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. Good afternoon, everyone. And so today I'd like to continue with some of the ideas from yesterday. For those who... Born here yesterday. I'll sum it up briefly in a few minutes. I also want to point out that tomorrow I'm going to explore a different topic on Dogen's poetry, especially the poetry he wrote in Chinese. He also wrote poetry in Japanese, different points of his career, which I think has some very interesting material. But today we want to continue with the main theme of Shinjin Datsuraku, Casting Off Body, Mind. And it's different expressions and manifestations.

[01:02]

So I did bring this new single-page handout in addition to the other handouts. So we're kind of handout heavy. And I realize it's in Japanese, but I couldn't resist these images. And so let's look at the one... The one with this on the page. And there's some conversation bubbles there, right? So does anybody know or can anybody guess what's going on in those bubbles? Yeah, right. So this is the scene... This is the scene of the reprimands. This is another version of it in a contemporary Japanese manga. You know, in Japanese culture today, the manga, the kind of comic book approach is very common.

[02:04]

Especially Japanese people don't know that much about Dogen generally, and they can't understand the language of Shobogenzo. It's kind of like reading Schotzer in the original language for them. So they need a lot of guidelines. There's a lot of interest in it. And especially when they had Dogen's 800th birth anniversary in the year 2000, that kind of triggered off. There was a Kabuki play. There was a movie. Some of you may have seen the movie. It was distributed with subtitles in the U.S. And a lot of other kind of pop cultural activities to disseminate Dogen. And some of them I found very fascinating. So in the top, Dogen is thinking to himself, what is awakening? What is awakening? And then... His teacher, Ru Jing, says you must cast off body mind to the sleeping monk. And then Dogen goes into the teacher and says, I've cast off body mind. And what does the teacher say? Right, right.

[03:06]

So he does that reversal. You can see there's two lines of four characters. And, you know, if you look at it, you can see that he has that reversal there. So if we look at the one on the back, this adds another dimension. Obviously, the bottom image on the right-hand side is Mu Jing reprimanding the monk. This time, he's sitting on the other side of Dogen, and he's saying quats, which was a Chinese expression that they used, kind of an emphatic expression. Sometimes used in scolding, sometimes used in praising, but it was kind of a nonverbal expression. expression that was often used in Zen. And Dogen sticking to himself in Japanese, wakatazo. I got it. And there we go again. And you can see the light coming out of the top of the sit. How about the ones above?

[04:08]

Some of you may recognize those are two famous stories in Zen that this author is comparing to Dogen's experience. These are both Zen monks from China. Yeah, the sweeping and the pebble or the rock hits the bamboo. That's that one. The other one is a monk who looks at a peach tree. Yeah. And at the top there it says seeing colors illuminates the mind and hearing sounds leads you on the way to enlightenment. And so... And Dogen often refers to those stories. And so he's saying this is similar. But whether it is or not is another question, but they're grouping it together with this kind of continuity from the Zen in China.

[05:09]

One of the things Dogen says in one of the fascicles is that the monk talked about the peach blossoms blooming, but he should have talked about the peach blossoms falling. because the moment of falling is no better or worse than the moment of blooming. And putting too much emphasis on the blooming would be one-sided compared to the overall phenomenon of flowers, which blossom and then fall. And so one other point about this handout is that at the bottom of that page, on the top line, there's a term there that we talked a little bit about yesterday, kiroku. Kiroku. The Roku actually has two, there's two terms. The Roku is the same in both terms. Roku meaning record of, but the key, it depends which character you're using, because there's a lot of homophones in Chinese and Japanese, so the character can be pronounced, different characters are pronounced in the same way.

[06:11]

So one key is biography. So you have biographical records, and we talked a little bit about that yesterday, how the biographical records are quite varied and not completely... reliable in the sense of we want modern historiography, let's say, because a lot of it's based on legends and stories that grew up and had different versions. But the other key is the key in Zen key. So records of the key in Zen key. And so how will we translate that word Zen in Zen key? Talked about that a little bit yesterday. Anybody? What would the key if we isolate the character key? No, it's close to the English key because it opens the door, so to speak. But the Zen key is undivided activity, right? So the idea is that the Zen mind is constantly active. And it doesn't come to an extinction point, but it's always reflecting on the situations.

[07:21]

And the Zen master is somebody who can find insight at any opportunity. And you can find the misappropriations or misunderstandings of the disciples in anything they say. So no matter what they say, the Zen master is able to activate ki. And this was something that Dogen talked about quite a bit. So the records of the ki are the records of the moments, the key moments in the English, the crucial moments when an encounter... And understanding happens. And so that author, this month, author is putting it in that context. Now, let's go back to that. Let's go back to this handout. We didn't talk about this one at all yesterday. So there's four pages here. And I'm not going to dwell on it too much. Again, one of the pages in Japanese. But I did want to introduce some ideas.

