surpass penetrating and perfect dharma, is rarely met with even in a hundred thousand million kalbas, having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept. I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Well, good evening. So before I... give the talk that I was thinking about giving, I will tell you a story.

[15:11]

One of the things that I do regularly is drive my daughter and some other girls to Lowell as a carpool, right? And I usually do it in the morning. And the time, the... day I do it on is a little slippery it's not totally clear so I had been working on mostly house projects for the last few months and not riding my bike and I was determined this week to go out and ride my bike and I looked at my schedule for the week and I realized that Tuesday was pretty free and that Wednesday which is when I usually do these things I had this drama talk, right? So I thought, okay, I'll do it on Tuesday. And then Monday night, the girl that, one of the people that I drive carpool, drive for a carpool, and who also does a bunch of driving, she wrote me, texted me, and said, oh, can you drive tomorrow?

[16:27]

I'm not able to do it, and I can drive on Wednesday. And I thought, okay, fine. And I looked at my calendar. I had this vague idea that I had something going on on Wednesday. But I looked at my calendar, and of course, my calendar on my phone started at, you know, 6 in the morning. Actually, earlier, because it normally has that every other week morning doshi here, right? And, you know, it runs to the bottom of the screen, and the bottom of the screen is like... late afternoon or something I thought so I'm free on Wednesday I'll go back ready on Wednesday and so I got up this morning and I got up really early and I drove a really long way north to this town called Williams and then drove into the mountains and got the bike out of the drove to the edge of the mountains got the bike out of the car and started riding and it was the first time I'd ridden in months and I was just

[17:30]

so incredibly excited to do it and I wasn't sure what I was going to do and so I would ride on for a while and then say well I could take this road or I could take this other road and some of the times I thought I know I'll just stay out all day and then you know come back at night and so on and so forth and but because I was not in spectacular shape not having ridden my bike for months I you know reason prevailed and I decided I was going to settle at about 60 miles of riding. I got about to mile 40. I was in this town, little tiny town called Sites, sitting on the ground eating an apple. It was a tasty apple. I looked. I don't remember if it was my watch or my phone. This was about three. I There's a little notation on it, either here or on my phone that said, 7.30, Dharma talk.

[18:39]

I was like, no! So I kind of did some calculating, and I figured if I just kicked ass all the way to the car, I might be able, and there wasn't huge amounts of traffic I might be able to make it. So I got on my bike, and I just started pounding away. And it was... It ended up being an hour of just really pedaling incredibly hard, and the road was a mix of pavement and gravel, and there were headwinds, and some of the gravel roads were extremely bumpy, so I had to slow down, and so it was really difficult, and by the time I got to the car, I had really worked out, and I was literally reeling from exhaustion, and Then somewhere along the line, I realized that part of the problem was that my robes were actually at my house, right? Because I gave the Dharma talk at Hartford Street last weekend, and I brought my robes home.

[19:42]

So I'd have to go home first, get my robes, and then come here. That couldn't possibly work. So I thought, I know. I'll do the talk in my cycling kit, which would be like a first. No one has ever done a San Francisco Zen Center Dharma talk wearing, I mean, to be fair, it wasn't like little skimpy bib shorts and a tiny jersey. It was a little bit more complicated than that. But basically, no one has ever done their Dharma talk in cycling kit. And I was pretty happy about that. But then I noticed, actually, as I proceeded, I would occasionally, the driving instructions back in and I noticed that the drive was looking shorter and shorter. And so I thought, I know, I can go home and get my rope. So in the end, you didn't have to endure me giving this talk in my cycling kit.

[20:47]

And furthermore, I kind of made it The only issue is that all that time that I was supposed to be preparing this talk, I was either larking about in the inner valleys of the coast range or driving with this sort of demonic, obsessed quality in order to get here on time. So... I haven't prepared this talk, but I'm going to give it anyway. Recently, one of the cons I've been looking at is this one. It's case 17 in the Blue Cliff Record. It's Xianglin's meaning of the patriarchs coming from the West.

