This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Okay, so in today's session, I mainly would like to focus on some examples of Dogen's Chinese poetry. So that's today's handout. And before doing that, I'd like to go back to a topic that we started to get to the other day. It ran out of time a little bit. It's part of the first handout, but I'll just sum up some of the key ideas rather than worrying about that handout right now. And that has to do with reading sutras, or there's a section in Shepo Genzo called Kankin, which is usually translated as reading sutras. sutras.

[01:01]

And as we said in part of the Shinjin Datsuraku dialogue with Rujing, one part of that is that Rujing has the five practices that he says are not needed or you shouldn't be dependent on. And we talked about how four of those five are used in Dogen. The fifth one that's not used is the Nembutsu chanting. But the others, in a sense, vowing, the repentance, and reading sutras are used. And in particular, the Kantian fascicle, the reading sutras fascicle, talks about that particular practice, of course, reading sutras. And so I'd like to explore that for a couple of minutes. And this was actually in the handout. In another fasco called Bukyo, which is Buddhist sutras, Dogen says, to read sutras, you must have the I for reading sutras.

[02:07]

So we come back to that term I. This was on the bottom of the second page of that first handout, if anybody had that. Not on the new handout, but you must have the I for reading sutras. So it comes back to that term I, which is in Shobogenzo, the I that is the I of Insight. And he has a, well, any thoughts on Dogen's general view towards sutras, at least as expressed in Shobhogenzo? Anybody familiar with that or have any thoughts on that? What's that? Right, right. That the river and the colors of the mountains and the sound of the river is a sutra. Actually, that's one of the Chinese poems that we're going to look at in a few moments. Dogen generally was very positive about sutras. He especially liked the Lotus Sutra, which was the kind of essential to Japanese Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese Buddhism in that era.

[03:15]

So all the various kinds of Buddhism, all the monks would have studied the Lotus Sutra very much. Avatamsaka Sutra, Diamond Sutra, Heart Sutra. Other sutras would have been studied by Dogen. And he does quote them quite a bit. So he generally quotes Chinese Zen masters and analyzes their sayings and doings. But he also is very interested in the sutras. Now... one of the things about the, uh, so, so there's several, uh, fascicles of Shobo Genzo that talk about sutras. The Bukyo fascicle, Buddhist sutras, of course, deals with sutras. Kankin, reading sutras, uh, talks about sutras. Uh, there's another one, Nyo Lai Zen Shin, the whole body of, um, of Tathagata, um, talks about, uh, reading sutras.

[04:18]

And, um, Mountains and River Sutras, Sansui Kyo, where the poem comes from that you mentioned, deals with the role of the sutras also. But if we come to the term reading sutras, I mean, generally in Buddhist practice from China and Japan, What's the main thing, what's the main activity that was probably done and still is done with sutras? Is it reading? Yeah. Chanting. Right. So actually, you know, having grown up in the... In the Sputnik era, if you remember, the Sputnik era. Yeah, in the Cold War era. And they always talked about the three... In American education, to catch up with the Soviet Union at that time, they talked about the three R's.

[05:22]

Which were... Yeah, and of course... Reading, writing... Reading, writing, they dropped the W from writing. And arithmetic dropped the A. Yeah, that's America. So they're talking about education policy, and they spell the, you know. But, you know, we all knew that that misspelling was done deliberately. But they were trying to say, okay, to catch up with the Soviets, we had a drill. You know, it's kind of like the buzzword today is STEM, right? Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, yeah. And... You know, it makes sense to train people in, you know, practical things. But anyway, when I was thinking about reading sutras, you know, the word, you know, I always try to go back to what the actual Chinese words say. And the word for reading doesn't really mean reading.

[06:25]

It means looking or regarding. That's enough. So I came up with 10 R words. For sutras, reading is one, but like most of you said, is reading the main thing you think of? Reciting. Reciting. Okay, R word. What else? Writing. So, because of the three R's, we can call that an R word. Arithmetic. Does arithmetic count at all? Absolutely. Yeah. In what way? 84. Yeah, how many sutras, how many scrolls that they were written on? Yes. And, you know, in the year 983, in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan province in China, they printed, you know, and China had the printing press early, they printed the first canon, the first collection, the first Buddhist canon covering... covering the entire record.

[07:27]

Now, that was before most of the Chinese Zen writings were being written, so they had to expand that canon eventually by the 11 and 1200s. They had to expand it to start including the Zen writings because otherwise, you know, if it had been a closed canon, it would have been left out. So they started counting how many items were in that canon, and the proficient monks were expected to know them, to know the titles, to have to have studied them all and to be able to recite and to be able to quote at will. I mean, one of the things that's so remarkable about Dogen is that with the sutras that were from Mahayana Buddhism and from the Zen writings in China, he was able to quote them at will and then also to interpret them and sometimes rewrite them a little bit with the kind of critical spirit of trying to be inventive and innovative in his interpretation. So we have reading, Reciting, writing, arithmetic, that's only four.