[08:22]

for understanding any of Dogen's writings, especially Shinjin Natsuraku, but many of his other writings and events in Dogen's life. Dogen's number one text, of course, is known as Shobogenzo. Anybody want to give a translation of Shobogenzo? You see it translated into English in different ways. Okay, so Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. Let's take a look at that for a moment. It says various Shobo Genzo Festival editions, collections. Let's just talk about the title. At the time Dogen lived, one of the main legends in Buddhism, or one of the main ideas in Buddhism at that time, was that it was about 1,500 years since Shakyamuni Buddha.

[09:22]

And the Dharma... The teachings of the Buddha had entered into a period of decline, and people were not able to apprehend them the same way as in the Buddha's lifetime or the centuries after the Buddha lived. And Japan was going through a lot of turmoil. There was the beginning of the civil warfare. Japan is always vulnerable to a lot of earthquakes and volcano eruptions and typhoons and other natural disasters. And there was a lot of that happening at the time. And the general idea in Dogen's environment was that this was kind of karmic punishment for people that were ignorant and deluded and you couldn't overcome it. Dogen and Zen in general, but especially Dogen wanted to emphasize not the Dharma of decline, but the true Dharma. So Dogen's point was that the true Dharma was always available to everyone at any time. And it wasn't dependent on the conditions of society in a particular era.

[10:24]

And so that's the true dharma. Those are the words shobo in shoboganso. Shobo is the true dharma. Bo is often pronounced ho, but with the compound word, it becomes a B sound. Okay, gen. Anybody, what would gen be? We talked about this a little bit at the end of yesterday. Gen would be I. Okay, gen. And of course, not the physical eye. So what might be another English way, another way to put it in English? And you do see this in some of the translations. Rather than eye, which sounds like a physical, you know, could be just a physical... What's that? Sight. Sight or... Insight. Yeah. Or awareness. Yes. So insight into the true Dharma. I don't know that that's better than I, because if you understand what they mean by I in this context, you would understand it's not just physical, but it's the I of insight.

[11:37]

But the point is that his writings, he considers his writings a treasury of insights about the true Dharma. So the last word, Zoh, means treasury, storehouse, repository. Now one of the interesting things about that word is that in Buddhist temples at the time, Dogen went to China, all Buddhist temples had what they call a sutra repository. A sutra repository was a building where you stored the scrolls of the sutras. And a lot of times it was octagonal shaped and it was made in a way that it could be rotated. They could spin it on an axis and the idea was that that was helping to spread the good karma from the sutras. So it was a physical, it's another image that was a physical image. The Zoh of Shobogenzo generally meant something that was a structure, a building on the temple grounds.

[12:38]

And inside you had other physical objects, which were the scrolls of the sutras. So what Dogen is saying here is that the repository is in the mind. The repository is a symbolic, is something symbol, symbolizing the the collection of insights that we have. Now, this page is a little bit intense, but we don't have to go into it in too much detail, but can anybody take a look at this page and see what the main implication is? Seems like there's different compilations of the show. Okay. Okay, good. A gentleman over here. Yeah, I was going to say, there's different combinations of different obstacles, and there's not... Exactly.

[13:47]

Good. Very good comments. Yes. Go here in sets. Right. Right, right. Good, good. So let me, so for those of you who, you know, are somewhat familiar with Shobo Genzo, if somebody asks you, okay, all right, what is this book? What is Shobo Genzo? You know, how big is it? How many fascicles or chapters, how many sections of it are there of And you could only pick one, the person said you had to pick one number. What would you pick? Who said that? Okay, you're adding up the ABCDs? Okay, so you're up to 97. Okay, that's a good number. Anybody else? Why do you say 95?

[14:50]

You've heard it somewhere. That's right. No, I mean, 95 is the number you generally hear. Because in the late 1600s, after some centuries where Shobo Genzo wasn't studied as much, apparently, or it was only studied by a handful of people, and they didn't write their commentaries. They kept them as an oral tradition, maybe. But then at that point in Japanese history, there was a big impetus for the Soto set to kind of rally around Dogen as the model figure and what his teachings were. And the Shogun said, well, okay, we don't want to hear there's A, B, C, D, E. You know, we want a book here that you can, because the Shogun had a lot of power over the religious institutions and all the other aspects of Japanese society. So they wanted things to be organized and clear-cut. And so at that time, they came up with the number 95. But as we look at these different versions here, we can see that it's not necessarily 95. It might be 96.

[15:53]

It might be up to 97. It might be as few as 12, because there's one version with only 12. The most common one that's used in Japan today is 75. They usually take 75 plus 12. That's 87. And sometimes they add a few more, and they might get 92 or 94, 95 or 97. And in a way, it's kind of splitting hairs. But the Soto researchers on Dogen in Japan are very caught up with that because they're trying to get to what did Dogen really intend? What did he want in this? And the point, if we go back to Dogen, was that he rewrote a lot of these. He edited them. Most of them were sermons that he delivered to the assembly. Sometimes he drafted the sermon beforehand, so there was a written record beforehand. Sometimes they were recorded by his disciple. Sometimes he edited them, sometimes his disciple Ejo edited them.

