Nice to be here. My formal practice is rudimentary compared to how it used to be and how it is here on a daily basis in Zen Center, and so I forgot that it was the third of the month, and it was very sweet to see our founder decked out with food and so on, as he always is on the third of the month. I forgot about that, and it was a beautiful thing to see. I appreciate Suzuki Roshi's saying, going back to Eheji after a long time, not being there and being moved to tears by just the everyday life. You don't notice it when you're in the middle of it.

[01:02]

It's even bothersome sometimes, although probably nobody here experiences it that way, but personally I found it bothersome once in a while. When you come and see it, you really appreciate it, and someday if you're not in the midst of it, either looking down upon it from heaven or living elsewhere in this world, you'll appreciate it too, seeing the daily round of practice. Very nice. Tonight I want to talk about Case Ten of the Mumonkan. I've been lecturing on the Mumonkan, so I thought I'd share this case tonight with you. Ching Shui, Solitary and Destitute. The case, a monk asked Cao Shan, saying, I am Ching Shui, solitary and destitute.

[02:15]

Can you fill up my larder? Cao Shan said, Venerable Shui. Ching Shui said, Yes, sir. Cao Shan said, You have already tasted three cups of the finest wine of Qingyuan, and still you say you have not moistened your lips. So that's the story. And Mumonkan's comment goes, Ching Shui seems humble, but how is he really? Cao Shan has the eye to see. Tell me, where and how has Ching Shui drunk his wine? Mumonkan, a woman's verse. With the poverty of Fan Tan and the spirit of Shang Yu, though he can barely eke out

[03:19]

a living, he dares to compete with the rich. So, as all of you know, the Mumonkan is forty-eight cases, compiled by Master Mumon, who is a Rinzai or Linji monk. Personally, I don't think that much about the different schools of Buddhism, much less of Zen. I've always been interested in all forms of Buddhism, all the schools of Buddhism, and I really feel that there's one school, the Buddhist school, and that's it. All the various teachings, as far as I can tell, hang together very well, and although there seem to be, on the surface, contradictions, really there aren't any contradictions.

[04:19]

And I find that I can study any kind of Buddhist tradition and find different wonderful angles on one seamless teaching that is very clear and very consistent. So I'm not much of a one-fer. This school says this, or that school says that, and so on. Still, though, there are different traditions that more or less maintain different approaches, although every teacher and every tradition is different. But anyway, you could say, given all that, that more or less, Linji Zen tends to put a big, heavy emphasis on the experience of oneness, the experience of dropping, self-clinging, and merging with the universe. That experience, which is a necessary part of any school of Buddhism, but it's emphasized

[05:21]

really strongly in the Linji school. Every school, including the Linji school, recognizes that we have to work on gradual cultivation and little-by-little improvement. We have to work on concentration, we have to work on kindness and compassion, we have to work on seeing through and letting go of afflictive emotions, on encouraging calmness, etc., etc., etc., all that we have to do. But in the end, all of it proves unsatisfactory, and maybe even counterproductive, if it isn't built on a foundation of insight that leads to the thorough self-abandonment, or if not thorough self-abandonment, at least a foundation of a strong confidence in, a strong faith in, and an aspiration toward self-abandonment.

[06:23]

So anyway, in the Mumonkan, since it's compiled by Master Mumon, a Linji monk, it's stressing this point of self-transcendence all the time. But this is a Soto koan, style koan, in the Linji collection here. The Soto style, which is by comparison usually a subtle dialectical approach that tends to be resistant to definitions and distinctions, fuzzy Zen, mist Zen, like Suzuki Roshi said. So they say Soto Zen is non-dual approach to Buddhism, non-dual approach to Zen. And don't forget, non-dual means non-dual and dual, because if it only meant non-dual

[07:28]

and not dual, then it would be dualistic, right? So non-dual, Soto Zen is non-dual and dualistic. In other words, all views, all approaches are included within each other without any ranking or hierarchy among them. So, the Buddha worlds, the insight worlds, and the ordinary everyday worlds are really seen as non-different. The powerful experience of oneness and self-transcendence and ordinary mixed up everyday garden variety delusion are not really so far apart. They're really seen to be coming from one root, one source, one taste. Not exactly the same thing, but also not really different.

