This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Thank you all for coming today. That's a beautiful day. As you know, I translate. And something I got into accidentally, karmically, my own relationship with Chinese is not in tension at all. I was getting a degree in anthropology at Santa Barbara in 1906, 1907. I wanted to go study, get a PhD at Columbia with Margaret Neat in the Fed. politics teachers who were well known at the time.

[01:02]

So I applied for fellowships. The only money I had was what I got from the GI Bill. I'd been in the army and so I got as a result $300 a month which wasn't quite enough so I needed to apply for a fellowship. So I applied for everything they had and they had a language fellowship And it had to be a rare language that you were applying to study, at least for an American in 1970. And I had just read a book called The Way of Seattle. And I thought, wow, this makes wonderful sense. And it duptailed with a lot of things I've been exploring and thinking about. And just on a whim, I wrote in the word Chinese on the application without really any interest or whatever. And they gave me this four-year fellowship in Columbia. I felt like Chinese. And it seemed like a really big mistake. Because when I got to Columbia, the terms of the fellowship required me to take intensive Chinese, which was a class five days a week, four hours a day, in addition to my anthropology class.

[02:14]

And so I went to this class, and there were 24 people studying with the woman everybody called the Dragon Lake, Loretta Khan. And within like two weeks, we were down to four of us. And she asked me to stay after class one day. I said, Mr. Porter, I only teach the best, and you're not one of them. And so I don't want you to come to this class anymore. So I said, well, I have this fellowship that requires me to come to the class. He says, I don't care. I'm not talking to you again. And so I go to class, and she wouldn't talk to me. And this went on for a couple of weeks. And I finally went to see Hans Bielenstein, the department chairman, and he convinced her to talk to me. And she got even by giving me a D for the class, which canceled my fellowship. But in those days, and I think nowadays you can still do this at universities, you can challenge a class. If you think you have already the knowledge to get credit for a class, you can just take an exam.

[03:22]

So I challenged the class at a B+. passed the class, but that was my introduction to Chinese. And it seemed like, fuck, damn. But anyway, after that first year at Columbia in 1970, I met a Chinese monk in Chinatown, and he invited me to come to this little place in the countryside, which I started to do on weekends. He taught me how to meditate. And I was just so impressed with this and so much more interesting than study that is academic, the academic curriculum. And so after two years, I quit the Ph.D. program. I went to live in a monastery in Taiwan. And lived in these two monasteries for about four years. Until the last one, he was the head of the Menzai school in the He said, you know, you've been studying here for a few years, and you really should become a monk.

[04:25]

And so that was just preloaded. I mean, you know, I said, well, yeah, I guess I'm not going to be a very good monk if I become a monk. So I left soon after that. But about three or four months before I left the monastery, he published the poems The Cold Mountain, the Chinese edition of with, and he pirated Burton Watson's English translations and stuck them at the back. So I could see the original poems, I could see how a competent translator translated them, and he also had a Chinese commentary. So I could see some of the structure, some of the goings on in the words. And so this is how I was introduced to the Chinese language in an attractive way. It really sucked me in. I could see how poems worked. And I came up with the idea of teaching myself classical Chinese by trying to translate it. And so that's what I did. Every day I would try to translate some poems.

[05:29]

I also tried to translate a text that is what we're going to study today, called this text that is attributed to Bodhidharma, called the Outline of Practice, or the Two Eccidences of Four Paths. And so I've been working on these texts. When I left the monastery, Because I really wasn't going to be a good monk. Every Saturday I would go into the city of Taipei to see this girl at this coffee shop. And she was studying philosophy. And so she taught me the classical text of Zhuang's great Chinese Taoist. So I was much more attracted into studying the texts, I guess you could say. So that's what I've been doing ever since I just started translating. I discovered that I had a real passion for translation. Most people, you never think about translation. When you read, say, a translation of the Odyssey or of Chaucer or something, you just take it for granted that the English text you're reading is by Chaucer or Cicero or something like that.

[06:42]

Never think about the process of getting from that original language your language. But, I mean, every translator probably comes up with a different way of doing this. And I've come up with my own way over a lot of time. And it's like about, I see, when was it? About 10 years. It was over 10 years ago. But 12 years ago, there was a college in Boston called Smith College. The women's college that held the first ever international conference on Chinese poetry. They invited me to give a talk and explain how I translate. And I managed to write two pages down. And I came up with this idea. Because you never think about what you do. I'm sure a basketball player doesn't think about how they play basketball. I translate. It's like this. I see a beautiful woman dancing on the dance floor. And I want to dance with her.

