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, everybody. See, if we knew what we were doing, we probably never would have started. We can say that about almost anything. I'm very happy to be here and Paul and Steve, where's Steve there? Thank you so much for your invitation for Shirley and me to come down from British Columbia where we live. We live in a very rural place, small island. We have a sangha there about 25 people who have been practicing together for quite a number of years and very dedicated, very loving, very warm group.

[01:09]

In a way it helps because we live on an island so you have to see everyone the next day at the market. So this really helps Dharma practice. Last night at Green's we attended a a dinner for presenters and translators and people who had come to... I'm having problems with this technology here. And while we were at dinner, Shirley and I couldn't help but feel the warmth of the people in the room. We really felt like we were at a family dinner, at a family occasion. It was such warmth. It was such heart. And I couldn't help but feel this was Dogen and Dogen's aspiration and Dogen's practice right there at dinner. It also, I have to say, reminded me of one time when I went to a wedding in Sicily.

[02:14]

There was a lot of happy faces and a lot of nice wine and food. It was quite great. So I would like to thank all of you, both here and not here anymore, who were determined and dedicated to bring out this translation of Dogen's Shobo Genzo into English. There are many, many things we could say about it, but... At this moment, the thing that's really in my heart is that our world needs this so badly. And we who speak English, we need to have Master Dogen's teachings in a way that can really penetrate our lives because there's so much work to do. We need his vision. We need his understanding. We need to practice in a way that he

[03:21]

has taught us to practice, really, so that we can return to the one life that we all are, really. And this is at the core of Dogen, as far as I understand. So today, what I'd like to do is I want to weave together some thoughts about Dogen and poetry and our practice and translation a little bit to try to be relevant to the occasion. And so I'm going to begin, I'd like to begin with a poem that I wrote a few years ago during the time that Kaz and I were working on the final translations for Dogen. I think we went through the whole Shovigenza four or five times, word by word, really to try to find the Dogen every time. And I feel fairly... secure at this time in saying that Dogen proposes a world in a way in which the world is intimacy itself, or in which the world is the functioning of intimacy.

[04:41]

And when I say intimacy, I don't just mean becoming or being close to somebody or to something. As I understand Dogen's teachings, intimacy goes way beyond being close. It has more to do with a kind of thoroughness, a completeness, a being drenched-ness, so that there is no gap in any part or any place of life. And acknowledging that there is no gap, discovering that there is no gap. Suzuki Roshi used the phrase through and through. This has got a bit of the flavor or the taste of what I understand as intimacy, according to a Dogen, this word that I want to use. The sense of all inclusiveness, which a Dogen uses quite a bit. And when I think about this idea of being drenched,

[05:46]

each thing being drenched in itself and in all other things, or each thing being completely, thoroughly, wholeheartedly, 100% entirely leaving nothing out through and through itself. It feels warm to me. It feels very warm. I can feel the functioning of warmth as life moves together in this mysterious way, and each thing is created by all other things functioning. That's my understanding, in a way, of intimacy. And I can feel how each thing then leans into everything else and helps to create that in this codependent origination that we talk about. When you think about that kind of interaction, or when I do at least, it feels quite warm to me. And I think Dogen was warm. I mentioned it last night. I don't think we think of him as warm, but I think he was quite warm. when he came back from China, and we see it in Bendoa, in Endeavor of the Way, he said, well, I have this teaching, and I don't know if anybody really will understand it.

[06:58]

I don't really know if anybody will use it. Maybe they won't get it for a long, long time. But what if there's somebody who needs it? I should provide it. I should give it. And so his heart was already completely opened. to bringing what he had, uh, understood his realization and his discovery, um, to, uh, to the world. And in this case, uh, to 13th century Japan. So, the other, uh, the other reason I wanted to read this poem is because when I, uh, first read it to Kaz during one of our, uh, one of our, uh, we would spend about a week at a time, uh, translating on a very lazy schedule. And, uh, And over the seven or eight years, we'll somehow manage to go through the whole text a number of times. But anyway, when I read this poem to Kazi liked it, so I read it to you again today. It's called Within, Within.