[08:31]

Yes. Well, actually, I'm going to write that one down. I'll give you... I hadn't quite thought of that. What I was thinking of was rotating. Rotating is part of it, but also airing them out. Yes, that could be an R word. So we had rotating and, well, regarding, because if you look at sutras, that can be a powerful experience. Remembering, of course. Recollecting. Recollecting. All right. Oh, my goodness. I can see you have a literary mind. Yes. Pardon me? Ruminating. Oh, we're experiencing this. Rolling. Yes. Turning. Yes. Yes. Rolling up the scrolls.

[09:34]

Yes. Great. I also was thinking of, well, regarding, well, I guess I said that one, but repeating, of course. Repeating is part of reciting, but it can be a little bit different. And rotating. I think I had the rotating. Writing I had, yes. Yeah. Drop the W. Receiving, because they're often gifted. Especially, you know, the lay followers would gift them to the masters or to the temples. And Dogen was the recipient. What's that? Revering. Whoa. Realizing. But, you know, the funny thing is, even though that's called... that almost always is translated as reading sutras. Reading is like, you know, not necessarily on that list at all. I mean, one of the last things on the list. Of course, in a way, it's kind of taken for granted, but there's so many other functions.

[10:36]

And there was also, well, I had the word remaining in the sense that there's an expression, you know, don't ever stop... Don't ever stop... reading or reciting. In a certain level, it's a constant activity that's kept up. It doesn't have a beginning or end. You know, it's a state of mind. And, you know, so what in particular does Dogen contribute to this overall discussion? And if you look, if you get a chance to read the Reading Sutras fascicle, it's very interesting because it mainly does two or three things at once. One thing it does is to give instructions on what it takes to take out the scrolls and recite them, especially if it's requested by patrons or donors for the temple on a festival or some kind of celebration or a memorial day.

[11:39]

It's very important. And a lot of those instructions that Dogen refers to here and in other... sections of his writings were well known in China, but they wouldn't have been known in Japan at that time. So partly he's introducing many of the basic manual techniques for how to perform rituals. That's another R. I think anything I'd say with R is going on my list somehow. So in a way, when you look at those sections of it, it looks fairly conventional in the sense that He's not saying anything uniquely Dogen-esque in those passages. He's bringing out passages that would be, you know, that others and followers in both Rinzai and Soto would be familiar with those passages. That instructional manual that was written in 1103 in China would have been standard practice in all the Chinese schools and then were basically carried over

[12:44]

And, you know, there's the term Shingi, right? There's the Dogen collection of essays on instructions, the Dogen Shingi and the Keizan Shingi. And that's the general word for the special Zen instructional manuals. Shingi are the rules for the monastic. And that adds to the Vinaya, which was the rules going back to Shakyamuni and the early days of Buddhism. on monastic behavior, and the Shingi is the Zen. One of the main things is that in the Shingi, they talk about the Dharma Hall, they talk about the monks' hall, they talk about the kinds of discourses that the abbot would perform that were very different from all the other previous Chinese Buddhist schools. But while Dogen gives the... Then he also has about a dozen koan cases.

[13:46]

And generally, the koan cases, I'm only going to say one or two here, seem to challenge those rules to some extent. So the one here is Joshu got off the meditation platform and walked around it. And he said to a messenger, the canon... has been turned or rotated. And a woman who requested the ritual said, I asked the master to rotate the entire canon. Why did he rotate only half the canon? And then, you know, of the dozen or so koans he cites, there's another one that's almost identical. Why... where the master simply walks around the meditation platform and says, I rotated the canon. Now, rotating the scriptures was a physical activity that was done.

[14:48]

Also, walking around, circumambulating where the scriptures were being held was another activity. Now, here, they're kind of... So, how will we interpret the significance here? The entire canon is? It's held in the activity. It's held in the activity of Zazen. Therefore? Right. Right. Okay. So, I think that's a very good point. Why does the woman... So, you know, we have to assume that if there's a valet follower is requesting it, you know, maybe they want what they think is the real thing, you know. But, you know, they're learning the Zen way.

[15:50]

So Dogan, this is one of the koans Dogan is citing. But how about the woman's response? I asked for the entire, why did he rotate only half? How would we interpret that part? Yeah? You're right. Okay. So, one view would be that the lay disciple is saying to the master, wait a second, you didn't realize... You thought you were doing some clever activity there to show that it's a reflection of the Zazen. But I suspect that the tail didn't get through the window, according to that other koan. Would anybody want to defend the master?

