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. Good evening, everyone. Make sure I've got my notes here. Um... Welcome everyone to Beginner's Mind Temple. We've got some students here tonight, thank you for coming. And welcome to everyone who is joining us online, both tonight and in the future. My name is Tim Wicks, and I'm a priest here. at San Francisco Zen Center, and I also serve currently as the Tanto, which means Head of Practice.

[01:06]

I want to first of all thank Abbot David. Thank you very much for letting me hold the Dharma seat tonight. And as always, I want to thank my teacher, Rinso Ed Satterson, for his kind-hearted guidance along the way. So right now, here in this building, we are slightly more than halfway through a practice period, and practice periods are a sort of concentrated period of study where there's usually a theme or a sutra. Sutras are the purported teachings of the Buddha. And I'm co-leading this practice period with Lucy Shao, my Dharma sister right there.

[02:07]

And we are looking at a sutra called the Platform Sutra that was written in the 8th or 9th century. And I didn't know that you guys were coming, the high school students, until after I'd already prepared this talk. So hopefully it's not going to put you to sleep, but I'll try to do my best. So inside the Platform Sutra, there's two poems that are very famous for Zen practitioners. They're very well-known poems. And we're looking very closely at them. Excuse me. We count our lineage ancestors all the way back to the Buddha some 2,500 years ago. And Buddhism started in India.

[03:13]

And then as it moved to China, we start with the first Chinese ancestor, who's Bodhidharma. And actually, if you look out here when you leave, if you go down here a little bit, in the hallway is a huge portrait of Bodhidharma, kind of spooky looking dude, but one of my favorites. And so he's the first ancestor in China, Bodhidharma is. And then you have the second and the third and the fourth. And the fifth ancestor in China, his name was Hongren. And Hongren reached a point in his career where he wanted to name the sixth ancestor, the ancestor who was going to follow him. And... The way he decided to do that is in his temple. It was a temple kind of like this. He said to all the practitioners and the monks there, you need to write a poem that illustrates your understanding of the Dharma.

[04:24]

The Dharma is the teachings of the Buddha. I think I mentioned that already. And so he wanted people to write a poem to show their understanding of the teachings. And in this temple was the head monk. The head monk's name was Shinshu. And Shinshu was really smart. And so the rest of the other monks in the temple said, you know, we're not even going to bother trying to write a poem because Shinshu will run away with this. So we'll just let him do it. And so he is the only one who wrote the poem. And it was written on the temple walls. And this is the poem. It's very short. I'm going to read it twice. The body is the Bodhi tree. Bodhi means awakening, enlightenment. The mind is like a bright mirror's stand.

[05:27]

Time and again, polish it diligently. Do not let dust alight. So once again. The body is the Bodhi tree. The mind is like a bright mirror stand. Time and again, polish it diligently. Do not let dust alight. We love Shinshu. I especially like Shinshu. But the real hero of our story is named Hui Ning. And Hui Ning is an illiterate lay practitioner. So he's not a monk at this temple. He works in the rice husking room. And he hears someone. So Shinshu's poem was written on the wall. And then people were sort of reciting it as they're walking around the temple.

[06:30]

And Hui Neng, our hero, hears someone reciting this poem. And even though he's illiterate, he understands it. And he says to the person who was reciting it, take me to the poem. And so he goes to the poem written on the wall and he says, I've got a poem too. And so his poem is, the Bodhi is fundamentally without any tree. The bright mirror also has no stand. Originally, there's not a single thing where could dust alight. So once again. Bodhi is fundamentally without any tree.

[07:31]

The bright mirror also has no stand. Originally, there's not a single thing where could dust alight. So both of these poems are about awakening. They're about enlightenment, which even though as Buddhists we have no goals at all, we're not trying to get anywhere, the end goal is really to be enlightened. And my teacher who I mentioned earlier, Rinso Ed Sattison, spoke here on Saturday. And when he did, he mentioned his teacher, who was Suzuki Roshi, And Suzuki Roshi founded this temple right here. And my teacher Ed said that Suzuki Roshi didn't really talk that much about enlightenment or awakening. And there's three books of Suzuki Roshi's lectures.

