Jō-chin-chin-mi-myo-no-ho-wa Yaku-san-mon-go-ni-o-ayou-koto-katashi Wa-re-i-ma-ken-mon-shi-ju-ji-suru-koto-etari An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas, having it to see and listen to To remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words.

[02:37]

the abbot for giving me an opportunity to address you again, and this time not about myself. I thought I'd say something a little bit about the body today, but maybe not in exactly the usual sense in which we talk about it. So I'm going to talk about the upright body and also about the boundless body. Someone asked me if I was going to make you cry again, and I said, well, some of the things that I read for this talk made me cry, so the crying is up to you. Tendon Yojo says, Stacking our bones upright on the flat earth, we each dig a cave in space. Directly we pass through the gate of dualism, and grasp hold of a black lacquered tub.

[04:09]

Stacking our bones upright on the flat earth, we each dig a cave in space. Directly we pass through the gate of dualism and grasp hold of a black lacquered tub. I'm not going to say anything about the black lacquered tub. The footnotes tell me that it means what Suzuki Roshi called ordinary mind. or everydayness. I think about this quotation every time I sit down for a period of zazen. This is Dogen's teacher, Tendon Yojo's description of what we are doing here in Ongo, in practice period. And it appears at the beginning of the beautiful fascicle in Shobogenzo, Ongo. To pass through the gate of dualism, we stack our bones upright on the flat earth. We use our physical body to make a metaphysical leap or transformation like the fish who swims through the gate under the water and becomes a dragon.

[05:19]

But we make our passage not under the ocean but on the flat earth. And I think it's particularly important, and I'll come back to this, that the earth is flat. as it holds us in our uprightness. Even here in the mountains, we make our seat on solid level ground. We balance our bones, individual and collective, on the platform provided by Mother Earth. And unlike in many other traditions where we make our home or nest in an actual cave, as in the part of the Himalayas where I am blessed to hang out in the summer, We each dig a cave in space. It's kind of weird, I think. We make a structure for our practice with space inside of it, and we make it out of space. Is our body inside the cave, or is our body the cave itself? Is the cave filled with space, or is it made of space?

[06:24]

And maybe most importantly, what exactly is our body? Is it a stack of bones arranged on the flat earth? Or is it maybe made of space itself? Is it possible that it could be both? The middle way of Buddhism has a very complicated relationship to the physical body and Zen perhaps even more so than other forms of Buddhism. The early Buddhist and still sometimes Theravadan denigration of the body is also easy to find in Tibetan Buddhism where we meditate on the body as a skin bag, a bag of bones, a bag of pus and shit. It struck me in thinking about this rejection of the body that it's helpful to think of it as more practical than moral. By contrast with the yogic asceticism with which the body was treated in even the Buddha's own early life, as I'm sure you know, where he starved himself and put himself through various

[07:32]

ascetic extremities, all of that solved by a bowl of rice pudding, where the body was something to be cast aside or transcended. Some of us call this up and out, right? The denigration of the body in Buddhism is, I think, or as I understand it, a mnemonic, a memory device to remind us of impermanence. The body is rejected not because it's fundamentally flawed or reprehensible or abhorrent, it's just temporary. Don't become too attached to it, and if you can manage it, don't become attached to it at all. So this derogatory view of the body certainly seems to carry over in places to our tradition. As Dogen sharply says in Raihai Tokuzui, which is prostrating, bowing to the attainment of the marrow, if we attach even slightly more weight to self-regard for the body than to the Dharma, the Dharma is not transmitted to us.

[08:42]

If we attach even slightly more weight to self-regard for the body than to the Dharma, the Dharma is not transmitted to us. I think this is a pretty familiar admonishment not to overvalue the body. But notice that what is dangerous here is not the body itself, but self-regard for the body, regarding the body as self or as mine. It's a warning about the selfing that takes place when we regard the body as personal property, as an object in my collection of possessions, which make up me as an individual. The body is only a problem when it's thought of in this way as separate, bounded, and proprietary. So over and against this kind of warning about self-making or eye-making through the body, we have the other side of the Zen coin.

