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. So we have been, oh, that's good. Well, let me start here. When I was driving in on the road with Tia and Jan, Jan said something like, you know, people often say that the Buddha was a social resolution.

[01:03]

but they don't necessarily understand why. And I thought, oh, I'm those people. And over the last day and a half, we've had this extraordinary, I say for me, I've had this extraordinary download of teaching and coming to understand the time and place and culture of the Buddha, and how it is that what the Buddha did, and specifically creating what we know today as the Fourfold Noble Sangha, the Sangha of monks and nuns, lay men and lay women. It was an extraordinary act to give him the time, place, culture that the Buddha inhabited, and in particular, the very rigid past or system.

[02:19]

And what I'd like to offer is sort of a complimentary from your standing of what the Buddha said. of what the Buddha taught, of what it is that the Buddha woke up to that I believe is essential to his courage, capacity, and willingness to go against history, as he said, to go against the string So for us as individuals to go against the stream of our patterns of chronic tendencies, and also to go against the stream in a collective way, to push against systems and structures that were oppressive, unjust.

[03:29]

Jen handed us these diagrams today that listed Buddhism is not a teaching of the book. It is a teaching of many, many, many, many, many books. So we have this description of the enormity of the Buddhist teachings. the three what are called titikas or baskets, the basket of the suttas, the words of the Buddha, the basket of the commentaries on the suttas called the Abhijama, and the basket of the vinya, of the monastic rules, precepts, training guidelines, ethical principles. There's so much there.

[04:35]

She also told us that something like only about 15% of that entire canon has been translated. You could do enough. There's a lot left. There are a lot of things that the Buddha said that we don't know. I find this very encouraging. So I want to touch on and point to two really very central teachings that the people offered that cut across all Buddhist traditions. And then to share with you some thoughts about these extraordinarily radical teachings of awakening.

[05:43]

And particularly, in some ways, all of this talk is an excuse to sing some of the songs, the poems of some of the early Buddhist notes, who in many ways are largely written out of history. We know they were there. And we know they were there because the poems of awakening are according. And those poems tell us something about the nature of what it is to be alive, what it is to be a human being, what it is to walk the path, and what it is to wake up. So at the time of the Buddha, there was a basic principle, which was the principle of Atman, or Atta, which is basically you would translate as a self or a soul.

[06:54]

It is the state that the Buddha couldn't find. And at the heart of Buddha's teachings is this radical premise of what's called anatta. So ata is a self or soul, and an means no or none or non. He was interested in suffering and the end of suffering. And when he looked in his direct experience, which I can do and you can do, when he discovered was not what he expected. What he discovered is something surprising. And this teaching on the top doesn't mean another city in this hall. Many years ago, with Mal, a wife's name, a surgeon, a wife's name, he said, no self doesn't mean there's nobody at home.

[08:04]

So this is not a non-humanistic teaching. It's a teaching of surprise. It's a teaching of the unexpected. It's a teaching of what I like to call a radical reorientation, which is what all of us are invited into as we walk the path. And this teaching of ,, for over thousands of years, morphed to become from anatta to shodhya-ta. The teachings that came through Nagarjuna, the teachings on emptiness, which basically it's not only, is there no separate solvity, I, me, and mine. But there is no separate solvity, anything else, either. In my experience, this part is easier.

[09:10]

The teachings on emptiness, it's often described, that when the Buddha first gave them, isn't when people freaked out. It's the days that people had heart attacks, they passed out, they died on the spot, because they're so radical. It can't happen again. You know, the heart sutra, it seems maybe mundane, all that knowing, unknown. So we have this evolution of the teaching of Anabatha, the teaching of Shimyakva, as we know in Zen, this beautiful teaching of Ta-ta-ta, the teaching of substance, this kind of pristine simplicity of justice. So if no self or emptiness does mean nothing, what does it mean?