[08:33]

And the most recent one, which I know my teacher has read, actually has quite a few more references from Suzuki Roshi on enlightenment. But the first two books, not very much. In general, in fact, us Zen practitioners, we don't really talk about enlightenment for a bunch of different reasons. least of, not the least of which, is that we really don't trust language. Language is something which is very limited in its ability to explain something as profound as awakening or enlightenment. The first poem that I read is said to, the one by Shinshu, is said to illustrate indirect awakening or awakening in stages. The second poem, the one by our hero, Hui Ning, is about direct awakening or immediate awakening.

[09:34]

And this contrast between these two types of awakening would become a massive debate in China and would see the development of two opposing schools, the southern school and the northern school. The southern school of Huining is the school of immediate awakening or sudden awakening. And the northern school of Shenzhou is the school of awakening in stages. And it was said that it wasn't really that big of a debate when Huining was there. It was really the generations afterwards that turned it into a big debate, which still has not been resolved before. hundreds of years later, although Lucy and I are going to resolve this debate during our last class, which will be next Monday. So to me, this debate that's been going on for hundreds of years is really about time.

[10:46]

It's a temporal argument. over and over in the Platform Sutra, Hui Ning. Hui Ning, who is the reciter of the Platform Sutra, this sutra that has these two poems in it. Hui Ning, who was illiterate, apparently, they think, all throughout his life. And he speaks about the obstacles to our awakening, the obstacles to our enlightenment. He talks about delusion and ignorance. And delusion refers to our mistaken beliefs. The belief that something which is impermanent is permanent. The belief that something which is impure is somehow pure. The belief that something that is painful is actually pleasurable. And the belief that something has no independent existence actually has an independent existence.

[11:52]

So these are our afflictions. This is the dust that's in Shinshu's poem. But in fact, that poem, that first poem, leads to the second poem. So there's a process that's going on here. And not until he reads the first poem does Wei Ning write the second poem or recite the second poem. It's almost as if he needs the first poem to create the second. He says, I quote, once I heard it, the first poem that is, once I heard it I understood what was truly important and I composed my poem. In some way, the second poem comes out of the first poem. It's connected. It gives birth in a way to the second poem. In our class on Monday, a question came up from Tara.

[13:08]

And it was actually at the end of the class. And it was a very important question that you can correct me if I'm misquoting you during our discussion period after this talk. But what I heard was a question that came up about entering directly into awakening or emptiness, entering directly into enlightenment. And the question that I heard was about working with people who have very specific types of afflictions, which is what we do. We work with people who have the delusions that I mentioned before. And the question was about particular forms of what Shinshu called in his poem dust. The dust that obstructs the clarity of awakening. dust that has to be wiped off of our mind so that we can be fully awake.

[14:11]

Specific forms, I heard Tara mentioning, of affliction like trauma. So working with people who have trauma, entering into emptiness, entering into awakening is not necessarily a good idea if there are profound difficulties with how it is that a person is relating to the self. And meditation can be difficult for someone just becoming acquainted with their traumatic past. This is why we have prerequisites for our sitting meditation. We ask that people before they sit in a longer retreat, sit for at least a half a day sit and a one day sit before coming to a longer seshin, they're called, which means gathering the heart-mind. When I first came to Zen Center in 2001, I was fresh in recovery for substance abuse.

[15:17]

I'd spent my entire life running away from the unbearable internal experience of being me. I had a lot of new information about myself and some of it was traumatic. To process it I needed a lot of help from a lot of different people, but most importantly I needed to move slowly. I couldn't move quickly. So we have an even more famous piece of writing from Dogen Zenji, who is our 13th century founder of our lineage in Japan. And this is from the Genzoe, which is an article that he wrote. And it goes like this. To study the Buddha way is to study the self.