[09:50]

This very mind is Buddha and this very body is Buddha. I wake up in this body and nowhere else. Or awakening occurs, awareness is activated, in this body and nowhere else. This body is the vehicle for awakening and it's the only one that I have. I have this vivid memory of Shohaku Okamura in Genzoe over and over again talking about the Heart Sutra and then touching his body and going, these five skandhas, these five skandhas. So we give away or allow to be released the five aggregates, as we call them in the Heart Sutra, but we need these five skandhas. We can't wake up in the absence of these five skandhas. And if you look at the core Zen literature, you can't help but notice that our practice is a body practice.

[10:51]

What is shikantaza? Just sitting. Total devotion to immovable sitting. We chant. every day before we feed our bodies at lunchtime. Or in another phrase that we chant in the Metta Sutta, standing, walking, sitting, or lying down. In his commentary on the Mountains and Water Sutra, Gary Snyder reminds us of the origins of this phrase. He writes, the Chinese spoke of the four dignities standing, lying, sitting, and walking. They are dignities in that they are ways of being fully ourselves at home in our bodies in their fundamental modes. They are dignities in that they are ways of being fully ourselves. So, no self-regard, but they are the ways of being fully ourselves at home in our bodies in their fundamental modes.

[11:55]

Fundamentally, we must be as at home in these bodies as we are in this temple and this valley, even as we understand that all of these are impermanent. These bodies are all we have for houses right now, and they are naturally dignified, naturally worthy, which is what dignity means. The notion of the four dignities exists in Sanskrit, in Pali, in Chinese, in Japanese. So this notion of standing, walking, sitting, and lying down, it goes back a long way. In Japanese, shigi, the four presences. And I really love that notion of the presences, of being present in my physical being. In Taoism, ching jing. I saw it described as the body clear and still like an alpine lake or a remote mountain peak.

[13:01]

So there we have Ho Zhou's Mountains and Waters, like a clear alpine lake or a remote mountain peak. The 12th century Taoist master Wang Chongyang or Wang Zhe writes this about Shikantaza. Sitting in meditation does not simply mean to sit with the body erect and the eyes closed. To sit authentically. Okay, I love this. It's 12th century before Dogen. To sit authentically, you must maintain a heart mind like Mount Thay, remaining immovable and unshakable throughout the entire day. Maintain this practice, whether standing, walking, sitting, or lying down, whether in movement or stillness. To sit authentically, you must maintain a heart-mind like Mount Tai, immovable and unshakable throughout the entire day.

[14:04]

Somehow we are immovable and unshakable whether we're moving or being still. And I think that's one of the great koans. of our practice, with a heart-mind like Mount Thai, a venerable presence in our primordial dignity and in all the postures of our life upright like the mountain. Gary Snyder quotes Dogen, a mountain always practices in every place. A mountain always practices these four dignities in every place. A key term for the Zen school, for Snyder, for us, for us as embodied beings, is practice.

[15:09]

Snyder calls practice a deliberate, sustained, and conscious effort to be more finely tuned to ourselves and to the way the actual existing world is. To be more finely tuned to ourselves and to the way the actual existing world is. How could we do such a practice and make such an effort anywhere but in our own bodies. This is why in Sashin, as we will hear in a couple of days from the Eno, we diligently collect body and mind. I have always loved this phrase, as though my body had been scattered and I'd forgotten parts of it around the place. My birthright, my original dignity, a bone or two. as though our very bones need to be recollected and made upright again.

[16:14]

Stacking my bones upright on the flat earth, I dig myself a cave in space. So what exactly is meant here by uprightness and what does it have to do with our dignity, with our mountain body that practices in every place? Uprightness is not a metaphor in our tradition, and I think this is beautifully expounded in Tenshin Roshi's book, Being Upright on the Precepts. It's not an analogy. Just as the body is upright, so we are ethically upright. That's not how it works. Being physically upright, collected, settling ourselves on ourselves, vertebra by vertebra, bone by stacked bone, is the practice of zazen. It's a very persistent lie. To be physically collected and attuned like this allows us to be still, but it also allows us to move efficiently with a kind of energetic economy.