[08:31]

So this kind of talking gets heady real fast, and I apologize for that. But of course, in the end, the point is not to be heady or to master a lingo, although such a thing could be done, but rather the point is to be able to appreciate in the radical present momentness of our lived experience simply the way things actually are, which requires that we are able to see through our many, many projections, preconceptions about ourselves and the world. So because the koan has this theme, undual theme, we know it's a Soto koan, but even if we didn't know that from the theme, we know it's a Soto koan because the characters in the koan are Soto school people.

[09:35]

That's a dead giveaway. The teacher of the koan is Saoshan, or Sozan in Japanese, who's one of the two founders of the school, the other founder being Dongshan or Tozan, but instead of calling it the Toso school of Zen, because Dongshan came first, that's hard to say, Toso, so they put it in reverse chronological order, Soto. Anyway, the story begins with a monk named Ching Shui who comes up to our founder, Saoshan, and says, I am solitary and destitute, can you fill up my larder, can you help me out? I'm a little free with my version of the translation here. There are many different versions. Some of them say, can you give me alms, I'm poor and destitute, can you give me alms? Other ones say, I'm poor and destitute, please make me rich immediately. But I said, I'm poor and destitute, can you fill my larder?

[10:40]

So what is the monk saying? How is he coming across? One idea that some commentators on this case say is that he is, the monk is expressing despair and total spiritual poverty. He's in the midst of a dark night of the soul, struggle, utter darkness, even to the point of depression, which is, I'm sorry to tell you, those of you who are rather new to the practice, a usual part of any spiritual path, sorry, but there's no avoiding these moments. Even well along the way, you never know, you never know. So anyway, one interpretation is that this monk is in that condition, approaching the

[11:43]

master in that condition. So this kind of despair in the path is actually something really good. Sometimes I say to people, they come to see me and they tell me that they're in total despair and it's hopeless and all that, and I'm saying, great, wonderful, keep it up. And they often don't like that much, but I can't help it because I really feel sometimes that in that condition, they're really ripe for awakening. So it's really important to learn how to work with despair and depression and darkness in the past, not to deny them, but in a way to welcome them and learn how to live with them, to manage them, how to make use of these states, never to be surprised by them or dislike them. To be able to work with your despair, depression, dark night in that way is probably a necessary

[12:47]

armor for the path for all of us. Misery is something, of course, that's natural for all of us to wish to avoid, but in the end, as we all have discovered, I'm sure misery is unavoidable sometimes, and it can even be advantageous. Without a little misery now and then, we might be going around in a self-congratulatory frame of mind, thinking how much good frame of mind we've been able to accumulate over the years of our practice and how well we're doing and so on, which might make us complacent. Or it might make us want to accumulate even more good feelings so that we will be fully protected in case something should ever go wrong. And then, when it does go wrong and a terribly negative state of mind arises, we're shocked, amazed, discouraged, and our despair is exponentially increased by our trying to avoid it.

[13:53]

So a certain amount of misery added into the picture now and then helps to prevent that kind of stupidity. So it's actually pretty good. When you're miserable, it's obvious that attachment to any state of mind is fruitless, especially miserable ones but also good ones. In fact, you can actually tell, you know, oh, this misery comes exactly as a consequence of the attachment to the previous good state of mind. This becomes clear. And so misery is a good teacher that way. It inspires renunciation. It inspires letting go, giving up, being totally hopeless, which in the end is always necessary. So after a while, on the path, we become connoisseurs of and great appreciators of misery. We see the virtues of misery and the importance of it because as soon as misery arises, we