[10:21]

The second central teaching of the Buddha is the teaching of Pratikasamitana. And that is called dependent origination or dependent coreizing. And some of you may know this teaching in its sort of technical form as the 12-fold chain of causation, these 12 steps. I think this is from my early teaching. The fundamental teaching of Pratika Samukhaya is because this exists, that arises. When this does not exist, that arises. does not allow us. This is a teaching of interdependence. It's a teaching, and you must mention it to me that I talk a lot, lean in the hands, so here it is, using for a dependent colonizing. That's going to start.

[11:23]

It's like all of these causes in picture are coming together to create this moment And then we say, knee. Or we say, table. This teaching is alive. It's a living world that we are invited into. And it's a living world that's sitting in your seat. This is our practice. we sit down with this wholehearted invitation. This is an invitation from the Buddha, Seiji Pāsika, please come, seek for yourself. Don't believe me, the Buddha said. Seek for yourself. This is an invitation of our practice, to discover how does it build a deity?

[12:29]

What is it that's here? Sometimes the Buddha is described as a great physician. And this is why they're saying that these teachings that I just mentioned are really not, they're not meant as a dry philosophy. They're not meant to be a bunch of interesting ideas banging around in our heads that you can let people know how smart you are. are transformational teachings. These are teachings that help us wake up. These are teachings that help set us free. Set us free from what? From, well, the four noble truths, this kind of physical. And this is the Buddha as a physician said, there is suffering, ditta. There's difficulty in human life.

[13:31]

I don't need to tell you all. And he said, there's a cause of something. This is the Buddha getting a diagnosis. And that cause is called tanha, thirst, desire, grasp it. And really, this is not just about wanting. It's about wanting and not wanting. That moment by moment, as we are bombarded by the wideness of our experience. Some of our experience is pleasant, some of it's unpleasant. When it's pleasant, you like it, you want it, you grab onto it, you try to keep it. One of my teachers in the insight tradition describes dukkha as a rope bone.

[14:35]

But there's a flip side, the same thing from the other side, which is unpleasant, we don't like it, don't want it. And this is our karmic life. That moment by moment, we think, until you sit down and practice, wow, I felt like I was doing all that. Try and stop it. And you'll see there's each other, right? So moment by moment, we are getting habitably out by pleasant and unpleasant, wanting and not wanting, liking and not liking, grasping and pushing. This is our fundamental suffering. And suffering is fueled not by people, not because we're bad people. It's because And so the Buddha said there's suffering, there's a cause of suffering, it's the diagnosis, and then he gave the prognosis.

[15:47]

This is the third little trick of the yoga of blowing up, blowing up the feet. That constant revelation can get wide. We can take our seat. We can find our place. We can be right where we are. We can find a sense of peace without getting what we want, without having to get rid of what we don't want. It's always new and valuable. And finally, this fourth truth is he gave a, what's it called? A prescription. No Rx. This is the fourth layer of truth, which is the path, the eightfold neural path itself. And I have been reflecting a lot on the path as a path of a radical re-organization, that as we walk the path, the first dimension of

[17:03]

aspect of the past is what's called wise being, like is you. And unusual view is, I like it, I want it, give it. I don't like it, I don't want it, give it away. And the Buddha is offering an alternative. You don't have to stop anything. You don't have to get anything. You can be right where you are. And it's right here, being with your experience, that me and you and all of us can discover something vital and alive and whole, complete. So one way of thinking about the Eightfold Path is that we have a particular view, and the path invites us to reorient, to change our perspective.

[18:25]

And the whole rest of the path is how we take that reorientation and filter it down. And we move our view through our intention, through our action, through our speech, through our livelihood, and we dig and then ground it through our dedicated practice. There's a beautiful Zen version of this path, a description of this path. It's much more poetic. This is, I'm not going to say the name quite right, . He says, when I first came to practice, mountains were mountains, and waters were waters.