[16:18]

To study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. This next part, though, we often leave out, but it's important for my argument about temporality and this idea of a process of awakening. When you first seek Dharma, you imagine, so when you first seek the teachings, you imagine you are far away from its environs. At the moment when Dharma is authentically transmitted, you are immediately

[17:20]

your original self. So this is part of a process of being introduced to the Dharma and becoming acquainted with your original self. This studying of the self takes time. We have to meet the self. And this can be difficult if, as it is for many of us, a complete mystery, the self that we've been not paying attention to for most of our lives because, as in my case, it was too painful. Sometimes we need extra help. I certainly needed a lot of extra help. I needed some therapy, actually lots and lots of therapy. I needed a recovery program. that has been going on for 26 years now, and I needed this Zen practice. And in this Zen practice, I needed to work with a teacher, which is what you can do here, is work with a teacher.

[18:26]

Some people come to Zen, and they hear this quote that I just recited to you from Dogen, and they try to get to the part that talks about forget the self. Um... But to study the Buddha way is to study the self, says Dogen. We have to meet the self. We have to meet our habit energy. We have to meet the deeply ingrained karmic conditioning, so the conditioning that comes from our past, from our families, and from the culture that we live in. We have to meet the methods that have developed inside of us that have been handed down to us that we've developed simply to be able to survive. My mother died when I was very young and my father was an alcoholic and I actually needed denial when I was young.

[19:32]

I needed delusion and denial just to survive because the consciousness that I was experiencing was unbearable to me. So once I got into recovery, I couldn't just suddenly give up those tools of denial and delusion. I needed to develop a process with the help of all the different aids that I had to meet my true self and begin to dismantle the behavior that had been cultivated over a long period of time through neglects and shame my behavior that was determined by low self-esteem. I couldn't suddenly give it all up because I needed delusion and denial to soften the sometimes powerful blow of the truth of who it is that I was. And this is the process of studying the self.

[20:36]

Dogen Zenji doesn't say to study the Buddha way is to forget the self. We would have forgotten that quote if that was the main quote from him. He says, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To go directly to forget the self is called a spiritual bypass. Many people, myself included, have embarked on spiritual bypasses. It's painful to look at reality sometimes. It's painful, not always, but sometimes to see who it is that we are. And sometimes it seems to me that I'd rather just kind of forget about my troubled self and get on with practicing emptiness and awakening, which can seem liberating, to enter that vast reality of no responsibility for who it is that I had become

[21:40]

and how I've lived my life and all the trouble that I've caused for others and for myself. The idea of letting go of the self, once it's been made clear to me that that was the source of my suffering, was very intoxicating to me, this idea of just letting it go. And if you're an addict like I am, intoxication is of course alluring. But if we go directly to forget the self, we're left with our old habits, our old deeply ingrained ways of avoiding what's painful, but which needs to be metabolized, it needs to be processed in order to grow and deepen our relationship with ourselves and with the world in which we're trying to live. This is temporal practice, practice that takes time.

[22:44]

Different time, different times for different people. This to me is what it is that Dogen referred to as practice realization. As we practice, we embark on this process of realizing awakening. Simply by sitting in the meditation posture, We embark on this process. Wei Ning needed to read the first poem before writing the second. And Wei Ning actually talks about this temporal process in section 30 of the Platform Sutra. when he says, some people in the world are foolish and some are wise. The foolish are shallow and the wise are deep.

[23:51]

So the foolish ask the wise and the wise teach the Dharma to the foolish until the foolish understand and their minds open up. But once foolish people understand and their minds open up, They're no different from the wisest of the wise. Hence, as long as they don't understand, Buddhas are ordinary beings. But the moment they understand, ordinary beings are Buddhas. A little bit further on he goes, good friends. He's always talking about good friends. Sangha. which is a community of practitioners, which you guys are all in tonight, because you're here, you're in the Sangha tonight, even if I never see you again, is very important to him, as it was to the Buddha. Good friends, he says, when I was with Master Hang Jin, that's his teacher, the fifth ancestor, as soon as I heard his words,

[24:59]

I experienced great realization, and I saw the original nature of reality directly. So it was something that had to happen, temporally, for waning. This is Dogen's practice realization. There's no separation for Dogen between practice, between sitting meditation, between what we call zazen, and realization, or awakening. To Sitzazen is to be in realization. So what does it mean to study the self? Certainly to go to therapy, as I did, and whatever it is that's needed by each individual. Hopefully we can get the kind of help that we need. Like I said, I needed three things. I needed my recovery program, therapy, and Zen practice.