[14:59]

immediately know, aha, now it's time to bear down and really get calm, really get focused. Misery reminds me of that. And then I can make a more steady, less boisterous, confused kind of effort. Even though it's still misery, it's not the same kind of misery. It's a little different kind of misery. So anyway, that's a little bit, what's the word, side avenue there. But that's one interpretation of ching shui, that he's feeling miserable and that he's presenting himself to his teacher, I'm in misery, you know, help me out. But, I actually don't think myself that this is what he's presenting at all. Solitary and destitute. The words sound like a difficult or miserable, disadvantageous condition, but I don't think

[16:08]

that it really is an expression of despair, but rather an expression of a great peacefulness. I think he's using these words to describe nirvana. The Christians have an expression that's similar to this. They say poor in spirit, by which they mean not pathetic and deprived, but radically simple, free, dependent on nothing. Alone, in some very positive way. Not lonesome or lonely, but alone. Of course, there is such a thing as loneliness, which is a terrible affliction and illness of the heart. You can feel lonely even when you're in a crowd. But I don't think the monk here is lonely. He is alone. He is perfectly alone. He is free. And this is what he's presenting to Sao Chan, his achievement.

[17:11]

He has dropped body and mind. He's let go completely, and he's asking Sao Chan, okay, now what? So again, there are two ways we can look at his question to the teacher. One way is to take him quite literally, that he recognizes that in the Soto way of practice, the non-dual, dualistic way, nirvana is a stage, because everything is a stage. Every moment is the first and last stage. No matter what our spiritual condition or accomplishment, any one of us can go to a teacher, if we're lucky enough to encounter one, make our vows, and say, I've been practicing for such and such an amount of time, but I'm just beginning.

[18:13]

Here's what I have been working on. Please guide me. I think any of us can, at any time, go to a teacher and say that with full seriousness. I have been practicing, and I'm just beginning. So maybe the monk is saying this. Also he could be arrogant. He may be saying, well, I'm finished, I've achieved nirvana, I'm beyond the beyond. What do you say about that? Well, I find that there are always many realities operating at the same time, simultaneous truths manifesting, so I would choose both of those options and say that the monk probably has both these attitudes, as is so often the case in real life. You go and ask for some advice, some teaching, then when somebody gives you that, you find

[19:15]

that you really hate it, because you already knew, and you don't want anybody to tell you, even though you didn't know that in the beginning. Anyway, whatever the case, the monk goes to Cao Shan, asks his question, and Cao Shan, without responding in any direct way, simply calls him, venerable. Now this, calling someone like that, is a very common Zen pedagogical technique. It seems like a trick, but it really isn't a trick. When you realize that most of our suffering and misperception, which leads to our suffering, comes from the fact that we are so completely and utterly entangled in language and thought

[20:15]

that we can't ever get out, and when you spend a certain amount of time watching people hurt themselves terribly and hurt others around them in serious ways because of this, you do really want to find some way to point a direction outside that box. Now the odd thing is that, in fact, we are already outside that box. Yes, maybe we're confused, yes, maybe we're in despair, maybe we're violent, greedy, selfish, and so on. And yet, at the same time, if we open our eyes, we see beautiful clouds, or like we've been seeing lately, a sliver of moon with Venus in the vicinity. Even though we're angry, our breathing goes on, night and day,

[21:24]

despite the fact that we're so much in despair we want to die. And our tender human heart can still be sometimes moved to tears, even though it has been hardened perhaps by lifetimes of all that has happened to us. So our minds and emotions may be in a terrible snarl, but beneath all of that, despite ourselves, existence flows on. And that's where our healing comes in, just to touch in with the breath, to touch in with the feeling of the body, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting. So, quite often, Zen teachers ignore mixed-up questions. To respond to them on their face would only be to get stuck in them like a tar baby. So instead, they step around those questions, and one great way of doing that is to just call out to the person, venerable.