[16:55]

But if Dogen had a number in mind, what would that number probably be? 100, yeah. I mean, after Dogen died, one of his followers said, you know, we really regret Dogen wanted 100, but he didn't quite, he died a little bit suddenly, and so it wasn't able to happen that it was completed. So, you know, as we stand today, new versions of some of these are still being discovered. So the researchers go to various temples throughout Japan and they dig into the archives. And sometimes they'll come up with some scrolls that were sitting around in a storehouse somewhere or in a closet somewhere. And they realize, hey, this is a brand new version. And this version may be a little bit different because the wording was changed. either by Dogen himself or by later writers or editors. And sometimes that doesn't make much difference, but sometimes it adds quite a bit of flavor.

[17:59]

One of the ones that's most interesting is the fascicle Laihai Tokuzui. Because that's... What's the main English translation of that? I guess... Getting the Marrow. What's that? Yeah, receiving the marrow. Because that's the one he talks about the role of women and whether women can get enlightened or not. And there's two different versions of it. Or there's an expanded version where he goes into much more depth about that issue. And that version neither got lost or suppressed. If you look back at it now, especially in light of contemporary issues, people are trying to get a picture. Because that was a period in Japanese history where... where women were getting more involved in Buddhist practice. And so it's important to see what Dogen's views were. Okay, let's look at some of the other pages here.

[18:59]

Second page, or the flip side, okay, that's a Japanese list. And that Japanese list, I just brought that to the visual mainly, to show that this is one of countless examples of what the Japanese scholars today are looking for. But what does this list, which you can see, you know, you don't need to know Japanese to see. What does this list add that we didn't have on the other list? The dates, right. Yeah, the dates. And, you know, to me, the dates are very important because Dogen went through several periods in his career. He went to China and he came back from China. He started a small temple. The temple grew. He left. that temple in Kyoto and went to the mountains. And it's very important to see, I think, when certain fascicles were written because they reflected his state of mind in relation to the issues he had at that time.

[20:01]

I mean, I think in Dogen's case, there is a true dharma, there is a true dharma, but it can be expressed in different ways depending on the context. That means depending on who his audience is and what situations come up, what he's responding to questions that his followers have. Now, one thing is if we look at Shobo Genzo in terms of dates, so if we look at number, 95 is the number, right, that you often hear, but he wanted 100. If you look at the dates, how long did it take him to write Shobo Genzo? What's that? Who said that? Okay, why 10? Well, it was actually one as late as 1253, right? Which is on the left-hand column, the box just above the bottom box, 1253.1.6.

[21:04]

That's the year he died. But it is true that if you look at the vast majority, they were over a shorter period of time. And if you start to analyze it even more carefully, you can see that most of them were written, over two-thirds of them were written over about a five-year span. That five-year span started in 1239 and went to about 1244. Yes, exactly. Revisions or some of them being repeated. So send men washing the face. He gave that lecture three times. So first in Kyoto and then in the mountains. So one theory was that, well, the mountain, the followers he got from the mountains weren't as well, you know, well-groomed as in Kyoto. So they needed that understanding. But yeah, so that's referring to the fact that, you know, none of these were fixed.

[22:10]

I mean, some of the Japanese scholars use the words tentative, provisional. It was, you know, it's a work in progress. And Dogen knew that, and he was rewriting some of them. But it's concentrated in about five years, from 1239 to 1244. And what happens at the end of that cycle? Anybody familiar with that? 1243 especially. 1243 is when he moves from Kyoto to Eiji, and Eiji is built in the mountains. But... We don't know why he moved. I mean, that's one of the big mysteries. To me, that's the single black hole in Dogen studies because we just don't know. He doesn't refer to it. Dogen doesn't say anything about we're going to move or we move. There's no reference to it, but he moved in the summer of 1243. There's a lot of speculation that he had rivals in Kyoto, that the authorities favored his rivals.

[23:13]

and he was kind of chased away, or he saw there was new opportunities up in the mountains. His teacher, his Chinese teacher, Ru Jing, told him, don't get trapped in secularization. Go for the pure thing. So maybe he realized he had to leave the capital because it was invariably going to be a very political situation there, and he could find the purity in the mountains. So the... But one thing that happened was he spent nine months without a temple. So from 1243, summer, seventh month, and I say that because it was the old Chinese calendar, so it's about a month different from the solar calendar. So 1243, seventh month, he left, and they didn't get the temple up and going, the new temple up and going until 1244, around the fourth month. So during that period... He stayed at different retreats in different small, very small temples in that area, in the mountains.

