Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome.

[01:09]

I'd like to introduce John Sutherland, a teacher, a cohen teacher in an open source tradition, who will give us today a presentation of how she works with call and practice. Thank you. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you for inviting me. Good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for coming. Can you all hear me? I guess I'm a little amplified, am I not? Yeah, you are. A little higher. A little higher? Good? Good morning. And I want to thank in particular Dana Felden for inviting me to come down today and to say many congratulations and best wishes on being named Shusa. That's wonderful. I understand that some of you here are studying the Paramitas this autumn. And one of the things that's most interesting to me about studying the Paramitas is a kind of creative tension between being and doing, you know, between what are states of mind at heart and what are the things we do in the world.

[02:32]

And so I wanted to talk some about that from the koan perspective. In the last couple of years with the situation in this country and the world as it is, an image that comes to me over and over again and offers a kind of comfort is something that the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski talked about. He was a man who lived through the difficulties of Eastern Europe in the 20th century through the World War II and the Soviet occupation and then the liberation of Poland. And in one of his essays, he talked about how evil always comes like the Blitzkrieg. It always comes very fast with big machines and lots of loud noise and a great amount of destruction in a very short amount of time. And in contrast, good arrives like an old gent on a bicycle the day after the catastrophe has occurred.

[03:38]

And I've been thinking about that old gent on the bicycle and feeling myself to be one such person, and many of the people I know also, and asking the question, if we are moved to climb on our bicycles and ride out and be in some way helpful in a very difficult time, how might we do that? And for me particularly, the question was, does the koan tradition have anything to say, anything to offer about that? And it turns out that it does in a most profound way. The koan tradition began in China over a thousand years ago. And at the time that the first stories that became koans were occurring, It was a moment of great upheaval and difficulty in China. It was the height of the Tang Dynasty.

[04:41]

We're talking about the 8th century now. There was a great deal of art and prosperity and trade and philosophy, and things seemed to be going very well. And the Chinese Empire extended great distances. But a great empire meant great borders to have to defend. And there were lots of people surrounding China who wanted to get a piece of some of that prosperity for themselves. And so there were constant border incursions and invasions. And eventually, the Chinese had to start recruiting people from as far away as Asia Minor to come as mercenaries and fight off the invaders for them. And that system worked just well enough until about the mid-eighth century when one of these mercenary groups decided that they would stay.

[05:41]

So they set themselves up in Chang'an, the ancient capital of China, although it wasn't the capital at that time, which is the city of everlasting peace. This event, which was called the An Lushan Rebellion, set up a cascade of events which led to 10 years of civil war and famine and dislocation and disease. It was a terrible, terrible time in Chinese history, one of the worst times in the history of the world. And the result was that in that decade, two out of three people in China died. Two out of three. It's something that's hard for us to imagine now. The famous Chinese poet Dufu was caught in Chang'an during the An Lushan Rebellion, and he wrote a poem about what it was like to be there.

[06:43]

And there's a very simple, very stark couplet in that poem that really sums up the situation. He said, The nation is destroyed. Mountains and rivers remain. And the people of Chan, which is the Chinese way of pronouncing the word that is pronounced Zen in Japanese, the people of Chan were looking at things in that way. What does it mean that There are things which are destroyed all the time, things which rise and fall and get broken and remade and broken again. And at the same time, there is something about those things that is eternal. The sound of eternity. There is something that is eternal that doesn't get destroyed.

[07:49]

How do we hold those two things in our hands? This seems to me to be one of the fundamental questions of meditation. How do we hold that things rise and fall away again and get broken and mended and re-broken, and yet everything is shining and eternal and goes nowhere at all? And both those things are true simultaneously. There were two teachers at that time who began to teach around the time of the An Lushan rebellion. They were Shito, which is Sakito in Japanese pronunciation, and Great Master Ma Baso in Japanese. And they looked at this question, and then they asked something else, which is another crucial question. If we hold these two things, if we experience them, how do we act? What do we do?

