This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Before I start tonight, I wanted to remember two people that have been very important to my life and important to Zen's life in San Francisco. The first being Paul Cantner, of the Jefferson Airplane, who died this week. And his son, Alex Cantner, was a student of Mark Lancaster's year and is an ordained priest by Alan Sanaki. And Paul always supported these temples and his son in his Buddhist pursuits. his son is now a priest up in Sonoma County with his own little sangha.

[01:06]

So I just want to say thank you to Paul and remember him. And Michael Jamvold, I don't know if any of you all knew Michael. Anybody know Michael? Michael was here when I first came to Zen Center in the early 80s. and he and Isan sort of left together. And he was a great supporter of Isan's. Isan started the Hartford Street Zen Center and the Maitreya Itz hospice. And then Michael went and practiced in Japan for the next 30 years. And he had his own small temple there, a little gaijin with his own small temple. And he... passed away a few days ago in Japan, and we had a memorial service for him this morning at Dragon's Leap Temple, and I think there'll be a memorial service for him here at Beginner's Mind Temple sometime in the next couple weeks.

[02:15]

I think there's one at Hartford Street on Friday morning. Michael was one of those people that... has a talent of finding the right person to put with the right person and to make something happen out of the combustion of those two personalities that was for the benefit of all beings. And he was gifted in that way, and that's a wonderful gift, and we will miss him and that gift. And... I know he's finding his way as well as Paul through the Bardo and into the next level. So thank you, Michael. Thank you, Paul. And we remember you. So I didn't really know what to talk about tonight.

[03:17]

I thought about it a lot. And then I thought, well, why don't I just talk about one of the most compelling questions that I've had in my Zen practice over the years. And that is, how does wisdom co-arise, or why does wisdom co-arise with compassion? Um... Zen in both its Rinzai and Soto traditions, perhaps until the 20th century, has always been very enlightenment gold. No matter what you may have heard, it's always been that way. And at the same time, there's been teachers and practitioners that have...

[04:24]

been more understanding of compassion and wisdom co-arising. I want to read you a couple of koans. They're really short, so this is not going to be anything deep. ... Sometimes when people first experience wisdom, it feels very lonely there. You feel very by yourself. All phenomena has become equal. There's no inside, there's no outside, there's no past, there's no future. And a lot of people used to stop there.

[05:29]

I don't even think it's an important place. I don't even think you need to go there. Certainly there's no steps in Buddhism, but it's more of a trap than anything else. Some famous people have been trapped for years in what Hakon called the glacier, the icy glacier of emptiness. as late as the 9th century, a monk asked, what is it when one is solitary and independent? The master said, still sick. Or the monk, Quenri, said to Kaoshan. Kaoshan was one of the co-founders of the Soto Zen tradition. I am alone and destitute.

[06:32]

Master, please give me some assistance. Kaoshan said, Worthy Ru, come here. Sounds like a Shosan ceremony. Step up. Kunri came forward. Kaoshan said, You've already drank three cups of Kwan province house wine, yet you still say your wet lips are not wet. It's almost like the... Christian tradition where they mention your cup runneth over. Your cup runneth over and you still think you're all alone and destitute. So there's another little koan from this book. This is a wonderful book. This is Ferguson's Zen's Chinese heritage which is every koan you ever wanted instead of being put forth in the Gateless Gate or Blue Cliff Record Way where it's a selection of koans Mr. Ferguson has put them chronologically and not only are they chronological but they're also wonderful translations of the koans I recommend anybody taking a look at it if you like koans and then we get to a teacher that really is trying to teach his students something

[07:56]

Jingxing asked a monk, what's that sound outside? The monk said, the sound of a snake eating a toad. Jingxing said, when you acknowledge the suffering of beings, then there are more suffering beings. So, I don't know if I've really explained my problem. So... Maybe I can get some feedback because we're such a small group tonight. My problem is it's really easy to get caught in phenomena and miss being compassionate. And I don't really... It doesn't help me to buy into all of the paramitas and the precepts.

[09:00]

What helps me is when I feel it coming up through my body through wisdom itself, where compassion expresses itself without it even being asked for. Okay. Rob? If we recognize that and we see ourselves as part of it, is that what's giving rise to the compassion, that insight about our own situation? Or is it that we're actually somehow, you know,

[10:06]

deepening our understanding of others? If you feel this arising in your body, where does it arise? Well, I don't think that you can trace it back to anything more than the source. But I don't think that we... I think it arises just like smoke. There may be cause and effect, and there is cause and effect, but the cause is sitting zazen. Another way I would describe, you know, when I sit zazen for a long period of time, I'm in love with the world. I will walk down the street and feel like that everybody I see is just a reflection of myself. How does that happen? How does that happen in zazen? That's my question.