[07:45]

But I'm deaf. I don't hear the music. I just see the result. I see this beautiful dance taking place. And I have this attraction to accompany that dance. And so that's what I do as a translator. I try to get as close as I can to pick up the energy of this dancer who hears music I don't hear. I don't want to dance too far away, but I also don't want to put my English feet on top of her feet, which is a lot of people think that's good translation. It's accurate and literal. Of course, it kills the dance. So this is what I've been doing. And once you start doing this, it develops a passion for it. I want to dance. And so, you know, I run into texts that I want to dance with, that I want to be close to. And so the texts in this little handout are some of those texts. The first text I ever translated was this Bodhigarma text. I didn't publish it for a few years ago.

[08:46]

I think they published Cold Mountain around 83, and they had published this book by Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma, as you know, is discredited with bringing Zen to China. And he sort of did. I mean, nobody really knows where Zen came from. There's no records in India of that tradition. And when it first came to China, there are no records, really. It's only about... About 100 years after Bodhidharma died, we start seeing records about Bodhidharma in China and about this tradition. But when Bodhidharma came to China, he had maybe five or six disciples. And one of them was a man named Tan Lin who wrote down this outline of practice. He listened to his master talk and wrote down this outlining practice, and also several other sermons.

[09:49]

Scholars aren't sure of who they're by. I think they're by Bodhidharma, but nobody knows who they're by if they're not by Bodhidharma. And everybody pretty much agrees this outline is by Bodhidharma. It's a sermon, it's a talk, a summary, it's teaching. But he had one disciple who became the second patriarch of Zen, Huayka. And he also had made five or six disciples. He had one disciple named Asantan. In fact, when the second patriarch was alive, there was a persecution of Buddhists in North China. A lot of Buddhists were killed because what was happening is if you were a monk, you didn't have to pay taxes. And if your monastery owned land, you didn't have to pay taxes on that. So a lot of wealthy people donate their land to a monastery so they wouldn't have to pay taxes on it.

[10:50]

And this was destroying the royal economy. And so they started killing Buddhists and driving them out of North China. And the second patriarch came down to South China, Central China, just north of the Yangtze. And the man he met there was a man named Sun San. That was his monastic name. He became the third patriarch. The second patriarch went back to the North when The persecution was over and he was eventually assassinated. He said the third patriarch stayed in the south, just right on the central part of the river. He had two disciples. We only know two disciples he had. One of them was a man named Tao Xin. Tao Xin had 500 disciples. His main disciple, Pong Ren, had 1,000. His main disciple, Kuei Nong, had 6,000 or 3,000, depending on who you believe. So something happened with the fourth patriarch. And what happened is why we have Zen today.

[11:51]

And why Zen is a world, a tradition with influence around the world. He made the basis of Zen practice. Up to that point, the word, we used the word Zen. It's It's a shortening. The Sanskrit is Dhyana. And when it came to China, they said Zeta. When it came to Japan, they just got rid of the Na. Actually, in China, they got rid of the Na. They just called it Zeta. They still call it Zeta in the area in China where Zeta began. Because nowadays in China, you have the... the Qing Dynasty Manchu pronunciation called Chan. But the original Tang Dynasty pronunciation of Zen is Zen. If you go to the area where Zen began, it's still the local dialect of Zen.

[12:54]

And to give you this area in China, there was this, Daoxin discovered this ecological niche that became the ecological niche exploited by all the great Zen masters of the Tang Dynasty. I only know two exceptions. That's an Indian link in North China, and a man named Saoshan, who found this same ecological niche, but in a different location. This ecological niche, in English we would say, the high mountain basin. Up to that point, Zen monasteries, well, first of all, there were no Zen monasteries in China. It was a Zen master living with, having a few disciples living in somebody else's monastery. which is the case of Bodhidharma and Kweka and Sun Tzu. With Dao City, you get a man who built his home monastery, and he built it in a high mountain basin. He bought the land. He got some disciples there, some supporters who bought the land. Nobody really wanted this land.