[17:25]

It allows us to move safely and it allows us to move with grace. And I think that notion of energetic economy, which I study deeply in my physical yoga practice, is crucial to something that I'm going to talk about later on, which is our life force energy. You can do the most vigorous practice with your body. You can turn compost with your body. You can work in the kitchen all day with a kind of energetic economy that actually renews your life force rather than depleting it. And this is a central part of our practice. Uprightness is a careful alignment of inside and outside, although I really don't like that way of expressing it. I'm not happy with that way of expressing it. It's not like my body is inside and outside is everything else. But it's an alignment, a practice precisely in Snyder's sense, a deliberate sustained and conscious effort

[18:29]

to be more finely tuned, attuned, aligned, and integrated with or entrained with ourselves and each other. I think about serving in this regard. I thought about it a lot in the last few days. When we serve with an upright posture, we are heart to heart and hara to hara or anahata, anahata. Manipura, Manipura, whatever language you want to use, we are directly addressing each other. When we bow to each other in serving, we are third eye to third eye, crown to crown as we bow. So our physical uprightness with each other generates a healthy and dignified relationship. it problematizes the power differential of server and served. There's a beautiful, in some of the traditions, the Hindu deity Vishnu, well, in all of the traditions, the Hindu deity Vishnu rides his vahana or mount is Garuda.

[19:41]

We also have Garuda in our tradition, kind of a giant eagle bird. But in some of the traditions, some parts of India and some parts of Southeast Asia, Vishnu and Garuda are always shown when Vishnu is riding the bird, they're always shown with their heads at the same level. And the story is that Garuda and Vishnu were battling in space for kalpas, and it was unclear who was going to win this battle. And finally, Garuda said, I'll tell you what we'll do. I'm going to submit and I'm going to serve you, but we will be depicted always as equals. So serving is not a disempowering of one and an empowering of the other. And I think about that image of Vishnu and Garuda sometimes when I'm serving or being served in this upright way. There is a bodily logic to our practice that goes well beyond the specific shape you are making with your body and has everything to do with how you express your uprightness

[20:47]

your fundamental, foundational, dignified nature as a Buddha in this very body. As Hojasan said the other day, every bodily posture we manifest is emptiness taking on the appearance of form. Of course, many times in our sitting practice, we don't feel dignified and we don't feel balanced, aligned, or entrained. We feel pain, imbalance, shutting down, trapped energy. We find old stucknesses and storehouses of unfelt emotion, old hurts, epigenetic trauma. And these granthi or knots, this is a beautiful Sanskrit word for knot, these granthi of stale energy, stagnant chi, and outdated pain afflict us in our practice. particularly in Sushin. I want to propose that rather than pushing these away or hating them, and I say this as a person who has had many, many physical obstacles and many surgeries, eight surgeries in the last 10 years on my body, so I know what it is to practice with these Granthi.

[22:05]

Rather than pushing them away or hating them, we should meet them, these knots, with unconditional love. They are good teachers, and they are very persistent, like hungry children. Trying to ignore them or shut them out will not make them quieter. In the book, Being Bodies, my first teacher, Catherine Thana, says, the deep attending to hard knots of holding is a powerfully compassionate act, a turning towards rejected parts of our being. This attending to or hosting of what I think of as our bodily ghosts is courageous and compassionate work. Fudo and Avalokiteshvara are both involved. Catherine writes that attending diligently to these old hurts and fears that are trying to catch our attention is the beginning of metta practice, loving kindness for the self. I would say if you don't know how to attend to and call out for the relief of your own suffering, your bodhisattva vow is fragile, brittle, and weak.

[23:18]

Notice how you engage with, respond to, and speak to your own pain and suffering, and you will discover what kind of training you are engaged in here. Still, physical pain can feel very undignified, shameful, even disgusting. It is also isolating. We have a strong tendency to contract or withdraw, quite literally losing our uprightness when we feel pain. Most of us also push others away for good measure, speak harshly to ourselves, and nearly always lose contact with ourselves, with each other, and with direct experience of the world, as well as with our seat. Which brings me back to the flat earth of Tendon Yojo. Why is it important that we have a flat earth to stack our bones on? What role does the steady support of the earth itself have in enabling our uprightness?

