This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everyone. I'd like to thank the Tonto for inviting me to speak tonight. Thank you, Tim. and to my teacher, always a guide for me. Thank you, Paul. This Buddha Hall, it smells grassy, from the grassy grass floor. That's a... A manifestation of a Buddha field with our practice embodying the way.

[01:06]

There's a gravitas and a magical quality. And I see this Buddha hall as a material expression of that imagining holding us together in our practice in that way. In the mind, there's, for me, an image thought of Buddha land or Buddha field. It could be here and now, but I think the sway of it is also very strongly kind of elsewhere in my imagining. You might, when imagining a Buddha Field, have this vague notion of color and light, and you may go so far as to adorn it, imagine the adornments as a part of its expression for you.

[02:13]

So just to think Buddha Field is to kind of lodge something in your imagination. It's a space that becomes a very pleasant object for the mind. In the Vimalakirti Sutra, that disciple asked the Buddha, would the world-honored one please explain the practices by which a land is purified? And the Buddha responds, by listing the Paramitas as a bodhisattva's pure land, the Brahma Viharas as a bodhisattva's pure land, the 37 wings of enlightenment as a bodhisattva's pure land, maintaining the precepts as a bodhisattva's pure land. All the myriad ways in which lists of qualities and practices are given to us as an expression, not so much of a place and

[03:21]

an idea but an effort, and wherever the effort and its expression are is the Buddha field. Sariputra is in the audience. We're familiar with Sariputra as a disciple of the Buddha. He's thinking to himself, looking around. The Buddha-land is so impure, Stariputra says, just in his own mind. But the Buddha knows what he's thinking. The Buddha understands and has sympathy for us in our suffering. And even when the Buddha suggests an alternative view, still, Sariputra says, as I observe this land, its hills and hollows, brambles and gravel and rocks and mountains, all filled with defilements.

[04:33]

The Buddha is aware that Sariputra could use a little help. And so he puts his toe to the ground and boink! For a glorious moment, the universe is sparkling for everyone's eyes to see, filled with jewels and all of the attendants and bodhisattvas and shravakas and pratyakya buddhas and every kind of practitioner that you could imagine, any kind of god that comes forth, are risen up from their seats, which have become giant jeweled lotuses. The Buddha declares, you should now observe the purity of this Buddha land. If a person's mind is pure, he sees the merits of the Buddha land.

[05:43]

And then removing his toe from that one spot on the ground, the entire world returned to what it had previously been. This is different than some other sutras where there's this radiant light that emits from the Buddha's forehead. I enjoy that it's his big toe. In the world of our own making, we want the Buddha Land to be a beautiful and comfortable place. And since we're all here practicing together, we come here because we're practicing. We also know that there's truth in this. It's not an idle thought. Our own practice leads us to this belief. We have had

[06:47]

a taste of awakened mind and a taste of the peace that can come from that. And we want to move into it. And we wonder why we don't always feel it in our life. So this makes sense. It's natural. If we hadn't experienced this, we wouldn't be here in our practice together. Sariputra II bemoans the situation in which his observation of his surroundings only shows the defilements of discriminating mind. Yet when we turn away from what is impure for what is pure, when we reject the compost and have a longing for flowers, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say, we're very confused in our view. This is how the Bhimala Kirti Sutra sets the scene for our practice.

[07:50]

Although for comedic effect, Sariputra is an unaffected buffoon, in our own lives we're usually not so unaffected. It's in our practice, because of our practice, that our heart can feel sick. Some Dharma gates are pleasant to walk through and others not so much. In this story, the Buddha invites his disciples, one after the other, to visit Vimalakirti on his sick bed, and they each decline to face him. Each one has been corrected in their practice by this layman, the first being Sariputra, who is scolded for meditating under a tree, as the Buddha did. True repose is to manifest emptiness in one's deportment, no matter what one is doing, Vimalakirti declares. Meeting Vimalakirti, each disciple has been shaken out of complacency in their practice, but they remain confused about what is wholesome and unwholesome in their own expression.

