This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. How's the audio, John? Good? Well, we have another spectacular winter day here in San Francisco. Good day to be sitting downstairs in the zendo all day long. So, returning to where we left off yesterday, this famous paragraph from the Genjo Koan, we might know it by the end of this term. To study... The Buddha way is to study the self.

[01:03]

To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. So, today we're going to do the last two sentences, starting with, when actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away. Dropping off body and mind is a translation of Shin Jin Datsu Raku, a key word in Dogen's teaching. He learned it from his teacher Ru Jing. When he first studied this saying, it was commonly thought when I first studied this saying, it was commonly thought that Dogen, it was when Dogen's enlightenment experience happened.

[02:04]

And the story was that Ru Jing was scolding a monk who was sitting next to Dogen and was sleeping. Apparently, again, this was one of those temples where in China during this time they sat in the Zendo 24 hours a day, But I don't think they had that nice break that they had under Soak Okoto where for two hours they wouldn't hit you. I think it was just continuous. 24 hours you had to be sitting and you had to stay awake. And so, of course, Rujing, who was the abbot, he didn't have to stay awake all night. He would probably go to sleep and then wake up in the middle of the night and wander into the Zendo and see who was sleeping or not. And there was somebody sleeping next to Rujing, next to Dogen. I think he took off his slipper, they have little slippers that you can wear in Zendo's in China, and hit him on the head and said, Zazen is dropping off body and mind, why are you just sleeping?

[03:06]

And with this, supposedly, Dogen was enlightened. That was the story that was written in the biography of Dogen by his successor, Kezan. Modern scholars, having read a lot of Dogen and researched it, believe that that's not a true story. That that was written by Kezon as a way of promoting Dogen and Dogen's Zen in Japan after Dogen was dead. It's much better if your founders had some extraordinary enlightenment experience in some wonderful temple off in China. Promotion has been part of the history of Zen. right from the beginning, so it's not surprising that it would have occurred again here. But according to Kaz and many other scholars, Dogen never talked about having a big enlightenment experience. Dogen's religious experience is not attaining some sudden and special psychological satori experience.

[04:10]

He never talked about such an experience. In his teachings, realization is a deep awareness of the fact that the existence of the self is not a personal possession of the self. Your self is shared with the entire world. So that was more important for him than emphasizing some big experience. For Dogen, zazen is dropping off body and mind. It is not some special psychological condition resulting from zazen. It is the practice of zazen. So, in Shua Kokumura's book, Realizing the Genzhou Koan, there's three pages where there were apparently three important interactions between Dogen and Ru Jing, his teacher in China, where the question of dropping off body and mind was brought up, and you can read the translations of those three.

[05:16]

but basically, I'm summarizing it for you. Rujing was saying that in dropping off body and mind, we are freed from the five sense desires that create greed, hate, and delusion. So our five senses, we hear things, we see things, we have sense sensations of things, whatever our five senses are, and we get attached to them. That is, we want more of something. We get greedy. We want less of something. We want to push it away. We get angry. Or we're just confused. So those three things, greed, hate, and delusion, come from our attachment to or clinging to our five sense desires and dropping... off of body and mind is to quit being clinging to those five sense desires that create that greed hate and delusion or clinging to the greed hate and delusion so in uh the chinese characters are broken down a little bit uh into that's clear right that's pretty stress basic buddhism that's fundamental buddhism you that's mahayana buddhism that's buddhist buddhism

[06:43]

So to break the characters down a little bit, the Chinese character for Datsu means to take off or sloth off, and for Raku means to drop off. And I think Carl Bielfeld put them all together and put to sloth off body and mind versus to drop body and mind or body and mind dropping off. Yeah. I'm not sure there's a huge difference between to sloth off body and mind and have body and mind drop off, but that's a second kind of interpretation of it. And Shohako Kumar, when he thought about it, said, well, what does it mean to really sloth off body and mind? And he went through a different kind of variation of it, which is, if we think about ourselves, we have created this self-image. And he first talked about clothing we wear. Every day we wear certain clothing. If you're a businessman, you wear businessman clothing. If you're an artist, maybe you wear artist clothing.

[07:56]

If you're a Zen priest, you wear Zen priest clothing. And all these clothing that you wear, the outer representation of some kind of sense of your own self-image or your self-activity, represents you to the outside world and to some extent to the inside world too. And when you sit zazen, you're supposed to drop that, drop that. your sense of being a businessman, like you would be taking off your clothing. But we also wear other kind of clothing, our social status, our education, where we live, various things like that. Our whole life story in some sense defines us and defines our image of ourselves and who we are. And when we sit zazen, we can drop that too. We can... drop our whole life story. We can drop all of the things that we are, and in the end we can, I also went on a little bit, we consider ourselves capable or incapable.