[24:15]

And he was writing a lot or giving a lot of those essays. So one theory would be that his followers really depended on him there. It was kind of, it was a difficult trip. They had a trek up from Kyoto through the mountains. It wasn't easy to do at that time. They had established a new temple, you know, in the forest. And so Dogen was trying to inspire his followers, and he was giving a lot more sermons at that time. So I guess my point here is that there's a couple things you often hear about Shobogenzo, 95, and he wrote it over the course of 20 years, from 1233 to 1253, but it's really, the number of fascicles is quite varied, and the number of versions is quite varied, and the amount of time that it was written is much more compressed than what you often hear. That doesn't necessarily change the significance of the content, but it does give a different context for understanding it. Okay, let's look at the next one.

[25:18]

But let's come back to the next one. Let's look at the last page. Okay, so this is... This is a very interesting diagram, I think. Dogen, who influenced him, both in terms of his personal family, his teachers, the support he got from one of the shoguns, and also who his heirs were, who his followers were, the generations that went by in the early days of the Heiji Temple. So... Obviously, we have Dogen in the center, and he was born, according to the accounts that we have, his parent, he was born into an aristocratic family. He had the option to have led a life in the capital system of the court system in Kyoto at the time.

[26:25]

But his father died when he was young, and his mother also died, and he... He was very consumed by understanding the impermanence and the suffering that he went through as an orphan. And he declined an opportunity from his uncle to become an aristocrat. And he went on a mission to find the Dharma at age 13. And that was not uncommon at the time for... people to join the monkhood at an early age. Some of his contemporaries started even younger as a childhood. But it was pretty clear, at least from the stories we have, that Dogen had the intention to find the true Dharma. And not that other monks didn't, but you can see that drive and the impetus that Dogen had coming through all the stories. But then he runs into the so-called doubts, Anybody familiar with his doubts?

[27:28]

What's that? Sorry. Why not? You're right. Why go off? But what's the other side of that? What would make it questionable? Why practice if we have lunination? Why practice if we... if we're all already enlightened. And Dogen does stress that we're all already enlightened quite a bit. So why practice? So that was apparently his doubts. He started in the Tendai school. The Japanese Tendai school was like the main quote-unquote church or the main religious institution in Japan at the time. Zen was just getting started. Dogen was one of the two or three main founders of Zen. in the early 1200s. So he was forging out on a new path. He also practiced several kinds of Zen in Japan, and then he went to China in 1223. And he said he didn't have the... You know, he was looking for the Dharma in light of his doubt.

[28:42]

This is part of the background for the Shinjin Datsuraku experience. Um, he's accompanied, uh, he studied with Asai, the, the first main, um, founder of Zen, of Rinzai Zen. He, he went to China with Mio Zen, Asai's disciple. And so one of the things about, yes. Um, uh, that's a good question. So, um, are you familiar with Fukuoka and Kyushu? Okay. So, uh, So Kyushu is the island in southwest Japan. And that was the port to go to China. So everybody, whether there was monks or whether it was traders or other kinds of travelers, had to go through the port in Fukuoka to get to the port city of Ningbo in China. So when Asai came back, he started a temple there in the 1190s.

[29:47]

It's not clear that Dogen would have stopped at that temple. But when Dogen came back and when some of his later followers came back, they did start Soto temples in the Fukuoka region, which is part of the island of Kyushu. And so there was quite a vigorous activity there. And there were a lot of Chinese travelers. So the Japanese went to China at that time. But the Chinese were coming to Japan, partly because... political events made the practice of Zen a little bit more difficult in China. Genghis Khan, you know, he died in 1227, the same year Dogen referred for China. But the point was that the Mongols coming on strong in China actually were somewhat supportive of Zen. Kublai Khan was actually a fan of Zen to some extent, but they didn't know that. So everybody was terrified of the Mongols. So they, you know, it seemed like some of the Chinese monks... were really interested in having Japanese followers because it would help spread the dharma if something bad happened in China.

[30:49]

And then some of them were eager and they became immigrants or what they call emigre monks. And they either went on their own or they were recruited by the shogun. The shogun saw the beauty of bringing in Zin to Japan at that time because it brought in a lot of Chinese culture, the poetry and... and the arts, calligraphy, and so forth. So it was a very active time. So the answer is, I don't think Dogen went to Eisai's temple there, but there were certainly interactions between Dogen's followers in later generations. And now, you know, that area used to be called Hakata. That was the ancient name. If you take the bullet train from Kyoto there, it's still called the Hakata line. And people talk about Hakata Zen, because we mainly think of Zen in Kyoto. or Ahiji, but that area actually played a really important role in the back and forth there. Okay, so one thing to point out is Keizan. Keizan, the author of Transmitting the Light, the Tenko Loku.

