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. Good morning. How's our sound today? Good? You can tell it's a one-day sitting day conversation. the shoes are especially well lined up outside the door do we have anybody here for the first time today all veterans well welcome back veterans So last Tuesday, we had the opening ceremony for the fall practice period.

[01:02]

Practice period is one of the most traditional ways we train in Zen. The traditional practice period in Japan is 90 days, and we do 90-day practice periods at Tassahara, which I think just started a few days ago, too. But in the city, we only do a 10-week practice period. What is that? 70-some days. It's a time when you set aside and practitioners set aside to make a personal and collective commitment to intensify their spiritual practice. And we have many activities involved in a practice period. Traditional sitting is one of the most important things we do, and we're starting off with a one-day sitting today, and we'll have one in a month. in November, and then we'll end with a seven-day Sashin ending on December 5.

[02:05]

It's a famous, it's called the Rohatsu Sashin, which celebrates Buddha's enlightenment. The theme of the practice period is Zen is our everyday life. This title came from a commentary Suzuki Rishi gave. Suzuki Rishi was the founder of this temple, a commentary made on the Genjo Koan, which was a famous essay Dogen Zenji wrote to a lay student of his. Dogen Zenji was the founder of the Japanese Soto sect. So I thought I'd say a few words about Dogen and then a little bit about what the Genjo Koan is, and then I would talk about a very well-known paragraph from the Genjo Koan that's five sentences long. I attempted to do something like this on Wednesday. I only got through sentence three, but I'm going to paced myself better today. So Dogen was born in 1200 in Kyoto, which was the capital city of Japan at that time.

[03:11]

He was born in high society. Some believe his father was the emperor's secretary. He was the grandson of the prime minister. His father died when he was two and his mother died when he was eight. And the story is that when he was watching the smoke from the incense at his mother's funeral, he decided he would be a monk, dedicate his life to the big questions. And so at age 13, he did ordain in the Tendai tradition, which was one of the major Buddhist traditions in Japan at that time. But he became dissatisfied with that, and at age 17, he left the Tendai monastery and joined a recently founded Zen monastery. At that time, the only kind of Zen in Japan was Rinzai Zen, which had just been recently brought up from China, and he studied there for seven years. And at the age of 23, he realized he still wasn't satisfied and didn't have the teacher he needed, and he set off for China.

[04:14]

And went to China, and he studied there for five years. Finally, the last two years, he found the teacher, Ru Jing, and studied with him for two years and received Dharma transmission from Rujin and returned at age 27 to Japan. He sort of lived in a hermitage for the next few years, maybe six years, until enough students gathered around him. So I thought I'd say a few words about Dogen and then a little bit about what the Genjo Koan is, and then I would talk about a very well-known paragraph from the Genjo Koan that's five sentences long. I attempted to do something like this on Wednesday. I only got through sentence three, but I'm going to pace myself better today. So Dogen was born in 1200 in Kyoto, which was the capital city of Japan at that time.

[05:22]

He was born in high society, Some believe his father was the emperor's secretary. He was the grandson of the prime minister. His father died when he was two and his mother died when he was eight. And the story is that when he was watching the smoke from the incense at his mother's funeral, he decided he would be a monk, dedicate his life to the big questions. And so at age 13, he did ordain in the Tendai tradition, which was one of the major Buddhist traditions in Japan at that time. But he became dissatisfied with that, and at age 17, he left the Tendai Monastery and joined a recently founded Zen monastery. At that time, the only kind of Zen in Japan was Rinzai Zen, which had just been recently brought over from China, and he studied there for seven years. And at the age of 23, he realized he still wasn't satisfied and didn't have the teacher he needed, and he set off for China, and went to China, and he studied there for five years.

[06:30]

Finally, the last two years, he found the teacher, Ru Jing, and studied with him for two years, and received Dharma transmission from Ru Jing, and returned at age 27 to Japan He sort of lived in a hermitage for the next few years, maybe six years, until enough students gathered around him. And in 1233, at the age of 33, he founded Koshinji, which was his first monastery. And in that year, he wrote two essays, one called the Makahanya Haramitsu, which was a short commentary on the Heart Sutra. And in the fall, he wrote the Genjo Koan for a lay practitioner. And Okamura, who wrote this marvelous book about the Genjo Koan, states that through these two essays, Dogen expressed his basic understanding of Buddhist teaching.