[13:55]

It's up in the mountains, but it was different from all Buddhist temples in China up to that point. All the Buddhist temples were either in cities or in mountaintops, or maybe even at the foot of a mountain. Or on the slope of the mountain. But not in a mountain basin. What this did is it changed everything. Except at this point all goodness in China begged for their living. And the Chinese have always looked down upon people who begged for their living. With Daoxian you begin to see the formation of an agricultural commune. Where you farm and support yourself without support from anybody outside. And this allowed Zen to become your daily practice. And not just sitting, up to that point, Zen just meant sitting on a meditation. But with the fourth patriarch, Zen becomes washing the dishes, pulling the fields, cutting down bamboo.

[14:56]

It becomes your daily life. And the thing about it is you're living with hundreds of other people who are doing the same thing. And so this is what gave Zen its real power. is Zen became a communal practice. And that's why it's really important. There are places like Hasahara where you can live this tradition and do it in a setting in which it gained its great power in China. That is, as a common, as a group of people practicing together. Yes, you went there. Yes, that's right. That's right, because you're killing worms. Or when you're digging in the soil, you're getting more worms. What was that kind of thing? How did that make it acceptable? It's a good question. It was acceptable because that's the way the Chinese do business. They have a word, expedience. In Chinese, it's fang bian. Expedience.

[15:58]

Even nowadays, for example, you're not supposed to eat after lunch. So, in Chinese monasteries, if you want dinner, it's called medicine. You make up a name. And if you're sick, you're allowed to have this extra meal and to eat. And, of course, it's up to you to decide if you're feeling sick or not. I've never read any, shall I say... crows, pieces by these Tom Baggins, the masters defending this practice. Everybody just accepted it as soon as it started. Everybody said, yeah, yeah. Because they were supporting themselves. They weren't having to rely on other people. And it gave them this great chance to live together. It was a violation of the Vinaya.

[17:00]

And, let's say, the Chinese have never been good at heeding rules. I mean, they definitely, you know, like the idea of celibacy. And they're very strict about that in their Buddhist sects. But farming, they decided it was a good experience, expedient needs to state that our practice. That's how Zen really started in China. It was around the time of the Fourth Patriarch that people like him started talking about his teacher and his teacher's teacher and his teacher's teacher. And thus there'll be Dharma and the lineage in India. Before that, we have no records of what's going on in India. But with Fourth and Fifth Patriarchs, we get people writing down these stories about their teachers and that tradition. And it all begins then. And of course it becomes more official because you get 500 people living together. Certainly some of them are going to be good at writing.

[18:06]

And so you get this great literary tradition that begins with that. And also you get this great kind of training. So what happens in Chinese communities even today in China or elsewhere? I'm sure it happens in Japan too. I only know personally China, is you get a bunch of villagers who want to gain merit and they've got some money. And it's like the Magnificent Seven. They get their money together and they go off and search of a master to come and build a little temple. This happens all across China where you get farmers and Maybe somebody builds a factory next to it and they get some money. Nowadays, before it was just farmer. They gave money. They go find a master. And so who is going to impress them more? It's going to be somebody practicing Zen whose life manifests this.

[19:13]

What they find on a meditation cushion, they manifest walking down the road. So Zen became a national phenomenon. because of this communal practice. Everybody wanted a Zen master to run their temple. And if you go see Chinese records, after the Tang Dynasty, all the local temples begin calling themselves Zen temples. Even though they don't have a Zen meditation hall, but they know those Zen people really have their act together, and that's what we want in our place, is a Zen master. So that's just some background. I thought I would... give you to Bodhidharma and to this practice again also. Yeah, yes. Oh, I just was curious real quick. That innovation of immuno-parming, do you know what your pre-doward's innovation of the Zen? Or was that like an indigenous Taoist practice that was kind of already

[20:18]

The only time it happened in China was during the Han Dynasty. In the Han Dynasty, around 280 or so, there was a Taoist pastor who developed a commune in Sichuan province. That's the only instance of it I have heard. And it's a commune that didn't work out after his... His disciples died, then there was no more Taoist confidence. And it's always been a problem in a sense for Taoism is the fact that it is so master-disciple oriented and it's so intricate in its practice because it's the transformation of this body into an immortal body. And their meditations last for hours. And it's sort of like... Think of it like this.

[21:24]

Taoist practice is like this. The meditation. Imagine making one of those san mandalas inside your body. That's Taoist meditation. Because you're trying to open up energy channels in a patterned way. I always like to refer to it as that person at the circus spinning the plates... And you have to get a whole bunch of plates spinning to get that energy flowing to make that transformation from this physical body into an essential body, into an energy body, and an essential body into a spiritual body. The knowledge of this is not something you can pass on to a large group of people. And I've had... Young Taoists complain to me about this fact today. Yeah, Taoism is great, but the master will only teach everything through a handful of disciples. That is, the master will choose several people as able to understand his practice.