[09:00]

I'm an honest person, a dishonest person. We define ourselves in this way and hold on to ideas about who we are, and we create this karmic self. And to sit zazen would be to sit, letting all of those things go, All those self-images go and just be a human being, being alive. That's what Shaka Okamura's idea of dropping body and mind is. And you know that part of your self-concept is also bound up in your body. It's... bound up and tensions in your body and the structure of your body. This is all left over from our trauma from our childhood and that also can be let go of and released too. So these many, we call these suffering producing thoughts, these ideas about yourself that you hold on to so strongly.

[10:12]

And and dropping your body and mind and dropping those conceptions of yourself, you can be freer in the moment. Of course, that's a wonderful thing to say. It seems kind of easy. In fact, we were talking about this in our class when we went through this, and we have deep pathological, pathogenic is a term I use sometimes, deep pathogenic beliefs about ourself. that do come from our trauma and our childhood, our efforts to attach to our caregiver or our parents, whoever they are, and what it took to figure out how to adapt to their world. And those beliefs about ourself are mostly unconscious. You see sort of little ripples of them in your life, and they're not easy to be let go of. So this idea of just sitting down and dropping all of your beliefs about yourself, I recognize is not such a simple thing to do.

[11:18]

Might require 50 years of therapy in addition to 50 years of zazen. But anyway, there's some idea, not some idea, there's the fact that we have a huge karmic life left over from being who we are and that most of that, much of that restricts our freedom, keeps us from living a free and joyous life. And to the extent that we can let it go, drop it, free ourselves from the concepts that create the prison in our mind that we live in, that's dropping body and mind. So Shohako Kimura summarizes it in this way. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away. This simply means that in zazen, the separation between self and other falls away, is dropped off.

[12:25]

Zazen reveals the total reality of interdependent origination. When we let go of thought, we settle our whole being into this reality. This is how we are actualized by all beings. I might comment, letting go of thought does not necessarily mean that we quit thinking or that there's no thinking. It's that non-thinking I waved my hand at a couple of days ago. It's that you don't stick to the thoughts as they come up. And what a relief. Zuckeroshi's comment on dropping body and mind is the true meaning of to drop body and mind is nothing to grasp. Don't grasp anything. That's dropping body and mind. Nothing to grasp. Or he called it Bodhidharma's not knowing. You know, Bodhidharma, the famous story of when Bodhidharma met Emperor Wu, and Emperor Mu asked him, who's this standing in front of me?

[13:31]

And he said, I don't know. That is, I've dropped all my self-images, my self-descriptions. I don't know, I'm not, I don't know who I am, but I'm, because of that, ready to meet you, just being a person standing in front of you, not a famous Zen teacher from India, or you a... king. It's just two people meeting free of all of those self-descriptions. So this is kind of a renunciation, a renunciation of our previous idea of ourselves, a letting go. In this concept of renunciation, we think of renunciation a lot of times as giving up all of our material stuff. like Laman Pang, the famous Laman Pang, who was quite wealthy and at one point in time had a realization, took all of his material things, put them on a raft, pushed them out into the ocean and sunk the raft.

[14:34]

And he and his family, it wasn't just him, he took his family on this trip, lived in poverty for the rest of his life, that is material poverty. I mean, they had great spiritual poverty and he became famous for it. I'm not recommending you take all your stuff and float it out on a raft in the ocean. Because we have another example, Vimalakirti, who lived in an enormous palace as a layman and conducted many affairs. So the key is not that you give away your material things, it's you give away your attachment to your material things. You give away, I think as Zuchara, she says, it's not that you give it away, but that you know it will go away. How can you get too attached to something that you know is going to go away? In fact, in the end, it all goes away, right? We know it all goes away.

[15:35]

And yet we're enormously attached to what we have just right now. I'm afraid it goes away sooner than we imagine. I can speak from a little experience. Fifty years has gone by like a flash. You young people don't believe that. Some of the people that are a little older here will do that. Anyway, I have this poem that I love from Kay Ryan, the poet I read yesterday, that kind of summarizes this a little bit. For those of you who are maybe from some other country, just to let you know, the Niagara River is a Niagara River that ends in large falls. And if you go over those falls, you don't survive. I mean, people tried to go over those falls in... Barrels, I think, for a while. It was a fashion. Some of them survived. Anyway, here's the poem. The Niagara River. As though the river were a floor, we position our tables and chairs upon it, eat and have conversation.