[21:47]

And in it, not surprisingly, a monk asked Xianglin, well, okay, so what's the meaning of the patriarchs coming from the West? And those of you who aren't totally steeped in this stuff, when the in the late Tang and early Song dynasty, the sort of scholarly crew that were in the process of creating the literature of Zen, basically, decided they needed a lineage of teachers all the way back to the Buddha and up to what was then the present day, right, in China. And since, obviously, Buddhism was... originally founded in South Asia and not in China.

[22:54]

They had to come up with a first ancestor in China, a first patriarch in China. And the guy they decided on... was this sort of semi-legendary... I mean, he might have been a real person. If you read various scholars, some people say he wasn't, some people say he was. But in any case, he's credited with doing a lot of things. And, you know, he has place of honor in the Blue Cliff Record, the book that I got this koan from. He's in the first koan, right? And in it, he has this sort of famous encounter with the emperor where... he comes in to meet the emperor, and the emperor says, hey, I'm a great Buddhist emperor, I've done all this stuff, what's the merit in that? And Bodhi Harmon goes, no merit, it's all empty. And then the emperor says, okay, well, what's the highest meaning of the holy truth?

[24:00]

Which was a legit question, and had a kind of legit answer. And Bodhidharma says, empty, not holy. And then the emperor, maybe a little vex, says, who are you anyway? And he goes, I don't know. And then he turns around and he walks out. And... He walks north and he crosses the river, I think the Yangtze River, and lands in the next kingdom to the north where there's this sort of famous, now famous monastery called Shaolin. And he settled down there and supposedly sat in a cave for nine years staring at the wall.

[25:01]

And one of the stories about him, which is related to this koan, is that he became very vexed with his eyes for closing. Like he was constantly like, you know, I don't know. There are some people who regularly nod out when they're sitting. And clearly Bodhidharma was one of those. His eyes would close and... and he'd have to shake it off and sit up, and then his eyes would close. And he got so angry at them that he tore them off and threw them on the ground. And if you look at pretty much all representations of Bodhidharma, first of all, in sort of classical form, we have this gigantic, well, we did when we had a wall up there, this gigantic picture of Bodhidharma. glowering like this, and with his eyes wide.

[26:05]

And these little statuettes, they're called daruma in Japanese, that you can get that they're a thing where you push them and they bounce back up again, because he was a pretty springy guy. They also have these wide staring eyes. So it's... Oh, and the last part is... according to the legend, where his eyebrows fell, tea plants sprouted. So the message there is, if you're seeing a lot of zazen and you want to stay awake, drink some tea. Or, in this day and age, coffee, let's be clear. If you go to Tassajara, our monastery, There's a huge urn of coffee. But anyway, maybe then it's not surprising, but when a monk asked this guy, Xianglin, what's the meaning of Bodhidharma or the patriarchs coming from the West?

[27:23]

He essentially came from Pakistan, I think, or what's now Pakistan. I'll say one more thing about that. That was a standard question. This literature that I'm talking about is just a huge collection of stories of interactions between teachers and students, teachers and teachers, students and students, people and things and so on that are held up in one way or another as skillful or significant. Or maybe not skillful, but significant. And there are a lot of standard questions in the literature. One of them is, what is Buddha, for example? But another one is, what's the meaning of bodhidharmas coming from the West, basically?

[28:25]

And if you think about it, it's really... kind of a metaphorical stand-in for what's the essential meaning or essential part of Zen practice, right? And almost everyone that answers it answers it by pointing at Zazen practice. So there's a really famous case where a monk asks two different teachers this question about And the first teacher says, oh, hand me that Zafu over there. And the guy hands him the Zafu, and the teacher hits him with it. And then later, and he says, you can hit me all you like, but there's no meaning of the patriarchs coming from the West, right? And next he does it with this famous teacher, Linji, who was really famous for hitting people and for hitting them hard.