[26:01]

But mostly what we study when we're studying the Buddha way, when we're studying, when we're sitting in Zazen, when we're sitting in meditation, most of what it is that we're studying is impermanence. But what is happening right now isn't permanent. It's not an expression of a permanent self. How I feel right now does not continue unchanged. I go from one thought to another as long as I don't grasp and hold on to the specific thought that just came up. If I don't grasp at it, then I'm not cultivating delusion. I'm not creating the dust that Ching Shui was talking about that has to be removed from the mirror, that obscures the mirror of the mind. As long as I don't feed the thoughts by grasping at the narrative or adding to it in any way, I'm moving along with the practice of realization.

[27:10]

Just to run over that last poem, Line by line, bodhi is the first line. Bodhi is fundamentally without any tree. Bodhi, as I mentioned, is awakening. There's nothing solid and fixed about anything, not even about awakening. The next line, the mirror has no stand. The mirror is the mind. And the mind is not a fixed thing. Everything, including the mind, is impermanent. And the next line. Originally, there's not a single thing. Nothing is separate from anything else. Everything is connected and arises together with everything else. And the final line is, where could dust alight?

[28:17]

We're not trying to expel all the bad. We're not trying to get rid of all the delusion and the ignorance in our Zen practice. Because we recognize that delusion and ignorance is a part of our awakening. It's a part of what it is that we see as the whole. Throughout the Platform Sutra, Wei Ning talks about non-abiding, about not stopping anywhere, not sitting anywhere, not getting stuck anywhere. Non-abiding in Buddhism means not staying, not holding on, not grasping. Seeing the brevity of this precious life that we live. because it's in holding on, it's in the grasping, that is where it is that our suffering begins, in staying in one place.

[29:21]

Zen asks us to keep moving on in the flow of the universe and all that is. So I'll just finish up with a quote from the Diamond Sutra. And the Diamond Sutra was, before waning our hero, goes to the temple, when he's in his home village, he hears someone reciting the Diamond Sutra, and it affects him so deeply that that's when it is he goes in search of the temple that he ends up at. And when he hears this sutra recited, He has an awakening that we call bodhicitta, which means the mind of awakening, which is in many ways the beginning of this process that I've been talking about. These, however, are the final words of the Diamond Sutra and my favorite.

[30:25]

All composed things are like a dream, a phantom, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning. That is how to meditate on them. That is how to observe them. Thank you all. We should have a little bit of time for questions, comments, and corrections from Tara. If you can speak into the microphone so that they can hear you online, that would be wonderful. Dan will bring the microphone to you. Hi. Can you say your name as well? Christopher. Hi, Christopher. Thank you very much for your talk. I was wondering if you could reconcile the need to study oneself and the Buddhist concept that there is no self.

[31:28]

Thank you. Well, yeah, that's a big problem. And that's sort of where I understood that Tara's question was coming from. And that's what sort of led me to make this argument about this process that has to occur. And it's really, the answer to your question is in Dogen's quote. So to study the Buddha way, so to study the Dharma, to study Buddhist teaching, including the teaching of no self, we need to study the self. That's what Dogen said. We must study the self. To study the self, he says, is to forget the self. So we look at who the self is. And we internalized that information. So for me, it was internalizing the truth that I was a terrible drug addict and alcoholic and that I did terrible things.

[32:33]

And I needed to look at that very closely with the help of lots of other people over a period of time before I could begin to lighten my grip on this horrifying thing. that I was and I could begin to have it be simply a part of who it is that I am. And it doesn't have the same power now because of that process right there. So I can begin. I can't say that I'm completely forgetting the self. I'm not quite there yet. But that process of letting go of the self that Buddhism asks me to do has certainly been embarked upon. But it was really necessary for me to look very closely at first. So I hope that answers your question. It doesn't look like it does, though. But still, Tim exists in more than just the moment.