[24:25]

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Anne Klein, some of you may know her because she wrote Meeting the Great Bliss Queen. She's a wonderful teacher in Houston. She's an academic, but she also now mostly is a Dharma teacher, teaches in the Bay Area fairly regularly. She writes beautifully about the ways in which being anchored on the flat earth, anchored in our bodies, but also anchored in something other than ourselves, breaks down the notion that we easily fall into, especially when we are in pain. that we and our bodies are what she calls a small closed system separate from the rest of the world. The illusion of separateness can be disrupted at any moment by connecting with the flat earth on which we are sitting, standing, walking, or lying down. It's a kind of ever-present cure or antidote for separation, a reminder of interbeing,

[25:31]

of the extent to which we are companioned and supported in this human life. She writes, to inhabit our body fully and to feel connected through it to the earthy body beneath is to be physically grounded, able to inhabit our bodies as the mooring and support for all our activities. We know that we must be physically and emotionally moored and grounded as well as upright to access our awakened nature. And the earth is an ever-present foundation and support for that awakening. Connect with your sitting bones when you are sitting. Connect deeply with your feet when you are standing, serving, walking. She writes, for stability of mind, stability of body is essential. So mountain body supports mountain mind, alpine lake mind.

[26:34]

And yet, finding the stability of the earth also somehow paradoxically opens us up to the lack of solid boundaries in the form realm. And this is a difficult concept, but easy to test. As you're sitting in stillness, see if you can actually find where your sitting bones end and the earth begins, or with your hand on your other hand, where one hand ends and the other hand begins. You can find them if you move, but if you're still, you can't. So the more still we are, the harder it is to discern where we end and the world begins. When we are supported by the earth, we can relax and let go of those hard knots we suffer with, but also we can let go of our separateness. Grounding is a precondition for releasing. And you know this if you've ever tried sitting with one of your knees not connected to the earth, as though somehow over time gravity will bring it down to the cushion.

[27:48]

Just think in the rest of your life, when you don't feel supported, is it your response to expand? No, it's your response to contract, and that is exactly what your thighs will do if you don't support your knees. Klein writes, if we understand our physical boundaries as selectively porous, I love that phrase, selectively porous in ways that allow us to receive what is helpful and release what is not, the space through which we understand ourselves to move is expanded. it becomes easier to sense that the groundedness of the earth and the openness of the sky are qualities that move through us, not objects we gaze at out there. I can read that again. If we understand our physical boundaries as selectively porous, I think we know this so clearly in our tradition. That's why it's called warm hand to warm hand transmission. A couple of years ago, when I was here for practice period,

[28:52]

I don't know, I'd been practicing for 15 years at that time, and one day Leslie, who's never given me a physical correction, said to me, you know, in our tradition, when we put our hands in gachot, we make the palms come together and the thumbs touch the index fingers. Probably you all know this, but who knows? Maybe someone doesn't know that. I had never heard it before, right? Never heard that before. But here's the amazing thing about this transmission. Every... single time I put my hands in ga sho, I think of my teacher. It's like the greatest gift anybody ever gave me because every time I go like that, there she is, right? Now Hojo-san told me where my hands are supposed to go. And now every time I bow, I think about the Hojo. So this is a kind of porosity. This is a kind of body-to-body transmission that we can take up. if we want to. So our bodies are selectively porous in ways that allow us to receive what is helpful and release what is not.

[29:56]

The space through which we understand ourselves to move is expanded. It becomes easier to sense that the groundedness of the earth and the openness of the sky are qualities that move through us, not objects we gaze at out there. Stacking our bones upright on the flat earth, we dig ourselves a cave in space. Directly we go through the gate of dualism. Directly we go through the gate of separation. I think what Tendon Yojo is reminding us is that the upright, grounded body is also a boundless body. not a small closed system, but continuous with the great earth and the universe itself, and directly in touch with other beings and the energy of the universe. The porous body, our tradition tells us, is a kind of superconductor of all the energy that exists in the universe.

[31:03]

And I want to talk just a little bit in closing about this boundless body. in hopes that it will encourage you in session should you find yourself feeling small, contracted, pained, or otherwise separate. Reflecting on Sansui Kyo, Okamura Roshi writes, this body and mind named shohaku includes everything in this entire universe, not just from my birth, but from the Big Bang. This body and mind named Shohaku includes everything in this entire universe, not just from my birth, but from the Big Bang. We are made up not only of the materials released by that Big Bang, but by the energy released there as well. When Shohaku first came to the States, he studied with Katagiri Roshi, and I cannot recommend to you highly enough the book...