[16:42]

As it moves along, we notice, as calmly as though dining room paintings were being replaced, the changing scenes along the shore. We do know, we do know this is the Niagara River, but it is hard to remember what that means. Isn't that lovely? So much like our life. We're on the river of our life. We set up our tables and chairs, eat, and have conversation. We notice, as calmly as though dining room paintings were being replaced, the changing scenes along the shore. We do know this is the Niagara River, but it's hard to remember what it means. Everybody get that or should I read it one more time?

[17:50]

Who wrote it? Kay Ryan. She lives up in Marin. She was the poet laureate for the country about five years ago. In fact, she has an entire book of poems titled The Niagara River. It's the first poem in the book. I'll read it one more time because I explained it the second time. As though the river were a floor... We position our tables and chairs upon it, eat and have conversation as it moves along. We notice, as calmly as though dining room paintings were being replaced, the changing scenes along the shore. We do know this is the Niagara River, but it is hard to remember what that means. So anyway, I was thinking about this whole thing of letting go things, of kind of letting our past karmic life, freeing ourselves from our past karmic life, which of course we're working on in our sashin here, dropping body and mind.

[19:09]

And I thought sometimes we need something more dramatic. And it made me think about pilgrimage. A pilgrimage is a journey or search for moral peace. or spiritual significance. It comes from the French word, pellegrin, Latin, pellegrin, foreigner, traveler, wanderer, migrating like a peregrine falcon. I was thinking about that. We used to come from a long lineage of pilgrims. Suzuki Roshu was a pilgrim. He left Japan. and came here. Dogen was a pilgrim. He went to China and came back to Japan. Buddha was a pilgrim. He left his rich palace life in search of the meaning of life when he was in his 20s, spent seven years wandering. So we come from a long lineage of pilgrims. And in some sense, our whole life is a kind of pilgrimage, a search for spiritual meaning.

[20:14]

I think if you don't have a search for spiritual meaning as part of your life, your life sort of has a kind of fundamental emptiness. And a sashin is kind of a mini-capsulation of a pilgrimage. We started, it seems like a long time ago that we started it, and now we're in day five of this pilgrimage and we've still got a ways to go. And we'll be celebrating Buddha's enlightenment on Saturday, which is a celebration of the result of his seven years of pilgrimage. Anyway, I'm kind of in a poetry mood today, so I'm going to share a poem about pilgrimage from David White.

[21:16]

Nancy Petran was my first chouseau five practice periods ago. And Nancy had lived in Spain for a while. And apparently there's a very famous pilgrimage called the Camino de Santiago, which is many different routes, but they basically go to... to the shrine of the Apostle of St. James in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. Many take up the route as a form of spiritual path or retreat for spiritual growth. The main pilgrimage route to Santiago follows an earlier Roman trade route, which continues to the Atlantic coast of Galicia, ending at Cape... Finisterre? Finisterre, Cape Finisterre.

[22:20]

Although it is known today that Cape Finisterre, Spain's westernmost point, is not the westernmost point of mainland Europe, some other point is, the fact that the Romans called it Finisterre, which literally means the end of the world, or land's end in Latin, indicates that they viewed it as such, the westernmost point of Spain. We have people here today that have taken that pilgrimage, I think. Is Mary here? Mary Scott? Anyway. So, you can just go to the cathedral, or you can continue on a little further, all the way to Finisterre, which is the end of Spain. Uh... It says, at night, I pulled this up from somewhere.

[23:26]

At night, the Milky Way overhead seems to point the way, so the root acquired the nickname, voilacte, voilacte, French, which means the Milky Way. So that's kind of cool, too, that the last part was the Milky Way. And it kind of reminded me of the very last sentence of the Genjo Kohan, because I always like to throw a little Genjo Kohan in there from time, is the nature of wind is permanent. wind being Buddha nature. The nature of wind is permanent. Because of that, the wind of the Buddha's house brings forth the gold of the earth and makes fragrant the cream of the Long River. Brings forth the practice of the Buddha way. Brings forth the gold of the earth and makes fragrant the cream of the Long River. And the characters, the Chinese characters for Long River, are the same as the characters from Milky Way. Just one of those things that I was amused by.