[07:39]

For him, the practice of zazen is the practice of the great perfect wisdom of philosophy expressed poetically in the Genjo Koan. Dogen practiced for 10 years at Koshishoji and then founded Eheiji, where he practiced for another 10 years and died at the age of 53. Eheiji is still the founding monastery of Soto Zen and is a very large temple complex in Japan. During the time of his life, he died early at 53, he composed 95 essays which were compiled into a collection called the Shobo Genzo, the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. In 1252, Dogen rewrote Genjo Kohan and made it the first chapter in the Shobo Genzo, signifying that he thought it summarized his essential understanding of what he was trying to convey. So basically, this is just a short story to say that Dogen went to a lot of trouble

[08:47]

traveling all the way across the ocean to China to find out what Buddhism was, and then spent a lot of time working on how to express it, and even rewrote the Genjo Koan one more time the year before he died, and placed it at the beginning of his collection. So it's an essay worth studying. Okamura says, Genjo Cohen is one of the best-known chapters of the Shobo Genzo. It is the best text to use in a beginning study of Dogen's teaching, and understanding it is essential to developing an understanding of Zazen and our daily activities as bodhisattva practitioners. So I'm going to spend just a little bit of time talking about what genjo koan, which is obviously a Japanese word, means.

[09:50]

In this book, Chohoka Okamura, or Okamura Roshi, defined genjo as reality as it is actually happening in the present moment, and koan as a question that true reality asks of us. Actually, you guys are probably pretty familiar with what the word koan means. That's essentially becoming an American word. It comes from all those paradoxical Zen stories that sometimes us Zen lecturers bring forth to confuse us all. A classic one of those stories is, and one of my favorites, and I'm only saying this because it might have some relevance later on, this famous interchange between Nanshuan and Zhaozhou. Zhaozhou asked Nanshuan, what is the way? A marvelous question. What is the way?

[10:53]

What is Zen about? What is Zen practice about? And Nanshuan said, ordinary mind is the way. A kind of both intriguing and surprising answer. And Zhaozhou said, should I try to direct myself toward it? Nanshwan said, if you try to direct yourself, you betray your own practice. Chow just said, how can I know the way if I don't direct myself? And Nanshwan said, the way is not subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion, not knowing is blankness. If you truly reach the genuine way, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can this be discussed at the level of affirmation and negation? We're not going to talk about that at all. I mean, you could spend a lifetime talking about that koan, but you get this sort of general idea. It's one of those little life teasers that you run around, you know, ordinary mind is the way, what does that mean?

[11:59]

So, anyway, going back to what Shohaka Okamura says about the genjo koan, he says the genjo koan means to answer the question from true reality through the practice of our everyday activity. To answer the question from true reality through the practice of our everyday activity. So, at every moment of our life, there's a question that life is asking us, and we have to answer through what we do. That's a koan. It's not something you can figure out with your head and do. It's like, how do we live a life? How do we live our life? And the emphasis is that you have to answer that at every moment of your life, not just when you're sitting zazen or doing chanting or listening to lectures, but every moment of your life is an opportunity to express your deepest understanding of

[13:09]

what your human life means. So this is very handy because it means that you get a chance to practice all the time. You don't have to wait. You get to practice at work. You get to practice at home when you're maybe disagreeing with some family member about who did the dishes. These are all tremendous opportunities to practice. translation of Genjo Kohan that maybe is easier to remember is the Kohan of the present moment. There are so many different translations of the title, let alone the text itself, but I kind of like the Kohan of the present moment. It's easier to remember than that long sentence that I gave you earlier. This present moment is a Kohan. This present moment is our opportunity to practice. Hence the title of this practice period, Zen is our everyday life. Our everyday life is our opportunity to practice.

[14:15]

I'm doing really well here on time. I'm already through page four. I get to reward myself with a glass of water and drink of water here now. So here's the paragraph we're going to study. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly.

[15:17]

Excuse me. Are we back on that? Okay. So on the one hand, this sort of sounds like a step-by-step process. First, we're going to study ourself, then we're going to forget ourself. And then once we've forgotten ourself, we're going to be actualized by the myriad things, that's everything. And then when actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away, and then no trace of realization remains. But it's also not just a step-by-step thing, it's also sort of all the same. We're going to take one sentence at a time. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. So at a sort of like basic level, this means you don't have to read the 10,000 texts on Buddhism to study the Buddha way or to study Zen. You just have to study yourself.

[16:22]

Again, that's handy because it's much easier to carry yourself around than a whole bunch of books. And there's many famous stories about you know, Zen scholars that carry books around but never understood Zen. So you start with that. You've got yourself and you're going to study it. So... Okay. So at some basic level, I think what that means is you just have to honestly observe your life with a certain amount of, you know... without prejudice, you know, willing to admit things. So it also means, you know, like your conduct and everything, so how you're feeling. So you might be feeling a certain way, and you might say, oh, well, I'm feeling cranky. Zen students aren't supposed to be cranky. They're supposed to be kind and buoyant and happy all the time, so I'm not really feeling cranky.

