Perfect and again it's dark now. This is where I'm getting right for you. This is where I'm getting right for you. This is where I'm getting about a hundred thousand million robots. I can't get to see you and listen to. If you're looking like a word I accept. I promise this is the truth of the world. It's not the devil's words. continue today with the Eheikoso Hotsuganmon.

[11:33]

The next section reads like this. Buddhas and ancestors of old are as we. We, in the future, shall be Buddhas and ancestors. Revering Buddhas and ancestors we are one Buddha and one ancestor. Awakening Bodhi mind, we are one Bodhi mind. Because they extend their compassion to us freely and without limit, we are able to attain Buddhahood and let go of the attainment. Therefore, the Chan master Lung Ya said, Those who in past lives were not enlightened will now be enlightened. In this life, save the body, which is the fruit of many lives.

[12:41]

Before Buddhas were enlightened, they were the same as we. Enlightened people of today are exactly as those of old. kind of challenging, isn't it? Buddhas and ancestors of old were as we. We, in the future, shall be Buddhas and ancestors. Us? Me? With my busy mind and my tired back and my aching knees, This question is a kind of cynical doubt. It's the doubt that says, I'm asking a question, but really what I'm saying is, uh-uh, no way.

[13:52]

Can't be. Cynical doubt says, I know how it is. How it is, is I'm not like the Buddha's ancestors. Not possible. But Dogen, in this piece, this is Dogen's faith. Dogen is asking us, too, to have faith. And if we don't have faith, then we can ride his faith. to cynical doubt isn't hubris. I'm a Buddha. I'm an ancestor. The opposite of cynical doubt is what we would call don't-know mind, beginner's mind. I was walking down on the way to the hall this morning, and there's that giant

[15:02]

picture of Bodhidharma, the guy with the big bulgy eyes. Bodhidharma is our ancestor who brought the teachings from India to China. It's said that he The reason for those bulgy eyes is that he didn't want to fall asleep during meditation. And so he cut off his eyelids. I'm not recommending you do that. In fact, he did that. The legend says that his eyelids fell to the ground and became green tea. So ever since... You don't have to cut off your eyelids to stay awake. You can just have a nice cup of tea. So we thank Bodhidharma for that.

[16:05]

Bodhidharma is perhaps most well-known for his don't know. When he was asked, what are the teachings of the, what are the highest teachings of the holy truth, something like that. When he said, when he was... What's the essence of the teaching and who are you? He said, don't know. And that don't know mind has echoed down for centuries. And it is an invitation for all of us. Not don't know as ignorance. This isn't the don't know of ignoring, of not paying attention. This is the don't know of intimacy. It's the willingness to release our pre-existing views and opinions and ideas about who we are, about who other people are, about how the world is, about who

[17:25]

the Buddhas and ancestors were. It's an open invitation. Come in. Come close. This is what we practice when we sit together hour after hour with our achy knees and backs and minds and hearts. We are invited to come close, to drop under the mind that, have you noticed, it always has an opinion about something. When we drop below, we don't have to get rid of it. We don't have to shoot our thoughts, right? But when we drop in, we discover something in that not knowing that is mysterious and alive. We say, Even the 10,000 sages don't know.

[18:27]

When it says, awakening Bodhi mind, we are one Bodhi mind. What is that Bodhi mind? That mind that transcends past and future. The mind that's always here, like the body, now. even the 10,000 sages don't know. And if we think we know something, we get into a little bit of trouble. There's a story I like very much. Ostensibly, it is a story about our ancestor Dushan. And Dushan was a scholar of the Diamond Sutra. Remember the Diamond Sutra?

[19:33]

That was Hui Ning heard that line from the Diamond Sutra. It said, a bodhisattva should arouse a mind that abides nowhere. And that line sent him off to practice and ultimately to become our sixth ancestor. So Dushan also was a scholar of this Diamond Sutra, of these Prajnaparamita teachings on emptiness. He heard that there were these Chan teachers who were pointing directly to the nature of mind, Bodhi mind. And he... got a little bee in his bonnet, and he thought, I am a great scholar, and I'm going to go challenge these Chan masters to a debate.

[20:36]

And so he set off with all of his, a copy of the Diamond Sutra and all of his commentaries that he had spent his whole life writing about the Diamond Sutra. And he set off to go challenge the Chan, the Zen masters, to be Zen masters. And then he ran into one of our unnamed, less-known women ancestors, the old lady at the tea shack selling rice cakes. And before he got to the temple, he approached her little hut, and she asked him, what is that that you're carrying on your back? And he said, this is the Diamond Sutra and my commentaries. It's my whole life's work. And she said, hmm. And she said, I heard that it said in the Diamond Sutra, past mind cannot be got at.

