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. It's very nice to be here. From a book of Irish fairy tales, all desires save one are fleeting, but that one lasts forever, and that is the desire for wisdom. When asked what one would do with that wisdom, a wise Irishman replied, you would write a poem.

[01:03]

So one of the great poets of the Zen tradition is our 12th century Japanese ancestor, Dogen Zenji, who traveled to far off China in search of wisdom. And yet he returned home and said to his monk, his monks, I have returned empty-handed. I've brought nothing back with me. So empty-handed refers to Dogen's awakening experience. Upon hearing Ru Jing, his Chinese Zen teacher, saying to the monks, drop body and mind. Drop body and mind. Which Dogen apparently did. And when reporting that experience back to his teacher, Ru Jing, Ru Jing then said, now drop that. So once back in Japan, although empty-handed, Dogen wrote poetry, and volumes of essays on his awakened insight, including one of his most famous essays, which we recite here at the Zen Center, called the Genjo Koan.

[02:17]

Genjo Koan means actualizing the fundamental point, in which Dogen instructs, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. So that's the instruction that I'm recommending to all of us practicing the Buddha way together, right here and right now, studying the self. And so how do we do that? How do we study the self? Well, I think perhaps the best way, as the Irish say, is to start with a poem. This poem is called A Cedary Fragrance. by Tassarhara alumna Jane Hirschfield, reflecting on her own experience as a young monk. Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water, not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted.

[03:30]

Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water, not for discipline or memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted. So I think maybe the first step in studying the self is to find out what it is that we want, or maybe don't want. And then once we figure that out, then how are we going to get it? We know that the young prince who became a Buddha wanted to find relief from suffering. The unshakable suffering that had come upon him when he realized that even he, a handsome young man, was going to die. Just like all of us. And so he ran away from all of us. So the story of his home leaving and the initial search that he made for immortality, the deathless nirvana, became the basic model for the elements of our tradition.

[04:43]

And just like him, we too have all left home to find our way in this world before this one precious life comes to an end. So maybe what we are doing here in this funny old barn is taking our life seriously, as opposed to simply taking it for granted. Although that's exactly what life truly is. It's been granted. We've been granted a life, albeit, as the Buddha said, it's temporary, selfless, and fraught with discontent. And still, somehow I, and maybe some of you, have a few questions that I would like to have answered before time, so to speak, runs out. A few questions about myself. I think those questions are the big ones.

[05:45]

They're the ones that sent me to Tassajara around 50 years ago now. To long hours of sitting in the heat and the cold with the bugs and the guests. and this strange vegetarian cuisine. And even there, those big questions had followed right behind me. Where am I? What am I? And what am I supposed to do now that I'm here? Well, as for where am I, although I truly enjoy gazing up in awe at the star-filled sky in the mornings at Tassajara. The answer to where am I, as far as I can tell, is far beyond human comprehension. I think maybe you've seen the photos of the pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan called it, floating along all there in the trackless void, our dear planet Earth.

[06:51]

I remember saying to a friend at an astronomy class back in my college years, many, many years ago. I can't wait until we get into outer space so we can find out what's there. And my friend said, Nancy, we are in outer space. Beyond human comprehension. So the same incomprehension goes for the question, what am I, as any evolutionary biologist will tell us. leaving me with just one of my unanswered questions. What am I supposed to do now that I'm here? So that question is the one that the Buddha took great pains to answer for himself. He was also, along the way, kind enough to answer this question about what am I? With those famous lines from the Dhammapada, what we are today comes from our thoughts.

[07:58]

of yesterday. Our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our life is a creation of our mind. What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday. Our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our life is a creation of our mind. So that was kind of a big surprise. to me, the first time I heard that. I don't think I could have ever figured that out on my own. And I find it still a bit hard to believe that my life is a creation of my mind. Which leads to a follow-up question about all questions. One that I have been asking and generations of meditating monks and philosophers and scholars have been asking. How do we know any of this? How do we know according to the Buddha and elaborated in the mind-only teachings, which we've been studying together here at Green Gulch, everything that we know about our world is perceived through our senses.

