This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. This is the first in a series of talks for the next three plus weeks of this intensive where we'll be studying the Xin Xin Ming, The Mind of Great Faith, by the third Zen ancestor, Sung San. And tonight and on Saturday, I'm going to be giving kind of some context and orientation or really reorientation that I hope will... guide us gently into studying this text.

[01:02]

The first time we will kind of dig into it together will be, the text specifically will be on Monday night, during the Monday night class. But tonight, I wanted to start by talking about faith. So the title of this poem, the Xin Xin Ming, which is alternately spelled or transliterated from the Chinese character H-S-I-N, H-S-I-N, or X-I-N, X-I-N. And those two words, though they sound the same, are different. So they are written in English the same way, but they represent different characters. And the first character is mind or heart-mind. And the second character is translated as faith.

[02:04]

Or alternately, we could translate this character as something like confidence or sometimes trust. And in a way, you can feel that each of those words offers a slightly different flavor. Chinese characters are very, very rich and layered, nuanced. There's quite a lot of history and story that goes into the characters themselves. And so each of the words that we might use to translate what it is that Sung San is pointing us to shows up in each word. For me, the word confidence has a kind of embodied resonance.

[03:08]

Confidence has a substantiality to it, a sense of a mountain or redwood tree rooted. And trust, at least in English, trust has a more relational feeling. We often use the phrase, I trust this person or I don't. So trust gives that kind of dynamic interplay. And faith, well, for me, faith has more of a heart feeling to it. It's something that touches very deeply. For most of us, or many of us, I don't know where all of you are from or those of you who are zooming in. They come from a variety of different places and cultures. But in Western culture, the word faith, at least in its kind of spiritual or religious meaning, has a particular valence, right?

[04:18]

A particular overtone. And faith here means something very different. It said simply that what we are pointing to as faith is faith in our inherent Buddha nature. What is that? This is a kind of faith that's not a faith in something out there. A faith in God or Jesus or Allah or Mother Mary or whatever it is. but it's also not exactly faith in something in here. It's wider, deeper than that. It's the faith in the, I think of it as the substance of reality itself.

[05:19]

It's the faith in life, or as it says on the Han, birth and death. the whole spectrum of our being alive, living a human life, being here for a short time, and then passing on. I found a talk that I gave in my notes when I was the head student. That was a long time ago. And to my surprise, when I came upon this talk that I had given, it was about faith. So for me, this is a topic that I have been circling for some time. And I haven't been circling it in an academic way. I was circling faith because it was something that called out to me that I felt missing.

[06:29]

Every time I come to this temple, to Beginner's Mind Temple, I have such a vivid memory of arriving here full of anxiety and confusion and some way really just wanting something, anything to help me fix myself. I was quite convinced of my own brokenness. And I had tried many things. And I remember so vividly when I came, there wasn't something that someone said, although there were many wonderful things said, and it wasn't so much something that someone did, but it was this visceral feeling I had of the people who were here that

[07:30]

I didn't know what it was. It was something mysterious, but somewhere in me I thought, that, that, that's what I want. And so that's how I came. And you may be surprised and may be happy in some way to learn that the proximate cause of faith, does anyone know? Yes, exactly. This is surprising to me. She said suffering. The proximate cause of faith is difficulty, is angst, is distress, is all of the many words that encompass the word dukkha. This was not what I thought was to be true.

[08:35]

And I ask myself the question, what is the proximate cause of faith? The answer that comes up in my mind is something more like chocolate. You know, like something yummy and wonderful. Like if we have a really good life, then it would be easy to have faith. But that's not how this works. You might... be happy to know that our third ancestor, Sung San, who wrote this poem, who gave us these beautiful instructions for how to reorient ourselves, how to find our way from confusion to this great mind of faith, that he suffered too. Sung San was known to have been ill.

[09:41]

It's not clear what his sickness was, possibly leprosy, possibly rheumatism. But also he lived at a time when Buddhist monks were persecuted. He had to hide out in the mountains because it wasn't safe for him to follow his path. If you have some suffering, you're in good company. And this teaching, you can trust. You can have confidence in the understanding that this teaching came out of. This pointing us toward the great mind of faith came out of Sang San's own suffering. The opening line of the poem is, the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.

