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. What a beautiful evening. So, since on this... beautiful evening. I have a terrible cold and I'm thinking all the time about my body. I talk about the body. Once a monk thought he'd talk about the body and so he asked young men, what's the pure body of reality? Yuen Min said, a flowering hedge.

[01:05]

So it goes on, but let's talk about that first. So when the monk asked, what's the pure body of reality? He was referring to the Dharmakaya, where you have this notion of the Dharmakaya and of the Trikaya, the three bodies of the Buddha. The Dharmakaya has a really long history. It goes right back to the beginning. There are references to the kind of body of truth or the true body, the truth body in the Pali Canon. And it's the body that in that formulation, is kind of pure and undefiled. And so when the monk asks about it, he says, what's the pure body of reality?

[02:10]

And it kind of throws a light on how we think about, generally think about our body, right? There's a There was this really weird eccentric mathematics and logic book that was written in the mid-20th century by a guy named G. Spencer Brown called The Laws of Form. And it was widely criticized because basically all it does is it takes regular predicate logic and it sort of casts it in this sort of odd form. But if you look at it from this perspective, from the perspective of Yun-men and the pure body of reality, actually it's a peculiarly Buddhist proposition.

[03:17]

He basically says the following. He says, everything about how we reason about things and make sense of the world arises out of what he calls the first distinction, right? So if you bring into being a distinction between inside and outside, then everything else follows from that. As long as you have a couple of kind of obvious rules about how that works, right? And maybe some operations that you can use to operate on these now distinguished objects. And that's sort of how we are, right? So we, early, early on, we make this distinction. This is separate from everything else. And it has its own everything.

[04:20]

And over time, as our mind grows out of the body like a flowering hedge out of a trench full of compost. These are some weird kind of metaphor. With it grow these ideas and conceptions that arise from this distinction, this first distinction of our separateness, of the separateness of the body. This body looks different from that body. We must be deeply different. This body sounds different than that body. Mine must be better. And so it goes, right?

[05:24]

And even if you're not talking about God, comparison and the social constructs that come into being as a result, right? There's still this whole, there's the whole, you know, meditation on, you know, on the body itself, on this body, right? When it's real easy, when you've got a bad cold to think, this thing is letting me down, right? not doing what it ought to do. How can I possibly get another one? But, you know, it looks rather like it, but it isn't. Yeah. We think, we say, you know, rightly in some sense, I'm not this body, right? Yeah, that's true. There's more going on than that. There's the physical and the

[06:26]

and the metaphysical and the informational and so on and so forth. But fundamentally, the relationship between those things is so complicated that we can't even conceive of it. So often when we say, I'm not this body, it's kind of a rejection. And the most pernicious... I don't know, trope or something that somehow came up a while ago and just hasn't quit since is this notion that somehow the body is just a slightly soiled, not particularly well-sealed envelope for the spirit, right? And that it carries the spirit around for somewhere between zero and 120 years and then lets it go.

[07:28]

And the spirit goes off and does whatever awesome thing it does when it's been let out of its nasty, crinkled envelope. What a mountain of hurt that that idea has caused in the history of ideas. So the... When we think about the body of awakening or the body of an awakened being, it's kind of a continuum. There's the dharmakaya, the body that transcends construction, distinction, and cognition.

[08:36]

In some ways, this is a body that lasts from the beginning of time to the end of time and covers the whole universe. It covers even the concept, the whole universe doesn't capture it. Then there's the Sambhogakaya, the body of bliss or deep concentration, right? And then there's the concrete nirmanakaya, this body, the body of, say, Shakyamuni Buddha, or, you know, Jean Valer. Yeah. And when asked to talk about the pure body of reality, let's drop the word pure, right?

[09:45]

It's actually, it has nothing to do with pure. When Xuanshaw was asked the same question, he said, dripping with pus. Nothing pure about that. And there are other ways we can answer the question. So, who wants to volunteer one? What's the pure body of reality? Anyone? How about a mid-90s Toyota Camry? How about... black ant crawling across a slate countertop.

[10:47]

It goes on. So, Yen Man says, because he's a poet and master wordsmith says, a flowering hedge. It doesn't get much better than a flowering catch in terms of efficacy in responding to this question. So it seems like there's four possibilities about how he was trying to respond. The first is, he was just trying to say, drop it with your pure body of reality. Just arrive here and let's talk about it. There's one. The other one is... the concrete form of a flowering hedge is exactly the pure body of reality.