[31:54]

Now, the intermediary between Dogen and Keizan was Gikai. So Gikai was a direct disciple of Dogen. But he then became the teacher of Kezan. And Kezan ended up helping to spread Soto's end quite a bit. And another monk I want to talk about is Gion. Gion was the fifth patriarch of the Heiji. And he wrote commentaries on Shobogenzo. And Gion himself was supposed to have experienced Shinjin Datsuraku. So he talks about Shinjin Datsuraku. uh, geek high also was supposed to have experienced it. So a lot of times, uh, they would go back and say, uh, okay, uh, don't go into that. And I want to understand that experience. And, and, and so that became a common theme. Um, now you notice, uh, near the bottom of the page, a lot of these, these names start with the, with the, uh, word geek, geek, geek, uh, geek high, geek, uh, geek on, uh,

[33:01]

Anybody familiar with why they all start with Gi? Okay, that was a Dharma name given to the group that was called the Dharma School, or the Daruma School. So this was an early school of Zen. There was Asai, but then there was another early school of Zen. The founder of that school did not go to China. And Asai criticized them. So he sent some of his followers to go to China to get transmission. But according to Dogen, would that work? Right. So if the teacher doesn't have transmission from a master in China, he doesn't have... Right. He doesn't have the true Dharma. He doesn't have the Menju experience. He doesn't have the face-to-face experience. So Dogen was very, very critical of that teacher.

[34:06]

His name was Nonin, N-O-N-I-N. And when he died, his followers were very interested in Zen, but their teacher's legitimacy was being questioned, and a lot of them came to study with Dogen. So one of the theories about why Dogen left Kyoto to go to the mountains is because these monks had their main temple up in the mountains near where Eiji was. And maybe he saw that this was a good opportunity to attract those followers. And they did play crucial roles in those generations after Dogen. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The mountain monastery system. Yeah. Yes, and that goes back to Wu Jing's admonition, you know, do the pure thing, don't just stay in the cities because it's going to be corrupted. And Wu Jing himself, he had been head of temples in the main city, which is the city of Hangzhou, was the capital city.

[35:12]

But he... But the temple where he met Dogen was outside of the city. And so, yeah, that was part of it. And the beauty of the environment and the natural environment. Yeah. So the face-to-face transmission, we talked about that a little bit yesterday. The idea of the face-to-face transmission, Nenju, is that you have to get it directly from the teacher. There's no other way to get it. You can't get it in any readings. You can't have somebody else present it to you. You can't get it on your own. It has to be transmitted from the teacher. One of the things we talked about yesterday was how if we talk about Shinjin Datsuraku casting off body-mind, one theory is that he got it when watching the monk getting scolded, and he had that wakata, I understand, the light bulb blows off experience kind of thing, but the other theory is that

[36:19]

He got it from when he first met Rujing a couple months before then, because as soon as he met Rujing, they had a kind of intuitive understanding of each other, that this was the ideal teacher, this was the ideal student, and the transmission happened at that time rather than through watching the monk getting scolded. Okay, so to finish off with this diagram, You know, the history of any religious institution and any kind of tradition is always going to be quite complicated. But over the years, the continuity with Dogen has been established and maintained for the most part in the history of Soto Zen. And I think that even though Kazan and his followers played a very important role, What we've seen in the 20th century is that there's been a big input to come back to what Dogen's teachings were.

[37:24]

And that's why there's so much examination and investigation of Shobo Genzo. Like, what did he really mean? Can we capture that real meaning? Now, the other page on this handout is... Anybody know where this came from? Some of you may have come across this. In the editor's introduction, who was the editor? This was from Kaz Tanahashi's translation of Shobo Genzo. And that's quite a large book. And he has some great materials that go with the translation. There's a glossary at the end. And then in the introductory essay, what I really liked was the way he presented these 13... I mean, it doesn't have to be 13. That's just the number he came up with. But if you look at these items to understand the rhetoric or the literary quality of Shobogenzo or how Dogen expresses himself.

[38:30]

Dogen is the, you know, I mean, one of his many geniuses was the creativity of his use of language and his emphasis that language was crucial to explicate. But language is not just ordinary language. The eye is not the Dharma eye. Ordinary words aren't yet. But you had to use a kind of... I think of the poet Rambeau talked about the alchemy of words because words become transformed. Words take on a special quality if you use them in a poetic, creative way. So if we look at this... So Kazir is trying to kind of sum up briefly... what are the main elements of Dogen's literary flair? And then I wrote down from the footnotes which fascicles he's referring to.

[39:31]

But if we look over this list, what are some main themes or principles that come up? What can we say about Dogen's use of language based on Kaz's A very brilliant analysis here and a way to summing it up so briefly by giving some key examples and highlighting the key features. Pardon me? Contrasting. Contrasting, okay. Can you say a little more about that? Okay, contrasting, contradictions, paradoxes. Yes? Right, so playing around. So let's take a look at number two, what Kaz is calling upside-down language.

[40:32]

The forest runs around the hunting dog. Well, it might be a little hard to understand that out of context, but... Anybody get that one? You really have to read that fascicle. It's from Shunju fascicle. What is that? Spring and Autumn fascicle. What would be interesting about the forest runs around the hunting dog? The forest usually runs. The dog usually runs. One of the Zen sayings from that era was that the looted person is like a You know, a dog chasing after somebody's already, you know, gone up the tree and escaped from the dog. And the dog's just there barking and not able to accomplish anything. So, Dogen says, you know, it's nice to talk about the dog running in the forest. So, does it make sense to say the forest runs around the hunting dog?