[09:00]

Knowing better than to have a false confidence and afraid to meet him, In his illness, they withdraw themselves, turning away from the Buddha's request. Perhaps I can say that we know this feeling. These are disciples of the Buddha and practices running through it. It's because our practice matters to us that our hearts can become sick in our own confusion. We can see ourselves grasping for remedies without knowing the true medicine, and we can taste our self-obsession in the midst of our self-doubt. Indeed, this very taste is at the center of it. In case 84 of the Blue Cliff Record, called Vimalakirtis Nonduality, It's like being up on a 10,000-fathom cliff. If you can give up your life and leap off, you can meet Bhimala Kirti in person.

[10:04]

If you can't give it up, you're like a ram caught in a fence." Ouch. Karl Brunholtz calls his book the Heart Attack Sutra for this reason. called to the teaching of emptiness. The disciples become panicked and afraid and have an emotional heart attack. The Bhimala Kirti Sutra opens with the disciples who, in their confusion, are fearful of losing control. Writes Bhigu Bodhi describing four of what are known of the 62 wrong views. The first three equivocators place a special prize on peace of mind. The first two even display a certain degree of moral scrupulousness.

[11:06]

One has fear of making a false statement, the other of giving way to desire or aversion. The third does not take a stand because he's afraid of being challenged and refuted by others. while the fourth equivocates out of sheer dullness and stupidity. There's a reason why the sutra begins with the doubts and hesitations of students on the path. These hesitations have to do with facing a challenge in your practice. These are disciples. They are of some realization, and yet they can feel in their bodies the different textures of their own hesitations and withdrawal. When our emotions feel thick to us, clouding our vision, might there be a difference possible between personal emotion and true feeling right there in the midst of our suffering? Joan Sutherland describes the value of what she refers to as endarkenment.

[12:13]

Endarkenment is the heart that breaks open to life rests comfortably on the unfathomable mystery of existence and is easy with uncertainty, complexity, and what courses underground. Enlightenment and endarkenment are both essential to awakening. And Vimalakirti was one of the earliest voices for including the dark, an inclusion that makes awakening whole. Vimalakirti's story continues. After his disciples withdraw in their confusion, the Buddha turns to Bodhisattva Manjushri and asks him to pay a visit to Vimalakirti on his sickbed. Manjushri is able to follow his request, although he too feels that Vimalakirti is difficult to respond to.

[13:16]

Hearing that Manjushri and 32,000 others are to join him, Vimalakirti clears out of his 10 by 10 foot room of all servants and furnishings. And when Manjushri enters the room, Vimalakirti can immediately see that there's no self clinging in his walk. He neither arrives from the past nor heads into the future. Manjushri knows his own walking and is without doubt. Vimalakirti praises Manjushri for his deportment and emptiness, and they begin a dialogue of questions and answers, in which Vimalakirti states that because the world is sick, so is he. Manjushri can understand that clinging to forms and concepts, the basis of our own ideas, can make us so ill that we don't know our own walking.

[14:30]

With compassion in his heart, he wants to learn from Vimalakirti's experience and from the power of his own practice. Manjushri asks, how can we use emptiness for emptiness? Recall the earlier Buddha field where Sariputra is dismayed by the impure world around him. Nothing but what is high, what is low and defilements all around. It is as though Vimalakirti has taken the defilements of that perceived external world into his own body and become sick with them. Yet his Buddha field is a field of emptiness, holding illness, watching for it and offering it to others freely in their healing. Like a real dupe, Sariputra walks into the empty room and the first thing he wonders is, where's our chairs?