[16:54]

That Joshu, after all, is a pretty... Joshu is the... He's involved in the... in the Mu koan or does the dog have Buddha nature, he's involved in the cutting of the cat koan. He's probably cited in koan cases by Dogen and many others from that period as much as anybody. So do we want to leave him hanging as like he didn't, you know? Yes. My first impression is like, it's like the, it's like the knowing a moment, half, only knowing half a moment. Right. That's my first impression. Yeah. can't just rotate half of it. But by rotating half, it's actually rotating. You can't just rotate half. So that would sort of agree. That would agree that maybe he only did half. It seemed like he was being inventive by just walking around the meditation platform, but you would agree with the comment that maybe he missed... Yeah.

[17:58]

Maybe the other way to look at it would be that You still need the relative sutras. You still need the sutras. So I'm only going to go halfway because you just can't throw them out. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah. And Delgate says that later on. Like, every speck of dust is 84,000 sutras. So... Yeah. Yeah. He talks about appreciation for the science and how it can meet the world both in science and speech. But what comes up for me also is the image of this

[19:02]

woman, I don't know if she was a nun or a lay practice woman, but even the nuns could represent some related to a lay practice world that the men and monks do in quite the same way. And so there is a cultural cognate at San Fernando and you also need a concerted effort to reach many practitioners, I'd also see that. Good, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think women aren't mentioned that much in some of these koans, so when we do see it, we wonder if that's indicating... Well, if there's indicating a larger context of whether the... of, you know, if there's any gap between the male practice and the female practice, but yeah.

[20:04]

The resonance for me is between the monk, I've forgotten his name, of the pack of sutras. Yeah, Deshan, Togshan, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, because we do have a couple cases, and actually, there's another one involving Joshu, where he's going to the famous Mount Wutai, which was known for a lot of visionary experiences. And generally, the Zen monks didn't go there. It was more like tantric type of Buddhism, because you would see reports of seeing multicolored clouds and the Bodhisattva Manjushri kind of appearing in mysterious ways, flying in the skies or taking on a disguise as he walked in the mountains. And... Some of the Zen monks from that era would say, like, hey, you know, this is going against the grain of what we're looking for. Don't get hung up on it. But according to the story, Joshu, whose temple, and Wutai is up in the north.

[21:07]

It's kind of close to the Beijing area. And, you know, Zen at that time was known as a southern school. It was mostly in the south. But Joshu happened to be located up north and not too far from Mount Wutai. So apparently he went there. because so many monks were interested, according to the story, and he wanted to go check it out for himself. And he said to the, when he was on that road, he, this is a similar story. He meets a woman by the side of the road selling the cakes. He asked her, am I going on the right road to Mount Wutai? And she says something like, yeah, keep going. And then as soon as he keeps going, she laughs and they say, oh, don't listen to anything I say. And you don't know exactly if that's a kind of put down or not, but that's in the record. So I think one thing is that the... you know, in Koan cases, it's fair game to put down anybody because nobody's got the final answer. Maybe somebody has only half the answer. Maybe half the answer is the full answer.

[22:08]

So I think Dogen's kind of playing around by citing these. One last thing before we go to the Chinese poetry is that one of the things that occurred to me recently was that what was the canon for Dogen? So... When I say canon, again, in China, they published in 983 this collection, and they got very concerned with, let's have all the materials collected into one compendium so that we can consult them. And like other religious traditions, we decide, hey, these are the authentic ones, and these are the ones that are less... you know, are not as substantial or not considered as high a priority. And one of the things they say about Dogen before he went to China was that he read through the entire canon.

[23:10]

This is something that's mentioned in a couple of biographies. He read through the entire canon. Once or in another version, he read through it twice before he went to China. Now, that was a remarkable feat, but it was probably something fairly common in those days for the monks to have this capacity for reading and absorbing and memorizing these vast amounts of materials. That was taken for granted as part of the practice to some extent. Now, Dogen was probably kind of a prodigy as well. And they're pointing out that his capacity for it was even greater than others. So that would have happened around 1220, 1221, a couple of years before he went to China. But then when he's at Heiji, there's a story that his patron, Hatano, who provided a lot of the funding for Heiji and support for Dogen, donated a collection of to Dogen, and that was received at AAG, and Dogen writes a letter thanking Hatano.

[24:16]

And it's something that was... And we can see that in those last couple of years of Dogen's life, that he was able to cite Indian Buddhist writings more extensively than he had previously. If we date... the Shobo Genzo fascicles, we can see that the Indian Buddhist references come up a lot more. So I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I haven't really found a good rationale for it, but I wonder if when they referred to the canon in Dogen's biographies, there were two different sets. One was more the Mahayana and Zen material that he read at the beginning of the career, and then there was a more comprehensive, complete collection that had the Indian Buddhist material, because he seemed to take a turn in that direction. Okay, so let's take a look at the Chinese poetry. So, you know, as we talked, Dogen was quite a literary figure.

