This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. It's so wonderful to be here with all of you this morning. I feel like I've been talking a lot lately with Way Seeking Mind talk two days ago and and this today, and it's lovely. Thank you, Fusan Habes Fu, for inviting me to give this talk. And I also want to thank my teacher, Sojin Roshi. Yeah. He died just a few years ago, and somehow I feel closer to him

[01:00]

in many ways now than I did when he was alive. Maybe some of the hindrances in myself have dropped away now that we always connected best in the absolute realm anyway. So, yeah. Thank you, Sojin Roshi. So, I wanted to continue the theme of the practice period, which is the two truths, and practicing in the realm of the two truths. So as I said in my Way Seeking Mind talk, I first encountered Zen through R.H. Blythe, that high-handed old poem, and it... I was thinking it was kind of like reading the Avatamsaka Sutra, in that it's just, it put me in an altered state of consciousness, a very free and open state of consciousness, reading R. H. Blythe did.

[02:09]

Although they're so completely different, Blythe was a very eccentric, British, tweedy, person in Japan. And so if you could imagine the Abha Tamsaka Sutra as imagined by a professor of English literature with a very dry sense of humor and something in common with Lewis Carroll, wrote Alice in Wonderland, then you might have something a bit like my experience of R.H. Blythe. It's just mine. Anyway, this was so enlivening and invigorating to me, and that was kind of my breviary for many years. I would just open it and I was like, ah, yes, yes. I had no way of explaining that or holding on to it. It was just something that was awakened as I read. And it took me a long time to figure out how to connect any part of that with what I was encountering about practice

[03:20]

which seemed to be a lot of stiffness. You know, sit still, don't move, sit exactly like this. I think part of that was just my own conditioning because I was stiff on the inside. So it met that and I'm like, how, where, what is going on here? Sojin Roshi, on the other hand, the first time he ever sat down to sit was like, ah, yes. I'm like, oh, that sounds so lovely. Yeah, so he felt free within that. And I felt tied. So I had to find out how to become free in a way that was not just up in my head, not just in words. Words were opening it, but there was something else that I was really looking for. And obviously I did, or I wouldn't be here. But one of the, you know, so two truths.

[04:23]

So here's the absolute. You can roam and play in samadhi, temporarily at least, and then there's coming back out into daily life and, ouch, you know, in various ways. So how to bring all those realms together since I completely believe that they were not separate. And we're not different, but I could not see how. So, yeah, so I would say that's been a koan for me. And that koan in many ways is still alive. Because, you know, kind of losing the way and then finding the way. And how do we find the way back when we are somehow off balance? And whether we're aware of it or not. So the text I want to talk about today is some short passages from Hongzhu's practice instructions.

[05:33]

You can find it in a book translated by Taigen Dan Leighton called Cultivating the Empty Field. And Hongzhu lived in the 12th century China. And he was abbot of Mount Tiantong Monastery, which was where Dogen met his teacher, Rujin, Tendon Yeojo. And yeah, Hongzhi was abbot at Tiantong. Oh, I just said that. And Hongzhi also wrote the Book of Serenity, the collection of koans called the Book of Serenity. And his writings had a very deep impact on Dogen. Hongzhi talked about dropping off and casting off the dusts. So there was this very deep resonance between them.

[06:38]

So it begins, The Field of Boundless Emptiness. is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down, brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness. The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness. So there they are.

[07:42]

A little sandwich. Absolute reality, absolute. And with a nice kind of relational aspect and cause and effect, the word then is in there. It's like, oh, this is great. And it just sparked so many resonances and continues to do so with other texts. The Fukanzazengi, The way is basically perfect and all-pervading. How could it be contingent upon practice and realization? He just goes on with all these different things. The Dharma vehicle is free and untrammeled. What need could there possibly be for concentrated effort? Indeed, the whole body is far beyond the world's dust. Who could believe in a means to brush it clean? And then, of course, he goes on to say, and yet, if there is the slightest discrepancy

[08:45]

The way is as distant as heaven from earth. Like, yeah. Yeah, that's right. If the least like or dislike arises, I am lost in confusion. So... Yeah, so how do we practice with this? You must purify, cure... Grind down or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. So all these tendencies that we fabricated into apparent habits, this is our karmic conditioning. And I hadn't always understood in years gone past all the references to the dusts or the coverings. But when I got that this was my karmic conditioning, I'm like, oh, that I'm intimately familiar with.