[33:38]

No, he doesn't. Okay. He only exists in the moment, and now he's gone. And there's a new Tim here, who's one second older, and so on and so forth, until I die and go into dust once again. But your ass soul stays with you. Not after I die. No, I mean, in the present, you are composed of your past. Yes, but my past is constantly changing as I change. My relationship to the past changes all the time. Okay, thank you. Tara had a question. Oh, there's someone online. Sorry, Tara, we might not have time for you. Don't worry, we will. Don't worry. Sengho, you can go ahead and unmute and speak.

[34:41]

Thank you so much. I'm always very intrigued by Dogen's sentence of studying yourself. And I very much agree with Tim that it's about studying our habitual energy because we just have so many. I think of ourselves as basically a collection of entrenched habits. That's all we are. So I guess one question I have, I read up I read a book by Darlene Cohen. So she mentioned about the approach. She wanted to quit smoking. So the way she did it was initially trying to, you know, she lived in Green Gulch and then people kind of looked down on her. She thought, okay, that probably will help me to quit. I didn't. So I think she then adopted a way to like a koan. The koan in a sense, not in a traditional koan, but like constantly by the open question to ask yourself about your habit, like, Why is smoking important to me, right? Why am I doing it? And then pay a, not analytical question, but pay attention, like open question to all your feeling around your habit.

[35:48]

So I'm sort of in the process of adopting that method of like a call method to my life, not in the traditional sense, but more like if I see my habit, I try to ask myself why, you know, this is coming up, why this is important. Because I tend to sometimes harshly criticizing my kids So I like, okay, what is this happening? What is it doing to the parenting? I found it actually quite effective. So I guess I just want to get your sense because you also went through about, you know, trying to change your habit. I just found a way of the new year resolution way doesn't work. Like if I tell myself not to do something, it doesn't work. So I want to get your thoughts on this. So thank you. Well, it sounds to me like you've done what it is that I've been talking about. You've developed a process of seeing what it is as your habit, your habit energy, the behaviors that come about as a result of your habit energy. I didn't hear that story about the person from Green Gulch.

[36:51]

They do look down on you at Green Gulch if you smoke. That was like 20 years ago. I know, because I still smoke. LAUGHTER It's, along with sugar, the last thing that I'm still addicted to. And I give up every morning. And I ask myself that question that you ask. Why is it important to me as I light my first cigarette of the day? I'll keep trying, though. Tara. Thank you. Just a small correction. Please. No. I just wanted to say, like, I do think there's a place for... Because what I asked was, well, I guess you got it right, what I asked. Essentially, when you're working with, because I work as a therapist with people, like when you're working with people who have so much trauma and have had so many experiences that are so disturbing to them, yeah, you can't just directly, I've found that, you know, there's some sort of like reconstituting of a sense of self

[37:59]

before they can actually study. And there's cognitive reasons for that, and there's nervous system. It's like there are actual concrete reasons for that. But I think there's a case to be made for, and I've seen this in my work practice, having that time for people to sit will help them reconstitute, or not even re, but constitute like a little bit of a sense of like their true self before they start to study. So before they start to study the self so that they can handle the study of the self, because if you, if you start studying yourself without learning how to basically emotionally regulate yourself, which is what happens when you sit Zazen naturally, I mean, that's, that's a pretty tough road. Yeah. So even if you don't want to study yourself yet, just sit, Yeah, and do it with other people.

[39:02]

Right. Do it with other people. Correct. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so very much for the talk this evening. It's been wonderful. What's your name? My name's Robert. Hi, Robert. Hi. And As we've been talking about the self, that is the self. And yet, I was reflecting, sometimes I wake up in the morning and there's a raven outside my window. And it will go, call, call. And I'm like, that's my self. Am I forgetting my self? self there or what's going on we would have to have a much longer conversation in order for me to find out what's going on but it doesn't sound like it doesn't feel other than me in fact it seems actually you okay well that's a really great start to this whole process right there yeah yeah well done

[40:25]

Keep it up. Keep up the good work. Thank you. That's all the time that we have right now. 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. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:01]

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