[11:50]

Or metaphorically, it doesn't get much better than the pure body, than a flowering hedge to represent the kind of conceptual form of reality. the pure body of reality. Or he could have met all three at the same time. And my guess is that he met all three at the same time. Because that's what everyone says about young men is that he manages to do, he say three things at once whenever he opens his mouth, right? Lucky young men. But if we think about it, right? People all over the world recognize flowers as some really special case, right? They grow in this substrate, right? Because we're really incapable of perceiving what's actually going on in there, can only look to us kind of dirty, chaotic, and

[13:07]

Mysterious, right? And they grow out of this thing and they produce this order that's both, you know, remarkable, right? And also pretty much by, you know, universal agreement, beautiful, right? So it's not surprising that when Christ decided he wanted to get up on this mountain and give a sermon. He decided he was going to start with the lilies of the field. It's not surprising that when the Buddha was looking to transmit the Dharma, he held up a flower and twirled it in his hand. It's also not surprising that on Clementa Pinckney's former desk in the in the houses of Congress, or not of the state Congress, there's a black cloth and a white flower.

[14:14]

People recognize it. Out of the inconceivable comes order and beauty. With seemingly by by magic. I think we're still not really sure how it works. And, you know, even better, right? There's a lot of things for which that's true. Tigers, for example, come out of seeming disorder and chaos and are tremendously beautiful, but they'll also have you for lunch. Flowers, you can kind of put in your garden and, you know, put them out in the courtyard, cut them without risking damage her to spine and put them in your window box, right? Or a vase. Pretty great. So, Inman says, a flowering hatch.

[15:19]

But what about the other possible interpretations? Unless we spend too much time thinking about the flowery, right? It's... not about flowery. It's not about pure. It's about how to live in such a way as to embody the whole range. The nirmanakaya, the sambhogakaya, the dharmakaya, the that dynamic, the relationship between the concrete, the orderly, and the inconceivable that we can only perceive as chaotic or messy, right? We say the world's messy, things fall apart.

[16:28]

Yeah. Nonsense. The world's messy. We only think the world's messy and things fall apart because we don't understand what's going on. And we'll never understand what's going on. Understanding is kind of overrated in that respect. So then, well, before I move on, does anybody have any questions or comments about that before we launch into something else? No, not at all.

[17:45]

So the question was, if I was saying that flowers arise out of apparent chaos and take the form of order and beauty, does that mean, you know, order is naturally beautiful and dirt is not? Does that sort of capture what you're saying? No, of course not. Dirt is beautiful. We just don't understand it. And so we think of it as chaotic. The stuff that's going on in a tablespoon of dirt is so complicated that that will never, not never, but we have a whole lot of work to do to understand what's really going on there. And the stuff that's going on in a tablespoon of dirt, you know, sitting on your table is one thing. What's going on in that tablespoon of dirt when it's down in the middle of your garden and it's pulling in energy and information from, really, the whole universe and, you know, bringing it to life, right?

[19:01]

That's a... That's a big deal, and we don't really know what's going on with that. It's very hard to understand. And because of that, and because we tend to think of dirt and decay and dissolution, et cetera, as problematic, we have this funny relationship with the chaos that that represents, right? Whereas for some reason, and it's a mystery why this would be true, we really like order. And we're just built that way. So it's not, but when you can see the glory in the dirt, it's not, It's not like that at all, right?

[20:01]

I mean, dirt is marvelous. It's like, it's the body of the earth, right? Constantly folding the products of life back into its heart and spewing them up again a million years later as something else, right? Unbelievable. That's beautiful. And we're all a result. Every single one of us is a result. Nothing more. It's just because the earth did this thing that we can be here. So. And the monk says, so what is it? How is it to just go on like this? be like this. And Yen Men says, a golden-haired lion.

[21:14]

So one thing about that is, you know, there's this funny kind of flip-flopping in the, you know, if you take every koan in the koan literature as an answer to the question, what does it look like to transmit the dharma without relying directly on the scriptures, right? What is it to just transmit the dharma mind to mind, right here? If every koan is a proposal, proposes an answer to that question, well, they can look like this, right? then this one has some interesting attributes. So the monk, clearly kind of a sharp, well-informed person, comes in and asks this question that brings in the trikaya, the dharmakaya, the pure body of reality.