[09:49]

I know about that. So this pointing back toward this is where we practice. It's not somewhere else. It's not doing this practice or that practice. All of these practices, well, you can say it in so many ways. This was the way that totally resonated for me, that all of these practices, all of these words are to bring us back to turning the light and shining within. And what do we find? There's the light and there's the dust. There's all the karmic conditioning that covers over the light, the boundless, bright field of emptiness. So how do we relate with that realm? You must therefore purify, cure, grind down or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits.

[11:05]

That could sound, and initially it did sound to me, pretty dualistic. And that the point is to get rid of all the defilements, all the karmic conditioning, all the hindrances. It's like nothing else in what I'm reading in Hongshir would make me think that. that he actually has this dualistic view, and that the point is to get rid of those bad things, and then you'll be free. That was what Dogen encountered, I'm sorry, that was what the Buddha encountered when he was first searching in his first six years, was try to get rid of the body, try to get rid of this or that, and then you'll be free. And it was exalted states of consciousness, but it wasn't the freedom from suffering that the Buddha was looking for.

[12:11]

And somehow it was bringing these realms together. Not two. Not one. There's not a hair's breadth deviation. It's fully in accord. How do we live that? How do we live our lives in accord with the relative world and in accord with that intuition that we have of the whole, the absolute, the bright field of emptiness? So Sojun Roshi's name, Sojun, means essence of purity.

[13:11]

And Suzuki Roshi gave him that name not because Sojun was pure in the conventional sense, but because he had this undefiled mind. he could access this mind of brightness and openness and presence and love. Not a word he used very often, love. But it was always there. So this essence of purity, this purity to purify... in one sense, is to bring these things together in a way that allows the dust to not be dust. It's a part of the universe.

[14:15]

It's not separate. We see it. We experience it. We live it as an obstruction. But in itself, it is not a problem. And of course we all have many, many moments of this. It's like that pain in my knee is suddenly a strong and rather interesting sensation. It has ceased to be something that I will die of. But there are many stickier places than that. So how do we practice all the way down? So I find this instruction helpful because it's an ongoing process. It's not like once and done. And when I first read these four words, I kind of purify, cure, grind down, brush away.

[15:16]

I read them as maybe four different approaches to practice. And you can certainly read them that way. But they're also ways of kind of differentiating one from the other in conventional terms. Like you're brushing away the dust, you're removing something. Your cure is to remove the disease or to remove the problematic aspect of body or mind. Grind down could be read two different ways. It could be like grain is ground down, which would mean grinding it all together. But it could also be grinding off, like polishing a mirror, removing the impurities.

[16:21]

So for me, if purify is to let go of our ideas of purity and impurity, these parts of me or someone else are good and these other parts are not good, and I must have more of these and less of those in myself or others, then it's like, oh, can I... somehow bring these together, can I see that they are not separate? Can I see that they are completely in a dance together? All these parts of myself and others and the way we interact with one another. And this cure really resonated for me about kind of the healing process that we often go through in practice.

[17:30]

We sit, and some of our old stuff has space to come up. So we have this opportunity to heal these places that haven't been able to fully work through, to see the light. Sunlight is a wonderful disinfectant. cleans things, whitens things, but the light of awareness, the light of seeing clearly allows us to relax with what is, to let go of clinging, to stop pushing away, to stop holding on. And then to grind down... Sometimes it just takes a long time.

[18:36]

And it feels like it's not going anywhere for a while. And just this... Once I did a Vipassana retreat with one of my teachers, Gil, and I'd been sitting in this... very stuck and uncomfortable state that just wouldn't move for a couple days. And I talked to him about it and he said, hmm, sometimes it's just like that. I was like, okay, great. I'm not doing something wrong. It's just, yeah, that's just what's happening now. Can I bring this, continue Can I continue to bring the same awareness, patience, compassion to this moment when it appears that the moment is not changing for several days?

[19:41]

I'm fine for a day or two, but three? So, yeah. And then brush away. Sometimes it's just like, nah. I can choose not to pick that up right now. So the not picking something up resonates for me with brush away. This is the only place that Hongshir talks about those four words, and I haven't heard them elsewhere. There may be other things that in translation I'm not recognizing are the same thing. But for me, those four really, there's been a lot of richness there. In thinking about Hong Xiu's overall approach, I wanted to share a passage from the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Flower Garland Sutra.