[09:15]

Everything we know about our world is perceived through our senses. Right now, my sense of hearing is activated. I hope there For the eye, its colors and shapes. For the ear, sounds. For the nose, odors. For the tongue, tastes. And for the skin, multitude of textures. And for the mind, thoughts. What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday. And although those oh-so-familiar things that we perceive through our senses appear to be real, and to be true, when we examine them closely, we see that it's our own mind that's mixing the object of our perception, each bird, each person, each candy bar, with a lifetime of ideas, of beliefs, of experiences, and preferences from the past, from our own past, our thoughts of yesterday, a lifetime of stories,

[10:34]

It's our own mind that is creating our stories. And it's our own mind that we are studying when we endeavor to study ourself. I wanted to mention that the Chinese character, which Japanese use as well for mind, is a little bit of a heart. It looks like a heart shape. And when they say mind, they mean heart mind. So feelings and thoughts together. So when I say mind, remember it includes your heart. So the Yogacara, or the mind-heart-mind-only Buddhism, has been a major influence in Zen. It arose in the 5th century in India as a collection of teachings designed to examine this mind of ours. And in particular, as it relates to practices of awakening. Mind-only teaching can help us to see how we humans collectively and for the most part unconsciously construct ourselves and our world with an eye hopefully to doing a somewhat better job.

[11:51]

As students of the Dharma, we can reflect on how these teachings can help us appreciate the power of our conditioning from the past. along with the power of our practice to affect a profound change in that conditioning for the future. So how do we go about making that change? Well, for us in the Zen school, by manifesting awareness of our mind without trying to control it. As Suzuki Roshi recommended to his students, give your cow a big pasture and watch her. Watch is another name for zazen, meditation, and the cow is another name for your own mind. There are a great number of other tools for our self-study, including scriptures, commentaries, and of course, more zazen. And then there's a sequence of how we go about self-study that the Buddha taught to his monks.

[12:58]

First, we hear the teaching. You're hearing something. You're hearing something. We hear the teaching. We listen for the teaching, for the wisdom, for all directions. And then we study what we hear. Just like you've learned anything. You practice it. You review it. You look words up. You study. And then, finally, you become the teaching. You understand. And you can share. So these three types of learning fall into many additional categories. We are very complicated. Which, according to modern cognitive scientists, can help us to even more fully understand how we humans come to know things in the first place. How do we know? And most importantly, how we come to make a self out of the things that we know. So most of my life I have been taught to value a single form of knowing, of knowledge, the kind of knowing that scientists call propositional knowing.

[14:12]

It's the kind that we all learned in school. So propositional knowing, for example, is knowing that a cat is a mammal or that a cactus is a plant. And what makes a proposition real is my conviction that it's true. Propositions establish beliefs that such propositions are either true or false. And so we argue. Propositions are also what we are graded on in school. The more propositions you knew, the better the grade. So that's why when questioned by a monk, about the name of a furry ball in the corner of the room, his teacher replied, you call it a cat. That's your proposition. You give it a name. So calling that furry ball a cat is a proposition, and so the teacher is calling on the student to question his convictions about the cat based on the naming of things.

[15:27]

calling on him to question his propositional knowing. So here are some other examples of how we name things without giving it a whole lot of thought. You know, that's stupid. She's ugly. They're inferior. And he's the best in show. Those are propositions. And along with this propositional knowing, fraught as it is with our convictions about them being either true or false, there are three other types of knowing that I have been learning about through a brief introduction to modern cognitive science. And right there I want to apologize because you might not want to hear all of this. It's really dense. At the same time, I think it's so helpful. So just bear with me. And I'm going to go through these four kinds of knowing. And you'll find out for yourselves if it's useful. I found it very, very useful.

[16:30]

That's why I'm sharing it with you. So I wanted to begin this talk about the mind only with these few extra tools to help us understand how we construct both a self and a world for the self to inhabit. Whereas that first type of knowing Propositional is either true or false. The second type of knowing is called procedural knowing, and it's not based on propositions of any kind. Procedural knowing is knowing how to do something. For example, how to swim, how to ride a bike, how to write a short story, how to play the piano. And so notice the big difference between propositional knowing and procedural knowing. Propositions are true or false, whereas knowing how to do things, having skills, is not true or false. It's either being done right now or it's not being done right now.

