This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. So, you know, when we were standing up the stairs there and I started down... I had a vision of myself. I thought what I was doing was going down to open the zendo for 9.25 zaza, and so I was just going to walk down the stairs near the zendo and leave everyone here just kind of lounging around. I guess that would have been bad. So they say that dansya... greeted a monk. My daughter told me this koan should start.

[01:03]

So a monk walks into a monastery. So a monk walks into a monastery and is greeted by Dansha. And Dansha says, so where'd you come from? And the monk says, oh yeah, just down the mountain. And Dansha says, oh, did you eat yet? And the monk says, yeah, I ate. And then Tansha says something great. He says, did the guy that served you food have eyes or not? And the monk doesn't know what to say. Did the guy that served you food have eyes or not? So Tansha was kind of an interesting guy. I like his story because it's really modern, right? So he was kind of a well-off guy, and when he was young, the way you kind of set yourself up for life in Tang Dynasty China, I guess, if you weren't actual from the imperial families, you studied really hard and you took these kind of civil service exams, right?

[02:25]

And if you did well in the civil service exams and were accepted into the civil service, then you were set for life, right? And it was a pretty great education. Everyone was, the people that ran the civil service were kind of highly educated. Often they were very good calligraphers and poets. They were kind of the cultural backbone of Tang Dynasty society or something like that. And anyway, so he was studying for the civil service exams. And he met a guy, I'm assuming like in a bar or something like that one night. And they're talking about what they're doing. And Donja says, well, you know, he wasn't named Donja at this point. I don't actually know what his name was. He said, you know, I'm studying to be a civil servant. And after that, I'm going to be fixed for life. And the guy in the bar says, I'm studying to be a Buddha. which would you rather be, a civil servant or a Buddha?

[03:28]

And he goes away and he thinks about it, and he thinks about it. And then he goes to somebody else, I forget who, and says, well, you know, he goes and meets another sort of traveling monk, and he says, if I were to go and become a Buddha, where should I go? And the monk says, oh, well, The greatest teacher of the day is Matsu, this really famous, really Tang Dynasty Zen teacher, really remarkable guy. His name means the horse master. He was just a really kind of towering figure of Tang Dynasty Zen. And so... the future Donsha, packs himself off to Matsu's place, and he walks in the door, and Matsu looks at him and says, you don't belong here, you shouldn't study here, you're not my student, you should go and visit Sherdo, another guy.

[04:31]

So he walks to Sherdo's monastery, and he's accepted, and he's working, I don't know, like... in the scullery or something like that, right? And one day in the Buddha hall, everyone's sitting around and Sherdo comes in and he goes, today, here's what we have to do. We're going to clear the weeds away from the shrine of the Buddha, right? And everybody goes, yes! And they all leave... and they go out and they get their gardening tools, and only Donsha gets it. And he goes and he gets a bowl and a razor, and he comes in, sits down in the Buddha hall, and he washes his head, and he goes up to Shurdo and gives him the razor to shave his head so he can be ordained, right? And Shurdo goes, ah, clever guy, right?

[05:34]

And he starts shaving his head, and then he starts... reciting the precept ceremony, which is the thing that happens both when you get lay ordination or priest ordination. It's essentially the same ceremony. And Datshuya sticks his fingers in his ears and runs out the door. And he goes back to Matsu's place. And he goes in the Buddha hall. And he climbs up. They have a big statue just like that, only really huge, in their Buddha hall. And he climbs up on the shoulders of that statue, and he's sitting there, presumably going like, woo, like this, right? And all these monks are around. They're going, what's he doing? And they go grab Matsu, and they say, Matsu. There's some guy, and he's sitting on the Manjushri statue.

[06:36]

What are we going to do? And so Matsu comes in, and he looks at him, and he goes, oh, my son, how natural you are. And Donsha jumps down and bows to him and says, ah! Thank you for my name. And so ever after that, he was known as, Donsha is the name of the place that he lived, but his ordination name was something, I think it's like Tianjian or something like that, which means essentially Mr. Natural, right? So he was kind of Mr. Natural, right? And then he went off and founded his own place and was a kind of great teacher in his own, right? And so he shows up in this con. So the question is like, What's he talking about, right? So he says, the guy that served you food have any eyes? Here's the problem, right?

[07:48]

we're not very sophisticated creatures, right? We're... There's a couple of things we do pretty well. We're pretty good at language, and we're pretty good at, you know, certain kinds of long-range planning, right, compared to other animals. Most other things we're not that good at, right? And... because of the way we're built um we i mean i mean obviously and like every single being in the in the universe each of us stands at a unique place in in all all This is why you need a sound person.

