really know if he was a real person anyway. But this is the address. Good friends, you already possess the prajna wisdom of enlightenment. But because your minds are deluded, you can't understand by yourselves. You need to find a truly good friend to show you the way to see your nature. Good friends, Buddha nature isn't different for the ignorant and the wise. It's just that people are deluded or awake. When people are deluded, they're ignorant. When they wake up, they become wise. What he doesn't say here, though he addresses later, is that neither ignorance nor wisdom are steady states.

[28:01]

It's not like you fall into wisdom and finally you're rid of ignorance. Not so much. So in Buddhism, the mind is one of the senses, as in eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind, or sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, object of mind. And this is why we can say that thoughts and feelings as objects of mind don't really belong to us any more than the object of sight, like a tree, belongs to us. So neither ignorance nor wisdom really belong to us. And we all travel back and forth between ignorance and wisdom. And what is ignorance? It's attaching to a thought concept, thinking it is real, enduring, and true.

[29:07]

I'll tell you a sciency story about how deep this capacity to form concepts among us really is. The story is fiction, and it's only one word, and the word is white. It turns out there is no white. There's no white. Looks like there's white, but there's no white. There are only seven colors which correspond to wavelengths of electromagnetic energy that come off the sun or come off the lights. There's only seven colors that our eyes have evolved to be able to see. Some animals see more colors than us, which is an odd sentence. You can't even understand what that sentence means.

[30:11]

But bees, for example, see ultraviolet light, which is really handy because the thing about bees is that they're looking for nectar and flowers. If you can picture a flower petal, it's got these little veins going down. Well, it turns out that these veins reflect ultraviolet light, so they're like... a runway, like at the airport, for the bees. So a bee goes flying along and sees these little runways to nectar and goes and lands, hopefully accurately, and feeds. Lots of animals don't see as many colors as we do. Lots of animals can kind of see colors a little differently. But we only see these seven colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

[31:19]

That's it. All the other colors we see, including white, is an averaging that takes place in our brain. They're not really there, whatever we mean by there. You can find that out. You can discover this. If you know what a diffraction grating is, it's a little piece of usually plastic that has a bunch of scratches in different angles and different distances. And if you look through it, you can see the colors that are really there. So you can look through a diffraction grating at a white wall and see that it's all rainbows. And of course, all those colors didn't come from the diffraction grating. They're the light falling on the wall and reflecting back. And that's probably more like what animals that see color see. They probably don't have the mental capacity that we do to average those colors together and make a new color that isn't actually there.

[32:27]

So our brain works really well when we tell a story like the story of white. We don't like chaos very much. Our brain kind of doesn't like chaos very much. We like organization. We like to see the big picture. We like job descriptions and mission statements. We like to make plans. And we kind of like to know where this whole thing is going. We like to plan to polish the mirror tomorrow so that we can polish the furniture the next day. That's the way we work. And it's not just this pesky habit that we can get over with a lot of zazen. It really is how we are wired. We are storytellers.

[33:32]

And it may be that these seemingly pesky concepts that we live with aren't really what causes us the suffering. It may be more the repetition of them over time and our consequent belief that they are true. So we can retrain ourselves, which is something like what we're doing in meditation. What I mean by retrain is to refrain from reinforcing the deep neural grooves that have formed by repetition over many years of the same thought, the same thought that causes suffering.

[34:43]

the thought that I'm not good enough or nobody likes me or there. See that? That proves that I'm always last or always weakest or always best or whatever. All of those thoughts are born of the concept of a me defined as separate. We came by that concept honestly. We have been told that that's who we are since we were babies. You are you, and you may not grab from that person because that belongs to them, and this belongs to you. So we have trained, we have lived this concept our whole lives. But that... a concept of me defined as separate, so that anything I think slips into the slot of separate from me.

[35:46]

For example, enlightenment slips right into the slot of not me, something I want, something I don't have, something I probably can't ever have. It's only for the special ones. Something like that. even love and happiness. The concept of separateness causes suffering according to these teachings. If we have a fixed idea of enlightenment, no experience that we have will qualify because we've made a prior commitment to failing at enlightenment or love or friendship or whatever. So Hui Neng says, is there a switch?

