This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. So before I give the talk that I was thinking about giving, I will tell you a story, Sam. One of the things that I do regularly is drive my daughter and some other girls to Lowell as a carpool, right? And I usually do it in the morning. And the time, the day I do it on is a little slippery. It's not totally clear. So... I had been working on mostly house projects for the last few months and not riding my bike, and I was determined this week to go out and ride my bike.

[01:06]

And I looked at my schedule for the week, and I realized that Tuesday was pretty free, and that Wednesday, which is when I usually do these things, I had this Dharma talk, right? So I thought, okay, I'll do it on Tuesday. And then... monday night the the girl that um one of the people that i drive carpool drive for a carpool and who also does a bunch of driving she wrote me texted me and said oh can you drive tomorrow i i uh i'm not able to do it and i can drive on wednesday and i thought Okay, fine. And I looked at my calendar. I had this vague idea that I had something going on on Wednesday. But I looked at my calendar, and of course, my calendar on my phone started at, you know, 6 in the morning. Actually, earlier, because it normally has that every other week morning doshi here, right?

[02:10]

And, you know, it runs to the bottom of the screen, and the bottom of the screen is like... late afternoon or something like that. So I'm free on Wednesday. I'll go back riding on Wednesday. And so I got up this morning and I got up really early and I drove a really long way north to this town called Williams and then drove into the mountains and got the bike out of the, or drove to the edge of the mountains, got the bike out of the car and started riding. And it was the first time I'd ridden in months and I was just, so incredibly excited to do it and I wasn't sure what I was going to do and so I would ride on for a while and then say well I could take this road or I could take this other road and some of the times I thought I know I'll just stay out all day and then you know come back at night and so on and so forth and but because I was not in spectacular shape not having ridden my bike for months I you know reason prevailed and I decided I was going to settle at about

[03:14]

60 miles of riding. So I got about to mile 40, and I was in this town, you know, little tiny town called Sites, sitting on the ground eating an apple, and it was a tasty apple. And I looked, I don't remember if it was my watch or my phone, and this was about three, right? And And there was a little notation on it, either here or on my phone, that said, 7.30, Dharma talk. I was like, no! So I kind of did some calculating, and I figured if I just kicked ass all the way to the car, I might be able... And there wasn't huge amounts of traffic I might be able to make it. So I got on my bike, and I just started... And it ended up being an hour of just really pedaling incredibly hard.

[04:22]

And the road was a mix of pavement and gravel, and there were headwinds, and some of the gravel roads were extremely bumpy, so I had to slow down. And so it was really difficult. And by the time I got to the car, I had really worked out. And I was like, I was literally reeling from exhaustion. And then somewhere along the line, I realized that part of the problem was that my robes were actually at my house, right? Because I gave the Dharma talk at Hartford Street last weekend, and I brought my robes home. So I'd have to go home first, get my robes, and then come here. That couldn't possibly work. So I... I thought, I know, I'll do the talk in my cycling kit, which would be like a first. No one has ever done a San Francisco Zen Center Dharma talk wearing, I mean, to be fair, it wasn't like little skimpy bib shorts in a tiny jersey.

[05:25]

It was a little bit more complicated than that, but basically no one has ever done their Dharma talk in cycling kit. And I was pretty happy about that, but then I noticed actually as I, proceeded, I would occasionally put the driving instructions back in, and I noticed that the drive was looking shorter and shorter, and so I thought, I know, I can go home and get my rope. So in the end, you didn't have to endure me giving this talk in my cycling kit, and furthermore, I I kind of made it on time. The only issue is that all that time that I was supposed to be preparing this talk, I was either larking about in the inner valleys of the coast range or driving with this sort of demonic, obsessed place.