[32:10]

the light that shines through infinity, Zen and the Energy of Life, which is a posthumous book of Kategori Roshi's. It was like the greatest surprise ever when I went to the bookshelf one day in the bookstore, and there's a new book by Kategori Roshi who's been dead for many, many years. So that's a miraculous way that his life force keeps coming. So we're made up of this energy. Kategori Roshi says... Accessing that life force energy through the body is the entirety of our practice. That is our practice, is finding that life force energy and learning to work with it. He writes, when you become aware of the magnificent energy of being arising in your body mind, you feel fully alive. You are boundless and broad, compassionate and kind. This is the guideline for living as a human being. And as someone who hasn't always wanted to live as a human being, I find this so inspiring and encouraging.

[33:16]

You feel fully alive. You are boundless and broad, compassionate and kind in this body, not despite it. For Katagiri Roshi, our life and body are nothing but this original energy. And learning to connect with, access, and draw from that energy... is the essence of our sitting practice. He writes, you directly experience pure energy as the core of your own being and you realize that you can always depend on it. So you can depend on the earth, mostly around here, not to give way underneath you, right? It's funny that we've been having all these earthquakes. You directly experience your energy and you can depend on it, this moving, pulsing, uncontained energy is something that we can depend on and lean into as reliably as we can lean into the flat earth itself. And the only way to find that energy is through the body.

[34:21]

Katagiri writes, you don't know what your human body is. You don't know what your human body is. It is just something vividly alive hopping along hopping along, working with the universe, not against it, with it, activity itself. Your human body, he writes, is a bag of skin, and simultaneously it is something beyond a bag of skin. It is spiritual. So accept your human body as Buddha. He encourages us further, because you have body, Pure energy is always with you. It's too close for you to know it, but you can be it. This is our practice. This is our birthright. This is our practice. I read that line now at the end of Fukanzazengi, or at the end of, yeah, Fukanzazengi, your treasure store will open and you will use it at will.

[35:30]

And I know that that is, or I have been taught that that's about your wisdom store, but every time I hear it now, I think it's about your life force energy. That's the treasure house that we access paradoxically through stillness in our practice. So I'm going to close with a few lines from Walt Whitman, Dio Show. whose song of myself is fully resonant with this understanding of the body that we find in Okamura and Katagiri. Whitman, too, is interested in the way both the material of our body and the energy that we carry along and surf along on come from the beginning of time. As Okamura Roshi says, not just from my birth, but from the Big Bang. Whitman adds awe... an immense gratitude to this conversation across the centuries that I've been tracking about the body that is both upright and boundless.

[36:33]

He reminds us that the bones we stack are made of stardust, of dinosaur bones and dragon's teeth, of quahog shell, limestone, ground squirrel claws. Our flesh is finite and infinite, our marrow, dense meat, and vast space. our breath, cloud vapor, and pure life, our body bounded and boundless, dignified and divine. And because I know English is not the first language of everyone in this room, I'll just say that what he's describing is this embryo, this trans-temporal embryo of us, So the pure potentiality of our material being as it's been carried through time. And he uses this funny word, sauroids, which just means lizards or dinosaurs. He says, immense have been the preparations for me.

[37:35]

Immense have been the preparations for me. Faithful and friendly, the arms that have helped me. Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me My embryo has never been torpid. Nothing could overlay it. For it, the nebula cohered to an orb, so the ball of gas became planets. The long, slow strata piled to rest it on. Geological time was just there so that my embryo had a place to rest. Vast vegetables gave it sustenance. Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care. All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me. Now I stand on this spot. Now I sit on this spot.

[38:37]

Now I lie on this spot. Now I walk on this spot with my soul." All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me. Now I stand on this spot with my soul. I'm happy to hear questions or comments that could also be just about our body practice or about Anything that you hear here? Yeah? How does one new body practice specifically within the context of Zen?

[39:40]

Say more. We spoke a lot at that board meeting about Zen and yoga. is because yoga doesn't really come from and so I wonder is there a way that we can practice you mentioned that you do that specifically yes I believe so I mean I don't I think I've made my qualifications as a spiritual mongrel sufficiently clear here I don't I think that these traditions are all pointing to the same thing using different techniques and technologies. And so if you bring the minute attention to the interplay of stillness and motion that are described in the Four Dignities to your yoga practice,

[40:45]

I don't see any problem. Someone once told me that in a Japanese monastery where she lived, she had to go out in the woods and hide to do yoga. And I just thought that was really... I had a strong judgment of that. Because I feel like we can bring a clear alpine lake mind to our practice. We can bring this phrase, attention to detail is the family way of Zen, to our yoga practice. So I don't see any... contradiction between those practices. And I don't think they're the same. And I think that to remember, first of all, Hinduism is a modern invention. So I wouldn't call it, I wouldn't worry about it being too Hindu. That's a 19th century English coinage. But to remember that most of the asana practice that we do now is also modern and that it was specifically for sitting practice.