[08:00]

It's the title poem of this book, and it has an epigraph from Dogen's Kenbutsu, Seeing Buddha. The epigraph is, Spring is within a plum twig bearing the snow, cold. No one can say what this life is. Snow, spring, plum twig, and bearing, each thing is cold, cold, cold. And cold, cold, cold is snow, spring, plum twig, and bearing. This is within, and this is what is within. Bearing sorrow and silence, or holding our happiness for the world, are just plum twigs bearing snow. Shouting joy at passing cars or whispering, I'm going to kill myself, is the heat of petals in winter, the blossoming of snowdrops in spring.

[09:00]

Don't try and don't quit. That's the best I can say. People who love you and people who need you and people you love and those you hate come to the same thing. No matter how you turn, you can never turn fast or far enough. There is no escaping the ten directions, or ten thousand things, even when you die. So, take it easy. Have a Cuban cigar. Your shoulders are wide as the path is wide. Your heart is open as one blossom, two snowfalls, three bows to the east, and four kisses, one on each cheek. Intimacy. Yeah, when that last line came, I became so happy. I thought I finally was starting to sound like me.

[10:03]

So, I would say the first real encounter I had with Dogen, I didn't identify it as that for a long, long time, actually for decades. I was at my first session, and Dokusan was going on during session, and I had just, I had been practicing a sort of a wild weed, a sort of Zen wild weed from the 60s into the early 70s, just doing my own thing, practicing seriously, but staying away from all formal practice. And then I decided something else might happen. So I went to Zendo, and... And during session, someone came and said, would you like to have Doka-san with the master? And I said, oh. And they said, okay, come with us. They knew they had a wild one right there. So I went outside and they told me, okay, when you hear the bell, you run down the hall, you ring the bell, you open the door, you go inside, you bow in front of the altar, you go in front of the Roshi, you bow in front of Roshi, and when you come up, you just stay right there.

[11:17]

And try not to fall on your robes. And I said, okay. So then it was my turn. And I did everything they told me. I ran down the hall. I rang the bell. I opened the door. I bowed to the altar. I bowed in front of Roshi. And I sat up in front of him. And I found we were this close. His face was here and my face was here. And we were so close I could not even see the outline of his face. I had almost never been that close to somebody physically before. And my heart was just pounding. And then I heard his robes move. And I thought, uh-oh. This is the moment in the story when they hit you. And I saw his robes move and his hand coming up, and I thought, this really is that moment. But I was so scared I couldn't look down. Anyway, I saw his hand come up right in between our faces, and he went like this.

[12:21]

And that was Dogen. Come closer. He wasn't, of course, calling me closer to him, but he was giving me the whole teaching at a fingertip to come closer, to not let anything stop me from going all the way. And I took it. as a sign of his great care, really. It was a wonderful, wonderful lesson in fingertip dogen. Paul mentioned that I translate, and one of the languages I like to translate is Spanish. And there is a wonderful Spanish poet named Juan Raon Jimenez, who, have any of you heard of Jimenez? Jimenez wrote in the early part of the 20th century. And here's a poem called Intelligencia Dame, in Spanish, obviously. Intelligencia Dame. I'll give you a few lines just so you could feel the language.

[13:27]

It's chewy and rhythmic and beautiful. Intelligencia, dame el nombre exacto de las cosas. Que mi palabra sea la cosa misma, creara por mi alma nuevamente. So, well, it's so beautiful. And I translate this poem as Minds Give Me, Intelligencia. Dami, mind, give me. Mind, give me the exact name of things, that my word may be the thing itself recreated by my soul, so that all who do not know them go through me to things. All who have forgotten go through me to things. All those who love them go through me to things. Mind, give me the exact name and yours. and theirs and mine of things. It's like a prayer, isn't it? It's really like a poet's prayer. And I love it so much for the prayerful feeling in it.