[22:31]

So Taoism has never worked really well in a communal setting. And it never even had monasteries, except for that one commune back in about 200 AD. It never had monasteries until the Buddhists started building them. And even then it waited about, oh, 500 years. It was only around 1,200 or so that you begin to see Taoist monasteries, and they do it, to compete with the Buddhists for imperial patronage. Because an empress has started donating money to all these Buddhist monasteries. We want some too! And so then you get Taoists building monasteries, copying the Buddhist liturgy and even the musical instruments, musical instruments and so forth. And then you do get a monastic celibate sect of Taoists in the beginning, around 13th century. Before that, the question of celibacy never entered any Taoist practice.

[23:36]

Why? But suddenly if you're going to be monastic, it became clear that that you're going to have lots of problems if you aren't celibate. And so you get a Taoist celibate wing that exists today. In my book, Road to Heaven, the people I'm interviewing there are all members of the celibate sect. Anyway, so Taoism has been communal. I suppose nowadays maybe there are some... Religion is experiencing a renaissance today in China. So I'd be surprised if there weren't some Taoist forms of that taking place. The second thing a Chinese person does when they become wealthy, the first thing they do is they take care of their family. The second thing they do is they wire it ahead. They wire it to the next life. Where are you going to do this?

[24:38]

Where's the bank? Then why are you accepting that? Well, it's your temple, your shrine, your monastery, your nun. So you get religious centers in China getting millions and millions of dollars. They often don't know what the hell to do with it. And it's a really big problem. It's too much. And the Chinese themselves are starting to complain about it. It's really hard for these very simple people who are really good at spiritual practice who suddenly have millions of dollars. And it's hard to handle that well, as it would be for any of us. It's like we see athletes, athletes becoming millionaires overnight, and then screwing up their lives. Anyway, so religion is seeing Taoism and Buddhism expanding in a new way in China. It's often has this negative side, too. Anyway. So what I wanted to do today and the next two days is I wanted to go over a couple of these texts you went into in Zen.

[25:46]

Oddly enough, Zen is a tradition that is very proud to describe itself as not based on words, not letting itself be defined by words. And does everybody have a copy of this handout? I need some more handouts. You could pass some of those around and pass some of these back to the back. Zen is this tradition which among all the different spiritual traditions is used the usefulness or at least the importance that scriptures aren't the last word. And oddly enough, no tradition has generated more books.

[26:50]

You go to any bookstore, library, whatever, there's thousands of books about what you can't talk about. But sooner or later, you are going to run into a couple of texts. One of them might be these three that I've got here, which is the Bodhidharma's outline of practice. In the Chinese, a literal translation of the title would be the two paths, the two entrances and four practices. I've never liked that, so I just call it the outline of practice. When Bodhidharma came to China and started looking for something that he could teach the people, he discovered that someone in Nanjing, had just translated the Lankavatara Sutra. And so, he obviously was familiar with this text from India, and he started using the Lankavatara Sutra as the text which he relied upon to teach Zen.

[27:53]

And so, you see all these early Zen masters in China, all studying the Lankavatara. You get... And not just in the Zen lineage, but people who are even outside the Zen lineage are starting in the Tang Dynasty, the 6th, 7th centuries are already starting to write commentaries on the Lankavatara. And so when you see this Bodhidharma's outline of practice, you can view it as this man who read it. Have any of you read the Lankavatara? A few of you have. Well, it's not an easy text. And that's why as soon as Thao Sin, as soon as you get 500 people living together, the Zen masters like Thao Sin said, you know, this Lankavatara, you just can't teach it anymore. Because it's a very difficult text. And by the time you get the fifth patriarch, you switch to the Diamond Sutra.

[28:55]

Much easier to teach. Anyway, the Lankavatara is not an easy text. It's a Bodhidharma. aware of this, you can see in this outline of practice, what it is, it's a reinvention or an interpretation of the Lakotara. And so if you look at the very end of the second page here, at the very bottom of the outline of practice, just behind the title page, if you see this little summary, I thought I would, this is not part of the outline of practice, just behind the title page. The outline of practice You see on the bottom of the second page something called, in this outline, Bodhidharma reinterprets blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He reinterprets these two essential teachings of the Lakavatar. The Lakavatar teaches these two things. The redirection of your awareness, how you use your awareness up to that point.