[15:38]

Immediately in his mind, Sariputra has peopled the room in form, has come standing in his own form and seeks his place in the Buddha field. Manjushri now, Vimalakirti's accomplice in meeting illness with illness, gives Vimalakirti the name of the guy who makes the biggest, finest chairs in the universe, and Vimalakirti telepathically orders them. With great show, 32,000 massive golden chairs instantly appear in the 10 by 10 foot room of Vimalakirti's home. These chairs are so large that everyone has to change the shape of their body entirely in order to be able to sit in one of them. And while most bodhisattvas are able to become a mile high in order to reach the seat, Sariputra and the other beginner bodhisattvas can't.

[16:47]

Form could only be in relation to themselves and they feel stuck. Manjushri and Vimalakirti are pressuring them, using emptiness for emptiness. They're jostling them out of their complacency Easy for them, the entire universe can fit into a mustard seed, but Sariputra is stuck in the world of form and can't see his way out of it. Using emptiness for emptiness, Vimalakirti skillfully jostles Sariputra even further out of his complacency in practice. When Vimalakirti speaks with Manjushri in order to instruct him on how actually to go about this. He explains that in order to use emptiness for emptiness, it must be sought in the 62 wrong views. All the hosts of Mara and the 62 wrong views are Vimalakirti's servants.

[17:56]

The wrong views are speculations about what is past and what is future. These are the ways that our grasping self occurs in speculations. We've already met the equivocators, four of these 62 wrong views, who are stuck in the grip of their own past conditioning. How is it that form and formations are not an enemy but our servant? In order to sit in Vimalakirti's chairs, it will take some intimacy with shape-shifting. This is how we can acknowledge and learn from ancient twisted karma without grasping to form in either the past, the present, or the future. I was once given the assignment to find an animal that I felt drawn to

[18:58]

I went to Golden Gate Park and I studied the bison, giant hulking creatures with their heads so low to the ground. In time, I was asked to be this animal, to contort my body into an expression of the bison, to fall out of my usual contours into an intentional imagined space of a body, and to relive a traumatic event in this new animal form. The true feeling of human agency and power and being present for what had been overwhelming and confusing sensations was made possible because I was jostled out of any story in this new form. Being present to myself in this way, in leaving my own standing in form, I could experience the body as something that can have an almost more geological shifting movement than personal emotions can have. Loving kindness meditation does this for us too.

[20:07]

Between the poles of affection and aversion, a friend and an enemy, the very directed intention of loving kindness arises from the karmic condition of life And affection and aversion can fall away sometimes quite quickly and sometimes not for something that is cooler and larger, but that is still a shifting of temperatures, at times more contoured than not, more tethered than not, more textured than not, moving and changing in the mysterious shifting of karmic conditions unknown to us, shifting and fresh, held in open awareness and in form, feeling completeness as well as the edges of incomplete feeling. This too is more geologic than personal. I'm using the word geological for the feeling of deep time beyond our human time.

[21:10]

which is also no more than a concept that helps us to imagine how karmic conditioning extends beyond us and yet expresses through us, and not as isolated forms seeking their way in the world. When our feeling is not so contained by the grasping feeling of self, we can share more and more the feeling of our interconnectedness, which includes our personal suffering and that of others. Joan Sutherland says it beautifully when she writes, Whatever pain we're experiencing is a little shard of the world's suffering that's been put into our care. Vimalakirti states, In contemplating the body, one should realize that the body does not transcend illness and illness does not transcend the body. And that this illness and this body are neither new nor old, this is called wisdom.

[22:21]

For one's body to be ill but never die is called skillful means. To think that there are correct paths and wrong views is a duality. It's a tricky thing to imagine in our minds that samsara and nirvana are one. We can't really grok this as an idea. It doesn't work for me. But you can't really know your own walking without understanding something of this in your practice. The Four Noble Truths tell us that there is suffering, that we can investigate its arising, its cause, that there is cessation, and that there is a path. It's pretty normal to think of this as some kind of sequence with the qualifying danger that there might be a self in eternalism in the now I am free part.