[08:51]

When times are this troubled, this full of sorrow and pain, how do we get on our bicycles and ride out and see what we can do to help? That question was sort of formulated by the scholar Peter Hershock, whose book on Chan Buddhism I highly recommend to you if you're interested, as it is not enough to see what Buddha nature is, you must realize what Buddha nature does. And that was Shito and Ma's great question. What does Buddha nature do? There's a koan from a little bit later in Chinese history which seems to really address how you might go about looking at such a question at such a difficult time as the An Lushan Rebellion. And the koan is a simple question and answer. What is the way is the question, the eternal question.

[09:56]

And the answer this time is the fully enlightened person falls into a well. I've been living with that koan for a couple of decades, and I've always thought of it as being about how we go right on being human beings, no matter what our understanding is, and we go right on making mistakes and falling into wells and messing up in the midst of our enlightenment, full or not. But having now spent this time with Ma, in particular, and Shito as well, I also hear it a different way. Sometimes the world offers to us wells. That is what appears before us. And the bodhisattva question is, are we willing to throw ourselves down a well if that is what is offered to us? What does Buddha nature do? How does it act?

[10:57]

Can we, with with real dedication and caring, throw ourselves down the well of this beautiful, troubled, devastating, poignant world. Not once, but over and over and over again. And is that something about what Buddha Nature does? So let me just say a word about where Shito and Ma came from because it's interesting to me. They both came from the margins of Chinese culture, not from the great cities at the center. Shito lived in a place where people were still living in caves and were making blood sacrifices to the local gods. And when Shito was a little boy, he used to go out and free the animals that were being offered as sacrifices.

[12:00]

And I have this image of Shito's mother looking out the kitchen window saying, another chicken, another goat, as he came back from the shrines. But that's the kind of person he was from the very beginning. Ma came from the far west of China, almost on the borders with Tibet, and he was the son of the town garbage man. And later on, when he became famous as a teacher, he returned to his hometown and was given whatever the equivalent of the key to the city was. A kind of fuss was made over him. And the lady who used to live next door to him said, oh, I saw all this fuss going on. I thought it was somebody important, but it's just the old garbage man's son. And Ma used to tell that story on himself as being a very important thing to remember as a teacher. So these two men came from the margins of Chinese culture, ran into the Dharma somehow, studied, became teachers, and took different but parallel paths.

[13:08]

Shuto went to live on South Mountain as a sort of hermit. although South Mountain was the home of many hermits and Daoists and a Confucian academy. So he was a hermit in a very busy and rich neighborhood. But he stuck to that. He felt that that was important to him. And so when the local Chinese temple invited him to come live with them, he declined and said better to spend eternity drowning at the bottom of the ocean than follow the wise. So we leave Shuto on his mountain and of course over time many students came to him and studied with him. Ma, we know, walked for 20 years through the China of the An Lushan rebellion and its aftermath. He walked from temple to temple and he saw what was going on and what had happened to the country.

[14:09]

And when he finally settled down, it was with that knowledge, with that experience of what he had seen. His monastery became one of the great training places of the age, if not the greatest one. The two of them never met, although they played kind of spooky jokes on their students back and forth. They sent students back and forth to each other. someone had gone to see Shito and had come prepared with an answer to any question that Shito might put to him. But what he wasn't expecting was for Shito to take one look at him and say, alas, alas. And so he went to Ma and said, I had this experience with Shito, what should I do? And Ma said, ah, the next time Shito says, alas, alas, you just give two sharp breaths, blow out two sharp breaths, Like that, that's your answer. And so he went back to Chito, ready to go.

[15:13]

And as soon as he walked into the hall where Chito was, Chito went, ha, ha. So there was a kind of spooky resonance between the two of them, although they did never meet and they respected each other greatly. And at the time it was said that you really didn't know Chan until you had studied the two of them. So they really changed Chan as a result, I believe, of their experiences in China at the time. They were looking at a question that, again, is almost unimaginable to us now. And it was, we one in three who survive, how do we go on? The first thing they did was they raised the eyes of Chan to the horizon.