[21:47]

Present mind cannot be got at. Future mind cannot be got at. And Deshawn said, yes, this is the mind that I'm an expert in. He had a little bit of hubris. So she said, well, if you're the expert, if you can answer my question, I'll give you a tea cake, some tea and rice cakes. And if you can't, I'm not giving you anything. So she said, past mind cannot be got at. Present mind cannot be got at. Future mind cannot be got at. Tell me, which mind is this? And poor Dushan, with his backpack full of scholarly text, was dumbfounded.

[22:52]

And he didn't get any snacks. So she said, you should go there to the temple and meet with these teachers. She was humble. Of course, she was herself a teacher. But as is often the case in these stories, we don't know her name. But her words, like Bodhidharma's, also have echoed down through the ages. Insight comes in very unexpected ways. We are sitting, paying attention over here, and something comes in, like this tea lady, and has us wake up. We see that we didn't understand something. This is the willingness to be in don't-know mind.

[23:57]

the willingness to be intimate with our experience, to allow it to inform us. Our mind is so busy categorizing and opinionating and assessing and judging what happens if we see that mind for what it is, but we instead allow our experience inside. We allow our experience, moment by moment, not so much the experience of our thought, but the experience of our intimate, visceral, felt moment to moment. If we can hold a don't-know mind, we have the opportunity to be surprised. As we sit, hour after hour, period after period, sitting and walking and eating and napping and doing work practice, that rigidity of our linear mind begins to soften.

[25:35]

can't quite hold in the same way the thoughts may still be there but for me the experience is often like they may still be loud but they're down a long hallway increasingly there's more and more space and in that space we begin to soften In the Theravada system, Theravada Buddhism, the initial experience of awakening is called entering the stream. I think of it actually more accurately as saying becoming the stream. As we sit, we begin to become aware of the fluidity the aliveness of our experience, even if the mind wants to chop everything up into ideas and opinions and this moment or that moment or good or bad, we begin to have a different experience of time.

[26:57]

In Greek, there are two kinds of time called chronos and kairos. And chronos is like chronological. I think of it as tick-tock time. It's the time that is marked on the clock or the calendar. And it's important. If I went talking, talking, talking till noon, you wouldn't be that happy about it. So tick-tock time is important. It helps us navigate, right? But we can also, as we sit, begin to get an experience of what's called kairos, deep time. And you may have had an experience of this as you've been sitting. I did yesterday during that third period of zazen in the afternoon. So sometimes you sit down and time the same amount of time on the clock, the bell rings and What just happened?

[28:01]

And sometimes it's interminable. Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. Sometimes time feels so slow, right? This is the experience of time, not clock time, body time, experiential time, intimate with time. So again, the mind that categorizes and organizes and judges the time that marks on the clock, these are useful. But they're not all that there is. And we have this invitation to taste for ourselves something different, even just a whiff. One of my favorite descriptions of this is the opening lines of a novel by the Nigerian author Ben Okri.

[29:13]

It's called The Famished Road. I've carried these opening lines with me for decades. He says, in the beginning, there was a river. And the river was paved over and became a road. And soon, the road spread out and covered everything. But because the road was really a river, it was always hungry. The thinking mind is like a road. It's useful. It helps us get places. It helps us get places without bumping into one another. But if all we have is the road, and we forget, we forget our depths, we forget that we have river nature,

[30:28]

that there's something just under the surface of all of that commentary that is fluid, alive. This is Bodhi mind. So how do we discover this one Bodhi mind? In these paragraphs, Dogen gives us some pointers. Some of his language is helpful in orienting us to how to discover, drop down, that whole world that exists beneath the surface of my ideas and opinions and beliefs about who I am,

[31:30]

and how things should be. That is a living world. So the first thing that Dogen says, well, actually Chan Master Lung Ya says, is, in this life, save the body, which is the fruit of many lives. So the body is a doorway for us. We want to take care of the body because unlike the mind and unlike the spin of heart-mind, of thoughts and emotions, the body is always here. Always in the moment. So in any moment, you can return. You can find refuge here by coming back to the simplicity. of the body sitting, the body breathing.