[10:54]

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the poem, you can see it sounds simple, doesn't it? And of course it's not, because every moment we have preferences. Every moment we're liking and not liking, preferring one thing over another. And if you say, get rid of my preferences, that's just more of the same. It's preferring not having preferences. So he's inviting us into a koan, he's inviting us into a mystery, really. And ultimately he's inviting us very fully, wholeheartedly into our own life. One of the things about faith is that it's not exactly something you can cultivate.

[12:01]

Because, as I said, it's not like something that's out there that you can get. But it is something that can be deepened. It is something that we can remember. That as we sit and walk and engage our lives with a quality of honesty and kindness, as we are willing to let go of the things that cause suffering, what's left, what's left, what can be deepened in this way, is this quality of faith, of confidence. I've been thinking of it lately in a sort of simple way, this quality of faith that correlates with the breath.

[13:08]

And you can try this on. So initially, for many of us, certainly this was true for me when I arrived here, I didn't feel much faith at all. or hear, or in my case, kind of feel something, have a sense of something that points us, that suggests, oh, I don't really know what that is, but yes. This is inspiration. This is we take something in seemingly from the outside. It's so important. in our world today. Because if you don't have any dukkha, any suffering personally, there's so much everywhere you look. And if we're going to be able to show up for the real divisiveness and climate catastrophe and ongoing relentless systems of oppression and injustice and misogyny and racism, we have to

[14:29]

allow ourselves to be inspired, which is a way to say, can we let ourselves be nourished? Can we breathe in goodness, beauty, tenderness? Sometimes it takes some effort. I have a practice of walking my dog in Golden Gate Park near where I live. Sometimes in the morning I will look at the headlines, you know, I get the New York Times on my phone and I'll look at the headlines and I feel not a lot of faith, you know, sort of like air coming out of a tire. And then I go outside and I walk in the trees, and the shimmering of light and shadow, and the wind.

[15:35]

And I wonder sometimes, what are the headlines? You know, what are the headlines on the branches of the trees? What do the leaves have to say? And this is part of what allows me to look again, to read the headlines the next day. And particularly in times of difficulty like this, we, so important, to take in real nourishment in this way. And the thing about inspiration is that when we see what we think is something outside that inspires us, it wouldn't, it couldn't resonate here in us if it wasn't already here. So the thing that we think is outside, that's just, you know, as Einstein said, it's an optical illusion.

[16:35]

But it's a reminder. It's pointing us to something that's already here. And important, so important to be reminded, to be nourished, to breathe in. And as we take in inspiration, as we allow ourselves to be touched, to remember, to consider what's possible, to wonder, to marvel. Well, then, as our faith, as our nourishment increases and our faith deepens, we can exhale. We take it in, we breathe it out. This is the cycle of birth and death, a cycle of being human, a cycle of our shared human life. That's why we're wearing masks. I'm not this evening, but we're wearing masks because we're sharing the air.

[17:40]

It comes in here, goes out there. I probably shouldn't be saying this tonight because everyone's nervous about COVID. But it's true. We're connected in this way. So we breathe in and breathing out, the deepening of our faith is that what we take in, we make it ours. And the breathing out is a kind of aspiration. We say, as I did, that, that's what I want. Even if we don't know exactly what it is, if we don't understand that we allow ourselves to be touched, to be moved, And then we turn in that direction. We commit ourselves. This aspiration, this exhale is about, we call it sometimes in the Zen tradition, living by vow. We orient ourselves toward that resonance that we feel.

[18:50]

Again, even if we don't know exactly what it is, I certainly didn't. Breathing in, breathing out, we find our way in the midst of extraordinary difficulty, extraordinary beauty. So I want to read to you from a text that weaves these two themes of faith. and vow. And this is from maybe my single favorite piece of literature and liturgy. This is from a text called the Eihei Koso Hotsuganma, which is posted on the intensive portal, so you can read the whole thing. I'm just going to read a little bit of it.