[22:31]

And naturally, automatically, unintentionally, without thinking about it, the person says, Yes, here I am, a living, breathing response. So this is the answer to all of our problems in the end. We are called forth by our life, and whether we like it or not, we're always here for it. We always respond, we always dwell within our condition, and we act on it. We say, Yes, here I am. In the Bible, often in key moments, one of the people in the Bible is called on, and it says in Hebrew, Hinani, Hinani, it means, Here I am. That's what, like in the story of Abraham, God calls out to Abraham, and he says, Hinani, here I am.

[23:36]

In many other times in the Bible, this is said. Automatically, this response comes up. If you're a human being, and you're called, you always answer, Here I am. Yes, despite everything, I am alive. I am here. So instead of our complications, religious or material or psychological, we take one step back into the bare facts of our life, simply that we are alive, joined in that to all that is alive. Our body and mind flow with reality, and they work. And no matter what kind of state of mind we're in, or who we think we are or aren't, we are always expressing ourselves uniquely, moment by moment.

[24:42]

Here I am. So, with this, Cao Shan has already pretty much succeeded in demonstrating Soto Zen to his disciple. And that's how it is with us, too. Even though we may not be coming forward like Ching Shui, showing off our nirvana, we do come forward, always, with some spiritual wealth, and always wishing for a little bit more. That wish itself, and our condition itself, cut free from our linguistic entailments, is already what we have been seeking all along. So, the Master says, You have already tasted three cups of the finest wine of Qingyuan,

[25:48]

and still you say you have not moistened your lips. Some of the translations say you have already tasted three cups of the finest wine in China. But actually it says Qingyuan, which is a place in China. Famous for wine, of course. Milwaukee, I guess, would be the equivalent. In the United States. Or Napa Valley, yeah. I'm thinking of beer, but Napa Valley, yeah. Napa Valley. Anyway, the reason that I think it's good to leave it as Ching Shui, is because Qingyuan is not only the name of this famous place where fine wine is made, but it's also the name of a Zen teacher who was a precursor of Deng Shan and Cao Shan. In other words, the sort of progenitor of the Soto line. So this fine wine must be the fine wine of the non-dual,

[26:53]

fuzzy, misty Soto practice. The three cups, I think, is also important because three cups stands for three positions in the dialectic of the non-dual way of practice. Like the Hegelian dialectic, you know, thesis, synthesis, thesis, antithesis. That's hard to say that, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. You can fill in really any position you want, but maybe the one that works best for this particular case is nirvana, samsara, and the union, the non-difference of nirvana and samsara, which, in other words, is the emptiness of all phenomena. So, all roads in Mahayana Buddhism always take you back to the same place, emptiness. Here we are again in emptiness-ville. No way to get away from emptiness.

[27:57]

It's really the key to our practice, this teaching of emptiness. It's really the key to some ease in our living. Lately I've been thinking about emptiness as potential. That all things are empty means that all things are, in their most fundamental aspect, not actual, but rather potential. If you look up potential in the dictionary, it says capable of growth or change, dynamic. Something that's potential is at any moment ready to manifest, but it hasn't manifested. The actual is the opposite of potential. So it's a kind of funny thing, potential. It's something real, and yet it isn't actually anything. As soon as it becomes something, it's no longer potential. And then another definition of potential in science,

[29:01]

it's a kind of technical term in science, and it means the work required to bring a unit of electrical charge or mass from an infinitely distant position to a specific designated point. The amount of work needed to bring something from an infinitely distant position to a specific point is potential. So that's a pretty good definition for emptiness, I think. Or as the Diamond Sutra explains emptiness, everything is an illusion, a bubble, a dream, a mirage, a flash of lightning. We take this ungraspable, ever-shifting show of potential space-time concept and we make it into a pathetic little world of separation, and then we suffer over it.

[30:01]

We made it, and then we suffer over it. It's not that we're supposed to be going beyond this world that our senses live in to be solitary and destitute like the monk in the story, abandoning everything as unreal for a higher class, peaceful, Zen reality. No, there isn't any more peaceful reality that we are aspiring to. Everything as it really is, is complete already, special, extraordinary, and unrepeatable. Everything as it actually is, is already, infinity, nothingness, which arrives at and appears as, in disguise, so to speak, this moment of our lives.