[29:57]

You know, you're talking about tables and love and governments and You know, ideas and objects. And for that sort of awareness, these thoughts and objects become your reality. It's what you think is real. So the Lakavatar is teaching you to look on your awareness itself as what is real. And to experience that for yourself without relying on what your Zen master tells you And so that's why in an early exam, the two famous little ways of the instruction is, have a cup of tea, which is aimed at changing the way you look at things. Look at them now freshly, without thinking of a thought. And then taste the tea. Experience it for yourself. And so this was the, these are the two essential teachings used over and over and over in the lap of the tar. And so I've written this little outline.

[31:00]

which gives you basically a summary of the Lankovitara, where you get down to this goal that appears toward the end of the Lankovitara. It appears periodically. All those numbers I have there are the chapter numbers or the section numbers in the Lankovitara. These numbers were given to the Lankovitara by a Japanese scholar lived around the turn of the 19th century. late 19th century, early 20th century, a Japanese scholar edited the text, did the reception of the Sanskrit text, and divided it into sections. And so when Suzuki translated Dalaki into English, he used those sections. And so I figured when I'm translating it, I did my translation in Chinese for the most part, I used the same sections. You see those numbers. So if you ever... want to see what those numbers reference, you can find the relevant text in Suzuki's translation or in my translation.

[32:09]

But you see, when you get down to the very end there, you see what is happening in the Lanka, the teaching it is trying to address or make happen, is the transformation of the laya vijnana to the tatagataka. The When the Lanka was written maybe 400 A.D., something like that, nobody knows exactly where the Lanka came about, but maybe 400. It was part of this phase of Buddhism called the Yogacara, where suddenly people are just focusing on awareness. Buddhism had already gone through phases, and tomorrow we're going to talk about early Buddhism. Not today. The Hark Sutra is a rejection of early Buddhism. There are a certain variety of early Buddhism. This outline of practice is a reinterpretation of this Yogacara tradition whereby you look just at your awareness.

[33:19]

And of course they came up with a way of explaining your awareness in terms of how it's affected by different sense organs. So you have six kinds of consciousness based upon the different ways you're manifesting the way you're receiving interpretation of the world about you through your ears and eyes and nose and mouth and through your mind thinking thoughts but the Yogacara added two more kinds of consciousness one being self-consciousness the awareness of me and then The other consciousness is the awareness of awareness. This alaya, this term alaya is a difficult one to translate. I translate it repository consciousness. It's where all the seeds of everything you thought and done are resident and then sprout. So your mind at any given state has these overlays of all these different eight consciousnesses that you could say are going on all the time.

[34:28]

But for Buddhists, for the Yogacara tradition, it is transforming that repository of basically your total karma, your total karmic genome, and transform that into what gives rise to Buddhism. So what you're giving rise to, instead of this thought, is the thought that Buddha would have, which is the Tathagatagarbha, acting like a Buddha instead of like a human. The two aren't necessarily distinct, but anyway, so that's the idea of the Lantavatara. It is trying to get your awareness to reinterpret your own awareness so that this thought you have, which is anger, can be used, can be used to do something to help others. So this is what Bodhidharma sees is going on, and he has this

[35:29]

this way of directing himself in a way that he's not a scholar, he's not just talking about ideas, he's just dealing with people with their real lives, and he comes up with these four ways of practices. And he takes that Habakkuk teaching, and he calls a reason. You see in the first part, if I can just go over this briefly. So you see, one, no, that's the wrong sutra. Many rules lead to the path, but basically there are only two, reason and practice. You see, I have a little note down below about reason. The Chinese word, Li, which means rationale, principle, patterns in wood or stone. And the Sanskrit equivalent that was probably in Bodhidharma's mind was Siddhanta, which occurs throughout the Langa.

[36:30]

which means established truth and its attainment, its realization. A practice, the Chinese word that Bodhidharma uses, is seeing. And seeing means action. Sanskrit equivalent is sanskara, which has the same meaning as seeing those in Chinese. It means action that has memory, that leaves a trace, but also, because it leaves a trace, it's karma. So sanskara in Sanskrit is used in this sense in the chain of dependent origination. So Bodhidharma uses these two terms because he's, you know, trained in Sanskrit and now he's trying to reinterpret that with Chinese. But he's trying to do it in a way that replicates the teaching of the Lankavatara. So he says, to enter by reason means to realize the essence through instruction to believe that all living things share the same true nature, which isn't apparent because it's shrouded by sensation and delusion.