[16:17]

And by that I mean, before that, Chan was largely an introspective tradition. You meditated and looked inside for your own nature. So that Wei Nung, the sixth ancestor, the greatest teacher up to that time in China, said that meditation was a matter of clearly seeing your original nature inside yourself. But Ma and Shuto said, Shuto in particular said, everything that meets your eye is the way. Everything you see, everything you experience, that is Buddha nature. It's not just inside you, here in your own heart, mind, but everywhere you look, in everything you see, everything shines with that light. I find myself tremendously moved by the generosity of spirit of these two men who said, it's all you, it's all me.

[17:29]

When that all included refugees starving by the roadside, blighted fields, people mourning the loss of their children in the wars, That's you. That's me. People standing on the roofs in Hurricane Katrina. People dying in Iraq. People protesting the war. Our vice president. That's you. That's me. So that's what I mean by raising the eyes of Chan to the horizon, taking in the world and saying the whole world shines with Buddha nature. And the second thing they did that was so important was to say that awakening happens in relationship. We sit together. We eat together. We raise children. We have jobs. We listen to the birds sing.

[18:31]

And our meditation is made up of all those things. all of those things come in and become part of our samadhi. And our samadhi becomes also part of all of those things. And it seems to be true that in those moments when we do wake up, when we find a kind of intimacy with the world, it's when we are fetched by something. It might be as simple as someone coughing. or the call of a bird, but something comes to get us. And if meditation practice is about anything, it's about making us fetchable. It puts us in the way of being fetched by the world, by having a true meeting with something or someone else. It can be the words of another. the words of a teacher or a colleague or someone else, the child you are rearing.

[19:37]

But it can be anything else too, and there are hundreds of stories in the tradition of someone coming around the bend on a mountain road and seeing a tree alight with plum blossoms, and it's the plum blossoms that fetch them, or the sound of a stone knocking against bamboo. So these teachers said, that's how it happens. It happens in relationship. And so while previously most of Chan teaching had gone on in a lecture format, not unlike this, they developed a way of teaching that allowed them to have true meetings with students who were willing to do that, to come up against them and have that kind of encounter. And I think that they were hoping and in fact were succeeding in creating true meetings over and over and over again so that people could have those true meetings for themselves in the world with whatever presented itself.

[20:53]

So the next thing they did was to say, when you have these true meetings, what you're experiencing is freedom. And their encounters with people could be quite mild or very probing or could literally knock people off their feet. But the intention was to create a moment of freedom. not to describe freedom, not to talk about freedom, not to explain what freedom is, but to create a moment of freedom right then and right there in that true meeting between teacher and student. Just a couple of examples of that that came to mind as I was thinking about this. Someone once said to Ma that he didn't understand this thing that mind is Buddha. That didn't make sense to him. And Ma replied, the mind that doesn't understand is exactly it.

[22:08]

So what he's doing there is he's saying, you don't understand something, you don't have to go somewhere else to find an understanding. You don't have to work this out. You have to just for one moment be fully and completely the mind that doesn't understand this. And if you can be that, without impediment, without judgment, then that is exactly it. That is the mind is Buddha. Another time he said something that I actually use now, so I thought I would mention it as something that persists over time. He said, the things of this world, the 10,000 things, none of them are ever going around saying, I am empty, or I am form, or I am pure, I am impure. I am such a bad rock. Such an inadequate redwood tree. They don't do that. They don't think right and wrong.