[36:50]

Or did I burn out the bulb? So he's talking about externalizing our meditation, having an idea of a meditation and trying to conform to it, allowing that meditation to control us so that we have to conform to it.

[38:01]

Deluded people who cling to the external attributes of a dharma... get hold of one practice samadhi and just say that sitting motionless, eliminating delusions and not thinking thoughts are one practice samadhi. But if that were true, a dharma like that would be the same as lifelessness and would constitute an obstruction of the way instead. The way has to flow freely. Why block it up? The way flows freely when the mind doesn't dwell. on any Dharma. Once it dwells on something, it becomes bound. And he goes on. What do we mean by no thought? Not to think about thoughts and no attachment

[39:05]

which is everyone's basic nature, thought after thought, not to become attached. Whether it's a past thought, a present thought, or a future thought, let one thought follow another without interruption. And he even goes on. To be unaffected by any object is what is meant by no thought. To be free of objects in our thoughts and not to give rise to thoughts about dharmas. But don't think about nothing at all. Once your thoughts stop, you die. So this is a subtle point for us. Thinking, the objects of mind flow freely, just like when I look around the room, I see what I see and I hear what I hear.

[40:17]

Thoughts are like that. But we get confused on that point and we attach them. We kind of think it's special, we think it's real, we think it belongs to us. That is what he's saying. And when something belongs to us, it implies separateness. There's me and there's you. There's my thought, which is absolutely unique to me. Nobody has the thought except me. And that sets me apart. But I've been thinking about enlightenment, for example. So we have this... remote, we operate under this kind of remote idea of enlightenment as like a sparkly psychedelic thing. I don't know. And I'm thinking, why don't we reinvent that?

[41:21]

In the Platform Sutra, and Dogen and all the ancestors say over and over, that enlightenment is hiding in plain sight, that we are already Buddha. So how about this? When we feel a breath of air moving through us, and we know that air touching us now has been to many places, been inside many beings, accepting the air, How about just this is enlightenment? Sitting on the cushion connected to the earth by gravity and the evolution of life on earth as it is in this body connected to other bodies this moment. This body is connected to the legacy of life on earth. How about just this is enlightenment?

[42:32]

Or the universe is 13.8 billion years old. Our life is so short and so rare. Each of our lives are so short and so rare in this whole universe of time and space that we could meet each other is rare compounded. that we could be in this room at this moment. It's so very rare. We can say, you and me, alive here. How rare. Let's call that love. We can even extend this to rocks and water. You, me, alive here. how rare love in this way or whatever way you can generate oh wild ones we can refrain from reinforcing suffering and create new wholesome neural grooves

[43:56]

to postpone some of what I have here till next time because I'm talking too long. But I will end with this passage from the Platform Sutra from Huynang. This is in his explanation of the refuges when he says what I said last time, what I ended with last time, I take refuge in the pure Dharma body Buddha, the Dharmakaya Buddha, in my own material body. I take refuge in the myriad-fold transformation Buddha in my own material body. I take refuge in the future and perfect realization body Buddha in my own material body. He says, what do we mean by the pure Dharma body Buddha? Good friends, everyone's nature is fundamentally pure. And the 10,000 dharmas are present in this nature.

[45:25]

What he means by the 10,000 dharmas is all our capacities, our capacities for the sublime, our capacities for the twisted up and messed up and dark and depressed and angry, our capacities for love and amazing work, If we think about doing something bad, we commit bad deeds. And if we think about doing something good, we perform good deeds. Thus, we all know dharmas are present in our nature. But our nature itself remains pure. The sun and moon are always shining. It's only due to cloud cover. that there is light above and darkness below and we can't see the sun and moon and stars. Then suddenly the wind of wisdom comes along and blows the clouds and drives the fog away and a panorama of 10,000 images appear at once.

[46:37]

So in the midst of this 10,000 things appearing at once. Practice. Please take care of yourselves. 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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[47:15]

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