[20:47]

And this also appears, or this does appear in Hong Xiu's Book of Serenity, in case 67. The flower ornament scripture says, I now see all sentient beings everywhere fully possess the wisdom and virtues of the enlightened ones, but because of false conceptions and attachments, they do not realize it. And this was said to be a sentence uttered by the Buddha. at the time that he was awakened. Recognizing the Buddha nature of all beings, but also the false conceptions and attachments that make it difficult for human beings to see that. I now see all sentient beings everywhere fully possess the wisdom and virtues of the enlightened ones.

[21:53]

but because of false conceptions and attachments, they do not realize it. And Hongshir says, How amazing it is that all people have this but cannot polish it into bright clarity. In darkness, unawakened, they make foolishness cover their wisdom and overflow. In darkness unawakened, they make foolishness cover their wisdom and overflow. And that's suffering right there. That's dukkha. And it's a very particular form of it when we can see that there's some other possibility for our life, for our way of being, and we don't yet know how to actualize that watching ourselves do something over and over again, apparently unable to stop it.

[23:00]

And just watching it play out again and again. But actually this awareness of what we do and waking up to that when we touch into that suffering, that's when we can start to see how things are arising, how things are happening, and to do something different, or to try to do something different and see how that goes. So this also resonated for me with the end of the Genjo Koan.

[24:12]

Zen teacher Boucher of Mount Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why then do you fan yourself? Although you understand that the nature of wind is permanent, Boucher replied, You do not understand the meaning of it reaching everywhere. What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere? asked the monk again. The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply. The actualization of the Buddha Dharma, the vital path of its correct transmission, is like this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you will understand neither permanence nor the nature of wind. True reality is naturally undefiled.

[25:19]

And yet, because we are human beings, we have this karmic conditioning. and it covers over. So we found ourselves, and keep finding ourselves. And then we can feel the breeze, the true breeze of reality. Oh, and in the Ehe Koso, at the end, Dogen says, quietly explore the farthest reaches of these causes and conditions. So this is the same practice. Turn the light around and shine within. What do you find? You find light, you find some dust. Shine the light on both.

[26:23]

Let it all be there. quietly explore the farthest of these reaches of these causes and conditions that are karmic conditioning as this practice is the exact transmission of a verified Buddha. And confession and repentance, all our ancient tangled karma, is part of how we touch into, stay in, intimate with all of ourselves, not turning away from any part of it. We fully avow, yes, this too. And mostly it's, we confess to this one, this one person, ourselves. And it can also be very, very helpful.

[27:25]

to let ourselves be seen by others. This is such an old practice within Buddhism. The oldest ceremony in Buddhism is the full moon ceremony. And they would confess their transgressions. I'm not sure what they'd done where they'd missed the mark. All these vows in the Vinaya, it's like, how did I miss the mark since last we met? And I just say, yes. And everybody's doing it. I did this, I did that. It's like, oh, okay, you know, this is normal stuff. It's not about shame. It's just like, let's get it out there. So there were a few passages in here I wanted to share.

[28:29]

The practice of true reality is simply to sit serenely in silent introspection. When you have fathomed this, you cannot be turned around by external causes and conditions. This empty, wide-open mind is subtly and correctly illuminating. Spacious and content, without confusion from inner thoughts of grasping, effectively overcome habitual behavior and realize the self that is not possessed by emotions. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, but not possessed by emotions. You must be broad-minded, whole without relying on others. Such upright, independent spirit can begin not to pursue degrading situations. When I read that, I thought about junior high school. And this, you know, it's like we, of course we grow out of that to a certain extent, but so many people have come to Tassajara in the summer, you know, and we have like the picnic tables in the student eating area.

[30:04]

And it's like, you know, who are you sitting with? Where are you sitting down? And it's like, oh my God, it's like the junior high school cafeteria all over again. It's like, boom, it's right there. It says, you must be broad-minded, not in the sense of liberal, but vast, great, broad-minded, whole without relying on others. Again, junior high school, it's like, what are we doing? We want to belong. We're looking at everybody else. And, you know, that just has other forms of playing out when we're grown up. Are we okay? Are others okay with us? Do I still belong? And that can play out at work and get covered over by status or power or safety and all these other things.