[06:33]

quality in order to get here on time. I haven't prepared this talk, but I'm gonna give it anyway. Recently, one of the cons I've been looking at is this one, case 17 in the Blue Cliff Record. It's Xianglin's meaning of the patriarchs coming from the West. and in it, not surprisingly, a monk asked Xianglin, well, okay, so what's the meaning of the patriarchs coming from the West? And those of you who aren't totally steeped in this stuff, when the... in the late Tang and early Song dynasty, the... the sort of scholarly crew that were in the process of creating the literature of Zen, basically, decided they needed a lineage of teachers all the way back to the Buddha and up to what is then the present day, right, in China.

[07:57]

And since obviously... Buddhism was originally founded in South Asia and not in China. They had to come up with a first ancestor in China, a first patriarch in China. And the guy they decided on... was this sort of semi-legendary. I mean, he might have been a real person. If you read various scholars, some people say he wasn't, some people say he was. But in any case, he's credited with doing a lot of things. And he has place of honor in the Blue Cliff Record, the book that I got this koan from. He's in the first koan, right? And in it, he has this sort of famous encounter with the emperor where... He comes in to meet the emperor, and the emperor says, hey, I'm a great Buddhist emperor.

[09:02]

I've done all this stuff. What's the merit in that? And Buddy and Harvey goes, no merit. It's all empty. And then the emperor says, okay, well, what's the highest meaning of the holy truth? Which was a legit question and had a kind of legit answer. And Bodhidharma says, empty, not holy. And then the emperor, maybe a little vex, says, who are you anyway? And he goes, I don't know. And then he turns around and he walks out. And... He walks north and he crosses the river, I think the Yangtze River, and lands in the next kingdom to the north where there's this sort of famous, now famous monastery called Shaolin.

[10:08]

And he settled down there and supposedly sat in a cave for nine years staring at the wall. And... One of the stories about him which is related to this koan is that he became very vexed with his eyes for closing. He was constantly like, I don't know. There are some people who regularly nod out when they're sitting and clearly Bodhidharma was one of those. His eyes would close and and he'd have to shake it off and, you know, sit up and then his eyes would close. And he got so angry at them that he, he tore them off, right. And threw them on the ground. And if you look at pretty much all representations of Bodhidharma and, and first of all, any sort of classical form, there's, we have this gigantic, well, we did when we had a wall up there, this gigantic, um, picture of Bodhidharma, um,

[11:17]

glowering like this and with his eyes like wide, right? And these little statuettes, they're called Daruma in Japanese that you can get that they're a thing where you push them and they bounce back up again because he was a pretty springy guy, right? They also have these wide staring eyes. So it's... Oh, and the last part is... according to the legend, where his eyebrows fell, tea plants sprouted. So the message there is, if you're seeing a lot of zazen and you want to stay awake, drink some tea, basically. Or, in this day and age, coffee, let's be clear. And, you know, if you go to Tassajara, our monastery, there's a huge urn of coffee.

[12:19]

But anyway, so it may be that it's not surprising, but when a monk asked this guy, Xianglin, what's the meaning of Bodhidharma or the patriarchs coming from the West, right? Because he came from, he essentially came from Pakistan, I think, or what's now Pakistan. Um, guess i'll say one more thing about that that was a standard question in the you know the the this literature that i'm talking about is just a just a huge collection of stories of interactions between teachers and students teachers and teachers students and students um people and things and so on that that are held up in one way or another as skillful or significant Or maybe not skillful, but significant.

[13:23]

And there are a lot of standard questions in the literature. One of them is, what is Buddha, for example? But another one is, what's the meaning of bodhidharmas coming from the West, basically? And if you think about it, it's really... kind of a metaphorical stand-in for what's the essential meaning or essential part of Zen practice, right? And almost everyone that answers it, answers it by pointing at Zazen practice. So there's a really famous case where a monk asks two different teachers this question. And the first teacher says, oh, hand me that zafu over there. And the guy hands him the zafu, and the teacher hits him with it.

