This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. Is it on now? Okay. Can you hear me okay? Does it sound amplified? It sounds muted? How about now? Is it light enough? If it's not light enough, you can just put your hand up and we'll turn it up. This afternoon, someone said to me, when you were 12 years old, do you think you'd end up being in Zen Center and being a Dharma teacher in that?

[01:06]

And I said, well, you know, when I was 12 years old, I didn't even know that Buddhism existed. But it was an interesting question because before lunch, I had asked someone the same question. And when I was standing out there waiting, as we were waiting to come in, I was thinking, is this what we do when the weather's nice? We ask each other existential questions. The person I asked in the morning grew up in China. got dispossessed, their family got dispossessed by the Chinese Revolution, the Cultural Revolution. And then, somehow or another, I'm not quite sure how they did it, but they moved to the States and did their masters and then established a, what you might call, a conventional

[02:26]

suburban life. They were married. They had a house. They both, them and their partner, had good jobs. And then they went to Tassara. I think the seeds of questioning were already there. And they went to Tassara and attended a workshop that coincidentally I led and it challenged the convention and and it set in motion some other change in their life and And they came to Zen Center and absorbed the teaching beyond teachings, is how I think about it.

[03:46]

Does any one of us plan out our lives so that 40 years later, we can look back and say, just what I expected, just what I was planning. And yet something in us makes those changes, makes those decisions, makes those priorities. And here we all are. And that preamble that I just did was, I'm going to talk about Dogen Zenji, the finder of this style of Soto Zen. He wrote a fascicle on a quote from the Lotus Sutra.

[04:55]

And I'm assuming most of you don't. know what the Lotus Sutra is or was, but it's one of the classic texts in Zen Buddhism. But the reason I gave that preamble was that I'm going to try to talk about what Dogen wrote in a way that each of us can think. oh yeah, that's me. Each of us has a life. Each of us, our lives unfolded sometimes in terrible ways and sometimes in absolutely lovely ways. And here we are. And the name of the English

[05:55]

of the fascicle is Only a Buddha Together with a Buddha. And I'd like to talk about it from the inside out and then I'd like to offer you a question and then you can break into dyads and discuss it. And if you don't wish to do that, you can just, if someone asks you you want to be their partner, you can just put your hand up as a signal, no. So in talking about it from the inside out, I'd like to start with the notion of acknowledging.

[07:03]

There's a phrase that's sometimes used in the cultivation of awareness. being aware that you're aware. Sometimes we become aware according to our notion of what reality is. Someone recently was, I was talking to someone recently, And they were prompting me, I thought, to say something about my political views about the current election that we're gonna have in November. And I declined, you know.

[08:20]

I feel like from a Zen perspective, life unfolds. And I don't mean that in a passive way. I actually think that having some agency in terms of our society, in terms of our own being, and in terms of our relationships is both appropriate and hopefully, given that we're thoughtful human beings who are trying to do the right thing, that our contribution is at least not harmful and possibly helpful. But my hesitancy was about getting drawn into an intrigue And so in one way, our life is filled with intrigues.

[09:36]

A lot of them we have. It's our biased, subjective version of reality. And it's a series of stories. And then we can get caught up inside them, repeating them to ourselves, infusing them with significance and having a deep emotional response. And yet, there's another way acknowledge them and that we see them as almost like a metaphor or almost like a narrative that goes like when you watch a kind of like a nature program

[10:58]

And then there's some wonderful voice saying, and then the lion did this, and then we can have a narrative about our being. And then even more thoroughly, we can be aware that this is the unfolding of my subjective version of reality. And we can kind of marvel at it. And then on the piece of the fascicle that I'm going to quote, Dogen says, when we mention delusion, it's not a thing.

[12:02]

It's a concept. And then he says, and also when we mention realization, that's also a concept. So there's a way in which we can become aware of our own concepts. And this process of, there's a place in Zen mind, beginner's mind, where Suzuki Roshi says, it's important to believe in nothing. Very important. That's how it's written. So I hope you can see that when we're just aware of the reality we create and not grasping it like, well, this is the real deal, this is the real thing, that when we're just aware of it, okay, this is my physical being,

[13:32]

cognitive process, my social process, my physical health, you know, all of those contributing to my version of reality. And so Dogen's starting off by saying, and it's a concept, you know, we could say, As it says in the fascicle, the words are delusion, realization. But we could also say good and bad. We could also say successful and unsuccessful. There's all sorts of what we would call in Buddhism dualities that we can attribute to our life and relate to as true absolute truths.

[14:40]

So Dogen starts by saying, there's an option. You don't have to relate to your own version of reality as an absolute truth. It's possible to hold it as true the version of reality you have now. The version of reality I have now is quite different from the version of reality I had when I was 12. When the person asked me that question, I said, I didn't even know Buddhism existed when I was 12. I grew up in a world where there were two religions, Catholic and Protestant. The person I was talking to early today, they grew up in the cultural revolution of China.

[15:51]

And their multi-generational family had their house taken off, taken from them and they were sent off into a rural area. Being alive is amazing, you know. Every life has such an extraordinary specific way of unfolding. So if we can allow and invite ourselves to think like that, what an extraordinary thing to be me.

[16:57]

You know? all the components and particularities of being that come together and constitute me. And Dogen says, in even your deepest notions of success and failure, your deepest yearnings and aversions, Their concepts do. And in Buddhism, we say, taking refuge in the awareness of all of that supports a human life. You know, the phrase we use is immersing body and mind deeply in the way

[18:01]

allowing ourselves to be part of this ever-changing world. It contributes that immersion, awakens something within us, to marvel at the life we're living. Those of us who didn't go through the cultural revolution in China, we can imagine it. The person told me once the details. There was a gap. They had quite a large grand house. There was a lot of them, three generations of their family lived there. And it was taken from them And they were sent to a rural area. And then there was two houses, and there was a kind of a space between the two houses.