[31:07]

But... so that we don't have to feel. I mean, so much of this is these vulnerable, vulnerable feelings are not the problem. We think they're the problem because they hurt and because we don't know how to meet them very well. But the problems that we have are generally our conditioning on top of that to try to keep us safe from those feelings, which often works for a while or they wouldn't be so persistent. It's like, yeah, here's my go-to. I'm going to do the anger thing or I'm going to do whatever. And then it just creates its own stuff. So as always, our capacity to be with what's arising, it simplifies things. It's like, oh yeah, oh yeah, that's okay, I can be with that.

[32:08]

Contemplating your own authentic form is how to contemplate Buddha. Yeah. Remembering that our own form is not separate from Buddha. And I think this is a really important balance between when we turn the light around and some of the sticky stuff comes up that we are also Buddha. It's like not to get stuck going down the rabbit hole of old pain. Preparing for my Way-Seeking Mind talk was a trip. That was, you know, it's like, wow. I haven't visited some of those places in a long time. And I did not intentionally go there. It was just like once I started looking, oh, that's interesting. Different layers are coming up now. because I'm in such a different place in my life and I'm seeing things differently and how do I make sense of this now?

[33:19]

And it's like, oh yes, this one person has some wounds and this person has always been whole, indivisible from self and from the world. I have never not belonged to the universe. But I... had a hard time experiencing that because of causes and conditions. To cultivate our house, you must clearly and intimately experience it for yourself. So our house is like Buddhism, but Soto Zen. This is our house. You must clearly and intimately experience it for yourself. It's no good to just read about it.

[34:26]

I mean, it's good. It is good to just read about it. And that may be fine. I think for many people that is fine. But it's... Well, you know, it's like reading the menu and really enjoying reading the menu and imagining having the meal. But then it's also possible to have the meal. And of course, you have to cook the meal as well. You have to prepare it. And it might take a little effort to do that. And it might not turn out the way you like it. Suzuki Roshi used to say, be careful what you wish for. You might not like it. So when we engage deeply in practice, it's so important to have a teacher or some guidance in this, a practice leader, because we can get really turned around and think that something is working when it might be working just according to how we think things are.

[35:40]

and we can't always see ourselves. So I want to end with a passage from Shutu's Song of the Grass Hut. Sekito Kisan. A great vehicle bodhisattva trusts without doubt. Turn around the light to shine within, then just return. The vast, inconceivable source can't be faced or turned away from. Meet the ancestral teachers. Be familiar with their instructions. Bind grasses to build a hut and don't give up.

[36:42]

Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely. Open your hands and walk, innocent. Thousands of words, myriad interpretations are only to free you from obstructions. If you want to know the undying person in the hut. Don't separate from this skin bag here and now. This skin bag is our human body. One of the ways the Buddha talked about it was you get attached to these beautiful bodies, but it's just a bag of skin. So don't separate from this skin bag here and now. Don't cut off. This is where it's all happening. let go of hundreds of years of karmic conditioning, all that we carry in our own lifetime, our ancestors, and everyone's ancestors.

[37:58]

The karmic conditioning of the world is ripening now in many painful ways and in many ways that are beautiful beyond anything that I had imagined. What individuals and communities are doing in the midst of and because of the ripening of karma in the world is it's it's amazing and it's not it's not perfect it's messy and it's not fixed it's dynamic and it's moving so finding how to dance with that, partner with it, be intimate with all of the mess of our own beings and each other's beings and the world's being with a broad mind, a broad and settled mind and a loving mind

[39:12]

and settled and open heart. Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely. We can relax with this completely. It is possible. Open your hands and walk innocent. We are still and always innocent in this sense. We can drop off, let go. It's right here. It's right now. Thank you very much. Are there any questions?

[40:13]

full moon ceremony in a way that extended beyond what we chanted and did in the Zendo, and including the idea that we've said many times that we freely and openly express or look at our flaws, faults, mistakes, errors, and share them in a way that then we have to go outside and think, oh, I just told everybody that, and yet understanding that we have the wholeness of the Sangha to support that, and the wholeness of Buddha to support that. So my question is, when are we going to actually do the fullness, here we are at Paso Haro with a whole bunch of monks, the fullness of that ceremony? And what do you think keeps us from doing it now, if there's a reason, and what do you think we might gain right here in this place? Paul Haller often does that when he leads practice periods.