[09:16]

So each of us stands at this unique point, right? No one has ever sat here at this time, in this place. And in particular, no one has ever been me sitting here at this time, in this place. And, you know, same for you, right? And furthermore, our notion of what that means, of the infinite not infinite, but effectively infinite chain of causation that led us here and that produced this particular set of circumstances and so on, we only have the foggiest notion of it.

[10:30]

We're not very clear on it, actually. We have a dream that we understand the world, and we have a dream that we have... at least a shred of control of what's going on, but it's just not true, right? Mostly what happens is we walk into a situation like this, right? This flood of information about the current moment lands on our sensory apparatus, which immediately throws away most of it, right? And then we... in the process of figuring out what's going on, throw away more of it. And finally we get to a few scraps of information that we can hold on to. We take them and we hammer them into some framework by which we understand the world and discard anything that doesn't fit and make a bunch of assumptions about what's there and then that's kind of how it works, right?

[11:32]

It's how we are. It's okay. How else could we live? If we really tried to process everything, even if our sensory hardware was capable of transmitting it, it'd be like... We'd be incredibly smart, but unbelievably slow... or maybe we'd be like trees or something like that. You'd look at us from the outside. It'd be like there would be nothing going on for hundreds of years. In fact, we'd be digesting information at a furious rate, but no one would really know. So we've managed to compromise with the world and... enable ourselves to act in real time by moving largely on generalizations and assumptions.

[12:34]

And by aligning our memory with the current circumstances and acting as though our memory told us the truth. That kind of thing. And you know, by and large it works. But the fundamental axiom of Buddhism is that it also is the thing that leads us to suffer. This thing, this ability to do that and construct a self and invest it with energy and emotional weight and activate it into the world in the way that we do is the cause of all suffering. That's essentially the meat of the Pali Canon and most Buddhist literature sense.

[13:41]

So there we are. We're stuck with it. And in particular, that which falls outside our immediate perception and and scope of action is often considered meaningless in our sort of day-to-day life, right? Or at least highly secondary. So we can be sitting, for example, in Oreoke, and one of the things you chant when you're about to be served food, or even here in the dining room, actually, is you say, innumerable labor has brought us this food. We should know how it comes to us. Yeah, great, right? But innumerable is an understatement, right?

[14:48]

The chain of causation that delivered this bowl of rice to the monk went beyond, far beyond, his understanding, right? Even the circumstances, the moment that present themselves there went far beyond his understanding and probably beyond his noticing too. So that's one of the things that Donsha is trying to get at, right? It's like he could as easily have asked, you know, did he have a nose, right? You know, Do you have a stain on his rocks? Any of those things. Probably the monk wasn't really paying that kind of attention. In some sense, he was just checking him on whether he was really there when he was being served food, whether he was really thinking innumerable laborers brought me this food, including this guy that just walked up and handed me this bowl of rice.

[15:59]

I should know how it comes to me. And receiving this offering, I should consider whether my virtue and practice actually deserve it. That's what you say when you get ready to eat. I remember I was sitting tangario at Tassajara, which is this thing, if you don't know what it is, where you go... and you get up in the morning really early, and you sit continuously, not taking any breaks, not getting up to walk around or any of the other things that you do, just sit continuously till morning service and then breakfast. And then right after breakfast, you take a really short break, and you sit back down and sit continuously until lunch. And a little service before lunch and then lunch. And then you sit back down and you sit continuously until dinner.

[17:02]

So you're sitting for maybe more like four hours at a stretch. And you do that for about a week. You sit until you go to bed at night as well. And then you fall exhausted into bed and get up in the morning and do it again. And while I was there, I was in this group of people who were sitting in Tangario. And two of the other people in the group were the significant others of these two women who were already living at Tassahara, right? And they were coming up to, you know, sort of do a couple of practice periods there with them. And so these two women were really excited, and they signed up to do all the food service. So they served all the Oriyaki meals for the Tangariya students, right? And they would... they would kind of, you know, like, press their robes and kind of get all, you know, kind of freshened up, and they'd come bursting into the room at this, you know, usually there's various...

[18:18]

bells and whistles and so on often when you're sitting tangari you don't get a lot of that the the serving crew just walks in right you turn around and you eat right and um i have to say you know after sitting for four hours you really notice everything about the person that's serving you lunch, right? And you notice it completely until you finally pick up a bowl of food and you put it in your mouth like, look, there's a sunflower seed in that salad. And you put it in your mouth, just the sunflower seed, and it like explodes. And it tells you... I am full of energy. 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.

[19:20]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[19:33]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_93.83