[31:03]

Here I am. So the important thing to remember in all this is that things are not what they seem to be. That our experience is subjective, always, and our thoughts are just that. They are our thoughts. They appear according to our conditioning. They are not, at least in their relative aspects, as content thoughts. Absolute truth, as we seem to be committed to thinking that they are thoughts, are only thoughts. They are manifestations of the absolute truth, it's true, but not in their literalness, just in the fact of their coming at all. When we see that about our thoughts, our projections, our moods, we can appreciate them, and we don't have to get entangled in them and wrapped up in them.

[32:06]

And when we're not entangled in our own thoughts and moods and states of mind, the world all of a sudden appears quite flexible and workable, manageable, even wonderful. Opportunities, potential, abounds everywhere. As you all know, the usual language to discuss this in Soto Zen is the merging of difference and unity, and there's a whole complicated system called the Five Ranks. And there's a whole paragraph of my talk about the Five Ranks, which I think I'll skip. Because I've never been a big fan of the Five Ranks, I don't really like it that much. And besides that, Dogen didn't like it either, so that gives me permission to completely get into not liking it. He felt, I think, that the teaching was a little too abstract,

[33:10]

and he wrote a fascicle about this in his Shobo Genzo chapter called Spring and Autumn, which I recommend to you. Because it's mostly an exposition of the most wonderful of all the Soto Zen koans, which I'm now going to tell you about. You all know this one, probably, or many of you do. This one has to do with the Dongshan, who was once asked by a monk, how can you avoid heat and cold? And this was a very important question to me, because I hate it when it's really hot in the summer. And I grew up in a place, small town, and a little small world, and in my mind, it's hard to believe, but I actually thought that everywhere in the world is hot in the summer. There is no place where it's not hot in the summer. So when the summer would come, because every place I ever lived was really hot in the summer. Humid, terrible, you know.

[34:12]

So somebody said, one day the summer was approaching and I was freaking out, and I said, where can you go where it's not hot? And a friend of mine said, Eureka, California, it never gets below 68 degrees, above 68 degrees in the summer in Eureka, California. I thought, my God, really? Could there be such a place? And I went, I moved to Eureka, California. So my whole life changed quite a bit because of this. Anyway, this has nothing at all to do with the story, but... A monk asked Tungshan, how can we avoid heat and cold? And Tungshan didn't say, go to Eureka, California. He said, why don't you go to a place where there is no heat and cold? The monk said, what do you mean, a place where there is no heat or cold?

[35:16]

And Tungshan replied, when it's cold, the cold finishes you off. When it's hot, you're totaled by the heat. So that's pretty good advice, right? It's very clear, very practical. How can you escape misery and difficult conditions? Well, of course, you can't. You really can't. There are various uncomfortable circumstances. But in the end, there's really only one uncomfortable condition. And that is that we are human beings. And from this, there is absolutely no escape. Or at least, not the kind of escape you're looking for. The real escape, the great escape, is not to run away.

[36:22]

Because running away is just restlessness. After you have the vacation, and the hot tub, and the cuisine, and the ski trips, and the winter lodge, and the summer cabin, and the Buddhist practice, and the Tai Chi, and the Sashin, and the yoga, and the journaling workshop, then what? Then what? What will you do after that? No, the real escape is not away from, but into the heart of. That's the place where there is no cold and no heat. Right in the dead mathematical center of cold and heat. Right in the heart of your restlessness and suffering, there's peace. When you can finally bore into the absolute center of cold, there's heat.

[37:31]

Nice and warm. And when you can finally bore into the absolute center of heat, it's nice and cool. Cold is cold, but also, right in the middle of it, it's not cold. And heat is the same way. And all conditions, life, death, are the same. And this is not something fancy or exotic. It's the nature of time, the nature of existence, the nature of change, the nature of all the moments of our life. In this fascicle I'm speaking about, Spring and Autumn, Dogen quotes a number of poems by different Zen masters of the past about this case. I'll quote you a few of them that are favorites of mine. Chong Ling wrote, Within difference there is oneness. Oneness is difference.