[41:36]

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. From Genjo Koan. So the myriad things coming forth to you. So from the holistic standpoint, from the undivided activity standpoint, from that Zen Ki, the undivided activity standpoint, the whole is happening around us. And that goes back to the first example about the mountains are walking. And, you know, that was a Zen saying that if you cross a bridge... The bridge is flowing and the river beneath it is still. We can apply that here. So Dogen talks about another example, actually by the same Chinese inn master who talked about the hunting dog. He said there was a saying that the pearl is going around in the bowl. So what does Dogen say? Can you guess what Dogen would say?

[42:38]

ball spinning. You're right. Don't focus on the pearl spinning in the ball, but focus on the ball spinning the pearl. So, it's that upside-down language. That's part of the contradiction. That's part of the contrast and contradiction. So, whatever you say, you can look at from another angle. Any other examples here? I just think, also, when I read art from Brown, I think, oh, I also think of the The dog is hunting, searching for something and it's actually stopping the searching. Right, right. Yeah. Right. And then a fish, like a fish, a bird, flies like a bird. It's a little obvious. Quite obvious. It's similar like spring flows to spring. It's only what you are in that moment. Right. Okay. So let's go back to the dog for a moment.

[43:44]

There was a Zen saying that Dogan cited one time that the diluted person, we talked about the diluted person is like the dog chasing somebody up a tree, but let's say there was another saying that the diluted person is like a dog smelling hot oil that's used for cooking, wanting to taste it, knowing that it shouldn't taste it, but can't resist tasting it. Now, if we look at the upside-down language, it's not the pearl spinning, it's the bull spinning the pearl, it's not the dog running, it's the forest running. What would be the relation between those contrasting images, those contradictions, and the tautology, the fish swims like a fish? I mean, why would you say... That's another contrast we have. Why would you use both of those kinds of images?

[44:47]

Okay. So which is which? Form is form. Okay. But the fish is not swimming like a fish. Right. Okay. So he's building up these different levels, and we have to assume that he's... When he says one, he's trying to solve one case of delusion. When he uses another, there's another issue that comes up that has come up. One of my favorite ones is from the Uji Festival, the Being Time or Time Being Festival, where he says that a... Let me make sure I get it right. A half-being time... Right. A half-being time that's whole or that's fully known in one translation.

[45:54]

A half-being time that's... No. A full-being time... Okay, let me restate it. My mind got twisted around here. A full-being time... By being time, it means the fullness of that moment. So a full moment... half-known is a half-moment fully known. So what sense does that one make? Yeah, I'll try, I'll try. I was hoping nobody would say that. Okay, good point. Let me just restate it. So a full moment or a fullness of being time, half known. Okay, that sounds deficient, right? I mean, you only half know the whole truth.

[46:56]

But that's a half truth, fully known. So there's no difference between full and half. Because those are relative terms. When we get rid of the relativity, an instant of being time or fullness of a moment is not... You know, it's not a fixed entity that we could measure with the clock or that we can pinpoint. So, again, the language is trying to create an avenue to use metaphors and allusions and paradoxes and ironies to try to create a vehicle into entering into the way. In the last section here today, and as I said, tomorrow we're going to have a different topic on Dogen's poetry. But let's go back to that first handout because there were a couple of items we didn't quite get to on Shinjin Datsuraku. So Fukanza Zengi, most everybody's pretty familiar with Fukanza Zengi, and it does use Shinjin Datsuraku one time.

[48:00]

I think. And on the fourth line from the top of the first page there, in the Japanese, it has Shinjin, body, mind, Jinen, Natsuraku. I'm on the fourth line from the top where it says Fukanza Zengi. And I'm reading from the Japanese. I don't mean to... But... I wanted to highlight something there with the... I didn't put the translation there because I really wanted to highlight. So how... Do you remember in Phucan's Ozengi when he refers to body, mind dropping off or falling off? There's another adverb that comes in there. Depending on the translation that you're looking at. Yeah, he gets into that. But there's just one word. What's that? Naturally. Yeah. Yeah. So if you look there, there's six characters instead of four.

[49:05]

And the middle two mean natural. So I think that adds an important flavor to it. Because we talked a little bit about, do you release it? Do you kind of throw it away yourself? Or does it just fall away on its own? And this one would emphasize the falling away on its own. It happens naturally of its own. Now that word natural was used quite a bit in Taoism. If you go back to... You know, Tao Te Ching and the Dallas ratings, they talked about that quite a bit. And, of course, that was a big influence on Zen in China. So that's one example. It's pronounced in Japanese J-I-N-E-N. And in modern Japanese, it could have been pronounced Shizen to make it more confusing. But... If you go to a natural food store, they would use that word. It's interesting how these words have a contemporary meaning.