[25:20]

And one of the reasons that Zen Buddhism was succeeding in China was that there was a group of intellectuals, generally referred to as literati in China, in the 1000s and 1100s. The literati were often trained as government officials. They were very well educated. We could say they had a very sophisticated worldview because they had studied Buddhism and Confucianism and Daoism and many examples of Chinese philosophy and literature. They would have memorized the so-called classics which would be the Confucian writings and and the basic Buddhist writings. And they were also great poets. And you had to be a good poet to move up the ladder in the government system. Hard to imagine, right? Yeah.

[26:22]

140 tweets, letters, characters. Well, we have had intellectuals do better in the public domain here, I guess. But anyway, that's, yeah. So in China, though, this was taken for granted. So the person who wrote the poem that you mentioned about the, you know, I have that on page two of that handout. I think it's, yeah, in the middle of page two. What anybody, read this translation, Sounds of Valleys, Colors of Mountains. Okay.

[27:29]

Okay, so this is quite a remarkable poem. Dogen cites in the Sansui-kyo fascicle, Mountains and Rivers, or no, he cites it, I'm sorry, he cites it in the Keisei Sanshoku fascicle, Sounds of Valleys, Colors of Mountains. And those fascicles are a little bit similar because the emphasis on nature, and nature is a sutra. And he also has a Japanese poem, the waka at the bottom of that page that is kind of identical to the original poem, but a little bit changed, where he talks about all in one, one and all, is the voice and body of Shakyamuni, of our Shakyamuni Buddha. So he kind of personalizes it there. Now that poem was written by a Chinese poet named Su Shi, also known as Su Dang Po. And Xu Xie was the most famous Chinese poet of the 1100s, excuse me, of the 100s.

[28:39]

So it was about 150 years before Dogen got to China. Xu Xie was not a practicing, he's not a Zen practitioner, but he did visit many temples. He did talk to a lot of the Zen teachers and he was very involved in Zen. But he was also quite a secular figure. In his poetry, he was the mayor of the city of Hangzhou, which later became the capital city for a while. He was involved in political reform movements. He was an inventor of some agricultural devices that were used to upgrade the farming techniques. And he was a real Renaissance figure and very well known. You know, part of the good education process would be that he has become part of the canon, so to speak. Like, everybody would have studied Sushi's writings and be able to memorize and recount them. This is particularly interesting because for this one, Sushi had a meditation vigil one night attending a Zen temple and having heard a Zen teacher give a discourse in the evening.

[29:47]

And then, you know, he's meditating. throughout the night and until the sun rises. So a lot of the Zen masters in the later century would quote this poem. Dogen was probably the first Japanese monk to do that because he traveled to China and was able to introduce a lot of this material to the Japanese. So let's Let's read the passage where he gives some prose commentary on it. Will anybody read that one? While on a Visit. While on a visit to Mount New, Sushu was struck by the sound of the valley stream rippling through the night and was enlightened. He composed the following poem about the experience which he presented to Chang Wong.

[30:50]

who said in approval, just so, Xu Xu had this awakening experience, shortly after he heard a challenge when he talked about the poem case, in which his ancient meanings are expressing the Dharma. But was it the voice of the stream, or was it the sermon by the master that awakened Xu Xu? In short, was it Layman Xu Xu who awakened, or the mountains and streams that were awakened? who today clearly sees the tongue and body at the Buddha. Okay. So that Koan case is a famous case that's associated with Dongshan, the Tozan, about insentient beings expressing the Dharma. And so Dogen raises two questions here. What are the two questions that he raises? Right. Okay. So one question is, was he awakened by the stream itself or by the teachings of the Master?

[31:56]

And the other question is, was it Zusha that was awakened or was it the mountains? Was it the mountains that were awakened? So very, I mean, this is one of Dogen's real inventive. You don't see this in... A lot of people wrote about this poem and they don't see them say that the mountains were just as enlightened looking at Susha as Susha was enlightened looking at the mountains. So that's an interesting case of Dogen's prose commentary on a famous poem that was written by a lay practitioner. But let's look at some examples of Dogen's poetry. You may have... I've read some of these in the past. But first, let's go to the top of page four. Now, when Dogen went to China, I mean, one basic question that's probably not ever solvable is how much Chinese did he know when he got there?