[14:28]

And then later, and he says, you can hit me all you like, but there's no meaning of the patriarchs coming from the West, right? And next he does it with this famous teacher, Linji, who was really famous for hitting people and for hitting them hard. And he asks the same question, and Linji says, oh... I dropped my sitting brace. Could you hand me this sitting brace? Which is this thing that they use in India, among other places, where it sits down here kind of in your lap, and it sticks up like this. It has a little platform on top. You can put your hands on it and rest your chin on it, and kind of it makes you... You can even go to sleep while you're meditating, basically, with it. And it also helps you sit up. But... So he gets walked with that, and he says, yeah, okay, fine, but there's still no meaning, right? So it almost always points to zazen, and so you won't be surprised to hear that Xianglin pointed to zazen, and he said this thing that's, well, okay, so in the translation that I almost always read, it says, it's a pretty elaborate sentence.

[15:38]

It says, sitting for a long time becomes toilsome. Which is true. And refers back to the exploits of Bodhidharma in this really sort of neat way. And also is kind of a, you could think of it as an encouragement or as just as holding up the zazen practice as the core, you know, toilsome or not, as the core of Bodhidharma's teaching, which we've carried down to this day, right? And I always sort of believed the translation, because the guy that translated it is really way better at all this stuff than I am, and he's really quite good, and I trust him, and so on and so forth. But I was...

[16:40]

I was interested to note that when you look at the original Chinese, it's a four-character thing, right? Phrase. And the first two really are sit for a long time, right? The next two, though, are very interesting. And the last one, yeah, means work or toil and a few other things, right? But the third one, it would be hard to interpret it the way Thomas Clary interpreted it. It may be such an obvious reference to Bodhidharma, and you could pull that... that meaning out of it. And maybe everybody understood it that way or something like that. But when you look at it, it looks a lot like, essentially, sit a long time, do the work.

[17:45]

Or maybe, even better, sit a long time, get it done, basically. It's more like that. And the third character also has a kind of celebratory or phrasing connotation, like... You know, like, it can even be just okay, which is kind of great. So, you know, it's been a long time. Work, okay. So, anyway, it kind of, particularly in the context of the story that I originally told, brings to mind this question about What exactly is the work of zazen, right? When you sit. One way to look at it is that it embodies, you're completely embodying this

[18:59]

complicated fact about the human condition, which is that we hardly do anything without some kind of purpose or aspiration or function or something like that, right? And If you read, again, the literature that I'm talking about, the Zen literature, it's full of aspirational formulas. The first case, not the Blue Cliff Record, but another one, the famous Mu Koan. When you read the commentaries, it's like the guy that collected, that made this collection and and wrote all the commentaries is saying things like um you know you what you have to do in order to um to you know realize the function the function of practice is you have to you have to cross this the barrier that's set up by this story right and and

[20:29]

If you do that, you'll be able to walk along with the famous Zen teacher in the story. His name is Joujo. And seeing through his eyes and all that sort of thing, he says, wouldn't that be great? Okay, well, then you've got to do the work. And he says, the way you do the work is you make the story, you know, like meditating on the story be like... trying to swallow a red-hot iron ball, right? You can't swallow it down and you can't cough it up, right? That's a horrific metaphor, let's be clear. And then, you know, the commentator says, and, you know, if you do that, eventually something's going to happen and then it'll be great, right? But, so there... It's full of aspiration, right?

[21:34]

And Zen practice is fundamentally an aspirational activity, right? Who would come do this thing on a day-to-day basis without at least a few thoughts like, ah, I want to be more compassionate. Or I want, you know, when I... teach zazen instruction. And I've been doing that for years, right? That every time I do it, just some cohort of people comes in and sometimes it's a lot, you know? And when I kind of try to get a feel for why they're here, they all have these really poignant and wonderful things Aspirations. I want to have a calm mind. Yeah, who doesn't, right? I want to have my relationships be more on an even keel, right?

[22:43]

Yeah, exactly. Wonderful. And yet... Suzuki Roshi, the founder of this school, and just about everybody else says, when you sit, in order to really kind of come to the heart of the practice, you have to sit without any gaining idea. So how do you do that? How can you... where your aspiration and the sort of conventional mind is a categorizer, calculator, measurement device, and planner, right? And you can't actually stop it, right?