[37:38]

Those who turn from delusion back to reality, who meditate on walls, the absence of self and other, the oneness of commoner and sage, who remain unmoved even by scriptures, are complete and unstopian, agreeable, reason, without moving or effort. They actually say, by reason. But this is, this, a lot, I've talked about Zen centers and I've noticed that some people feel a little uncomfortable with that word reason. It sounds too much like logic and people who practice Zen try to get away from that sort of academic approach whereby a lot of thought is involved. But you can see that there is a lot of thought involved in redirecting your sense of what's going on in the world. There is a stage at which you're only going to do that if somebody says something to you that makes sense, that makes sense, that redirects you to, oh, yeah, that's right, I do have a mind.

[38:47]

Because people don't often realize they do, oddly enough. And so that's sort of the background on reason, which is this have a cup of tea, taste the tea thing. But Bodhiyarma then takes this second phase, this last phase of the Wanka where you're transforming this alaya, this repository consciousness into the basic practice of a Buddha. And that is to deal with your karma. And so he has these four ways of dealing with karma. First, by suffering injustice. You deal with bad karma. By adapting conditions. You learn how to deal with good karma, so you don't become attached to it. And then you learn to see nothing, so you're not generating a whole bunch of new karma. And then you practice the Dharma, which is the Tathagata karma, the Buddha, Buddha karma, Buddha action. And so that is the teaching that Bodhidharma is presenting here.

[39:52]

And finally ending up with this where practicing the Dharma, he's teaching people to practice the paramitas, and of course, beginning with charity, and these are the basic teachings of Mahayana, the teaching of charity, morality, devotion, meditation, wisdom. There's a little note down there at the bottom of the paramitas, which once when I was living in the monastery, and I first became aware of this, I was reading a commentary by a Zen master on the diamond suit. And he said, well, the tarp readers are like a boat that help you, or I think it was sort of like a raft that helps you cross the river of suffering. And so I sat on this desk one day waiting for the Zen master.

[40:55]

When I got to the Zen master, temple in China, the abbot said, picked up a stick and banged it on a rock, and he asked me if I heard that. He said, well, that means it's time to eat. If you have any questions, just ask. And I lived there for two and a half years and never had any questions. But I knew when it was time to eat. And because of that simple little act that the abbot transmitted to me. But one day while I was waiting for that sound, I came up with an idea and I built myself a boat. Yes, it's paramita. And so I think it's a way of thinking about paramitas. If you think about charity, for example. Charity is about giving. But

[41:57]

So if you're trying to come up with a material that floats, you want to be something that floats, not something that sinks down to the bottom of the ocean. But you want to be too light, you just float up to heaven. So charity is about becoming light. And morality is about the same thing you do when you have this wood, is you build a keel. A boat has to have a keel. Otherwise, it won't be able to go in the direction you want it to go to. But you can't have the keel too big, too deep, or it'll hit the shoals. It'll be so slow. It can't be too shallow. When wind comes along, it just blows you wherever the wind wants to go. So your SS Paramita needs a nice keel of morality. And then you need devotion or forbearance. Forbearance is sort of like you need to pick this wood, After you've built the keel, you need the wood to be able to break through the waves.

[43:02]

So you need, what do you call it, a stern boat. You could be like a garbage barge and just have sort of a flat leg, but then you're slow. You're not going to get it across the street. So anyway, so forbearance is sort of the shape of the hull of the boat. And then you've got devotion. You need something that really is upright, so you need a mast. And then you need a sail on that mast, which is meditation. And then you need a runner, which is wisdom. So that's my little insight into the paramedics that I got one day waiting for dinner at that temple. So most Zen texts will just begin with charity. So just as Bodhidharma does here. He says, this is how charity is like. And just as there's no gift, the gift doesn't really exist. Either it's the person who gives or the person who receives.

[44:05]

That's how all of these Karamidhas should be practiced. And so that's the SS Karamidha. And tomorrow we're going to get more into wisdom, the rudder of the boat. So this is this teaching that Bodhidharma has. us to reinterpret the lock of the Tara to give us this basic teaching that has entered the event is run through the history of that the teaching of the walk of the Tara does not everybody wants to read the lock of the Tara but but I think I know the lock it is probably as well as anybody I can tell you it's not anything more than to taste the tea to have to but to have somebody give you that cup of tea to wake you up in a sense that you see things different. And then to experience that for yourself and make this transformation that you have to... Do you have any questions on this?