[32:59]

And we talked about, did he hear Ruzhin correctly about Shenzhen Datsaraku, or did he mishear it, or did he deliberately... you know, change it because he had a different, a slightly different vision that was less dualistic than, than, uh, and we can debate those points, but, um, we know that he had a remarkable ability with, um, with reading and citing the Chinese and, and, and, and had the confidence to interpret it in his distinctive way. What we don't know for sure would be, you know, did he speak Chinese or did he have an interpreter or did he find Japanese monks who had been living in China longer than him? I mean, there were other Japanese monks there. When he got there, it's just that most of them didn't become famous. So he was only the second really famous one, but there were other ones there. And maybe they helped bridge the gap, the communication gap.

[34:00]

We don't know all those points. It's interesting to think about. But when we look at his Chinese poetry, one thing that comes up is that Chinese poetry is generally known as regulated poetry. It's a very tight standard of rules and regulations for how to write the poetry. So I just wanted to mention a couple of those that are listed here on the top of page four. Generally, you have four lines. And it's either five characters or seven characters. It's almost always an odd number. They did have four-character poems. Those were known as gata. Those were the Buddhist-style poems. But when they wrote poetry, even if it had a Buddhist flavor, but it wasn't specifically in the gata style, then they followed the Chinese literary style, which was four lines, five or seven characters. Now, if you go beyond the four lines, then you get another set of rules that added on to it. But Dorgan generally wrote the four-line, seven-character style.

[35:04]

When you have the four-line, seven-character style, you have to rhyme. So generally, the rhyme scheme would be A, B, A, B. So first and third and second and fourth, you could have A, A, B, A, or you could have some variety. As long as you were consistent with the rhyme scheme, that was okay. But then it got more complicated because the rhyme would be the last character. And in the tonal language, that would be a rising or a falling tone. So the third from last character of the line had to have the opposite tone. That makes it pretty intense, right there. There are other tonal patterns that make it even more detailed. So all seven characters in the line had to have some kind of consistency in terms of the tonal pattern. But the main one is the rhyme in the last one. The third from last. Another rule is the cesura. The cesura means that you had to be consistent that the first three or four characters, usually it's four, would make a statement, and then the last three characters, and then there's just kind of pause in your mind.

[36:18]

Sometimes they'll put a comma in the translations, and the last three characters had to, you know, were kind of a different flavor. So when you're reading it, when you're trying to read it, and translate it, translators generally say, if they get stuck on the translation, okay, let's go back to the first four. That has to be a complete phrase. And then the last three was another phrase. No straddling of lines. In other words, each line was complete in itself in the four-line verse. You couldn't keep the thought going. And then they had to have a progression. Now, this progression is very interesting because it has a very Zen-like flavor that Dogen used quite a bit. The first line presented the theme. The second line develops the theme. The third line kind of reverses the theme. And the fourth line has some kind of conclusion that either synthesizes or wraps it up in some direction. There's websites today where you can track this.

[37:19]

So you can cut and paste the Chinese poem and put it into a box on the Internet. And that website will spit out immediately. the pronunciation in modern Chinese, and what the Chinese scholars feel like the pronunciation was back in Dogen's era, or whatever era you can put in the era that you're looking for. It's pretty amazing what they can do with this. So you can get a sense of how... how good a poet it was, was not only how does it sound, but for those days, it was, did you follow those rules carefully? Now, of course, for somebody like Dogen, rules are only going to be so important, right? He's probably going to want to bend the rules. That's what we see with reading the sutras. Like, don't just read the sutras in a mechanical way, but you have to understand the essence of it in terms of Zazen practice. And so you're going to get some flavor of that in Dogen. But...

[38:21]

One of the things I got intrigued with was to try to figure out whether Dogen's Chinese poetry did follow the rules. So I wanted to focus more on the themes, but in this page here, these are the results for a couple of the poems. And I know when I was looking this over this morning, I realized there were a couple of typos here and there. So I think the... Let's look at that separate example, Dogen in Kyoto, the town of Fukakusa, which was just south of Kyoto. That's where Dogen's first temple was located, in a little town called Fukakusa, which means deep grass. And he uses that wordplay. A lot of the poets in Japan, now Japanese poetry, the Waka poetry, is completely different. It's also brief because it's five lines, 31 syllables. It's the precursor to the haiku, which is three lines, 17 syllables.

[39:21]

There's no rhyme at all in Japanese. There's no tonal patterns, zero of that. However, they do have very intense rules about how those five lines are to be constructed, what each syllable is supposed to do. What happens if you run out? Like you only had 30 syllables and you need to fill one in. So they'd have a list of these are acceptable syllables to put in there. And it had its own. And he did write the Japanese waka poetry as well. Now, he's famous for a line in Shobo Genzo Zuin Lonky, which says, this is back on page two, Zen monks are fond of literature these days, finding it an aid to writing verses and tracts. However, this is a mistake. No matter how elegant their prose or how exclusive their poetry might be, they are merely toying with words and cannot gain the truth. He's brutal.