[19:50]

And this is Dogen Zenji, who is considered the first Japanese Zen ancestor from this lineage. This is his vow. This is how he articulated where he was orienting, what was important to him, what he cared about. It's so beautiful. He said, we vow with all beings from this life on throughout countless lives to hear the true, We vow with all beings from this life on throughout countless lives to hear the true Dharma. That upon hearing it, no doubt will arise in us, nor will we lack in faith. That upon meeting it, we will renounce worldly affairs and maintain the Buddha Dharma.

[20:59]

And that in doing so, the great earth and all living beings together will attain the Buddha way. There's so much in this text that is orienting us, orienting us toward we vow with all beings that we do this together. We do this together because we are together. because it's the truth of how things are, that we are not separate. We are deeply connected, not just with all beings, but with the great earth, with the trees and the leaves and the sun and the sounds. And we don't vow this one time. A vow is not like a goal. It's not a task that you complete and check off your list. But we vow to countless lives. This isn't something we're going to do.

[22:04]

A vow is an orientation. It's pointing us. And when we do this vow, when we find our vow, then confidence, faith, trust arises. We're able to lean back. and allow ourselves to be right where we are. And it says, when we need it, we will renounce worldly affairs. Now, I don't know exactly what Dogen meant there, but I would invite us to consider that this doesn't mean you go home and give away all your furniture. But there's a deeper meaning here, which is that renouncing worldly affairs is, again... It's shifting how we relate to our life so that we're not constantly trying to get and get away from.

[23:09]

We are not being driven around by our preferences. We can have them. We will. But it's something when we discover that there's a deeper kind of happiness, There's a deeper kind of peace and wholeness and connectivity when we find this faith, this confidence. So when we do this, we discover our connectedness. We discover that we are together with the great earth and all living beings. So this is an invitation as we begin this period of intensive practice and study together for each of you, for all of us, to consider our vow, to begin to reflect on what really matters, what calls me.

[24:32]

What beauty and inspiration have I taken in that I want to offer back into the world with open hands, with an open heart, with the faith that it's possible and that this capacity for each of us and for all of us together can deepen. So again, it's important, this renouncing worldly affairs. It's not about getting rid of stuff. It is this reorienting from trying to get somewhere to this radical premise at the heart of faith that what we need, everything we need, this innate Buddha nature, it's already here.

[25:37]

It's waiting for us to find it. And the way that we find it is always here. It's not over there. It's here. It's now. Again and again. So there's a wonderful short poem from the Zen monk, Ryokan, who I think captures the essence, of what I'm pointing to as this vow or aspiration or intention. One of the things I love the most about Zen is that it's very practical. And at the same time, it's completely unfathomable.

[26:39]

You think you get it. And yet, you hold your hands this way. You step over the door this way. It has this wonderful combination of complete and utter mystery. And at the same time, simplicity. So both of these parts show up in this little poem from Rio Khan. He says, Buddha is your mind. This is what Sang San said as well. This is one of his core phrases. Buddha is your mind and the way goes nowhere. Buddha is your mind and the way goes nowhere. Don't seek for anything but this. Pretty good.

[27:43]

But he doesn't end there. He doesn't leave us in this kind of absolute realm of truth, capital T truth. He goes on and he says, Buddha is your mind and the way goes nowhere. Don't seek for anything but this. And just in case you're getting a little too attached to that side of things, you know, the ultimate essential truth. He says, if you point your cart north when you want to go south, how will you arrive? It brings in this very practical thread. So we don't get to just float out in the world of Buddha is your mind and the way goes nowhere, right? This was Dogen's essential question. He said, if we're already Buddha, then why practice? And what he discovered was that practice and awakening are all of one piece.

[28:49]

And we have some trouble with this because we're always slipping off on one side or the other. This is the heart of the Shenzhen Ming. It's pointing us to how our binary mind is constantly dividing. And it's inviting us to see that clearly so that we can be whole. Without having to get rid of anything. So your aspiration, your vow, this is like pointing your cart. What direction do you want to go? What's important to you? What do you care about? I remember so much when I first came to Zen Center and I was such an accomplishment-oriented little person.