[19:09]

And they were told, that's where you're going to live. You're going to collect scraps and create some kind of dwelling for yourselves. And you're going to live there. That's you. that not call forth strong descriptions of reality. And even that would just be concepts. They might be heartbreaking. The sense of injustice or inappropriateness or hardship maybe feel so painful it's hard to bear.

[20:14]

But rather than be caught up in it, taking refuge in Buddha, taking refuge in the power of awakening, as Suzuki Roshi says, not thinking your life depends upon some way some expression of it as it is now, not relating to that as if it's always gonna be there. And then Dogen goes on, in a kind of funny way, he says, when, this is a technical term, unsurpassed Bodhi, which means the complete engagement in awareness. The phrase I was using earlier was, when you're aware, you're aware.

[21:25]

The first awareness is within the world according to me. And then when you become aware of that awareness, it's like even that is not being grasped. And then in the language of Buddhism, this is taking refuge in Buddha. And then Dogen goes on to say, unsurpass the Bodhi. There's a way in which this drops all concepts. And in that regard, it's unsurpassed awareness. When unsurpassed awareness is a person, it's called Buddha.

[22:26]

And then for some reason, he also wrote, he followed that by writing, When Buddha is an unsurpassed Bodhi, we call him Buddha. The thought I have about that is there's something in acknowledging that helps us. like when we can say okay this is how it is right now this is how this one engages and acknowledges what's happening now within

[23:37]

constructs of it. And so here's a dyad I'd like to offer you. It's that think about your life and then think about a moment or some aspect of your life For instance, I grew up in Northern Ireland. My niece taught me a couple of weeks ago to say the north of Ireland instead of Northern Ireland, but that's a different story. I grew up there, but I left when I was about 20, and I've never lived there. I've visited many times, but I've never lived there since. I could say that about my life.

[24:48]

I grew up in Northern Ireland, and I can acknowledge it, but I don't cling to it. Actually, it feels like a dream. Sometimes when I say it, I think, really? Is that true? So it's an easy one to not get hooked by. So in the dyad, maybe you can express some part of your life that you're not hooked by, some part of your own being, you know? And how that is, you know? And then think of some other part of your life that you're so invested in that maybe you couldn't even imagine not having that.

[25:59]

I wouldn't be me if that part of me wasn't in existence. So both. The part of you that you can hold and acknowledge without some attachment. And then the part of you that you hold with attachment. Not to say, by no means to say, you're a terrible person for having attachments. But more to see how it is for you when you acknowledge it. Okay. So the Eno told me, we have a hard stop at 8.30 and it's 8.16.

[27:04]

Yes, 8.16. So, if you could pair up with someone close by and you'll both have three minutes. Sorry, I shouldn't have talked so long, but I did. So if you could just pair up with someone sitting right beside you and then turn and face them and then take a turn and you only have three minutes. some aspect of your being that you can hold and you're not clinging to, and then maybe some aspect of your being that feels deeply part of who you are. So that was you being a Buddha together with the Buddha.

[28:15]

I hope it was enjoyable. Something about talking to another human being that has a potency. We could have just said, or I could have just said, well, just... silently contemplate. Put something in our humanness when it meets another human in its particular way. It can feel like Buddha meeting Buddha. You know, we could dissect it and say, well, when it's honest, when it's said in a non-blaming way, like you didn't, I hope you didn't blame your partner for the difficulties in your life.

[29:40]

that this aspect of practice, we acknowledge where we're at, and we learn from it. This conditioned life that we are, in Buddhist terms, we take refuge in it. We learn from it. We take refuge in the teachings it gives us. There's maybe something about the teaching about conditioned life, but then there's the teaching about what happens when we acknowledge. I suspect that if each of us

[30:49]

Each of you, like what you said just to a person you know or maybe don't even know in the last couple of minutes, if you acknowledged it and let the acknowledgement settle, you know, let it be felt. This is my thinking. And here's how I feel when I think this way. And here's how it is when I'm not grasping and when I am grasping. That as we do that, it can foster a kind of equanimity. I'm both of those. And... And I would say, don't rush to say, oh, well, this is good and that's bad.

[31:57]

In some ways, well, Dogen in his fascicle, he goes on and he says, when we don't acknowledge, that has... the Pali word is nevarana. It's like a covering. When we don't acknowledge that part of who we are becomes not available for awareness. It's It's a source of ignorance. And of course, then we can think, oh, ignorance is a kind of nasty word. But if we can be more matter-of-fact about it, yeah, it's a mechanism that can cover up

[33:15]

aspect of our being. And in the acknowledging, we shed light upon it. And in closing, I'd offer you one other idea. That Sometimes there can be an aspect of our being that it seems like I'm just going to work with, I'm going to have to work with this one for the rest of my life. And maybe it's true, and maybe it's not.

[34:22]

And I would say to you, even if it's true, you're gonna work with that for the rest of your life. It's gonna keep teaching you. It's gonna keep unfolding. It's gonna keep eliminating an aspect of your being. So I would say, don't be quick in saying, well, this is good, and this is the real me, and this is bad, and this is, I'm gonna have to get rid of that. Maybe it's the other way around. That that so-called bad part of you is something to have reverence about.

[35:28]

Oh, how much that will teach me. Okay, thank you. 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.

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