[32:33]

And he says this body is precious. It is the fruit of many lives. There's an old story that says that taking a human rebirth is very rare. And the... Legend goes that there is an old blind turtle who lives at the bottom of the ocean, and it only comes up for air once every hundred years. And the likelihood of that blind turtle coming up and getting a breath of air and sticking its head through a piece of driftwood that has a hole in it, that's how likely it is to be born as a human in a human body. I had a lot of trouble with this one. Because for me, my body was a battle. I came in absolutely feeling broken, you know, sure that because I lived with an illness, no way was I like the Buddhas and ancestors.

[33:47]

And I just wanted to be fixed. I thought, all the other things I've tried haven't worked. I'll try meditation. And guess what? It didn't work, and it also did. It didn't take the illness away. It didn't take the difficulty for me of living in this body away. But it changed my relationship to it. And that's what's possible. And this points to the second thing that Dogen invites us. And this is an attitude of reverence. He says, revering Buddhas and ancestors, we are one Buddha and one ancestor. This is a hint. How do we enter the realm of one Buddha and one ancestor?

[34:50]

Reverence. What does it mean to revere? I don't think revering means so much holding the Buddhas and ancestors up here as something unattainable for us. I think of reverence more like a combination of humility and gratitude. I always say in my own experience that When I feel gratitude, I'm definitely in the neighborhood of awakening. Because gratitude isn't gratitude for this or that. Gratitude is gratitude that there's anything at all. It has a feeling of amazement in it. Most of the time, we sit with an opinion.

[35:56]

I like this. I don't like that. I wish this moment were just a little bit different. I wish this body was just a little bit different. I wish they'd ring the bell. I wish they wouldn't ring the bell. Gratitude says, thank you, whether we like it or we don't. So we enter through the body. And we take an attitude of gratitude. We take an attitude of humility, of not knowing, of being willing to see and see through all of our views and opinions. Some of them we don't even know we had, right? Those are the most interesting ones. Some views and opinions were pretty clear. This is what I think. But some of them we don't find out until we're sitting and then we realize, oh, I didn't know that I was supposed to something something.

[37:01]

I said this to Shenmue just before. I said, but isn't this green part of the robe supposed to cover the sleeve? And they said, no. I was like, oh, see? I'm just making things up in my mind, making things much more difficult for myself, as if it weren't hard enough to wrestle this dragon, this green, slippery robe. We do this all the time. We make stuff up we don't even know that we're making up. But as we sit with ourselves in this intimate way, we have an opportunity to bump up against, to see clearly, views and opinions that we might not have known we were carrying. And the last piece... Maybe shouldn't be a surprise by now, but I keep being surprised every time I read this text. The third thing that Dogen points to is compassion.

[38:02]

There it is again. I find myself a little bit dumbfounded. I've been reading Dogen for decades, and I find him gorgeous and brilliant and perplexing and... What's in his statement of faith? Over and over, he talks about compassion. Because they extend their compassion to us freely and without limit, we are able to attain Buddhahood and let go of the attainment. Maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise. There's a story about Dogen and his disciple, Tetsu Gikai. He chanted his name this morning in service. And the next time you chant this, you'll notice there is a name in between Dogen and Tetsu Gikai.

[39:08]

Tetsu Gikai was his most intimate disciple. But Dogen didn't... Hassan, the robin bull, he didn't transmit to him. He said to Tetsu Gikai, a little bit like the tea lady said to Dushan, you have full intellectual understanding of the teachings, but I can't make you my disciple because you need to cultivate what he called robayashin, grandmotherly mind. You need to develop this mind of compassion. My grandmother, my mother's mother, was my great champion when I was a child. And she had these incredibly soft hands, all wrinkly.

[40:17]

And when she would come to visit, she would pinch my cheek and say, nububula. And then she would look right at me and say, tell me everything. So this is the attitude that we can engage with our moment-to-moment experience. Can we meet our moments with those soft hands? with that inquiring gaze. I myself kind of relate to Dishan and Tetsu Gikai. I remember years ago after chanting the Heart Sutra as we do. The Heart Sutra, as you know, is a short chanting version of the Prajnaparamita texts. So the Diamond Sutra that we've been talking about is from the same literature.

[41:18]

It's an abbreviated version, chanting version. So I had for some years been chanting the Heart Sutra. And like Tetsu, like Dushan, I was really focused on emptiness. Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva. When practicing deeply, perceived that all five skandhas, what make up a I, me, and mine, all five skandhas are empty and thus relieved all suffering. So I came in with a lot of suffering, and I thought, if I just understand the emptiness of the five skandhas, my suffering, gone. Then one morning, we were chanting the Heart Sutra, and I felt like the words on the page sort of did a somersault.