[41:19]

I've heard he might be doing a practice period this fall, so in terms of when, that might be when. I don't know. I don't know for sure that he's doing that or that he would do it again. Yeah. I think what might be keeping us from that, by and large, is our individual and collective karmic conditioning. I think many people, you know, people grow up in Catholicism, and you go and confess, and this is what you do. You know, it's what everybody's doing. And you confess to one person, of course. And, you know, when I would do that with Paul during practice period, we'd get into small groups, and it was like... what exactly am I going to share with this small group of people? Like, how far down am I going to go? And I think part of it is that, you know, the culture that many of us are from, not all, but many of us within this American culture, is very much a shame-based culture.

[42:34]

So we don't have a ground, much ground, in sharing things. that we don't feel good about with other people. A lot of shame, a lot of guilt comes up. And then when we're in shame in particular, it was so helpful to me to hear that shame is an altered state of consciousness. And it's a state in which we're actually separate from ourselves. So to confess when we're not in some feeling of trust or wholeness, I think there's potential for it to be harmful. So I would choose what I felt. And we were encouraged. Choose what you feel comfortable owning. And it was like, yeah, I did these things. There were things I didn't feel good about, but they weren't the yucky ones. So what do we share? How? I mean, it's a really interesting question. What would it be like to do that?

[43:36]

And what's the whole... What's our shared understanding that would make this a really wholesome practice, a really supportive practice? And maybe even like, yeah, on the full moon, I'm just going to say it, you know, and then I can put it down. It's like when we're in closer relationships, sometimes it's like, you know, I have to tell you this thing that I did because I don't want to walk around with this and pretend it's not happening because there is that shared trust there. So I think for me, some sense of trust in ourselves and others, and some sense of fullness in the Sangha would be good supports for doing a practice like that. And of course, there's lots of ways to get to that point. Thank you. Anyone else? Yes. Hi, Therese. I mentioned that doing the Boston retreat and three days later you kind of got the same experience.

[44:49]

And then I think later you mentioned something like not getting stuck in, I don't know if it was old stories or old stuff. And yeah, I was just curious about the discernment between you know, this is just what's here now, and getting stuck. Ah, yeah. So in that instance, the stuckness was kind of in my body. There weren't particularly stories, and there wasn't painful emotion. It was just this kind of thick sludge. Like, yeah, like in my physical body, it wasn't like it was really painful, but it was... Yeah, it was like being in and completely permeated by this sludginess. I wasn't tired. There was nothing I could identify. So it was, but it felt like, yeah, there's something yucky there.

[45:52]

Maybe somewhere down there. It was like, oh yeah, there was. But by not trying to make it be something else, then it allowed things to move. somehow. But the not getting stuck in old stories was, that was a different feeling of stuckness, and that's when they start going around and around. And often stuckness is when we're in our head in some way because our mind is actually what's creating stability in the world. With little kids, like babies, If you take something away from them, it's just gone. They don't, they're not trying to look for it, because it was here, now it's gone. But at a certain point, they know that there was something there, and it's now gone.

[46:56]

And they'll look for it, and that's when you can play peek-a-boo with little kids, you know? It's like, here, gone, here, gone. So we're creating this idea that they're like, you know there's a back of my body. We spent a lot of time on Zoom. We assume that there's a back on everyone and the rest of a body, you know. But we have to create that. And we constantly create that. We couldn't go through our day if we weren't creating the stability in the world. But it's actually changing all the time. I mean, we know that everything is continually in flux. But to function... In the relative world, as human beings, we have to see it in a way that supports our human bodies to go on being. A baby would not live, could not feed themselves, could not do anything. So we create this world. And sometimes we get into little eddies in this world that we've created, and it just goes round and round and round in painful ways.

[47:58]

If it's not... I mean, and it can be... Like, apparently pleasurable, too. You can get stuck in fantasizing about what you're going to do on vacation or whatever it is. You can go in any direction. But it just, it keeps going in some loop. And it doesn't, it kind of keeps the actual world out. That. Okay, thank you. For more information visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[48:49]

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