[29:27]

And he asks the same question, and Linji says, oh... I dropped my sitting brace. Could you hand me this sitting brace? Which is this thing that they use in India, among other places, where it sits down here kind of in your lap, and it sticks up like this. It has a little platform on top. You can put your hands on it and rest your chin on it, and kind of it makes you... You can even go to sleep while you're meditating, basically, with it. And it also helps you sit up. But... So he gets walked with that, and he says, yeah, okay, fine, but there's still no meaning, right? So it almost always points to Zazen, and so you won't be surprised to hear that Xianglin pointed to Zazen, and he said this thing that's, well, okay, so in the translation that I almost always read, it says, it's a pretty elaborate sentence. It says, sitting for a long time

[30:28]

becomes toilsome. Which is true. And refers back to the exploits of Bodhidharma in this really sort of neat way. And also is kind of a, you could think of it as an encouragement or as just as holding up the zazen practice as the core, you know, toilsome or not, as the core of Bodhidharma's teaching, which we've carried down to this day, right? And I always sort of believed the translation, because the guy that translated it is really way better at all this stuff than I am, and he's really quite good, and I trust him, and so on and so forth. But I was... I was interested to note that when you look at the original Chinese, it's a four-character thing, right?

[31:34]

Phrase. And the first two really are sit for a long time, right? The next two, though, are very interesting. And the last one, yeah, means work or toil and a few other things, right? But the third one, it would be hard to interpret it the way Thomas Clary interpreted it. It may be such an obvious reference to Bodhidharma, and you could pull that... that meaning out of it, and maybe everybody understood it that way or something like that. But when you look at it, it looks a lot like, essentially, sit a long time, do the work. Or maybe, even better, sit a long time, get it done, basically. It's more like that. And the third character also has a kind of celebratory or phrasing connotation, like...

[32:43]

You know, like, it can even be just, okay, which is kind of great. So, you know, it's been a long time. Work, okay. So, anyway, it kind of, particularly in the context of the story that I originally told, brings to mind this question about What exactly is the work of zazen? When you sit... One way to look at it is that it embodies, you're completely embodying this complicated fact about the human condition, which is that we hardly do anything without some kind of purpose or aspiration or function or something like that, right?

[34:10]

And If you read, again, the literature that I'm talking about, the Zen literature, it's full of aspirational formulas. The first case, not the Blue Cliff Record, but another one, the famous Mu Koan. When you read the commentaries, it's like the guy that collected, made this collection and wrote all the commentaries is saying things like, you know, what you have to do in order to, you know, realize the function of practice is you have to cross the barrier that's set up by this story, right? And If you do that, you'll be able to walk along with the famous Zen teacher in the story, his name is Jojo, and see through his eyes and all that sort of thing.

[35:25]

He says, wouldn't that be great? Okay, well then you've got to do the work. And he says, the way you do the work is you make the story, you know, like meditating on the story be like... trying to swallow a red-hot iron ball, right? You can't swallow it down and you can't cough it up, right? That's a horrific metaphor, let's be clear. And then, you know, the commentator says, and, you know, if you do that, eventually something's going to happen and then it'll be great, right? But, so there... It's full of aspiration. Zen practice is fundamentally an aspirational activity. Who would come do this thing on a day-to-day basis without at least a few thoughts like, I want to be more compassionate.

[36:41]

When I... teach Zazen instruction. And I've been doing that for years, right? That every time I do it, there's some cohort of people comes in and sometimes it's a lot, you know? And when I kind of try to get a feel for why they're here, they all have these really poignant and wonderful things I want to have a calm mind. Yeah, who doesn't, right? I want to have my relationships be more on an even keel, right? Yeah, exactly. Wonderful. And yet... Suzuki Roshi, the founder of this school, and just about everybody else, says when you sit, in order to really kind of come to the heart of the practice, you have to sit without any gaining idea.