[50:08]

Tatsuraku, I remember many years ago when I was studying this in graduate school in the 1970s. What's the difference between Zen and Taoism? Well, a lot of people say Buddhism, especially Mayana Buddhism, plus Taoism, turned into Zen. You could just do almost a... a formula there. Mayan Buddhism plus equals Zen. I mean, in the early days. And Zhuangzi was one of the famous early Zen authors whose writings are remarkably similar to what Zen comes up with. And he talked about the path of meditation as a free and easy wandering and a forgetting of delusions. Very similar to Dogen's, you know, to study the self is to forget the self. and a lot of the Zen writings have a strong affinity with Taoism, especially the early Taoist writings back from the time of Confucius when Taoism first started. As Taoism developed, it turned into an institution that was a little bit different, but the spirit of the early philosophy was very conducive to how Zen developed.

[51:19]

Let me go back to the word Datsuraku in modern. So I remember studying in graduate school And my teacher showed me a Japanese headline in a newspaper, and there was a, I forget exactly what it was, there was a space shuttle or something, and a piece fell off. And the headline said, in Japanese, in space shuttle, piece Tatsuwaku. Yeah. And then when I looked into it some more, you know, this was the 70s and, you know, in the 60s era. There were a lot of high school or college... Dropouts. So those were called Datsulak Sha. Sha meaning a person who dropped out, a person who dropped off. I mean, it had this, you know, it continues to have... The dropping, yes. And, you know, in a way, I mean, this is very Dogen-esque that...

[52:21]

The Dharma is speaking in all these different contexts. You may not realize it. Most people aren't thinking of it that way. They're just thinking of the practicality of these actual objects or these particular situations. But in a way, you can see the Dharma manifesting in all of those varieties, and the language is able to express it. Okay, so let's take a look at a couple of other examples. So let's go to Genjo Koan. This is number nine at the bottom of page two. Since this has come up a couple times with some very good comments people have made about... So, would somebody like to read? I've got to ask you to read that, if you don't mind, since you've been bringing up Genjo Koran. Yeah, you mind? Thank you. To study the way. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the selfish, to predict the self. Forbidding the self is to be confirmed to myriad things.

[53:23]

To be confirmed to myriad things is casting off body-mind of self and body-mind of others. Awakening leads no trace, and traceless awakening continues. Okay, good. So what does this passage add to the whole package of Shinjin Datsaraku that we don't have, we haven't seen other places? And others. Right. Um, and I don't know that Dogen ever comes back and repeats that point. I can't, I don't, I can't remember any other examples. So cast off body mind of self and cast off body mind of others. So how do we interpret that? Oh, yeah. Which was right. Right. Right. And, and Dogen often uses the image of the, um, of plum blossoms, which Buddha used.

[54:26]

And also, anybody familiar with the way the plum blossom blooms in China or Japan, in that environment? Of course, the cherry blossom is famous, but the plum blossom blooms at the end of winter. It's the first bloom, a very fragrant, intoxicatingly fragrant smell, for one thing, but... You still see it when it's very cold and can be snowy. So the snow can decorate the branches of the tree, and then you see the blossoms still peeking out of the snow. So it's the idea that awakening is constantly happening. So that seasonal renewal becomes symbolic of awakening. So again, it's that holistic view. It's the forest. It's the ball rotating or spinning the pearl, I think, that he's getting to here. Okay.

[55:28]

We're about out of time, but let's look at... We don't have Greg to wave his hat today, but... Okay, yeah. So I'm trying to think of the good one. Okay, so... How about number 13? So number 13 is Gikai. I see there's a typo here, but not a big one. So Gikai was one of those followers of the Daruma school that flocked to Dogen when he moved to A.G. in the 1240s, where he moved up to the forest and built A.G. in the 1240s. And then Gikai became... a very close follower, along with Ejo. When Dogen died, he had to designate his heir. And he picked Ejo, who was a little bit older and more mature. Gikai was considered a little bit more brilliant as a thinker, as a follower of Dogen.

[56:33]

But I don't know if you've heard that dialogue. It's translated in one of Kaz Tanahashi's books, I think, in Enlightenment Unfolds. They translate... that he translates that there's a little essay about this experience and he says to Gikai you know you're right because Gikai kind of wants to be the heir of course right and he says you know you'd be a good choice except for one thing that you lack anybody familiar with that one yeah what's that grandmotherly mind what is a grandmotherly mind what's that It's one of the three lines in the change of caffeine. Yeah, right. So why is that important for the heir to Eiji? I mean, it's pretty obvious, right? So what is compassion? Yeah. And kind of blind, in a good sense, compassion. Always accepting. Yeah.