[23:48]

So it's going to be sitting there going, you know... this period of Zazen is not very good. The last one was better. Or, wow, this one is great. I think I've arrived. Or, you know, et cetera, all these things, right? And none of those are helpful, right? And your conventional cognitive faculty brings a whole host of ideas about... the nature of Zen practice, what's supposed to happen, what's not supposed to happen, what I should be doing now, and so on and so forth. Almost none of those ideas are fundamentally helpful. They may be helpful in a provisional way, but when they become an object of clinging or pursuit, then all of a sudden they're not helpful. And So one way to think about the work of Zazen is that it brings you up against this apparent paradox.

[25:01]

It's not actually a paradox, but it smells like a paradox initially, up against this paradox over and over and over again. And the... not the first time, and not the tenth time, and not the hundredth time, and maybe not the thousandth time, but hopefully at some point you see what's going on and you let go, right? And some other mental faculty sort of steps or rises up in the middle of your experience and shows itself, basically. This sort of other mode of being that's not concerned with calculation, long-range planning, categorization, and all the rest, that sort of thing, and that takes in the world in a kind of measureless, receptive, and

[26:15]

flexible way. And that, you know, time shares with your everyday cognitive faculty. Or maybe, no, that's false. That is constantly present along with your everyday regular cognitive faculty. It's just, you know... see it because you don't see it a lot of the time because we're always tangled up in measuring and planning, basically. So that's one way to look at the work of Zazen. I hate to ask this, but does anybody know what time it is? 8.15. Does that mean I have 15 minutes? Wow, I think I can finish this up in 15 minutes.

[27:19]

The other result of my story that I told you initially is that I'm appallingly thirsty because it was actually really hot up in the inner valleys of the Coast Range today. So that was really good. And then there's a, that's the sort of short-term work. And then there's a kind of long-term work, right? And the long-term work is this. Once you're aware that there's more to the experience of being human than our everyday cognitive faculty, you start to realize that for the rest of your life, your practice and really your life is gonna play itself out in this sort of tangle between these two modes of being.

[28:42]

basically. They're intimately intertwined and inseparable. Experience arises in one and it affects the other and vice versa. The nature of insight is you have an experience, it lands, and then you're your everyday cognitive faculty takes it up and it changes your conceptual framework, right? That's insight. And like I said, it goes both ways, right? So there's this, you're living in this, you're living in the context of the relationship between these two modes of being. And there's a, there's a poem that I'm not gonna go into too much detail about that tries to describe various aspects of this relationship, right?

[29:43]

And it sets it up kind of as a trajectory, but it's not really a trajectory. But one of the things, one of the first stanza really is kind of like about the first time that ever dawns on you that there's this other mode, right? And it basically says, no wonder you don't recognize it. You're still ruminating on your sketchy past. basically. But over time, and this is what happens in the second stanza, the second stanza is something like she gets up, she's wandering around the house, and she turns a corner and there's a mirror. Naturally, she recognizes herself, but she still mistakes her reflection for her head. The point is that because it's ever-present in the context of a life and practice, this other mode shows up whenever it wants to, basically, in your attention.

[30:55]

Or maybe when you turn a corner. And you become aware that actually... It's always there in either at the fringes of or in the light of your attention, basically. And it goes on for a while, and then finally the last stanza goes on for a while and mainly talks about, well, it talks about two things. It talks about, you know, the specifics of the relationship between these two modes is that they're connected, right? And so, and they influence each other, and even though some of the stuff that happens when you're

[32:01]

some of the experiences that arise as a result of being aware in this way are baffling to your everyday cognitive faculty, they're still a connection. And then there's a stanza about how it is that you work with this. And then the final stanza is essentially ends with everyone... wanted to be extraordinary. But in the end, you come home and you sit by the fire. So it's like the... to discover comfort and a kind of skill with the human condition, in the presence of the human condition. And... and to bring the unconditioned appreciation that's the baseline of this other mode to bear on the actual arising of your life and the lives of others nearby.

[33:18]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[33:46]

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