[14:31]

But also because look at what Jimenez is asking. He's not saying, you know, like, give me the good words so I can be on the cover of Time magazine. He's saying, let me have the names of things so they can be realized, so the word can be the thing itself, recreated through my life, from my soul. Why? So that people who don't know them can go through me to things. And those who are forgotten can go through me to things. And those who love them can go through me to things. I hear it as a bodhisattva vow. Let my life be a conduit through which... the world can become real for other people, those who have forgotten and those who never knew and those who love and everybody. And it reminds me of Dugan's poem, Awake or Asleep in a Grass Hut, I Pray to Bring Others Across Before Myself.

[15:37]

Those sound like translations of the same feeling to me. So there's something quite loving in that poem. But also, Jimenez is pointing towards intimacy with that poem as well. We know that the word is not the thing itself. That's clear. Of course it cannot be. In Zen we say words are like the finger pointing at the moon, and not the moon itself. But Jimenez is saying to poets, and I think to all of us, come closer. Come to be willing to know the world in the world's own terms. Come to find out what things are from within themselves, from within things themselves. Or as Suzuki Roshi said, come to find things as it is, with no gap, with no space, with nothing but the kind of thoroughness and intimacy that I was talking about before.

[16:43]

I think it's the right call. It's the right thing for us to do, to be able to go forward and to have some courage that there's a reason to go forward into real intimacy with the world, which means with life itself, and to use our life in that way on behalf of others. I really hear this as a poem of great vow, looking at Hogan and Chosen, as I said that. One of the things I just wanted to mention that has to do with translation is that first word, intelligentsia. It's close to English. When I say intelligentsia, what do you hear? Intelligence, yeah. So why didn't I say intelligence? Why did I say mind? This is the kind of question that translators have to ask. What is the word, really, in this other language?

[17:48]

Intelligence in English has a little bit of a stickiness to it. We think of people as being intelligent, and then there are those who are non-intelligent. We think of intelligence as sort of a passport to good universities or something like that. We tend to think of intelligence as something that relies mostly on the intellect. And I know that Jimenez would not do that. that Jimenez's understanding of what we rely on to receive the exact name of things, if that is ever possible, is not the intellect. It's something much bigger, something vaster. And so the best I was able to come up with was mind, which of course comes from our training. Mind, give me. Not my mind or your mind, just mind. Wang Wei, a great Chinese poet that, of course, many of you may have heard of, he had a collection called Hiding the Universe.

[18:57]

And the question was asked, where do you hide the universe? So what would you say? In your mind. It's a good answer. The answer they gave was you hide the universe in the universe because that's the only place big enough for it to fit. Or in your mind. Same thing. So this is why I chose mind for intelligentsia. We're always trying to find what's not just the literal translation, but what is really meant before there are any words. Even before Dogen wrote one of the fascicles in translating. Even though, I mean, we fail, of course we fail, but we try to meet Dogen even before his words, to go through his words, to meet him before he even had his own words in that wonderful place from which words can come.

[20:03]

I think that this is one of the great things about translation, is the attempt. The failure is not important. But to try to realize intimacy in this way through language, which is so limiting, is a great, great opportunity. Translation is tricky in many ways. One of the ways is that, and actually when I think about all writing and maybe all language, I think all writing, at least this translation, even when we're writing in our own language, we're translating. We're translating the ineffable, invisible world of feelings and sensations, emotions, intuitions, hunches, places in the deep, dark, and beautiful, boundless mind that we are, that we can't even get anywhere near words to express.

[21:09]

And yet, somehow, out of this world that exists outside of language, feelings are not language. sensations are not language. Those intuitions, those hunches are not language. They exist out of language. Somehow we have to translate that ineffable world into a word or into words so that somebody else who has their own feelings and their own sensations, their own pre-thoughts, their own hunches and intuitions will get it through. We really understand it. So in a way, To come into language, we have to go outside of language and be intimate with the world that exists outside of language so that when we speak, what we say really can come through. This is one of the great challenges of translation. With Dogen, it becomes even more difficult because, well, for example, let's say I'm

[22:12]

I'm walking down the street on a beautiful day, and the sky is so blue, and the wind is blowing just gently on my arm, and I feel moved to write a poem. But how do I write blue? How can I translate the feeling of wind on an arm so that when Paul reads my poem, his arm feels so good? This really is the challenge of poetry, you know? And it is the challenge of communication. And it is the challenge of all writing, I think, how to make that possible. And yet we all know it can be done. There were times that I've read poems or stories in which the rain was just pouring for days, and I noticed I'm starting to feel a little wet. And yet all I have is words. So we know it can be done. With Dogen, it becomes a little difficult because we have words. We don't start outside of language. We start in language.