[17:34]

We are clearly not playing the piano right now, although some of you may know how. However, it doesn't mean that our skills are no longer true. Skills are enacted. We enact skills, and the skills give us power to act, to do things. When the famous martial artist Bruce Lee was asked about his skills and the need for continuous practice, he replied, we don't simply rise to the occasion. We fall to the level of our training. We don't rise to the occasion. We fall to the level of our training, of our understanding, of our wisdom. So unlike those propositions, which are so easily forgotten, we have a special memory for skills that we've learned, which is why people with Alzheimer's, quite a few people I live with these days up in Enso Village, can still play the piano and paint, even though they don't remember where they live or what they had for lunch.

[18:45]

So there's a third type of knowing, which is a knowing that comes from our unique perspective. We each have a perspective, a viewpoint, a point of view. I know what it's like to be sitting here right now in this state of mind, in this situation. There's no one else in this room, let alone in this world, with my unique perspective. And nobody else in this whole world has yours. Perspective also has its own kind of memory called episodic memory. An episode is a slice of your personal perspective, a slice of remembering that includes a little narrative, a tiny story in which I am at the center. It's a dream that's dreaming us.

[19:48]

So episodic memory is the one that we truly cherish because it carries the events of our lives that really matter to us and are significant to us, and that really are different than any facts that we can think are true. Examples of episodes include high school graduation. Remember that? Kind of. It was a while ago. Weddings. I had one of those. A newborn. That's amazing. Taking Buddha's precepts, wonderful. And for me, retiring to Enso Village. Our sense of reality from our self-centered perspective affords each of us our presence. I'm here. Roll call. Who's here? I'm here. I'm here. Presence being a sense that we are here and this is what's happening to me. And as I said, it's just a story. A story about me that I carry with me like a purse as I move around in this great, big, inconceivable universe.

[20:58]

Where am I? I don't know, but I've got my purse. So the last of these four types of knowing is called participatory knowing. That's what we're doing right now. The sense of being connected to reality and having a genuine, authentic agency in this environment. The one that we're in now, we're always in now. This is the kind of knowing that tells us how we and the world are participants in the same patterns, the same processes, the same principles that are giving us life, like day and night, winter and summer. and down. You know, right now, we could walk around this room because we are participating together in gravity and in breathing the salt sea air and in enjoying a range of temperatures that so far is conducive to human life.

[22:05]

And yet we don't have to be conscious about that at all. In fact, most of the parts of our participatory knowing is largely unconscious. We don't think about it at all. Ignore it. It's just there. So it's through participatory knowing that we humans can either be aware that we are coupled with the environment or not. The Buddha's awakening took place when being coupled with the environment. In fact, with the entire universe. Suddenly, it made sense to him that he wasn't separate. his reality from then on was based in connectedness, in belonging, rather than in some mere conviction or belief. Along with the opportunity for awakening, participatory knowing, when combined with the other types of knowing, allows for a peculiar kind of memory called our sense of self.

[23:09]

And therefore, participatory knowing is where the potential for wisdom exists in our life is being held. If we focus solely on facts and statements and beliefs about ourself, on propositions, then we are cut off from the perspectives, from the procedures, and from the participation that actually allow for a deeper realization into just what it means to be a self. And that's what we're here to study, just what it means to be a self. Because there's no single practice that can cultivate all these kinds of knowing, we humans need a living, interconnected system of communities that restore our participation, where we belong, that refine our perspectives, that build our skill sets and those of our children, and test our propositions in order to deepen our contact with reality.

[24:13]

Is that so? So for example, participating in this practice intensive here at Green Gulch is an enactment of those very four types of knowledge. When the Buddha sat down under the Bodhi tree, he was at the end of a very long process by which he endeavored to understand his life, and in particular, why humans suffer. Suffering for the Buddha, just like for all of us, as he saw, was what he called the last step in the 12-fold chain of dependent core rising, also known as the wheel of birth and death. An elaboration of the first and second noble truths, if you have some knowledge of those, I hope you do. There is suffering, first noble truth. And there's a cause of suffering, second noble truth. Your suffering is caused by wanting things to be different than they are.