[24:32]

I know you all are aware of this, but I'm just going to mention it as a fact before I start reading this little pilgrimage poem. As you all know, when the sun sets, If it's a full moon night, the full moon rises at the same time the sun sets. So as soon as the sun sets, the full moon is there. The road in the end, taking the path the sun had taken into the western sea and the moon rising behind you as you stood where the ground turned to ocean. No way to your future now. but the way your shadow could take, walking before you across water, going where shadows go. No way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass, except to call an end to the way you had come, to take out each frayed letter you had brought and light their illumined corners and to read them as they drifted on the late western light.

[25:48]

empty your bags to sort this and to leave that, to promise what you needed to promise all along, and to abandon the shoes that brought you here, right at the water's edge. Not because you had given up, but because now you would find a different way to tread, and because through it all, part of you would still walk on, no matter how, over the waves. so I'll read it again. The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken, and so you're walking into the setting sun, because you're walking west, into the western sea, and the moon, full moon, is rising behind you, and when you stand, and as you stood where the ground turned to ocean, no way to your future now, but the way your shadow could take. The moon casts a big shadow of your standing body onto the ocean,

[26:51]

As you stood where the ground turned to ocean, no way to your future now but the way your shadow could take, walking before you across the water, going where shadows go. No way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass, except to call an end to the way you had come. To take out each frayed letter you had brought and light their lumined corners. Apparently, as part of this tradition of taking this pilgrimage, you write letters, maybe to friends that you wished you had said something to, that had died, or various other things, things you had to say goodbye to. One of the traditions some of us do here before someone does jukai or is ordained a priest, as we say, please try to clean up any old relationships that feel unfinished before you take this ordination.

[27:59]

So this is the kind of way they wrote letters and they carried them with them on the pilgrimage and then they lit them, burned them, and threw them into the sea. Light their illumined corners and to read them as they drifted on the late western light. Tempt your bags to sort this and leave that. Apparently, people leave some of their stuff there. I don't know how that's exactly worked out. So you're not only leaving some physical things, but you're leaving the things that you needed to leave, that you took this whole pilgrimage to leave. To promise what you need to promise all along and to abandon the shoes that brought you here. right at the water's edge. Apparently they actually leave their shoes there, take their shoes off, that they'd hiked with. Kind of a symbolic, you know, leaving it.

[29:01]

Not because you had given up, but because now you would find a different way to tread. And because through it all, part of you would still walk on, no matter how, over the waves. So, Sometimes you make a dramatic change in your life and you have to continue on in a new way. When I was young, I took two three-month pilgrimages, wandered all over the western part of the United States in search of the truth. And my pilgrimages ended at the end of a long 15-mile dirt road called Tasara, where I sat for four years. That was where my wandering led me. Okay, we are going to finish, so we're moving on to no trace. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly.

[30:05]

By the way, just one other comment on that. You don't have to go on a big pilgrimage. The point I made by my stopping at Tuss Harford for four years is you can be right where you are. work on, dropping body and mind. You can do it in this building today, or you can do it in your workplace next week, or you can do it in your family home. There's no need to go for a pilgrimage, but on the other hand, sometimes you do. You take a dramatic change in your life. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. Shohako's translation of no trace of realization remains is there's a trace of realization that cannot be grasped. We endlessly express this ungraspable trace of realization. That's a different feeling, right?

[31:07]

There's a trace of realization, but you can't grasp it. You can't hold on to it. But we endlessly express this ungraspable trace of realization. Koshio Uchiyami in this book that we studied said, we cannot say there is no enlightenment and yet we cannot say I have attained enlightenment. Beautiful classic Zen paradox. The trace of realization cannot be grasped. We must be free from the trace of realization. The Buddha way is actually living our lives expressing the realization whose trace is ungraspable. And I particularly liked Nishiari's commentary on these things. It is a great disease if the Dharma body has a trace or if enlightenment has a shadow. So it is said, a cloudless blue sky still needs to be hit with a stick.

[32:12]

And he goes on. Ikyu... was great. He said, I don't remember making a mistake called enlightenment. This is good. He doesn't look outstanding or distinguished, and he doesn't have the stink of enlightenment. Needless to say, he doesn't act violently like swinging a fist or hitting with a stick. Here is true dropping off. doesn't have the stink of enlightenment. Nishiari always said that kind of very strong way. Then what is this no trace continues endlessly. When you reach the point of no stink of enlightenment, whereas there is no trace, you vow with great determination to let the absence of enlightenment continue long, long, long, like a single rail of iron for millions of miles.