[23:10]

None of that. We are the only beings who do that. We are the only ones running around saying, I am such an inadequate rock. That's quite a startling thing if you really take that in. And so often in retreats and workshops I'll ask people to take a walk and just to consider that in the entire landscape there is nothing saying, I am empty. I am pure, I am impure. And when you do that, you feel something loosen up inside. You feel something get free. And that's what Ma and Shuto were after, that loosening up, that getting free right in the moment. And let me just say parenthetically that if you're interested in koans and you're spending time with them and you're having difficulty with a koan, it's not making sense or it seems impenetrable, a way to come into relationship with it is to ask, what is the invitation to freedom here?

[24:14]

How am I being asked to have a free moment by this koan? So I want to talk about this idea of freedom and this way of experiencing freedom through koans by talking about something completely different, which is the paintings of Jan Vermeer. In the mid-17th century, Europe was just coming out of the Thirty Years' War, which was another time of great dislocation and difficulty. And given the lifespan of people at that time, Thirty Years' War meant that most people had never known anything else but warfare in their entire lives. And at about the mid-17th century, the wars stopped and people kind of shrugged inside and went home and tried to figure out how we go on from here. In the north of Europe, Jan Vermeer and a group of painters around him were wondering about the nature of peace.

[25:24]

And he started painting these very simple, luminous portraits of people doing the most ordinary domestic things. A woman standing in the kitchen, bathed in the light from a window. Two people seemed through a doorway. in an interior room in a house having a conversation. A cityscape where the rain has just stopped and the clouds have parted and the city stands there glistening. It was as if he was saying, dear viewers, this is peace. This isn't a picture of peace, a depiction of peace. That feeling you're feeling in your heart right now as you look at this That is peace. It was as though he were trying to invoke peace into a world that hadn't known it for a very long time. And not in some general or abstract way, but into the very particular and specific hearts of the viewers of his paintings.

[26:32]

That thing you feel right now, that peace that is filling your heart, take that home with you and let us try together to figure out how to make a peaceful life after all of this war. And it's my sense that that is very much what the first koans were trying to do as well with freedom. To invoke an experience of freedom in the hearts of those people of Chan so that they might go home and create the circumstances of freedom for other people in a difficult time. And the really miraculous thing about art and about koans, who are two things very closely related, is that they go on working long past the time in which they arose in the world. Lawrence Wechsler has a very moving essay about going to The Hague in the Netherlands as the Yugoslav war trials were going on.

[27:46]

And he talked to one of the judges who was dealing with, you know, day after day after day, these reports of atrocity and ethnic cleansing. And he asked him, how do you do this work? How do you keep going? And the judge said... As often as I can on my lunch break, I go over to this museum where there's a room full of Vermeers, and I just sit there, and then I come back and keep working. So 350 years later, those paintings are still capable of evoking peace in a troubled heart. And in the same way, 1300 years later, the koans are still capable of inviting us to experience freedom for ourselves. So how do we go about doing that? If there are steps, the first step is a kind of deconstructive process. All of us have developed over time massively elaborate and ramified habits of bondage.

[28:55]

So the first task of the way Ma and Chito taught And the first task of the koans is to begin to deconstruct those habits of bondage and exile that we all live with. Chito had a kind of plank by plank approach. He would sort of deconstruct whatever came before him. And he rang variations on, are you sure about that? over and over and over again. So a kind of typical dialogue with Chito would be someone coming and saying, well, what about liberation? And Chito would ask, what binds you? Well, what about the pure land? What corrupts you? What about nirvana? What keeps you in the cycles of birth and death? Another time someone came to him and said, what should I do? What should I do to get free? And Shita said, why are you asking me? And the person said, but if I don't ask you, where will I go to find out?