[25:18]

In the first link of the wheel, we are born as separate selves, born out of a fundamental ignorance about reality. And then, if we fail to awaken to the truth about ourselves and our connection to the world, our belonging, then we grow old, we sicken, and we die as separate selves. As the young prince sat under the Bodhi tree studying the wheel of birth and death, a wheel of concepts spinning silently around in his own mind, he came to see how he might become free of its relentless circling, how he might become free of his belief in a separate self. In terms of the four kinds of knowing, Our young prince had begun his life of study by mastering the skills and the knowledge appropriate to his rank. That was his procedural knowledge. And because of his skills, with wielding both weapons and authority, he was fearless in the face of his enemies.

[26:30]

And yet, he became filled with dread at the knowledge that he too, a handsome young man, would one day age sicken. and die. This was propositional knowledge, what we call facts, the facts of life. Old age, sickness, and death. True or false? True. By leaving the palace and entering the forest, the young prince changed his perspective on the world, his point of view, from that of a prince to a spiritual seeker. And he began to develop new skills, such as the mastery of meditative trance, followed by a great effort to master asceticism, and unfortunately, nearly starving himself to death. And he said, this is not the way. So like the Buddha, we too have been learning how to be in this world through these four types of knowing.

[27:34]

So if you like, Please take some time during the weeks ahead to consider examples of how you have learned and continue to learn about the world and your place in it through how you come to know things. So again, in brief, here they are. Propositional knowing. What are some facts that you were taught as a child that you continue to believe? Procedural knowing. What new skills, in particular, for those of you who've come to Green Gulch at this time, will you be learning in the weeks, the months, or perhaps even the years ahead? Cooking, planting, cleaning the guest house, managing the farm? Participatory knowing. Do you as yet have a sense of belonging here at Green Gulch, as I once did and still do?

[28:35]

Do you sense your own agency in this environment? Please do. You are welcome here. Through such careful consideration of ourselves, we may come to realize, as the Buddha did, how deeply and truly we are making the world, for better or for worse, from inside out, by how we think and by what we believe to be true. Each and every day, I hate you, I love this, and I don't even know what you are. So as I said, the young prince, by leaving home, opened himself up to new and startling ways of knowing in all four of these modes. He didn't know what he would find when he finally sat silently under the Bodhi tree, which led to an episodic encounter with Mara, the evil one. the main character in the earliest accounts of the Buddha's awakening.

[29:37]

In this well-known story, which I tell often, you may have heard it already, the Buddha-to-be, after six long years of struggle, meets face-to-face with the evil one, who has just threatened to kill him if he doesn't get up from his seat. Mara, the evil one, also known as the master of illusions, had already conjured up an army of haters and a troop of dancing nymphs in hopes of unraveling Siddhartha's resolve to remain seated no matter what. Mara says to the Buddha, now I will kill you. And the Buddha says, no, you won't. Because I now know who you are. Mara says, oh, no, you don't. And Buddha says, oh, yes, I do. You are myself. And with that, Mara vanishes. Mind only. Mara the evil one personified for the Buddha as he does for us.

[30:44]

The resistance that we have to staying at our seats and thereby allowing the illusion of something outside of ourselves not only to congeal, but in the light of our steady gaze to melt away. along with that very notion of a self. A self that has somehow been imagined to be separable from joy and sorrow, from darkness and light, from birth and death, has imagined to be separable from the earth and the grass, the trees, the walls, tiles and pebbles of the present moment. So what's left of us when all of our illusions about our self and the world have melted away? like snowflakes on a hot iron skillet. I can remember when I first moved to Green Gulch again many years ago. I was in the dining room over here with Paul Disco, who's a great builder, built many of the buildings for Zen Center and other places in the world, beautiful Japanese joinery buildings.