[45:09]

Yes? Before... Reducing your desires is just about reducing the new karma you're creating. It's pretty hard not to have any desires, but it's just reducing it so there's no new karma. But the last one is actually about accepting all of your karma and transforming Taking that anger, taking that desire and transforming. Making it useful. Use the anger to run a pump. Produce water. Whatever.

[46:10]

In your heart. That's sort of the difference. First it's just about realizing when you run into something that's bad or something that's good. You don't reject. the bad stuff, get pissed off about that, but realize it has a root coming from you. I used the word delusion. I really liked the word delusion when I first ran into Buddhism. And when I was translating the Lankavatara, I was supposed to give the manuscript to the publisher two months. there was this person I'd become friends with. It was William Merwin. He was a poet laureate in the United States sometime. And he and I had struck up a friendship at writing. He said, would you come to Maui and explain the locket to me?

[47:13]

And I said, yeah. And I did. I did. I don't normally do things like that. But sometimes you develop a friendship and And somebody's serious about something. And so I did. And in the course of explaining the Lanka to the Merwin, I realized that in most cases, the word delusion is long. And if I... I don't know the... Again, Bodhi Garma is using Chinese here. There is no Sanskrit version of the outline, so I can't really change that. Because the word they use in Chinese is delusion. But the Sanskrit words... for the same thing I suddenly realized because I had contacted two people one at Harvard and one at Stanford who were my advisors on Sanskrit texts because I was looking I was reading the Chinese I don't have much problem with that I was also looking at the Sanskrit just to stay abreast with it but I'm not that person so I would ask these people and they gave me two different

[48:24]

interpretations of this and one day I just suddenly realized the correct translation is projection it's self our delusions are the emphasis is really on what we've created that's why our anger when we say when something bad happens the badness is something we've overlaid on that and also when something good happens the same thing But both result in attachments, just attachments of a different kind. Whereas reducing your desires allows you to have fewer attachments. And then, of course, transforming those thoughts, those impulses we have, allows you to do what a Buddha does. And we'll get into that in the Diamond Sutra. Two days from now.

[49:26]

Anyway, that's what I'd say to that. Yes? What's the English translation for Lankavatara? Oh, Lankavatara? English? Lankavatara. Oh, I see what you mean. The manifestation of Lankavatara. You know avatar? Avatara? Avatara essentially means to manifest something. Like the movie Avatar? That was based on that Sanskrit word avatar. So Alanka is this mythical island in the Indian Ocean. It's according to the earliest Sanskrit texts we have. It's the top of Mount Sumeru that was blown off in a big storm off the top of Mount Sumeru and ended up in the Indian Ocean. And so it's the top of the world of form. In the Buddhist discussion of three realms, it's the top of the realm of four, above which the Bodhisattvas dwell before they come down to earth to become the Buddhas.

[50:34]

So that's what it means. If we were to translate the manifestation, the appearance of Lanko. Yes? I'm just curious. I've read... My article right then was I was talking about the difference between the... He was the guy at Harvard who was my advisor. Yeah. So, Rev. Anderson, one of the senior directors here, wrote a commentary on something you mentioned. And so it's kind of suddenly kind of imbued in the practice here. And it's, you know, three-day trips on our practice. And then this does sort of contrasted the Wampagatara, the Samhiti Monshu, saying that, you know, the Samhiti Monshu is sort of more of like a pure Yoko Chara presentation and that the Wampagatara is sort of the hydrate of the Patagarbha and Yoko Chara.

[51:41]

I was curious, do you agree with that? Like it's simply just kind of grafting on this food nature idea to the essentially like Yoko Chara. I've never read this. I don't usually read books. I translate. I know that sounds funny, but it's true. If I'm not going to translate a book, I don't read it. One of the books I read are books that I need to read to help me translate the book I'm working on. I did buy that book. There was an English translation that's really quite good that I bought about 10 years ago, but I never opened it. I'd be happy to get this up. I took a look at it. I took a look at the Chinese. I translate text words that I feel like, wow, I've got to translate that. The language is different. It's much more analytical than the Wonka.

[52:42]

I don't know. Dan knows a lot of stuff. He says, Amazing guy. I've never known anybody like that. I will send... I'm just sitting there at home in the middle of the day, whatever, and I send him a question about something. And I would say within 30 minutes, I get a page of notes. It's like he's plugged into a computer and his repository consciousness generates all this stuff. He's an amazing man. But I'd say if he said it, it sounds for me. But I've never... Yeah. Any other questions? Yes? Why did you say Buddy? Why did both of you go to China? Well, they say his teacher told him to.