[11:08]

Let me put it that way. How does it happen that compassion coerizes with wisdom? Thich Nhat Hanh in his poem, which everybody here I'm sure is familiar with, Please Call Me By My True Names. Let me read it to you. Maybe it'll help me understand what I'm trying to talk about. Please call me by my true names. Don't say that I will depart tomorrow. Even today I am still arriving. So that's in some ways that little paragraph is a description of emptiness and the eternity, the eternal circle, the end cell. Look deeply. Every second I am arriving to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird with still fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding in itself in a stone.

[12:21]

I shall arrive in order to laugh and cry, to hear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly. I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond, and I am the grass snake that silently feeds on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my leg is as thin as bamboo sticks, and I am the arms merchant selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the 12-year-old girl refugee on a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the sea pirate, my heart yet not capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the Politburo with plenty of power in my hands. I am the man who has to pay his debt of blood to my people dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

[13:28]

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes the flowers bloom all over the earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four ocean. Please call me by my true names so I can hear all the cries and laughters at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names so I can wake up and the door of my heart should be left open, the door of compassion. So he mixes emptiness and compassion, duality and singleness all the way through that poem. And he explains it in a way that I can't explain it to myself. Julian, a question? That's exactly right.

[15:05]

Very good, Julie. I really want to turn this into a discussion because we're such a small group anyway. Shannon? Any thoughts? That's a good question because... Most of the time in our culture, we think of wisdom as something to be attained. Beginner's mind and wisdom in this sense is a little more like skinny dipping. It's like getting rid of stuff. I think that you can start...

[16:06]

your beginner's practice by letting go of concepts and language so that you can experience the universe, the now, the way it stretches into the past and the future without any conceptual barrier. And I don't think that's something that you grow or a brain cell you develop. It's kind of like getting rid of stuff. So as you de-evolve from being an expert, you grow into being a beginner. An expert, we've all heard Suzuki Roshi's quote,

[17:08]

but an expert really wants to hold on to his knowledge and not share it. You know, oh, I'm so smart. You know, I'm going to argue you and Locke with you until you fall asleep at the table. And in beginner's mind... you get rid of all your concepts and not just concepts about phenomena, but as you let that go, as you let phenomena go, you can see that you yourself are an empty vessel. Are you self-conscious about the wisdom about yourself?

[18:53]

I mean, are you self-aware of the wisdom about yourself? You have to have a lot of trust to give up all of your learned stuff. If I'm reading your question right, that's something that everybody develops in this practice at different times. But you can't... You can't preconceive emptiness or wisdom.

[20:03]

You have to trust it and let it go. I remember one of my friends, my roommate at Mount Baldy, we're not supposed to talk during sashim, but my roommate told me of this experience that he had. He said he went through... and he said, everything disappeared. I'm all by myself. What am I going to do? And Roshi essentially said for him just to trust that and have the courage to live in a space where he needed to, where he'd never been before and he had nothing to hold on to. Jump off the 100-foot pole. Yeah, if you're going into the situations where sometimes you have, you've learned something, then you're holding on to something extra.

[21:10]

Mornings, please. And you're all foreigners. Where are you from? Oh, see, William of Orange. I was having this discussion at dinner and they didn't understand why the Dutch wear orange, why it's orange. The Queen is orange? Oh, so that's her last name, like Bourbon or... Yeah, okay. Anyway, sorry to get off on that, but it's interesting that we were just talking about Holland, and then here you are. Yeah.

[22:15]

Poof, you manifested right here for us. Does somebody else want to... Yeah, you got me. That's exactly right.

[23:52]

You know, the Theravadans have all of these rules and they have almost 300 precepts that keeps them... A lot of the precepts are guides towards compassion. They have to have lists. Um... At least in our practice, in Soto Zen, we've cut it down to 10. Or if you want to add the Eightfold Path, you can keep adding more, but it doesn't get up to 300. But for me, it naturally arises, you know, the... I'm sort of ashamed to say this, but one of the interesting things about compassion that you can gauge, oh, you're getting fairly close, is that you'll be sitting on Sashin and the near enemy will pop up.

[25:00]

And what's the near enemy of compassion in the Sashin? What? Pity, no. For me, it's Eros. develop a crush on one of the servers. What? But pity is a good one. Pity is also a really good near enemy. But they're both right there. They're just not quite tuned in to compassion. You're headed in the right direction. But pity... involves some superiority of your being, right? And you're still holding yourself separate. Eros too.

[26:02]

You're holding yourself separate. It's just a different relationship. going back to sort of beginner's mind or expert mind, right, because I think the expert always wants to say, oh, am I being compassionate, or am I not, or what degree of compassion am I showing, or am I, you know, finally continuing those, whereas the beginner, the child, just acts out of an instinct for compassion, you know. Small children don't know, don't have a concept of that, they just do it in a natural way. People can act in a very unselfish way, you know, from beginner's mind, whereas the expert mind, which gets involved in these sort of finely tuning, oh, yes, I'm near compassion because wasn't I so great that I did this thing? Well, no.