[37:59]

So how do you do that? How can you... where your aspiration and the sort of conventional mind is a categorizer, calculator, measurement device, and planner, right? And you can't actually stop it, right? So it's going to be sitting there going, you know, this period of Zazen is not very good. The last one was better. Or, wow, this one is great. I think I've arrived. Or, you know, et cetera. All these things, right? And none of those are helpful, right? And your conventional cognitive faculty brings a whole host of ideas about...

[39:02]

the nature of Zen practice, what's supposed to happen, what's not supposed to happen, what I should be doing now, and so on and so forth. And almost none of those ideas are fundamentally helpful. They may be helpful in a provisional way, but when they become an object of clinging or pursuit, then all of a sudden they're not helpful, right? And So one way to think about the work of Zazen is that it brings you up against this apparent paradox. It's not actually a paradox, but it smells like a paradox initially, up against this paradox over and over and over again. And the... not the first time, and not the tenth time, and not the hundredth time, and maybe not the thousandth time, but hopefully, at some point, you see what's going on and you let go, right?

[40:13]

And some other mental faculty sort of steps or rises up in the middle of your experience and shows itself, basically. This sort of other mode of being that's not concerned with calculation, long-range planning, categorization, and all the rest, that sort of thing, and that takes in the world in a kind of measureless, receptive, and flexible way. And that, you know, time shares with your everyday cognitive faculty. Or maybe, no, even that's false. That is constantly present along with your everyday regular cognitive faculty.

[41:24]

It's just, you know... see it because we don't see it a lot of the time because we're always tangled up in measuring and planning, basically. So that's one way to look at the work of Zazen. I hate to ask this, but does anybody know what time it is? 8.15. Does that mean I have 15 minutes? Wow, I think I can finish this up in 15 minutes. The other result of my story that I told you initially is that I'm appallingly thirsty. Because it was actually really hot up in the inner valleys of the Coast Range today.

[42:25]

So that was really good. And then there's a... That's the sort of short-term work. And then there's a kind of long-term work. And the long-term work is this. Once you're aware that there's more to the... experience of being human than our everyday cognitive faculty, you start to realize that for the rest of your life, your practice and really your life is gonna play itself out in this sort of tangle between these two modes of being. basically. They're intimately intertwined and inseparable.

[43:32]

Experience arises in one and it affects the other and vice versa. The nature of insight is you have an experience, it lands, and then you're your everyday cognitive faculty takes it up and it changes your conceptual framework, right? That's insight. And like I said, it goes both ways. So there's this, you're living in this, you're living in the context of the relationship between these two modes of being. And there's a... that I'm not going to go into too much detail about, that tries to describe various aspects of this relationship. And it sets it up kind of as a trajectory, but it's not really a trajectory. But one of the things, one of the first stanza really is kind of like about the first time that ever dawns on you that there's this other mode, right?

[44:43]

And it basically says... No wonder you don't recognize it. You're still ruminating on your sketchy past, basically. But over time, and this is what happens in the second stanza, the second stanza is something like she gets up, she's wandering around the house, and she turns a corner and there's a mirror. Naturally, she recognizes herself, but she still mistakes her reflection for her head. The point is that because it's ever-present in the context of a life and practice, this other mode shows up whenever it wants to, basically, in your attention or maybe when you turn a corner. And you become aware that actually it's always there in either at the fringes of or in the light of your attention, basically.

[46:12]

And it goes on for a while and then finally the last stanza goes on for a while and mainly talks about two things. It talks about the specifics of the relationship between these two modes is that they're connected and they influence each other and even though some of the stuff that happens when you're some of the experiences that arise as a result of being aware in this way are baffling to your everyday cognitive faculty, they're still a connection. And then there's a stanza about how it is that you work with this. And then the final stanza is essentially ends with everyone... wanted to be extraordinary. But in the end, you come home and you sit by the fire.

[47:16]

So it's like the to discover comfort and a kind of skill with the human condition, in the presence of the human condition. And and to bring the unconditioned appreciation that's the baseline of this other mode to bear on the actual arising of your life, right? And the lives of others nearby. Yeah. So, does anybody have any questions about that? Comments? Worries? Go ahead. Oh, sorry.