[23:34]

Vimalakirti's Four Noble Truths are not of this nature. They are occurring all at once. It's the whole truth, the whole shebang. You can see the difference in this between the first question in the sutra. Would the World Honored One please explain to the bodhisattvas the practices by which a land is purified? And Manjushri's question, how does emptiness use emptiness? The way that I would put it, and that I think Dogen would put it, is that when suffering is not bound in self, we can understand our own walking. And even when our suffering is bound up in self, we're still walking. It's just that in that moment, we don't know it. For this reason too, whether we walk forward in compassion or backward in studying the self, there's no turning or being turned, no real backwards or forwards, just this.

[24:49]

Sometimes it may feel like we need Manjushri's sword for cutting away our delusions as though cutting something off. And sometimes it may feel like Manjushri's sword is cutting all into one. I love Dogen. I read Dogen a lot. But in order to understand him, I think we could use Vimalakirti's help, and maybe even Dogen himself could use it. I've been referring to knowing your own walking, and I found this in Dogen's Mountains and Waters Sutra. If you doubt mountains walking, you do not know your own walking. His language is generally more serene than in the Vimalakirti Sutra, but I mention it here for this. Walking beyond and walking within are both done on water.

[25:55]

All mountains walk with their toes on waters and make them splash. This to me echoes the boink of the Buddha's toe dancing in the field of emptiness. For Dogen, it will always be expressed as nothing lacking continuous practice. And that is what Vimalakirti is describing as well. But we can't be mountains walking on water unless we are very intimate with our own suffering, something that Dogen is poetically remiss to say, and that Vimalakirti says so well. Suffering is at the heart of our practice. And without knowing this, you can never investigate the mountains thoroughly. Yeah.

[27:07]

Do you have questions? Sure, if there's time... I'm not sure what happens next. I don't know what time it is either. We have about 15 minutes. 15 minutes? Wow, okay. I'll say that I had a funny conversation on the way over with someone who also writes Dharma talks, and I was saying, yeah, there's always that moment where you don't... think you've really got it. You know, there's this kind of panicky feeling. And there's a wholesomeness about that. You know, that fear is kind of a wholesome fear. Vimalakirti enjoys that as an important way to relate to our responsibility. Hi, thank you.

[28:14]

Can you talk maybe more about endarkening and mention again who it was that was talking about? Yeah, Joan Sutherland has written a really beautiful, small, skinny book on the Vimalakirti Sutra. And endarkening, what's valuable about Vimalakirti Sutra is... that at the very center of the teaching, the teacher is presenting himself as ill. And that illness is our own tendency for objectifying formations, which causes so much trouble having to do mostly with speculations about the past and the future. And in many other ways that you can describe how this occurs. And I was comparing it to Dogen's essay because when you read Dogen, it's like so flowery and nice and it's all about the mountains walking on, you know, everybody wants to be a mountain walking on water.

[29:23]

Like, that's so cool. But Vimalakirti is, you know, in his sickbed and inviting everyone to bring him their illness. And so the value of it Joan Sutherland is quick to say is that this is the gristle of our practice. This is where the real traction is for us in our life. And that there aren't that many sutras that go there to the degree that Bhimala Kirti is willing to represent illness and our suffering. It's at the very center of our practice. And there's a way in which... people can categorize practitioners that in more contemporary teachings is avoided. And so something I also appreciate about Joan Sutherland is the way that it's so personal, our suffering, and yet it's so relatable for each one of us.

[30:41]

you know, no matter what kind of suffering it is. And so, you know, in the tradition, there's this enjoyment of enlightenment as something that's achieved. And, you know, suffering is kind of on the down low, but it's really at the center of our practice. And so endarkenment is a way to speak to pain, speak to the pain that this human life can bring, universally and eternally. Yeah. And when you mentioned that there was like a way to categorize different practitioners that we don't use now, do you mean like... The Shravakas, Pratyaka Buddhas are the dominant ones that I can think of, and they're, you know, practitioners who have certain kinds of limits.