[30:02]

And Shita said, are you sure you lost it? So can you see that any time you think you're standing on ground, even if it's the ground of insecurity and self-doubt, Shita will take even that away. You think you need me for this? Ha! Let me pull that out from under you. And that moment of free fall after Chito has pulled the rug out from under you, before the world reconstitutes itself, that's the freedom they were both aimed at. What's it like not to even think that there's anything to get? What's it like to really experience that for a moment? That there's no teaching to understand, there's nothing to attain, there is just exactly this free-falling moment. While Shito would do these relatively patient deconstructions of people's thoughts and ideas with them, that was

[31:03]

way too much chitchat for Ma's face. And he would just yank the rug out from under you without even a moment's word or hesitation. So someone came to him once and asked him about the meaning of Chan. What is the meaning of Chan? And Ma responded by kicking him in the chest and knocking him over. And there was something in that moment of free fall that that that he got, Shwellial was the name of this man, he got something in that moment of freefall, and he stood up laughing and applauding. And many years later, he said, from the day that Great Master Ma kicked me, I have never stopped laughing. And I want to pause for a moment here and address Ma's teaching style. which did involve kicking people and hitting people and putting his hand over your mouth just as you were about to speak and tweaking your nose and shouting so loud that people were deaf for days afterwards.

[32:16]

In later times, that method of teaching Chan and Zen became a kind of cliche and a menace. But in Ma's time, it was startling and real, and it was a response to the urgency of the times. Remember what times we're in. And there were many people who came to the monastery, and perhaps you can find this impulse in yourself, many people who came to the monastery looking for an escape from the horrors of the time. Maybe some people even simply looking for a regular meal, you know? And Ma said clearly and unmistakably, you will not find an escape here. Someone asked him, what is the meaning of your school? And he said, oh, it's just the place where you lose your body and your life. That's a very serious thing to say in a world where two-thirds of everybody has just died.

[33:20]

You know? That's not messing around, and that is certainly saying you will find no escape hatch here. You will find no way to turn away from the world. You will find a way to deal with what has happened, and not just deal with it, but go help do something about it. I think that is one of the meanings of the way he taught. I think another was to say, we don't have time for you to dither around about not knowing. One of the things he would do was that he would never let a student for a second take the position of someone who doesn't know. You couldn't go to him and say, you know, I don't know, I'm lost, please help me. No time for that. You do know. And we need you to recognize that you know as quickly as possible. so that you can roll up your sleeves and get to work. And that was his relentless, tireless, tremendously generous style with people.

[34:30]

No one got to be a student. He wanted everyone to meet him face to face. And that is the optimism. of that style of Chan. You can meet me. We can go toe to toe and eye to eye. We can have a true meeting. And what this is about is discovering what can happen when we have a true meeting like that. Part of that deconstruction was to come to a place of having no position at all. Most of spiritual life and also diets and self-help programs and exercise regimes and all the rest of it are about replacing a bad set of beliefs with a better set of beliefs.

[35:37]

I used to... I used to not get it, but now I get it. You know? And what Ma and Chito both were doing was inviting people to experience what it's like when you have no position at all. Not a good one, not a bad one. Just no position at all. What's it like not to feel that your job is to find a new and improved and shiny set of beliefs to replace the old, bad, tattered set of beliefs? This is interesting for those of you who are looking at the Paramitas, I think, because one of the assumptions is that even a right view is a burden. Even a right view in some way limits us and creates an impediment to freedom. By freedom, I don't mean license.

[36:40]

I don't mean, yeah, whatever. I'm not talking about that. But I'm talking about the way in which we can get caught inside a right view and stop seeing freshly. Stop having a true meeting with the things of the world as they present themselves. Stop allowing ourselves to be surprised to have our minds changed by what we experience. So my sense of Ma and Chito, if they were speaking in a modern language, would be that they would say that everything we believe is provisional and we hold it as provisional. This is our best guess. This is the best we can do right now. And it's subject to change if something happens that makes me see it differently in the future. In the Tibetan tradition, there's something called liberating the antidote.