[41:57]

It was a preparatory practice for sitting practice. So we can use it in that way as well. Yeah. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Yeah. Well, thus have I heard that the fingertips are at the height of the nose, not the third eye, where I see quite a lot of them hanging out around here, and one fist away from your face. And that without it being mechanically rigid, they remain there when you bow. so they don't get closer when you bow, which is certainly how I tend to do it, and they also don't get farther away. Sometimes they sort of fall through space as you're going forward. But the idea is that with an open heart and an open chest and the hands pressing lightly together, we come forward.

[43:03]

You know, these precisions, again, this goes back to Rio's question, these precisions are enormous. I just changed my hand mudra after almost 20 years. I realized that I had my fingers too much overlapping, and so I'm making space in my hands now, and all kinds of congestion that I have experienced in my upper body in the practice, I've dissipated as I've opened my hands literally a little bit. So, yeah, I think it's really worth understanding that, yes, in some ways these forms are arbitrary and in other ways they have a bodily logic to them that is, you know, I mean, I didn't talk about the subtle body. I could have talked about the subtle body and uprightness and the subtle body and the alignment of energetic channels in the body. Instead of that, I would just say if we can think about how to keep the heart open and how to keep a steady, relaxed, upright posture,

[44:08]

It has strength in it, but no rigidity, like the stem of a plant, you know? I mean, how do they stay up, those stems, right? I mean, it's just this little thing, right? And yet there they manage to stay up because they have just enough rigidity and just enough motion. So I think about the hands in that way, too, you know, as the branches of this Jodi tree. If the wind blows, the branches are going to move too. That answer your question. And there's a beautiful logic to having space between the palms as they do in many Tibetan traditions and in many yoga traditions. It's another logic. It's just not our logic. We use this equal pressure. Serving and serving. Serving and being served. Thank you.

[45:15]

You're welcome. It seems to me sort of one of the very finest balancing acts that we do is to listen to Dogen's quote about not placing the body... Self-regard for the body. Self-regard for the body above dharma and that if we do the dharma, even the slightest bit, dharma is not transmitted. And then... And then saving this body, which is the three of many lives. If we decorate it to the point where the body starts to break down, it becomes hindrance in our practice. And so there's this holding both equal. There's two truths. We have to take care of the body because it's only through this body that we practice. Our Dharma practice is a body practice.

[46:16]

To me, it seems like such a tricky place to balance. I don't know that it's so tricky. If we take up the body in the thank you kitchen, helping us be embodied as you are, ensuring our capacity to go on as embodied beings. If you take up the body, as the dharma, then there's no problem, right? This view of the body that I was borrowing and learning from many others here, I think it's self... If you set it up as a competition between the two things, then you'll find a competition. You will have very successfully created one. But I think the passing through the gate of dualism is refusing that either or. There's a wonderful... in the same fascicle about, and I used to have it down, but now I get confused when I try to do it, but it's about lay practice.

[47:19]

And he says, those who think, those who believe that there are no secular activities in the Dharma do not understand. Those who believe that there is no Dharma in secular activities do not understand that there is no secular activity in the Dharma, right? So refusing to set these things against each other and try to create a hierarchy, right? The problem with dualism is not only that it splits things, but that it hierarchizes them. And so Dogen is always reminding us, he flips the hierarchy and then he refuses the opposition. Does that make sense? Yes. I don't know maybe it's because I'm a close reader for a living but I think that phrase self-regard for the body is different from the body itself it's a concept about the body it's an objectification of the body right part of the problem is that we take our body as an object

[48:37]

I said to Leslie yesterday, we're too much identified with our body and not enough identified with it. So we say, body, why won't you sit full lotus? As though it's somewhere else. And it's not like the machine is not working. The remote control is not working. That's making the body go into full lotus. And then at the same time, we're over-identified with it. No, no, this is my limited understanding. Dogen constantly sets up those dualisms for us. It's like a dualism trap, you know, a dualism obstacle course, right? Because then he says, you know, only crazed horses believe that the dharma and self-regard for the body can't be thought at the same time, right? So he does this to us again and again to, it tricks us, tricks us in a beautiful way. Yeah, Connie.