[27:04]

Maybe it was a great thing, but that's not really the story. So the reflection, the self-reflection creates duality again between you and the compassionate object or between you and the compassionate act. Whereas the child just gives up his whatever, his fire engine just to be nice. Even if the person has a million dollars, he just wants to give that person the shiny fire engine. Yeah, compassion, like wisdom, has no self-reflection. Maybe that's enough. You know, if you're being compassionate from beginner's mind, then you don't need to applaud yourself.

[28:22]

It's just natural. And then, of course, there's fear. We have a lot of that in our society today because there are certain people, certain things, certain situations that provokes fear in us without us even being aware of it. Some of the times we are aware of it, but some of the times we're not self-aware that, oh, here comes a thuggish-looking person. I better duck into the corner store or cross the street. There's a famous story of young Trungpa. How are we doing there? Good. What? Oh, good.

[29:22]

There's a famous story of young Chengyang Trungpa. Is that right, Chengyang Trungpa? Is that right, Richard? He was recognized as a young Tolku, a young reincarnated holy one when he was a young boy, so he developed a big retinue that he carried around with him, a bunch of guys carrying his books and spectacles and whatever else they carry around on the plains of... Upper Tibet. And they were walking through a village one day and at the outskirts of the village there was a big giant mastiff staked to the ground and all the monks were like, oh, let's make a big wide circle around the mastiff that's barking its head off and is surely going to bite us. And they made the big round circle around and as they're getting out of reach of the mastiff, over the horizon, the mastiff breaks his chain and charges at all the people that are walking along.

[30:34]

And little 10-year-old Trungpa turns around and he runs straight at the dock. I think it's incumbent on us, even if we have to bring... that self-reflection, even if we can't do it strictly out of wisdom, it's incumbent upon us to engage our fear and to engage humanity. And if we see somebody who is, or something, an incident, a person, whatever it is that scares us, that makes us fearful, I think it's incumbent upon us to go say hello. I don't mean that. I mean that both literally and metaphorically. You know, go visit that place. Go visit that person. When I used to come to Zen Center 30 years ago, I had a Chevrolet Caprice.

[31:44]

And some of you all know where I park every day when I come to Zen Center. And I would park in that spot, and there were hookers on the corner. Peter, do you remember that? And after a while, I just started leaving my doors open so that they could do their business in my car instead of in the alley. And then after a while, we became friends. Hi, Jamie. You're going to go in and meditate now, huh? We're out here working. And some of those conversations that I had with them, other people at Zen Center were going, why are you talking to them? Barbara Wanger, I remember, was totally outraged. She was on a campaign to get rid of them from the neighborhood. And I was on a campaign to make them my best friends. Because I was afraid of them.

[32:45]

I thought, oh, this is really... This is... A place that scares me. It wasn't the people that scared me. It was a place that scares me. Where people are so out of control. Crack was all over the place in those days. Where people are so out of control with drugs that their lives were manifesting themselves as hungry ghosts. And I didn't want to see the hungry ghosts. I wanted to be around the enlightened one. So I tried to run right at the dog. And it was beneficial to me and to them, I think. It is uncomfortable sitting on that mat, isn't it? I hate that. I always sit in the chair when I come to lecture. The only reason I don't like to do sashim here is that you can't get away with sitting in the chair.

[33:51]

during lecture. It's okay, though. Peter, you got any questions? Or have I rambled too much? No. No, but we tend to divide it up because we don't recognize it as the same red. We've been taught from a very early age that there are different shades of the red, and that's how I got caught up in it. We don't recognize that they're the same thing. It's... It's similar to that koan I read in the beginning where the master says, well, your cup runneth over even though you're alone and destitute.

[34:59]

You got everything going for you, buddy. But that's a really good question. That sort of dialogue that Peter just had with me right there is saving all beings. Peter's questions were more important than my answers. Yes? Well, if you pursue... Okay. I think it's the same thing. I don't think, but I'm saying that just like you were saying pursue. It's the same thing.

[36:01]

But you can't conceptualize compassion. So if you're practicing with it, you're just practicing with it as... But if you say, oh... I love everybody, then you're conceptualizing it. Killian, I know you'll stump me. It's not fruitless.

[37:19]

It's just a matter of not picking and choosing. And that sometimes sounds harsh, but as long as you pick or choose, you're creating a duality. As long as you're choosing not suffering over suffering, you're making the duality. As soon as the duality vanishes, there is no suffering and there's no not suffering. But you're saved from suffering and old age and death. Just like the Heart Sutra goes. There's no old age and death and there's also no old age and death. Or just like the Ginjo Koanen. There are Buddhas and there are sentient beings.

[38:20]

So, in attachment, flowers fall and in aversion, weeds grow. You can't move towards something and you can't move away from it. You've got to stay right where you are and let it flow over you. That's how you free yourself from suffering. Richard? You're really an age of reason guy, aren't you? Well, it starts with Descartes.

[39:27]

Marxism starts with Descartes, right? Well, I think that's an interesting and very Western point of view. And it has its time. But I think its time is bad. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:14]

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