[37:45]

And it's the sense that when we have a problem, we tend to try to find something to fix the problem. And then whatever it is we found to fix the problem ends up becoming its own problem. And we have to liberate the antidote. And then we have to liberate that antidote and the next one and the next one. And that it's a series of liberations of the antidote. I'm sure a lot of you have heard the story about the temple cat that... there was a monastery in which there was a temple cat who would come in during the meals and walk all over the bowls and mess the food up. And so the abbot declared that from now on, the cat would be tied up on the porch when the bell for the meal was rung. And so year in and year out, the bell rang, the cat was tied up on the porch and people went and ate their meal in peace. And after a while, the cat finally died and they got a new cat.

[38:48]

And this new cat didn't go into the hall and mess with people's bowls, but they went right on tying him up on the porch every time the meal bell rang. Because that had gotten, you know, that was a right view, that that was part of the ceremony. And so Liberating the Antidote is about going out and untying all the cats that have been unwittingly tied up because of our habits. And I'll just say a couple of more things and then I'd love to hear any comments or questions you might have about it. Another really crucial part of their teaching was about responding. That it is not enough to have a deep meditation practice. That we have to respond to circumstances as we find them in the world.

[39:54]

And Ma felt so strongly about this that he said at one point, to have such a deep meditation practice that you become lost in emptiness is to suffer the torments of hell for the bodhisattva. From the perspective of the bodhisattva, it is to suffer the torments of hell to be lost in emptiness. So he was saying, What's going on in the world right now, that's not the torments of hell. My turning away from what's going on in the world right now, that is the torments of hell. That part of ourselves that has aspirations to be kind, to be helpful, to make a difference, that part would feel tormented. to not be able to do that, even if what we were doing instead was some deep and good and pure meditation practice.

[41:02]

So one way we might say that is those of us who meditate, those of us who do have experiences of the vastness, of the great shining silence. It is up to us to turn that awakening into matter. We have to make something with it in the world. That is our human task. That is our human job, to turn our awakening into stuff, into matter, into something real in the world. To do that, we already have what we need. We even have the ability to do the impossible.

[42:14]

At another point, Ma said, benefit what cannot be benefited. Do what cannot be done. Just because something's impossible, don't let that stop you. Go right ahead. Doing what cannot be doing, maybe that's setting aside what worked last time or what we already know. Maybe it's looking to see what we don't know. what might become possible if we put aside our right views and our preconceptions about the way things ought to be, and we have a true meeting with what is happening, and we respond. They were living in an unprecedented time. There was no rule book for how to behave or what to do. In some ways, we are living in an unprecedented time.

[43:21]

If we take up Just the question of global warming out of all the questions there are before us. We are about to enter an unprecedented time. This hasn't happened before while human beings have been alive. Benefit what cannot be benefited. Do what cannot be done. In an unprecedented time, you must find unprecedented responses. And nobody is an expert yet. which means that anybody might become an expert, including you. So what did all this come to? This work that Ma and Chateau did, this revolution they caused in In the next generation, one of Ma's successors said that Ma had given him two great gifts.

[44:32]

The first gift was to know that he already had everything he needed. That's a huge thing. Your enlightenment is already here. Your kindness is already here. Your clarity and your courage are already here. You don't have to go anywhere to find them. You don't have to do anything. You just have to realize that they are already here. So that was the first great thing that this student said Ma had given him. And the second, perhaps equally important, was... He gave me the freedom to use those things in any way I could. I think that's tremendously important for us now because I think in our culture, in our time, we tell a story to ourselves of how disabled we are, of how broken we are.

[45:40]

of how we had the bad childhood or we're living in this crazy society or whatever it is that keeps us from being free to use what we already have. So it's a great thing to feel that freedom. It's a great thing to be able to use your clarity and your kindness and your courage for the sake of the world. to get on your bicycle and ride out into the world, to turn your awakening and your kindness and your clarity and your courage into matter, into things that are real in the world. And that, I think, was Ma and Shito's great gift. 1,200 years ago, and one that I hope we can pick up again today and bring into our lives and consider as being something worth doing, something worth considering.

[46:44]

Thank you all very much for your attention. And how much time do you have? Okay. Okay.

[47:24]

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