[31:44]

So the Shravaka, you know, the question, can you tell us how to practice, is kind of like a Shravaka question. or not being able to get up in the chair, you know, because he's so attached to form in relation to himself. And then Pratyeka Buddhas are Buddhas who are practicing only for themselves. They haven't turned over their practice and compassion for other beings in the way that a Bodhisattva does. So those are... But, you know, we are those things. it's not like we're not those things. And to talk about them as, you know, very definite stages in practice, it doesn't, you know, I think that at different times where this, you know, it's like it happens. Yeah. So that's a more contemporary and I think compassionate way of relating to pain in our lives.

[32:49]

Yeah. Thank you. You mentioned something around how we have some sort of limited notion of time and how there's a more vast kind of time. Could you explain a little bit more what you meant by that? Yeah, yeah. Time doesn't really exist. It's a concept that we have invented. And... And there are all different ways in which we shape it and mold it in order to reflect our human experience or our practical needs. Mostly based on consensus, right? So universal time is a kind of consensus. But what's happened in the way that people research the world

[34:00]

is that there's human history, and then there's something called geological time that is exponentially million-fold bigger than the span of human life on Earth. And so people refer to geological time as a way of relating to our own experience of time, because our own experience of time can surpass what we think of as human beings' time on Earth. So, you know, like, what do I mean by that? Well, it's... something that comes up in our spiritual practice. You know, spiritual practice is known for a kind of vastness in time and space that is what shows us the vitality of our interconnection and the impermanence and arising of causal conditions.

[35:15]

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for your talk. And I'm curious about becoming the buffalo. Yeah. And how, if I'm understanding it, is that like, it reminds me of a shamanic practice. And I was thinking, is that what you mean by ways to meet the indarkment? That was a very specific method or tool that I was offered by someone who does practice in a more shamanic and visually oriented tradition than our own. And I think that the...

[36:25]

the depth and surprise of it were that there was this kind of grotesque form that I was putting my body in that was so outside of anything that I would ever do in public, let's say, you know, like just totally bizarre. And that the way that... energy was running through my body had completely changed because of this. And so when emotion arose there was a presencing in my awareness and openness to it that instead of it being a personal emotion it became very fresh energy. with its own qualities that were large. And there was a kind of power in that that I didn't know.

[37:28]

And to understand our karmic conditioning as that is very releasing. Thank you. Yes. Given that this way offers release from suffering, why is it that Buddhism isn't more evangelical, if that question makes sense? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Why not scream it from the rooftops that there is... Well, I think that... Our sutras are screaming it. Things like the Diamond Sutra and the Platform Sutra were printed. It was the first book. So there's that. I think that there's a concern for having the methods of persuasion become conditioning.

[38:44]

and an extortion of someone's dedication. And that the effort is more in skillfully, you know, how to use emptiness for emptiness, right? So that people can taste practice for themselves and without that rising up from within you, bodhicitta, without feeling that energy in your body, and having a, without trusting it, but having it be able to pull you into your practice and support you, then it becomes something closer to conditioned. Does that make sense?

[39:45]

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Probably do one more question. Hi, Catherine. Hi, Lisa. Thank you. Really good to hear you talk and just curious what causes your world to sparkle. Oh, goodness. You know, I mean it when the smell of the grass in the floor is the Buddha field. Wherever I am, there's something that is that opens my body and my heart. Sometimes I have to be more determined in grounding myself in it.

[40:50]

But for the most part, delight in this amazing world that we live in and the people that we share our practice with. I have my own ways of... dropping out, if you will. You know, like, I watch Netflix. Right? And I can't say that about Netflix. I definitely can't. I mean, every once in a while, yeah, there's something marvelous. But it's really not even anything to write about. You know? So, yeah, I'm kind of curious about what that is. Like, why turn away? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And, yeah, it helps that we feel pain.

[41:58]

Without pain there wouldn't be wisdom. And the sparkle comes from that. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:32]

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