[42:28]

And I heard the very same words completely differently. Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva. When deeply practicing... perceived that all five skandhas are empty and thus relieved all suffering. Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva. Compassion. What is it that wakes up? It's Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva. It is compassion that wakes up. And I remember the moment that I heard in that way and I thought, all this time I've been looking over here. What I needed was right here all along. As we practice in the body,

[43:41]

with an attitude of humility and gratitude, as we learn to meet our experience with these soft hands, with this genuine curiosity and willingness to listen, we have an opportunity to discover something we might not have known before. And it's not really that there's something new. It's that we see what's here with new eyes. It's all been here all along. Our practice is a practice to help us, to help us see for ourselves Because when you know for yourself, then it doesn't matter what I say.

[44:45]

It doesn't matter what anyone says. You know. You know what's true. This is refuge. And this is faith. The deepening of faith happens. We may come in and say, no way, I'm not a Buddha and ancestor. But, I don't know, Dogen seems to be saying that. Okay. right? And then we sit, and we cook, and we stew, and we marinate, and we wish they would ring the bell, and we, you know, we mess up the full moon ceremony in the loudest possible voice, and we recover, because there's another moment, and there's another moment. And as we get close to as we bring this don't-know mind, as the kind of crusty, cynical mind begins to soften, and we touch that aliveness that's here, we have an opportunity to be surprised, to discover something unexpected.

[46:04]

So I will leave you with a poem, again from one of our early, one of the early Buddhist nuns, Dhammadina. She was also a very well-known bhikkhuni. She had many, many disciples. And like the poem I read the other day from Mahapajapati, this is Dhammadina's Song of Awakening, her way of describing what she understood. I love this. She says, for so long, I thought only of the river's end. She wanted to get enlightened, right? Sometimes it's talked about that way. In Theravada, we say entering the stream, entering the river. It's also sometimes described as crossing over.

[47:11]

She wanted to get there. For so long, I thought only of the river's end. Then one morning, I set my paddle down. She stopped trying quite so hard. Then one morning, I set my paddle down to watch the sun rise over the eastern hills. What we need is right in front of us. We think we're trying to get over there when we put that down, and we are willing to be with what's right here, with this don't-know mind. I set my paddle down to watch the sun rise over the eastern hills, only to find myself somehow floating gently upstream.

[48:19]

Surprise! For so long, I thought only of the river's end. Then one morning, I set my paddle down, to watch the sun rise over the eastern hills, only to find myself somehow floating gently upstream. I promise it was not what I expected. So I hope that you find some encouragement in the words of our ancestors from Dogen and Bodhidharma and Ben Okri and Tetsugikai and Dushan and Dhammadina and the unnamed tea lady who yanked Dushan's chain.

[49:32]

We are in the heart of the retreat of the Sashim. And you have put in quite a bit of paddling, quite a bit of effort to get here. So really to encourage you as best you can to stay intimate, stay very close to your experience. notice all of the views and opinions and ideas that you have and just say, oh, hello, and keep coming home to the immediacy of the body as a doorway, trusting that this Bodhi mind is already here. It's just the willingness to open ourselves to discover something that may come as a surprise.

[50:40]

So before I close this morning, I want to say two things. One is that I really enjoyed sitting with everyone for the stretch of the day yesterday. Doesn't mean I enjoyed every single period, but I loved being in the field, the cauldron of the community. And I just want to say, because you may, well, I will be sitting as much as I can in the zendo, but I will also not always be in the zendo because I will be doing practice discussion throughout the day. So if I'm not there, uh, That's what I'm up to. And the other thing that I want to say is that in a few moments when I get up and bow and we leave, those of you, especially who are new to practice, this is your first sushin or first-ish, after the talk is over, I will come back in the hall and any of you who would like, who have a question,

[52:04]

are welcome to bring your question. And that includes those of you online as well. You can bring your questions. And you don't have to. You don't have to come back. If you prefer, you're welcome to go and do kinhin. But that invitation is there for a few moments from now. So when we're done, you're welcome to leave and go to the bathroom if you like. And if you want, you can come back after. Perfect, huh? Thank you very much.

[53:11]

I, [...] I I will say if you know that you're going to come back from the Q&A and you're on a Zafug, you can leave your Zafug here.

[56:20]

Otherwise, please push your Zafug back. Thank you. Thank you.

[57:27]

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