[53:44]

That's in... All the early texts about Bodhi Dharma going to China were all about his teacher telling him to go to China. There are people there who will be receptive. I don't have an answer like three pounds of flax. Well, there must have been something about it. See, he lived down along the coast, you know, the tip of India. And he lived in the place where he supposedly lived was just outside Kachipora. Kachipora was a major port. People came there, traders came there from China all the time. And so he must have There must have been some familiarity with Chinese religion and with the fact that Buddhism was spreading into China.

[54:53]

Bodhidharma went to China around 500 A.D., maybe a little bit, probably a little bit before that, maybe 475, 480. Buddhism showed up in China around the time of Christ. It actually came about 200 B.C., but we get a lot of records around the first century A.D. By 400, 500 AD, Buddhism was flourishing in China. Emperors spent millions of dollars to build temples. You know, all the early work on the Silk Road, all those caves, it all begins around 300 and 400 AD. You see all those caves are being decorated, you know, paid for by wealthy merchants and the local emperors and stuff like that. So there must have been an awareness that there's a great deal of support. You know, why does China meet China? We got money. I think it was something like that. It was a really hard trip. It took two years at that time.

[55:57]

Later, as sailors, about a thousand years later, people like the Chinese figured out the trade winds and were able to get all the way from, say, Shanghai, all the way to the tip of India in a season. In like three, four months. But during his day, all the ships hugged the coast. They never just went way out in the middle of the ocean and did a shortcut. It was very slow going. And so it took two years. But he must have heard something good. People must have said something like that. Why don't you come and teach us? support. And of course the early stories are about him arriving and going to see the emperor in Nanjing. And so if that truly happened, then you can see that that's not out of place. In fact, even before that, the greatest of all translators was Komarajiva who lived around 400.

[57:07]

And the emperor at that time in Chang'an sent an army on the Silk Road to bring Kumrajeeva back. And the army, the general of the army, conquered the city where Kumrajeeva was living, which was Kucha, and brought him back. And halfway back, he got word that the emperor had died and there was a new emperor and he didn't like him. So he held Kumrajeeva captive at his place on the Silk Road. for 17 years. And then until, finally, there was, you know, things had changed, and he finally allowed Kumrajiva to come. This allowed, of course, Kumrajiva to become incredibly proficient in Chinese. And that's why, to this day, if you're going to read a text like Kumrajiva as a translation, that's the one you want. You don't want to read Shenzong's translation.

[58:08]

He was the other famous translator who went to India, brought back all the scriptures. Shre Zong is a great translator, but he dances with his tape on top of a Sanskrit tape. Really awkward language, very accurate. Anyway, at this time, if somebody's going to send an arm to bring back the translate, you can see why anybody coming into contact with Chinese people traders, people, merchants, you know, around 400, 500 AD would be conveying this story. Chinese, who doesn't speak in Chinese? We need you. Come and translate. Come and teach. Yes? Well, it's just where we should wrap up and then we can continue the conversation. Okay, one more question then. Well, it's like being in an ocean because I see the Chinese characters

[59:36]

But I know that there are 20 different words to translate that. So when I see the Chinese character, I don't see a word. I see a whole bunch of possibilities. Because that's what a translator has to become. We're foreigners. I'm a foreigner. I don't know how words are being used. So I have to be aware of all the different possibilities. This could be an adjective. It could be a verb. Chinese characters are often like that. They aren't necessarily a part of speech. They are. They're used as a part of speech, but they can take on the form of a verb or a noun sometimes. But we can talk about this again tomorrow. Otherwise, I wanted to make sure you had all these because tomorrow we're going to study, we're going to talk about the Heart Sutra, which is on the next page. And I'm very sorry about this. This is the first time I put anything like this together. It was after I got these back from the print shop. I said, so small. She says, well, why don't you just change the margins?

[60:40]

I said, you can change the margins. I never realized you can, I just do this work, you know. No, I never knew you could change the margins. So if I ever do this again, it'll be better. But anyway, so tomorrow, the Art Sutra. And then the day after that, the Diamond Sutra. And the diamond suit, of course, is very long, but I think we can get it to a good deal. Anyway, thank you so much. I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[61:32]

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