[17:28]

I'm going to kind of ignore that and pretend I'm not cranky. Well, that's not That's not being honest, right? So at some level, this means no matter what your idea is about how you're supposed to be feeling or what you're supposed to be doing or how you're supposed to be acting, which is a whole story and a whole theory you have about things, there is how you're actually acting and how you're actually feeling, and so let's just be honest about it. Let's see if we can observe with a certain amount of accuracy what our life is about. So that would be... studying ourself without prejudices. But another translation of the Japanese words, study means to become intimate with. So maybe it's not just a matter of standing outside yourself and observing yourself and making all kinds of non-prejudicial assessments, but to be very intimate with yourself, to actually be in the skin of your body.

[18:30]

Another translation of the character's study is the top half means wings of a bird and the bottom half means self. And Shoaku in this book says it's sort of like how a bird studies with his parents to see how to fly. And then there's that moment where you step off the limb and actually fly. So there was a certain point in time when you were studying how to bicycle where you got on the bicycle and then... you were going down the hill and somehow not using all your thinking mind so well you actually figured out how to do that. So it's a much more integrated way of studying yourself, of learning things. All of these things that I've been talking about maybe involve some separation, some I am here studying you out there or studying myself.

[19:51]

And Suzuki Roshi says about this sentence, studying yourself here, he says that in the direct experience, there is no subjectivity or objectivity. So to study ourselves is to study everything. This is the study of Buddhism. No subjectivity or objectivity. We're not setting up an objective observer, a subject observing the object of our life. And I mentioned this to a student the other day, and she was trying to figure out exactly one way to think about that. And I remember a famous story. Well, first of all, When I was looking up this story, I ran into this paragraph from Suzuki Rishi where he says, Suzuki Rishi says, if you try to understand who you are, it is an endless task, and you will never see yourself. It is very difficult to try to think about yourself.

[20:52]

To reach a conclusion is almost impossible, and if you continue trying, you become crazy. And you won't know what to do with yourself. Have you ever been there? That's not the kind of trying to figure out yourself that we're talking about here. We're not trying to drive ourself crazy. I mean, I think it's... Let's see, where do I have that? I have that somewhere. Well... So Dengshan, who is the founder of Chinese Soto Zen, said, don't try to see yourself objectively. If you seek for information about yourself, that's information. The real you is not that kind of thing. What is the real you?

[21:54]

It's not just all the stories you tell about yourself, all the information you have about yourself. I mean, it's interesting, and we do spend some time doing that. We can take a Myers-Briggs assessment and find out whether we're a introvert or an extrovert and various other nuances. And we make our own assessment of what our personality is and what our strengths and weaknesses and we have lots of theories and at some point in time maybe we decide we need some professional guidance in this area. So we go see a therapist for six or seven years and maybe after a while he says, this is what you're... And this is all good. There's nothing wrong with that. And although I mostly think after seeing a therapist for six or seven years, it's mostly that relationship, not so much the theories about who you are, but that kind of relationship that's important. But anyway, what we're talking about here is not all the theories we have about our personality and our life and the life outside us, but some other way of knowing ourselves, some direct experience of our life.

[23:02]

And this is a story that Suzuki Roshi was talking about. He says, when you see someone practicing sincerely, you see yourself. If you are impressed by someone's practice, you may say, oh, she is doing very well. She is neither she nor you. When you are struck by someone's practice, you see yourself. That is the real you. That you is the pure experience of practice. You know what I mean by that? I mean, like I remember one time I was looking at Sir Gershi and I just, I was so struck by the quality of his life. The way he was, the way he was conducting himself right at that moment seemed so free, so alive. So present.

[24:07]

And what he's saying here is that wasn't just him. That was me being able to see him. That connection between us that allowed me to see something about life that I had never seen before, never imagined before, never felt before, never experienced before. And that is... the pure experience of practice. That's a direct experience of a connection to another person. We think when we just see somebody and think, oh, wow, their practice is so good. That's them out there. When you're struck by their practice, you are struck by their practice. That's your practice, too. That's not your practice. That's not her practice. That's some connection practice between you. So this sort of leads into the second part of to study yourself.