[40:22]

Yeah, there's a lot of contradiction because if he thinks you're attached to the poetry as an end in itself, which a lot of the monks did seem to be, especially in Kyoto, where they came from aristocratic families, they were well-educated, they kind of got involved in practice for the prestige, because it became socially prestigious, and they didn't necessarily, you know, they weren't really trying to, you know, illuminate the Dharma. Then he was brutally critical. And it seems contradictory because he wrote hundreds of poems himself. And he also says the same thing about koans. And any reliance, don't do it. And reading sutras, don't rely. But then he does those things. So if we go back to page 4 for a second, looking at the rules, I think in that second poem, 1022c... you have first and third line, Chi and Shi, and the second and fourth line, Xing and Shums.

[41:36]

So they were pretty close. It's considered a pretty good line. And when you look at some of the rest of the rules, it does seem to follow it. So pretty impressive, just that feat. If he did that, you know, I haven't looked at, I mean, he wrote about 300 of these Chinese poems. I only did it for a handful. And I saw some cases where he didn't seem to follow it, although you don't know for sure because they're only guessing at what the pronunciation would have been like back then. I mean, the people who are guessing are good Chinese scholars, but it's still speculation. But Dogen did seem to know it pretty well. And, you know, he only spent four years in China. And how could he, in addition to everything else he knew so well, how could he have learned this? One thing I learned was that they said that there were manuals for this stuff. And there's still manuals in Kyoto, especially for Rinzai monks in Daitokuji and some of the big Rinzai monasteries in Kyoto.

[42:40]

They're still expected to write the old-fashioned Chinese poetry. And so they have websites where they can look up a rhyme pattern. Yeah, because, you know, and so they say back then, you know, Dagen might have picked one up when he was in the port. you know, they said, oh, why don't you buy this? You know, why don't you pick up this Zen writing? Why don't you pick up this manual? And who knows what he would have picked up. I mean, if you see the picture of his backpack, it was wood. I mean, it was only so much he could carry on his back. I don't know how, you know, but I guess he must have been, I mean, they don't really talk about an entourage accompanying Dogen in China. But when you think of all of the literary material that he seemed to have brought back, or unless other monks were bringing it back at the same time. It's, you know, it's incredible. But, of course, what's more interesting is the message of the poems, I think. So let's take a look at this one. This is one that was translated very early in Dogen Studies in America.

[43:44]

I think in the 1970s, Lucian Strick, if you're familiar with that name, had a small paperback book of translations of some Zen poetry. And he included this one. And it's a different version. So I revised this a little bit. So let's have somebody read this one. With feeling. 1022 on the last page, that middle one. You only need half the feeling. You don't need the full feeling. Yeah, so I'm trying to...

[44:52]

highlight the pun on Fukakusa, which means deep grass there. That's where his hermitage was located. So at this point in Dogen's life, it was supposed to be 1230. So he would have been back from China for about three years. He spent a couple of years in Keninji, which was Asai's temple that he had studied before he went to China. But he says that after Asai died, the practice wasn't as strong there, and he wanted to start his own temple, of course. But in 1230, he still wasn't ready. He still didn't have the resources to do that yet. So he lived in a small hut. He did have some followers starting to come to him. His reputation was beginning to spread. But in some cases, he turned them away at that point. He said, I'm not ready anymore. come back when I started a temple. So this was an interesting period for Dogen because he hadn't quite become Dogen at that point.

[45:53]

I mean, he must have sensed that he was destined to do that after his experiences with Rushing. So, any thoughts on this, Paul? Especially the third line. What is the thing that's hard to forget? What's that? His parents' death. Okay, so impermanence, the sorrow of the parents' death is probably still something that continues to weigh on him and how the parents' death indicates the feeling of suffering. Yeah. Right.

[46:57]

It's transitional. Yeah, that second line is very interesting. I mean, the first character in the second line is delusion. The third character is a character for enlightenment. So he juxtaposes those two. And then, so, I mean, it can be translated in different ways, but, you know, there's delusion... But then there's the path of enlightenment. There's getting lost in illusion, but then there's the path of enlightenment. That's the first four. Again, that four makes a kind of complete phrase. And then the last one, the last three, last phrase with three characters is walking in a dream. Now, we know that Dogen talked about the dream. He had the classical dream within a dream. And Muso Soseki, a famous Rinzai master from that era, had dialogues in a dream. The phrase in a dream... was very commonly used because a dream could be delusion or a dream could be the ideal state beyond delusion.