[22:29]

this highfalutin Buddhist concept, right? And Yun Min flips it on its head and says, flowering hedge. It's just a flowering hedge, okay? It doesn't even have to be a particularly big flowering hedge, just a shrubbery, right? And then the monk says, oh, so that's how it is. He says, well, what's that like? What is it to go on like that? And Yun Min pulls out golden-haired lion. I didn't realize this until I started studying this koan, but the golden-haired lion is this really complicated image. The idea behind the golden-haired lion is that imagine a lion in which every hair is the most brilliant goal, and it reflects the entire body of the lion, right? And so what you've got, it's kind of a, you know, Net of Indra thing, right? So you've got a single hair, it sees the whole lion, and so the single hair also reflects every hair, which is, you know, reflecting the entire lion and so on.

[23:40]

So it's this, it's a, an image that's intended to communicate something really complicated about the nature of reality. And, and, and A lot of Buddhist imagery of a certain era, Manjushri was seen riding on a golden-haired lion, sometimes on a blue lion too, but never mind that. Because he's the, or she, he's the bodhisattva of wisdom. And what better thing to come in on than a golden-haired lion that embodies this outrageously complicated concept about the nature of reality. So, Yen Men pulls up the golden-haired lion as a result of being asked, well, so what's it like? It's like a golden-haired lion.

[24:43]

And of course, he's right again. It's exactly that. to go on like this, to practice in this way, is just to live in the midst of the dynamic relationship between the inconceivable and the orderly. Or the... unconstructed and the constructed. How could it be otherwise? How can you get the nirmanakaya, this concrete body, without the dharmakaya? How can the two exist apart from each other?

[25:44]

They can't. when we construct the self in this, you know, conditioned, provisional way that we all do and carry it around and present it in all its facets and so on. That's just the activity of the Dharmakaya. playing itself out, arising in this body and in this mind and playing itself out in the way that it always does. Nothing more. It's the arising of life in the world. And the danger is that we'll go through an entire life without

[26:48]

Recognizing that or getting, gaining this sort of support and comfort that that recognition can supply. So that's why we practice. So we can start to see the way that works. That dynamic. The golden haired lion in action. And the thing that's peculiar about it is that in that practice, when we start to drop these ideas that have arisen out of the first distinction, the distinction between this body and the rest of the world, right?

[28:02]

when we stop, when we start to see the notions that arise in that way as what they are, kind of provisional, conditioned, and not particularly well-founded, actually. Yeah, this body is different from that one over there. How true is that, really? And what does it mean? And do I really even care? Maybe not. when that starts to happen, then our primary ally in that practice is exactly this body. Because when we connect directly with the activity of this body, we start to feel our connection to everything.

[29:08]

we get a clearer and clearer idea of the nature of effort, the nature of life, human life, right? The memory of... What it is to drop off body and mind stays with us since it's pretty inconceivable as an experience, stays with us in some ways just as a physical memory. It's like it's implanted in our body. It's like it has a kind of instinctual blind quality. that tropism, like growing towards the light.

[30:17]

So, now does anyone have any questions? Absolutely. I think we all have that. And I don't mean to belittle it by saying that. It's a big deal. It's a tough thing. One of the primary attributes of the human condition is this thing that we all do where When presented with a particular setup, this situation, this body, a big component of our primary action is not good enough, unsatisfactory.

[31:40]

And it's easier and easier to give that rein when the experiences we're having are not pleasant. Yeah, it's hard. I would say the request is always just to stand as close and be as intimate as you can with how that works for you. With your particular version of it. And with And then, so, that's one part of the answer. And the other part of the answer is, give yourself comfort and ease, right? It's easy to say, oh, just dig in and, you know, and experience it directly.

[32:41]

And then, you know, actually, it's good to also take it easy on yourself, right? To be comfortable and to do things that activities that promote comfort. I do, when I really need it, I do meta-practice, right? May Corona, my daughter, be happy, live in safety, et cetera, right? And kind of spread it around. That works for me. But whatever it takes to promote comfort and ease in your own body, right? In addition to standing as close as possible to how it actually works for you. So that's what I'd say.

[33:42]

Anyone else? This thing is falling off. Go ahead. I guess I just struggle to have any sort of acceptance or indigestion of that into my belief that there's an okayness about that somehow.

[34:48]

And yet it's a manifestation of reality. Right. That's one of the flowers in the truth. Yeah, exactly. As well as numerous other things that could be mentioned. And I guess I just, I mean, the stakes are really high. And how do you find that? Right. Well, it's, so, I mean, first of all, why would you expect yourself to find it beautiful, right? It's horrible, right? And, and, Beautiful is a, it's a human term, it's a thing that we mention, we measure and respond to in human terms, right? It's not, you know, when we look at dirt or the cosmos or a flower or lots and lots of other things, we're moved by their beauty, right? But we don't have to be moved by everything's beauty. That's just a thing that we do. It has absolutely no bearing on the pure body of reality.