[25:13]

To study yourself is to forget yourself in that connection with another person that you're not there anymore. You're just, there's some experience. To forget yourself is this. So at the first level of forgetting yourself is to see your own lunacy and say, I'm just not going to take this so personally. Do you know what I mean by your own lunacy? This is something triggers you and you go into one of those storylines about what a terrible person you are and how hopeless life is and how you're never going to get anything you want like love or success or anything like that. And then a part of you realizes, well, I've heard this song before. I've read this textbook before. This is just that same old line. And then the other part of you saying, no it isn't, because you just had this special proof this time that's different than all the other times.

[26:16]

You really are an idiot. You really will never succeed. But then there's that other part of you that goes, oh no, this is just that same storyline. You're just trying to pretend that it's new. And... When you can start to notice that, first of all, I think someone used to say, that's enlightenment itself, just to notice your lunacy and identify it as lunacy, because you can be free of it at that moment. But this is an example of how much of our life, as you're observing it, rotates around something called self-concern. You know, this is a background theme of your life. Me. How are things going for me? I had this interesting experience, or just a story to fill this out.

[27:19]

I was teaching at a group in Mill Valley that on Fridays, every other Friday or so, I'd go out there and I'd teach. And so I was... And it starts at 9 o'clock, so I was driving through Mill Valley. I don't know if you know Mill Valley. Downtown Mill Valley, very tricky to get through. Lots of coffee shops, lots of people walking, lots of cars driving around. You have to really be on your game. So I got through the main intersection successfully between the Book Depot and this other coffee shop, and I was moving along, and there was a crosswalk, and I saw a father and two... two boys. They looked actually like they were twins. They were maybe each about five years old. He had one in each hand. They were sort of coming up to the crosswalk. You know, I could have driven through easily, but I thought, I'm just going to stop, you know, and I stopped very nicely. And he just went across the crosswalk with the two boys. He didn't, you know, like indicate anything to me, you know, nod to me or anything like that.

[28:20]

And then in my little mind, there was... Well, why didn't he tell me how nice it was that I stopped at the crosswalk? You know, because it's all about me and how good I was to stop at the crosswalk. Never mind that, of course, it's the law to stop at a crosswalk. Any normal human being would not run over children. This is not some great thing I'm doing. I'm just doing what any... decent person would do, and yet I would like a little kind of acknowledgement about me. That's what I mean by self-concern. This goes on all the time, all day long, this kind of stuff is going on. It's kind of this background thing. So to study yourself is to maybe put that part of yourself. To forget the self is to forget that part. Let's just leave that out for a while. Let's walk around for a while without having to have so much of that going on.

[29:27]

It can be such a relief to set that down, not be worrying whether somebody's praising you or somebody's criticizing you or just, you know, like just let it go. And if you let it go, to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things, then your life is a life that's connected to everything. And in that connection to everything is an awakened life in a moment. You can appreciate the world you live in, even the tragic parts, even the difficult parts, because you're no longer dividing it into the things that are good or bad, you're just living it, whatever. It is. To experience life without that subject-object separation, without that what's in it for me.

[30:30]

So, now we get to a really fun sentence. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. This is a very... Dropping off body and mind is a translation of Shinjin Datsuraku. Shinjin Datsuraku. It's a very key word in Dogen's teaching. He learned it from his first teacher. Ru Jing in China. When I first studied the Genjo Koan and this paragraph, it was very common at that time to say this was the moment of Dogen's enlightenment, that the story was that Dogen was sitting zazen with his fellow students late at night, and Ru Jing was

[31:45]

walking down the aisles, as Zen teachers do from time to time. And the student next to Dogen was sleeping. And it's not so good to be sleeping when the teacher is walking behind you. So Ru Jing said, Zazen is dropping off body and mind. Why are you just sleeping? And supposedly with this, Dogen was enlightened. That's one of those wonderful Chinese Zen stories, right? So, you know, I think I believed that story for about 20 years. It was written in his biography by Dogen's successor. But the beautiful thing about modern scholarship nowadays, because they've got everybody studying Dogen like crazy, a lot of Japanese scholars are studying him, and he's being translated into lots of different things. And apparently... Nowhere in Dogen's writing is there anything about this story, his own personal writing.

[32:51]

This was just a fabrication by his student to kind of build him up. He had this big enlightenment experience and therefore he's a marvelous teacher. So according to modern scholarship, Dogen's religious experience is not attaining some sudden and special psychological satori experience. He never talked about such an experience. In his teachings, realization is a deep awareness of the fact that the existence of the self is not a personal possession of the self. That's a handful, isn't it? I'm going to repeat that again. So first of all, his religious understanding was not some big experience, but a realization realization is a deep awareness of the fact that the existence of the self is not a personal possession of the self.