[49:44]

Is that similar to the quotation about selective curiosity? Because I question my own judgments on what I allow in. Sometimes what I might think is not so good is what I need. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, thank you for that. I think, you know, the question of boundaries is a big question for us. Living in community, knowing ourselves and not knowing ourselves. And we do have a tendency to have a boundary where we don't need one in porosity, where it might be better if we didn't have quite so much porosity. I appreciate about Anne Klein that she... has us do our training for that, not necessarily immediately with other humans, but with the earth and the sky. And so we can begin to figure out how much boundary for us living here now.

[50:52]

You know, ideally, no boundaries, right? But particularly in our culture, I think we're not, we're not, I meet you in finding Difficulty knowing what to let in and what not to let in. One of the ways that I thought about it, I was a yoga assistant for many, many years. So I traveled all over the world touching people while someone else taught yoga classes. And one of the things that I learned there was about keeping the back door open. So there's not such a problem with letting things in if the back door is open. because they can just keep flowing, you know? If the back door is closed, then you let things in and all of a sudden you've accumulated a lot of things that you didn't necessarily want to be cohabiting with. So I think that maybe that is helpful too for me, is thinking about my porosity as having to be true porosity and not just, here's a little crack in the door, you can come in, okay, now I slam the door shut and I'm stuck with whatever you deposited here, you know?

[52:03]

Does that, is that any help? Okay. You know, son, and then maybe we wrap it up. The question is still large. So for God is a word that Freud used when unrises. Mm-hmm. sort of deprecation of the body is the relationship to self that we have built over the course of what comes. And then enjoying your expression through the ground and the sky, the embodiment They're pretty familiar to me.

[53:39]

I mean, one of the misunderstandings in the current parlance, narcissism is an exclusively negative connotations, right? If you really want to insult somebody, you call them a narcissist. But since you bring up Freud, one of the things that Freud says is if, and I know this as a twin in particular, if you don't have some degree of narcissism, you won't survive, right? You need some degree of self-regard. in order to ensure your own continuation. And this is another one of our koans. To what degree, it goes back to what Connie asked, to what degree am I engaging in self-care and care for others, right? You know, the Tibetans have this great concept of the near enemy, as I'm sure you know. And, you know, the near enemy of the bodhisattva vow is a kind of lack of boundaries and insufficient care for the self. So... Part of the problem here is translation, right? I'm using self-regard in the Nishijima and cross translation.

[54:43]

I don't know what that word is in Dogen or exactly where it would fall. But the reason that I found the notion of the four dignities so helpful personally is that I've had a very contested relationship to my own embodiment for a variety of reasons. Early childhood trauma, weird gender, lots of reasons, lots of pain and breaking things all the time. So one of the things my teacher, Daijaku, has said to me again and again is hold yourself with reverence. I think holding myself and my embodied self with reverence is a fundamental to my practice and antithetical to the kind of self-regard for the body that Dogen appears to be referring to in that passage.

[55:45]

I don't think, this is what I think I was trying to say about crying out for the relief of your own suffering, I don't think there's any foundation, ground, or mooring to our practice if we don't have some kind of relationship to and reverence for This is the only one of these that will ever exist in the past or the future of the world. It's the only one. This is the only one of you. Tantra has helped me to understand this, you know. This is the only time the Leela, the play of the universe, is ever going to produce a Catherine. So we should have reverence and awe for that. dinosaurs carried us around in their mouths so that we could have Catherine. And at the same time, our challenge is don't hold too fast to it. Don't attach to it.

[56:48]

Let it come into being and then let it dissipate back into mountains and waters. That's my best understanding. of the challenge of these bodies. But I do know this is the only thing we're waking up in. You know, as much as I would like to wake up in somebody else's body, it ain't happening. So this is my Vahana. This is my Garuda. So can I be head-to-head with this body vehicle? Thank you very much. and shall equally extend to every being and place with the truth of life.

[57:51]

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