[35:51]

It's just a nirmana kaya thing. I would say the way to practice with that is by... looking, you know, as is the way to practice with everything, looking deeply at what it is to be a human being and seeing for yourself how you get trapped, right? And how you cook up ideas about how the world should be how the world is about what's bad and what's good, and trap yourself in the middle of it, right?

[36:57]

And, you know, work on that, right? Yes, and I feel that within myself. Yeah. And then there's the moral imperative to engage. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And, I mean, I'm not really expecting an answer. There's some balance that has yet to be struck there. Well, yeah, I mean, there's nothing about exploring the ways in which we each play out the human condition that speaks against engagement. You have to be out in the world engaged in one way or another, right? Because we're all living in this world. Even people who go to remote monasteries and glue themselves into a cave are still living in the world.

[38:01]

It's a kind of reduced version, but they're still living in the world, right? And for most of the rest of us, particularly the people here, we're out and about all the time. Yes, absolutely. When you... when you see something that demands a response, then respond, right? And respond, make your best effort, right? In my experience, best effort arises out of a instinctive and deeply practiced knowledge of what to do right now such that everything is alive, right? That whatever encounter you're in the middle of wakes up and comes alive, right? And that nothing gets killed off, right?

[39:02]

Because when things are killed off, that path is closed, right? And I mean that both metaphorically, obviously, and concretely, right? Yeah. Was there another question over there? Go ahead. Great. So because I'm having a difficult time right now engaging with your talk.

[40:02]

So this is my invitation, obviously. But I wonder if you could speak to that. Well, I'm sorry that I haven't been clear enough. So you were asking about the difference between practice and speculation. Can you say a little bit more about that so I can be a little bit more clear on what you mean? I can't remember this exact quote that the Buddha speaks of. Someone comes and asks him about a complicated question and he says something about the fact that that seems to be speculative and he doesn't engage in speculation or quote-unquote philosophy. He probably didn't use the word philosophy because that's a brief word. But something to that effect. It just got me thinking, as I practically relate to what you're saying, whether there is a distinction for you in your practice between speculating about the things that you expose today and the practice of that.

[41:15]

Where is that grounded in your life? Yeah. So, I mean... Practice is practice, right? And it's... The primary request of practice is to just pay attention to what's happening now, meet it as completely as possible without adding anything in or throwing anything away, and to respond... to make your best effort to respond to the next thing that happens and the next thing that happens and the next thing that happens, right? There's no... The idea dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, nirmanakaya, pure body of reality, et cetera, only...

[42:22]

glance off the surface of that. They're fine. They're okay. They're great, actually. They're a great set of things to... It's great to have a mental framework by which you can think about what happens when you practice. But it's not the same as practice. The practice is a kind of a fundamentally a kind of wordless, signless activity that you just do? Because, amazingly, it seeps into your life and makes the world a completely different place than it used to be, right? Is it wrong to, from that cook up a vast body of literature that consists of hundreds and hundreds of stories about interactions between teachers and students, and then write voluminous commentaries on them over the course of thousands of years, well, a thousand years or so?

[43:37]

No, totally not, right? It's okay. It's just worth noting that it's not the same as practice. There's a great quote from Hakuin in his commentaries on the Blue Cliff Record. He goes, many of the activities that people engage in, that Buddhists engage in are inessential. Let me list them. He goes to this whole list of things that everyone does, right? Including, you know, organizing, you know, ceremonies and monastic retreats and so on, right? He really kind of lays it all out there, right? Are they unhelpful? No, of course they're not unhelpful. They're tremendously helpful. And they, you know, Monastic life is a marvelous thing, right? And so is the Colin literature, right? But they're not the essential thing, right? Does that help or do you want to?

[44:41]

Yeah. Okay. Do we have time for one more question? There was one other question I thought. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, excellent question. You just have to try it out. and be completely honest with yourself about it. Because, yeah, it's really the, you know, from the first paragraph to the very, to the colophon of Zen mind and beginner's mind, essentially what he's saying is, We start practicing, and then we make up all these ideas about how it is, and we say, I'm not doing it right, or I'm doing it right, or, you know, et cetera, et cetera, right?

[45:44]

It's really easy to make up ideas like that about it and say, things will be great if I only did this, right? So be really honest with yourself and actually pay attention to what happens, right? I only mention that about metapractice because it's been my experience that when things get really, really difficult, it's helpful. It probably doesn't work for everyone. Well, thank you so much. It's been really great. 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.

[46:45]

For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

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