[38:32]

Drifting in the human world hundreds and thousands of years, again and again you want to depart but cannot. In front of the gate, just as before, weeds grow. This is a beautiful and profound poem to me, which affirms our ordinary humanness, our ordinary confusion, as the very endlessness we seek. I think that one thing about practice is that after a while one develops a certain amount of patience and even appreciation for one's own and others' shortcomings. We no longer wish that they would be otherwise. Instead of trying to eliminate them or rage against them, we have an amused and bemused attitude.

[39:34]

The difference of my egotism, my fear of failure and fear of success and fear of dying is nothing other than the great oneness of the universe and of Buddha's heart. Of course, I'm working all the time to change my confusion and my shoddy conduct. That's my practice. But it doesn't have to be something desperate. It can even be something affectionate. Anyway, it's more effective anyway. It's affectionate instead of desperate. Another poem, this one by Fu Dong, goes like this. Where there is no cold or hot is Deng Xian's phrase. This is the place where many Zen people get lost. Go for fire when it's cool and cool yourself when it's hot. In this life you can avoid heat and cold.

[40:38]

So that's pretty good too, huh? Even better. So even though you appreciate the depths that are being pointed to here, also, you know, life is pretty ordinary and you have to be practical. And I did move to Eureka, California, and it was a whole lot cooler there. The heat inside didn't necessarily go away, but the air was cooler. So yes, by all means, take a vacation. Jump into that hot tub. Have some sushi. Go to the next Sashin. And enjoy them. Without any illusions. Renunciation is not the poverty that Ching Shui claims. In the case, real renunciation is wonderful wealth. The larder is already full. When the potential of the world is unlocked and released into our lives,

[41:42]

we can enjoy what comes. The good with the bad. Renunciation is the real avoiding of hot and cold. In this case, not the giving up of something that you could have had, but you nobly let go of. But seeing truly that everything is potential, arriving from an infinitely far distance right here. And so it can never be possessed and limited in any way. Possession is burdensome. Burdensome, tiresome, I think. Possessions, whether they are material or emotional or spiritual, are a great weight. But renunciation is real wealth. This is the wine that Ching Shui is always drinking, whether he knows it or not. Master Mu Man's poem.

[42:48]

With the poverty of Fan Tan and the spirit of Shang Yu, though he can barely eat out a living, he dares to compete with the rich. So these two are often the case in the poems here. These are Chinese folk heroes, Shang Yu and Fan Tan, who obviously one illustrates poverty and the other one is the famous person for poverty. Greatness of spirit. Mu Man's poem could be a critical poem about Ching Shui or it could be an appreciative poem about Cao Shan, who is appreciating everything and needing nothing and is free and full-spirited. Really, it's beside the point to call him rich or poor. He has absolutely nothing and yet the whole world belongs to him. What time does this usually end?

[43:51]

Now? Okay. Thank you. That's my talk on case number 10 and I suspect that this is late enough, so I'm sorry, no time for discussion. It is really wonderful to see all of you and I appreciate your practice. It supports me. So please enjoy it. Oh. Oh. Well, shall we have a few questions? The abbess says it's okay, so. Yes. Yeah. I always used to think I wanted wealth, but then I realized I wanted the kind of wealth that has to have been inherited. Yes.

[44:54]

That would be something he would say, yes. Yes. He's going to be moving across the street. Do you know this? Tomorrow morning, I think. I've been reading to him Gertrude Stein's The Geographical History of America and we've been having a great time. I recommend this book if you haven't read it. Pretty much it's got everything in there you need to know. What? Everything you need to know is in there. It's fun to read out loud as well. Ah, yes. No questions. Excellent. Okay. Thank you. Okay.

[45:49]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