[30:00]

Very anxious and driven and whatever it was, I wanted to get it. And then I heard the Bodhisattva vows. It was like completely stopped me in my tracks. Beings are numberless. I vowed to save them. What? And it was so good. It completely frustrated my, what we might call worldly affairs, my worldly affairs mind. The one who wanted to get the gold star, you know. And it made me so happy. Because when we orient ourselves in a direction towards something that is mysterious, maybe even impossible, it allows us to be right where we are. It allows us to engage wholeheartedly with ourselves, with each other, with the great earth.

[31:06]

So this is the invitation as we begin for you to begin to chew on and consider and reflect. What direction are you going? What direction do you want to go? And please don't worry about having to write some beautiful poetic treatise like Dogen did. Be practical about it. But allow yourself to really feel into what is it? What is it for me? What is it for me that calls me here when there's so many other things I could be doing? What does it mean to abide in a mind and heart? of great faith. This reflection and consideration of direction, of orientation, of aspiration or vow, it is the doorway.

[32:29]

It's the place we enter. And it's really important in the spirit of this impossible, the four bodhisattva vows that are impossible, that we don't worry about succeeding. I'll read you the close of the Eheikoso Hotsuganman. There's quite a bit of interesting content in the middle, but I just read the beginning, and at the end, Dogen says this, So imagine now you've come up with an aspiration, a vow, an intention. You know what direction you're pointing your cart. And guess what's going to happen? You're going to mess it up. You're going to fall down. You're going to make mistakes. But you get to do it with everybody else.

[33:34]

Over and over for countless, what does he say? Countless lives. This is our path. So we're not trying to do it right. What we're trying to do is engage wholeheartedly. So Dogen, at the end of his text, gives us some instruction about this. He says, by revealing and disclosing our lack of faith and practice before the Buddha. In my less than poetic language, I would say by being honest about when we muck it up, when we mess things up, when we have this very beautiful intention and then, you know, somebody cuts us off in traffic or takes the last lettuce out of the bowl or whatever it is. And there it is, whatever our reaction, our reactivity is. This is actually right where faith is cultivated, not by being perfect, not by having it easy.

[34:45]

By revealing and disclosing our lack of faith and practice before the Buddha, we melt away the root of transgression by the power of our repentance. When we're honest with ourselves about what's happening, when we're willing to to aspire, to be inspired, to vow, to live in a way that just brings delight to the heart, then we also want to be honest about all the places where, nope, I didn't do it there. And this is not a practice to just make you feel bad. Here's how Dogen says it.

[35:45]

So this power, this practice of noticing when, nope, I didn't quite get it this time. He says, this is the pure and simple color of true practice, of the true mind of faith, of the true body. By revealing and disclosing our lack of faith and practice before the Buddha, we melt away the root of transgression by the power of our repentance. This is the pure and simple color of true practice. of the true mind of faith, of the true body of faith. So I hope that these words from me and from Dogen and from Sung San and from Ryokan,

[37:03]

I hope that they will serve as a full invitation, really welcoming you in to this practice, this, again, not so much cultivation of faith, but the deepening of faith, the reorienting of our life, so that we can be here fully, so that we can meet ourselves and each other and the great earth from a place of confidence, from a place of trust, from a place of faith. Not because things are going our way, but because we are willing to keep showing up.

[38:16]

We're willing to be here. We're willing to be here. We're willing to be here. And we are doing it together. So maybe there is something in what I said that was inspirational. Maybe some of my words or one of these other teachers, maybe something was touched in you. So please trust that. Have faith in that. And give yourself permission to follow. just close with reading this one more time. We vow with all beings from this life on throughout countless lives to hear the true Dharma that upon hearing it no doubt will arise in us nor will we lack in faith that upon meeting it we will renounce

[39:37]

worldly affairs and maintain the Buddha Dharma. And that in doing so, the great earth and all living beings together will attain the Buddha way. Thank you all very much for your kind attention. Those of you on the camera, thank you. very much as well. And may we all together enjoy this practicing and deepening into our aspiration and our faith. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost 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.

[40:43]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:45]

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