[48:21]

No, I don't. Great. Thank you. Very fascinating. Loved, especially the grand finale of the two modes of being and how Zazen... is a pathway to the beginner's mind. But how do you stay in the beginner's mind in your normal day-to-day life? Can you only glimpse it when you are in zazen or in your normal work life, play life, family life, you can still have that beginner's mind? So that is an extremely good question. And it's interesting because the, you know, so I talked about the first case in the Blue Cliff Record. You know, the second case addresses that directly, exactly for the reasons that you're bringing up, right? And so this teacher that I mentioned before, Jia Zhou, he's quoting an ancient scripture and he's saying, oh, you know, this stuff is easy.

[49:29]

You just avoid picking and choosing. And then he says, the minute you open your mouth, you're picking and choosing. And so you're right. When you're with your family or work or friends or whatever, your everyday cognitive faculty is... is in full bloom, right? And it's making categories and it's making plans and all the rest of that sort of thing. And what Jia Jia says is this. He says, okay, so what I've found is that I can't actually stay in beginner's mind. So the question is, do you preserve anything or not? And there's this exchange where the monk goes, well, okay, since you say you don't... abide in clarity, or beginner's mind, what do you, what can you preserve? And Jaja goes, I don't know either. And then it goes on.

[50:31]

But I think the point in the long run is, yes, beginner's mind... can be present in the middle of everyday activity, it's probably not there. You can't... If you're, you know... This guy over here, my teacher, thank you. Once, we were having dhokasana, and he says, you know, when you're talking to your daughter, you probably shouldn't be counting your breath. In other words... something else is more required, something more suitable to the circumstances, the compelling circumstances in the moment. And my experience of it is this, right? One of the functions of zazen is that it trains your body and mind such that actual experience, and in particular experience that's familiar, right?

[51:42]

can act as a prompt to open the senses, open the attention, and bring up this other mode of being in the middle of everyday life. And that's tremendously helpful. But again, it doesn't stay there, right? Because then you go back to talking, basically. But it really is helpful. There's a number of ways that it's helpful. But the main one is that when that mode is present and your attention is on it, it has this effect on the imperatives of your... everyday cognitive faculty. It's like the, you know, a lot of times people go through life responding completely out of habit, and it's almost, when you ask them, why did you do that, right?

[52:47]

And they'll say, oh, I don't know, I just got mad, and so I did it, right? Or something, right? The... this other mode sees a much broader range of possibilities than your habitual response. And it softens the emotional drivers. It doesn't make them go away, but it softens the emotional drivers on our habitual and sort of everyday cognition in a way that's useful. It allows for more flexible and maybe skillful interactions with people and with people and things. It also allows for experiences in the middle of everyday life that totally turn you inside out.

[53:50]

And they come up. How often do they come up? I don't know. A fair amount. Anyway, does that help? Yep. It's very powerful. Thank you. Anyone else? Do we have time for another question? Okay. Okay. Thank you so much for coming. It's great to see you, and I'm really happy I made it. I have to reveal one more dark secret, and it is this. I am the only person, at least that I know of, in the history of San Francisco Zen Center to completely forget that I was scheduled to give a Dharma talk. And basically, I was scheduled to do one of these Wednesday night drama talks, and my family was in town, and then I kind of got muddled, and we went out to dinner, and in the middle of dinner, Lucy Schell, who isn't here, but who is a great friend, called me up and said, oh, Zachary, are you coming?

[55:13]

I was like, think i could make it and so they did this thing where they they got three people got together and gave these sort of round robin mini talks or something like that and but but my my shame about it was astonishingly powerful and i have to say it was it was like it bubbling cauldron at the back of my mind um during during the whole drive down here for exactly that reason so anyway now you know my deepest darkest most horrible secret so anyway may our intention equally extend to every

[56:08]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_93.8