[33:17]

A little something from Nishiari. But there's a sort of more practical side to this no trace. Tsukiroshi in his Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, he has a chapter called No Trace. Great, great read. It's titled, When You Do Something, You Should Burn Yourself Completely Like a Good Bonfire. I remember in the eulogy that Trungpa wrote for Suzuki Roshi, he said, Suzuki Roshi was like the hot tip of an incense stick. Kind of clean burn there. If you attach to the idea of what you have done, you are involved in selfish ideas. This will leave a trace or a shadow in your mind that will limit your actual experience.

[34:22]

In order to not leave any traces when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind. You should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. Zen activity is activity which is completely burned out with nothing remaining but ash. This is the goal of our practice. That is what Dogen meant when he said, ashes do not come back to firewood. Ash is ash, and ash should be completely ash. The firewood should be firewood. That's a very famous paragraph in the Genjo Koan, which we didn't cover, sort of waving our hands at it. When this kind of activity takes place, one activity covers all. In order not to leave any traces, when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind.

[35:33]

You should be concentrated on what you do. You're committed to the moment with your whole body and mind. I think we're doing really well. I think that's enough. on those five lines. So this trace of realization is a little bit like the trace of birds flying or fish swimming. Apparently a bird flies to the air and other birds kind of have some sense that a bird flied there before. Fish leave a little trail in the ocean. I don't know. This is something I read somewhere. And so what we're going to cover tomorrow is the beautiful paragraphs about fish swimming in the ocean and birds flying in the sky. And fish don't know that they're really in water, that water is really who they are, and birds don't really know necessarily that the air is who they are.

[36:43]

And there's a similar analogy that we humans are living in something called life-living, and we forget that we're living in life. We're like the fish swimming in the water not knowing they're in water because it's all around them all the time. Life permeates every moment of our existence and yet we forget about that fundamental fact. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish. It is possible to illustrate this with more analogies. Practice enlightenment and people are like this. We have happily, I sort of rushed through things at the end, and we happily have two minutes if someone has one quick question. Yes? Well, the sense is that when there is no separation between you and the other, then if you've dropped your...

[37:59]

self the other is dropping at the same time that is if there's no difference between you and the other i'll read i'll read that paragraph again it's beautiful there is you're dropping any description of yourself the world and since yourself includes them that is your ideas of them their body and mind in your mind is dropped too does that make sense I mean, we're dropping not only our conceptions of ourself, we're dropping the conceptions of other people we have. And that's what allows us to actually be able to connect with them. That's what Bodhidharma is trying to do with Master Wu, Emperor Wu. Another one? Another question from somebody? Yes, Jason. Well, that doesn't seem like the middle way particularly, does it?

[39:11]

But, you know, every culture has its own interpretation of these things. And our culture here in America has decided that seven hours of sleep is good, and that's the middle way. And we feed you well, too. I'm not complaining. How would the teacher say this is They probably were emphasizing, you know, practice hard, your head's on fire. You are living in a dream. You have no idea what life is about. You're not awake at all. We're going to have to really push you hard. We'll do this for two or three years, and then you can go off and practice the middle way. I mean, it's a common approach. I mean, Buddha practically starved himself to death. practicing the many yogic practices he did to attain awakening until he finally realized that wasn't the way.

[40:16]

And that's where he came up with the middle way. And I think it's easy for us to sort of wander into too, you know, you have the middle way and it's easy to wander off into too austere, being too tough on ourselves, driving ourselves too hard, or wander the other way, being too lazy. and not being strict enough with ourselves. In fact, that's our life. Sometimes we're too lazy, and some part of our self has to say, wake up. You're goofing off. You really are too lazy. Life is too important to be wasting it this way. Or we're pushing ourselves too hard to the place where we're actually being counterproductive, and you have to wake up. Don't be so hard on yourself. Don't push yourself so hard. So one might comment that in that tradition they were doing too much of that, but that's a cultural thing.

[41:19]

I'm not quite ready to make that comment. That was the bell, the sound of the bell. I'll read the last paragraph of the fish swimming thing is worth reading, and it'll be a kind of announcement of what we'll discuss tomorrow. Here is the place, here the way unfolds. Isn't that beautiful? Here is the place, here the way unfolds. The boundary of realization is not distinct, for the realization comes forth simultaneously with the mastery of Buddha Dharma. Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge and is grasped by your consciousness. You don't know what's going on fundamentally with you here.

[42:38]

It is not distinctly apparent. It cannot be grasped by your consciousness. Its appearance is beyond your knowledge. Have a good day. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:25]

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