[47:59]

And the image of dream or within a dream was one of the main examples where you could straddle both. And Dogen, like in Genjo Koan, he says there's some people who are deluded in their delusion, right? And then there's some people who are beyond Buddha and don't even think about being Buddha. And so those are the two sides. But, of course, all people have the potential to go in both directions. And then I was thinking about, you know, looking at it this morning as if walking in a dream, you know, the walking actually is practice. That's Gyo. Which generally means, you know, there's Gyo-ji, fascicle, sustained practice. So now I'm thinking that instead of walking in a dream, It could be awakening from the dream in a way or practicing through the dreams, maybe. Staying awake in the dream. Okay. You get footnote number two.

[49:01]

I think somebody else said two or three. Yes. Staying awake within the dream. That's better. Now, I know that original translation by Lucian Strick, did anybody ever remember seeing that? Do you remember what phrase he uses there? He says, what sleepwalkers we become. And I think that's stuck with me over the years, but I'm not sure that, you know, the more I look at it, I'm not, you know, I mean, sleepwalker means something very distinctive in English. It means you're in a kind of trance and you're not enlightened, probably. You're kind of determined by some physical mechanism that's, you know, so. Yeah, good point. So which one? So from the delusion side, maybe you can't ever get past the death of your parents. Not that you want to get past that, but maybe he's still haunted by the suffering. But from the awakened side, what would be the thing that you don't want to forget?

[50:03]

What's that? Well, yeah, so you can switch it to emphasizing the emptiness. Yeah, I mean, one way I interpret it is, yeah, interactions with his student disciples-to-be. So, in other words, at this turning point in his life, he's saying, hey, I can't get lost in the dream, even if it's an enlightened dream of emptiness, in this hut. I have to be committed. My mission is to be committed to teaching. To stay grounded. Right, to stay grounded, and that means to... That's how I look at it at that turning point in his life. Well, I think that's a very comforting image.

[51:10]

In other words, he's sitting in the hut. There was a grass roof, a thatched roof. you know, where maybe some of the, in a driving rain, the rain is leaking in, but in a gentle rain, you know, you hear the dripping of the rain, a very comforting sound. And then the, you know, the deep grass is not so much the deep, the physical deepness of the grass, but just the comfort of nature. So that's how I, so there's a constructed hermitage that he's in. So that's a human construction, but then he's surrounded by nature. But again, you don't want to, I mean, there are a lot of hermits. I mean, Dogen quotes the line that goes back to ancient China, that the lesser hermit stays in the mountains. The stronger hermit, or the more advanced hermit, comes back to the city. Now, Dogen does go to Aegee, but he never leaves the teaching mission. Yeah. I'm just curious, so in the Japanese, what are the characters for the deep grass of Fugan Pusa when this...

[52:14]

I mean, if we've got deep grass, it's like deep grass. Right. So, Fukakusa is the name of this little town. In those days, it was a suburb of Kyoto, and it was known for, like, you know, that's where the aristocrats would try to go into the countryside and get away. Of course, if you look at that area today, it's totally, you know, there's not a tree left. But, you know, that's... modern development, but I just wanted to, because the English reader wouldn't necessarily get that pun, so that's where I'm taking the license to, yeah. Yeah. Muchu. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

[53:15]

Yeah. Lose yourself in the moment. Not necessarily a dream in the literal sense of dream, but right. Yeah. Yes. Yes. That's great. Yes. Thank you. That's his first footnote. You got two and somebody, you had two, I think. It's the same thing, but it's not the same thing. It's the same thing, but it's not the same thing. Right. Yes, middle way, balance. Yes, that's true, too. That second from last character in the second line, in a dream, implies the middle way. So the Madhyamika school in early Mayana Buddhism, the middle way school, they would use this character.

[54:19]

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, and pitiful, right. You know, that's, okay. You get a footnote. You know, you're right. I got to go back and rethink this because, you know, that pitiful is, you know, there's a Japanese word, aware, A-W-A-R-E. I used to tell my students, when you see this on the test, even though I'm teaching, you know, Buddhism, it's not aware. It's the Japanese word aware. And I always would say to them, you know, 33.3% of you are going to... define it as aware, even though I'm telling you, don't do that, because I'm going to give you a zero for that. And every semester, 33.3% of them say, this means you're very aware. And it's like, oh. But aware is a very profound term.

[55:20]

Moro no aware. Poignant, I call it poignant sadness. It comes from Telegenji Europe. Where, you know, Shakespeare, parting in such means sorrow. The impermanence has a kind of sweetness to it because it magnifies the positive emotion. So pitiful is not the best word there. Poignant? Poignant, yes. You're going for, how many you got now? There's no merit in any of this. Right. It's all one field we're all part of, so... often translated as saying or how pathetic. Yeah. When he's criticizing some of the... It's not the same word. Right, right, yeah. Yeah, no, this is that poetic... I think this implies that... Right, right, right.