[57:37]

Asai, his first Zen teacher in Kyoto was Rinzai. So one of the things about Dogen is when he first went to China, he also had some Rinzai teachers. So one of the things about Dogen was that he absorbed all these influences. There was the Tendai Buddhism in Japan. There were several kinds of Rinzai both in Japan and in China before he selected Wu Jing as his teacher and chose that path. So if you look at it from an intellectual historical view, one of the things about Dogen is that he's at the crossroads of so many different approaches and then he's able to you know kind of deliver his selective understanding of the best of you know the cream of the crop for all those yeah um yeah

[58:40]

I'm curious too, casting off, casting off, was it something that he got from Ru Jing? Was it, or is his philosophy about it or the understanding of practice realization that had come from this experience he had with Ru Jing? Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, again, we don't know whether Ru Jing would have said casting off body-mind in that same way. We talked about that a little bit yesterday. You know, there's a word in Japanese, yomi kae, which yomi is to read and kae is to alter. And that was a technique in Japanese literature where it was okay to change what your predecessors had said because you wanted to come up with something brilliant. I mean, creativity, I think, in Japan traditionally is not to have something totally original, but to take what the best of your predecessor and then to tweak it a little bit. And that nuance of the tweak... So, you know, that's one way of interpreting Shinjin Dasuraku from... But if we try to relate that back to, you know, what is the meditation?

[59:45]

I mean, Dogen doesn't give those instructions. We don't see those instructions in Rujing. We don't see those instructions in the Chinese Zen masters for the most part. They wrote a lot of poetry. They had a lot of commentaries on koans. But the, you know, Fukan Zazengi, which is a short text, kind of sums up what Wu Jing and other Chinese teachers were saying. But what he liked about Wu Jing, I think, this comes through in a couple of the fascicles, is a couple of points. One is that Wu Jing was so dedicated to it. He never varied from it. He did it constantly, no matter what. And even though he was abbot, he did it just as much as everybody else. He did Shikantaza just as much as everybody else. But Rujing was also an inspiring teacher. So from a literary standpoint, if you look at Rujing's record as a document in the Buddhist canon, in the Zen Buddhist canon, and you look at other teachers from that era, the literary critics in Japan will say, well, Rujing wasn't really as great a poet or quite as good.

[60:52]

But what Dogen says is he was inspiring. And he could speak at any time. And... sometimes he, you know, he wouldn't wait just for the Dharma Hall discourse. He'd just, you know, grab people and just talk to a small group or to the assembly. And sometimes he'd wake people up in the middle of the night and everybody was eager to stand in line and go for it. And it was that charismatic atmosphere. And Dogen says over and over again, you know, he went to all these other temples in China and nobody else had that. Everybody else was kind of an institutional figure who seemed more concerned with their authority. So I... You know, sometimes I look at the words authority and authenticity, and Dogen's trying to combine both of those. He's an authority in terms of, you know, developing the monastic system of the AG, but it's got to be based on the authenticity. So for him, you know, Wu Jing encapsulated that, and whether he's as great a poet or whether he gave specific instructions, but, you know, unfortunately we don't have the written records of what those instructions would have been.

[61:54]

So that's another kind of black hole, so to speak. Okay, so let's finish off with Gikai. So this is number 13. Who would like to read this one? Okay. I didn't see any insight that I've reached you around for more things you're saying, shouldn't you? Aja, well, what? What did it say? Hikai, I thought only the barbarian stayed down with the earth, but here's another red beard without that. Aja, I thought that he committed this policy? No, there is this kind of change. Right, okay.

[62:59]

So if we look at Ejo's response to GeekEye, what's a feature that we see here? Verify. Verify. Verify is true. How do you feel about that verification process compared to what Dogen himself does? Well, it's a new twist here, right? So how do we understand that in relation to Dogen? I mean, there's different ways of interpreting it. There's not a right or wrong answer to this, but I guess if you looked at it from a kind of cynical or skeptical or critical point of view, What might be a problem with this element? It's lacking modesty.

[64:00]

Right. It's lacking a kind of modesty. And it's also kind of the verification is kind of a formula. Oh, this is an okay answer. A curriculum. And that's what happens with a lot of the koans. Okay, this is a correct answer to the koan. That's what Dogen... with the upside-down language, was always trying to get away from. But as you get to the successors, and no offense to Gika, because they had their greatness in their own way, but they're not Togen. And you can see why they're not Togen. Because the authority and authenticity, that unique union that Togen embodied, is very difficult for later generations to have. So... But a final point was that when you take Shinjin Dasaraku, if you look at the medieval period in Soto Zen, it becomes a kind of mantra sometimes. So you see stories in later periods where a deluded person would say they were haunted by ghosts or they were grieving for a death in their family and they couldn't overcome it.

[65:08]

And you'd see the master... in the medieval times, so this is like 1400s, 1500s, saying Shinjin Datsuraku, and then they say, okay, I got the answer now. Even though they didn't have a personal experience themselves, it becomes, you know, and it's a ritual, and all religions have the role of ritual, and not all followers are able to, you know, initiate the ritual themselves because they want to receive the ritual from the specialist, so to speak, but that's, you know, that's part of the legacy of how it goes on. So, okay, thank you very much and see you again tomorrow. And where are we meeting tonight? Okay. 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, visit SSCC.org and click giving.

[66:13]

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