[33:56]

You don't own yourself. Your self is a product of everything. So for Dogen, zazen is dropping off body and mind. It is not some special psychological condition resulting from zazen. It is the actual practice of zazen. Zazen itself is dropping off body and mind. It says, according to my notes, I'm supposed to go to page 88 in this book and read something. I've got my glasses on. I thought that was very interesting, isn't it, that you have this idea about some teaching from some great founder of their school, and then in 20 years or so, some scholars come up and say, I mean, does it really make any difference? I mean, not really, but kind of interesting. So I thought I would just give you a couple of examples.

[35:01]

So, in order to flesh this out, Shohako Komura says, what does it mean to drop off body and mind when you're sitting zazen? So he says, throughout your life, we wear clothing. You all have different clothing on. I have this clothing on. You know, Curtis, my potential shouseau, has special priest robe clothing on. Various other people have lay rocks who's on. Various people have, you know, if you're a If you're a policeman, you have a certain kind of clothing on. So the clothing you wear is a little bit about who you are. Rich people have very fancy clothing on sometimes. But besides the actual clothing we have, we also have our social position, our status, all kinds of ideas we have about ourself. That's the kind of clothing we wear. And so when we say dropping... cough, body, and mind, we're going to, in zazen, take off all our clothing and be the naked self.

[36:09]

We're going to sit without our, I mean, we're going to sit with clothing on, I hope you're all going to sit with clothing on, but that would be... But you're not going to associate with your clothing. That is, we're going to take off all our ideas about who we are. And of course, he goes on to say, through all the different experiences we have in our life, we built up a self-image. And this self-image, like, I'm a very strong person. Oh, I'm a very smart person. Have you ever noticed that about 90% of the people in the world are smarter than everybody else? And they're certainly more attractive than everybody else. So... All these ideas we have about ourself, when we sit zazen, we let go of all these self-images. We open the hand of thought. These concepts drop off, and the body and mind are released from their karmic bindings.

[37:14]

All these thoughts about yourself and who you are, they, like, in your brain. And they also, like, clog up the whole body, right? And one of the beautiful things about sitting zazen, if you can just sit there and just let it all go, all this stuff about who you are and what you're supposed to be doing, and just be there. What a relief. What a relief to let it all go. So in a kind of final statement on this, Shawaka says, to be actualized by all the things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off. That simply means that in zazen, the separation between self and others falls away, is dropped off. Zazen reveals the total reality of interdependent origination.

[38:17]

Zazen reveals the total reality of interdependent origination. We let go of thought, we settle our whole being into that interpenetrating reality. Okay. So you're all sitting zazen today. This is what's happening, right? You're going to drop all those ideas about yourself, all those thoughts, all that clogged up stuff in your body. You're going to sit there and just be part of interpenetrating reality. May it be so. I'm doing really well today on time. I've gotten through one whole extra sentence. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly. We so much want to have something, don't we?

[39:26]

I want to have that enlightenment experience and I want to carry it around with me. I want to get some deep understanding and I'm going to carry it around with me. This kind of realization that we're talking about, this living in every moment, is to not carry anything around with you. To be ready to meet the next moment free of any idea that you've ever achieved anything or ever had anything. that you own. It's so wonderful sometimes you'll have one of those moments in your life where all of a sudden you're just awake. You feel the breeze in the air. You notice how beautifully the light's sifting through the trees. A butterfly dances in front of you. No thoughts, just alive there. And then, wow! I must be having some kind of great experience.

[40:30]

The trace. The trace that goes through your mind. A little added story you have to... And of course, it gets bad if you actually start thinking, well, I must be a pretty special person. I'm having all these wonderful experiences. You're lost for sure then. It's kind of like a... Do birds leave a trace when they fly through the air? Do fish leave traces when they swim through the water? Maybe. Maybe you can see a trace, maybe you can't. And of course, like all things in Zen, maybe you do leave a trace, maybe you don't. So, to summarize, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. The study of self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away.

[41:40]

No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. Look and see what is going on in this moment of your living. Every moment is gone in a flash. It's a death. Whatever your problem is, whatever your issue is or non-issue is, your thorny relationships, your aging body and mind, a troubled heart, a strange longing, this is your life. Experience it. Live it. We don't notice how marvelous it is to be alive because we are so busy. We don't notice how marvelous it is to be alive and what a gift to share it with other people.

[42:47]

How brief it is and how great it is that we're in it together. We forget. We forget. But if you practice our way, Dogen's way, you will forget less often. I promise you that. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:47]

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