[56:24]

It's not like you're a... What does he say? You're a heretic and you know, you're honest, or you know, something... Something like that. Well, you know, I want to do... I know we're running out of time, but I want to do one last poem real quick. Going back to that point, they were sensitive to it. So when we talked about the different... versions of Shobo Genzo, and there was a 75 fascicle and a 60 fascicle in the handout from yesterday, if you remember that. The 60 fascicle version came up very early, and it wasn't clear exactly why, but some of the modern Japanese scholars in looking at it say most of the ones where he's very fiercely critical, and Linji is terrible, and Dahue is terrible.

[57:27]

Most of those are left out of that 60 version. So they did seem to be aware of, you know, sensitive that this could be misinterpreted. Yeah. Okay. So one last one. Let's go to. Yeah. Okay. It's on that same page. The one just above it. Now. If you look at the chart on the very first page, you can see there's several hundred of these poems that he wrote at different stages of his career. One of the things that's very interesting is that he wrote about 50 of these poems in China. And it's the only thing he wrote in China. There's the record of his dialogue with Ru Jing, but that was probably written later when he got back to Japan. When he wrote the 50 poems in China, a lot of times he was instructed, he was part of an assembly, instructed by Ru Jing, hey, you guys, look at the full moon and write a poem the day before, the day of the full moon, and the day after, or something like that.

[58:32]

There's the famous case of the bell, the bell ringing, Ru Jing's poem that's in Makahanya Haramitsu fascicle. which is generally the second fascicle in some collections. That has the, Wu Jing have the bell. Dogen, that was something, Dogen wrote his own verse on the bell in response to Wu Jing. And so that was one thing. Another thing that, yeah. There's also the rice cake tea lady. Yeah. Dogen corrects her and says she should have said. Yes. That he can have a rice cake one each for the It has the person of the people. Okay, okay, that's right, that's right. That's in that Shing-Fu-Kat. That's in, um... Which one? Gabyo. And Gabyo also, yeah. Painted rice cake, yep. Good. And, um... The, um... Another thing he did in, um...

[59:34]

I gave a talk one time. For those of you who remember Paul Simon's album in 1973 or 4, There Goes Ryman Simon. Anybody remember that one? Any old timers? There Goes Ryman Simon. I call it There Goes Ryman Dogen. Because what the style was, and Dogen was one of the group that did this, is like, you rhymed with somebody else. Not only did you have to be so knowledgeable about the rhyme scheme, but if somebody else wrote a poem, then you had to follow it up and matching their rhyme scheme. And you're supposed to, they say that people did that impromptu. Like you didn't have a lot of, you didn't go back and think about it. You had to just do it. So Dogen did that with a lot of lay followers because in China, it was very common if there was illness in a family, death in the family, or something positive, the son passed into the exams. They'd write a poem. And then Dogen, as an attending Zen teacher, would rhyme with that lay follower.

[60:38]

So that's one of the very interesting things about his Chinese poems that were written in China. He doesn't really do that. The Japanese atmosphere was not the same engagement with the lay followers that you found in China at that time. But let's look at this one final example. I know we're running out of time here. So who would read this one with no feeling? No, the first one, 1010. 10105, I'm sorry. Living in the world. Living in the world for so long without attachments. Since giving up using people and pen, I see flowers and hear birds without feeling much. While living on the mountain, I am embarrassed by the speeder effort. Okay. So what's he embarrassed by? He's not doing anything.

[61:40]

He doesn't really want to be attached to the natural sensations, right? Or he's saying the natural, I mean, another way to interpret it is the natural beauty is so great, I can't match it in my poetry. You know, I'm not that great a poet, really. I think this is one of the most interesting ones. And, you know, to me, and, you know, if you look at the first line, living in the world for so long, but without attachments, and you go like, really? This was written when he was at AEG, probably, and so he wasn't living in the world. But that second character, the second character, it means living, but if you, there's a radical, if you change that character a little bit, which... could have dropped out with some of the scribes over time, it would be renouncing. It would be the opposite. So having renounced the wall for so long, I can't help but be attracted. I still can't help but feeling the emotions.

[62:41]

I mean, this to me captures Dogen in a bottle, so to speak. This one four-line verse. Because we talked about all the seemingly contradictions and various attitudes. And here he's saying it in a very personal way. Like... I'm self-aware that I'm drawn in these different directions. And I'm still coming out with the, you know, I have to respond to nature. I have to respond to the emotions. I'm not cutting those off. I have to express it in language. So I guess we're about out of time. Last thing I want to say is, you know, Marcella and I are heading back early tomorrow morning. So I wanted to just say goodbye and thank you all for such a wonderful... few days here and the opportunity to speak to Avdo again. Thank you. 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.

[63:41]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[63:51]

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