[23:14]

And then in order to understand the words that we have, we have to go outside of language. We have to leave language to come back to language. My last conversation with the Maizumi Roshi, who was the teacher who did this with me, for which I'm forever grateful. But my last conversation with him, we spent about two hours talking about words, just what are words. And he was a wonderful translator, a Dogen poet, and loved literature, really fantastic heart in that direction. And he said, we should never forget the place from where the words come out from. It was a great phrase, the place from where the words come out from. that from and from. So he was just saying source, just don't ever forget the source of the words.

[24:16]

And so when Kaz and I would translate, sometimes, you know, I'd work on something, some passage that looked like we could work with it, and sometimes he would say, okay, let me try, and he would do it, but what were we really passing between us? We were trying to pass something and trying to come to something that really did not exist as words at all. And so you understand it's fine to fail. But to try to meet Dogen in Dogen's own terms, to try to be intimate with Dogen through his language, to the place before his language, is a treasure of a lifetime. And I hope you will read Shobo Genzo slowly. I know you will read it slowly.

[25:18]

But I hope you will read it more slowly than you think you will read it. Because there is the opportunity for the readers, just like for the translators, to reach towards Dogen, to reach toward the place from where the words come out from that gave rise to Shovagenzo. Our practice as designed and guided by Dogen's teachings and so much in Shovagenzo, I think of our practice as the practice of intimate living. Everything we do, the way we stand, the way we kasho, the way we clean our mat, the way we serve and receive food, the way we sit beside each other, the way we work during sanmu, the way we clean our dishes, the way we care,

[26:34]

Everything is designed to take us to inside where everything is waiting. Inside dishes, inside chanting, inside palms together. Everything is designed to close the gap. Everything is always pointing in our own direction. To receive the gift of practice, in a spirit that understands what love and what joy is inside of that practice, I think is to be encouraged to take the risk, to cross over across that distance, across that gap, to intimate life itself. And I know that Dogen would be very happy to know that we're making a sincere effort to do that. So I thought, since I'm in San Francisco, I lived here in 1967 and eight and nine.

[27:45]

Very good time to live in San Francisco. I used to like to go to Chinese restaurants. So I thought I would end my talk today with... one more poem from this book. I have to find it. Yeah, since we're honoring Dogen as one of our great ancestors, I'll read Ancestors at the Sizzling Sichuan Palace. The restaurant is crowded, noisy, steam clouds flee the kitchen heat. while outside the traffic river honks through the chair-prop door. I bury myself in a cup of coarse tea, a bowl of plain rice. But when I look up, it all comes clear. This is the heaven realm of bodhisattvas.

[28:49]

One stands squeezed between chairs in the aisle and nurses her newborn beside the flashing sing-dow sign. Another feeds her daughters fried string beans with chopsticks one by one. Grandfather with thick ears is yelling to his wife who leans closer, smiling, nodding, yes, yes, deaf to everything he and everyone else has to say. Boys with large grins tussle over the last spare ribs. Shiny-haired girls kick each other under the table with spanking new leather shoes. Wake up, wake up, they all say. Keep doing the best you can. And suddenly, a homeless man with a bright watermelon patch of skin over half his face and not a tooth in his mouth rushes in and scurries from table to table like a whirlwind that pats the children on their heads and laughs with his arms around the old folks like friends at a wedding before chasing himself out the door and leaving behind a breeze that glows all the way from the Yangza at Liang right through this palace of human love and cools us with a joy rarely seen.

[29:50]

Pretty soon we settle into the chattering hum again. as grandmother continues to nod and smile. But there is a quiet happiness at each table that wasn't here before. And beneath the hum, the sound of Bodhidharma's straw sandals can be heard as he steps from his floating leaf onto fertile Chinese soil. 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, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[30:46]

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