[31:50]

Anyway, I was a little shy, and he was sitting at the table, and he announced to all of us... you know, it's not what you're going to get here, it's what you're going to lose, which I thought was a little chilling. What's going to be left of me after all has been lost, melted away, lost to impermanence and transiency, to aging, sickness, and death, the most inviolable laws of the universe? When the Buddha added impermanence onto no-self and suffering, he gave us what, as I said, are called the facts of life, the very facts that we are facing right now, that we are always facing right now, along with some wishful thinking. So ironically, therein, with those facts of life, also lies the relief of suffering. And how is that so? Because just this is it.

[32:54]

Just this right now, all of it, this all-inclusive universe, as far as the eye of our practice can reach, is it, is what you've been looking for. Just this beautiful earth with her bright green grass and her stone walls and her shiny gray pebbles, just this beautiful earth with her armies, her ice agents, her thieves and her liars. Just this is it. With that, Mara vanishes. And what remains is a lot of hard work for all of us to do. At the end of seven days, when emerging from concentration, the newly awakened Buddha surveyed the world with an eye of an awakened one. And as he did so... he saw beings were burning with many fires and consumed by the fevers born of greed, of hatred and delusion.

[33:59]

And knowing the meaning of this, he said, this world is anguished at being exposed to contact with what is conceived as myself. What the world calls myself is in fact illness. The illness of sorrow, regret, sadness, despair. In other words, the suffering of suffering, as the Buddha called it in his first sermon. The suffering that results from our desire that things be different than they are. You know, it sounds so simple. And yet, as we all know, coming face to face with dis-ease, the unsettledness in our minds and our bodies is a long and at times very grueling process. I often also repeat the story of the Buddhist master whose wife had just died. He was sitting outside of the temple crying and beating a drum. His students gathered around and asked, Master, if this is all an illusion, why are you crying?

[35:05]

The master replied, yes, it's all an illusion. Right now, it's a very sad illusion. So awakening isn't about deadening ourselves to pain and sorrow and loss, what's been called spiritual bypass. It's about fully expressing ourselves, expressing our grief at all the losses of life, the corals and the polar bears, the elephants, the tigers, and our own human loved ones. It's also about expressing our joy. and gratitude for the incredible beauty of creation that includes ourselves up until our very last minute, which reminds me of another favorite poem by local Marin talent Kay Ryan, who is the 16th Poet Laureate of the United States of America.

[36:08]

If she only had a minute, what would she put in it? She wouldn't put, she thinks, she would take. Suck it up. like a deep lake. On her last instant, feast on everything she had released, dismissed, or pushed away. She would make room and room as though her whole life of resistance had been for this one purpose. So on the last minute of the last day, she would drink and have it, ballooning like a gravid salmon or the moon. So it's in that last and only minute that Kay Ryan speaks about that the Buddha woke up. I remember the tea teacher here, Mrs. Nakamura, used to tell us that every step in the tea room should be taken as if it's your last. Well, that's a great way to practice.

[37:09]

Left foot. So the minute that the Buddha saw was when the patterns of hate and greed and confusion in his own mind he recognized were being projected on the world around him. Master Dugan centuries later gave us the same instruction for awakening in and to the present moment when he said, learn the backward step that turns the light inwardly to illuminate yourself. And then with all the passion and intensity of newfound love, study that self and see just what that self is made of. It might take a few repetitions before we, too, come to realize that the self truly is the earth, the trees, the walls, the tiles, and the pebbles, along with killing and stealing and lying and sexualizing and overeating.

[38:11]

that the entire universe in the ten directions is the true human body. So these instructions have been given to us again and again down through the ages in the hope that we too might awaken to that simple, observable truth that sets us free. And as we endeavor to follow these basic instructions, starting with upright sitting, such as you all are doing right now, we can take great encouragement in what was perhaps the Buddha's most important insight of them all. And that is the very real possibilities that we humans could develop skills such as kindness and especially wisdom that would allow the disruption of the cycle of suffering preordained by a mind lost in confusion. Following his realization concerning reality, the newly awakened Buddha although reluctant to teach, thinking it would be too hard to explain what he had come to know.

[39:16]

After a time with encouragement from the gods, he set out to find the five ascetics and to share with them his awakened insight. And so he did. Just this is it. Thank you very much. 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.

[39:59]

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