[19:32]

This is the belief. that I and over here, and they're solid, they're stable, they exist. When I first came to practice, mountains were mountains, and waters were waters. After I had practiced for some time, and I had some initial waiting, mountains were no longer mountains. are no longer lovers. This is when we get that first glimpse that all of those ideas we're carrying around about who we are and who other people are and how the world is. And yes, we have a taste of the fundamentalness and wildness that's under the surface of all of our

[20:38]

ideas and stories and beliefs. That emptiness, that mountains are no longer mountains, it doesn't mean there's nothing here. It means that what's here is alive. Maybe my favorite way of describing this comes from the opening lines of a book that I heard Maybe here, or maybe in the top, several decades ago. The name of the book is The Samish Road. It's by an author recorded in Benito Creek. It's a war-winning Nigerian writer. And he says it this way. In the beginning, there was a result. And then the winter heaven is heading to the ocean and heading to the road.

[21:45]

All that aliveness stopped by our concepts, by our views, by our opinions. Now, there's nothing wrong with the road, and you're good, even this time. We just paved it all, right? What happens to get us is that it's functional, right? So the road isn't exactly at home. And here's the rest of it. That opening. In the beginning, there was a river. And then the river was paved over and became rolling. And the road swept out and covered everything. But because the road was really a river, it was always hungry.

[22:49]

When we get too stuck in our ideas, our concepts, our beliefs, our identities, when we lose touch with our true a river in nature, and we are hungry, and we want something to fill that ache, that ache of that aliveness that we've lost contact with. And then, it was like that song that comes in, that country song that says, looking for love in all the lonely places. We go trying to fill that ache in so many ways. But what's needed is to remember, to discover for ourselves that what we need is to drive near the surface.

[23:56]

This is the invitation of the practice. In Theravadi tradition, there is a phrase for Mirodha, Mibbana, that sort of initial mountains are no longer a mountainous moment, which is called string entry. And technically, it means you enter a string or what delineate to Dharma being. You have to stay with the insight that All of these ancestors, thousands of years back, had happened. And you enter that view, that way of seeing. I'd like to say, it's not so much that we enter the stream, but that we become the stream. We discover this awareness in ourselves as ourselves.

[25:03]

But that's not the end of the poem. When I first came to practice, mountains were mountains, and waters were waters. After I had some initial awakening, mountains were no longer mountains, and waters were no longer waters. But after I continued, I was described as complete rest, complete peace, once again, mountains were mountains. and waters of wives. So here's your koan. Are they the same mountains? Where exactly are you going on this path? For me, when I asked that question, I watched my mind go, yes, Yes.

[26:09]

Yes, no. This is the body of the mind. This is the mind that's always trying to lock things down, to have a clear answer. The practice of practice is learning how to be in that alignment without having, I think it is, the mind will freeze from it. You know, you turn a rushing river into a bunch of ice cubes. We must be trapped. And then we wonder why you are uncomfortable. We wonder why cold. We wonder why hungry. So what we see in the teachings and it's true across multiple traditions is that this path and this direct experience of radical reorganization that the Buddhist teachers are pointing to, that they are stakeholders.

[27:24]

That sometimes a disorientation can actually be quite impossible. But it's a disorientation that is So now I get to share this, the first of several poems from the Philippi Buddhist series. And this is one of my most favorite. This is also from the first Buddhist movie, the translation of the from . And this is the poem from . And I will just say it as a side note that for many, many years while I practiced here, you didn't chant the way they were originally called the patriarchs, the diocese.

[28:33]

I would actually delight in chanting, partly because I knew their stories. Over time, they had, like, studied them, learned about them, and they were these quantity guys who, you know, woke up. So today, when I was in the hall, when I was chanting, the names of Gini Charlias, I had this new experience, because Since the last time that I chanted them, I learned a lot of the stories of these many ancestors. And so in the same way, I was like, oh, there's issues. These are real people with real suffering, real struggles, really making. This is Dharmadina's Song of Awakening. For so long, I thought only of the river's end.

[29:43]

For so long, I thought only of the river's end. Then one morning, I set my cabin down to watch the sun rise over the eastern hills. only to find myself somehow floating gently upstream. A moment of surprise. For so long, I thought only of the river's end. Then one morning, I set my paddle down to watch the sun rise over the eastern hills. Only to find myself floating somehow gently upstream. I promised it was not what I expected.

[30:50]

When I came to practice, I was a very hungry paddle He has nothing because she knows. I worked very, very hard. I was very diligent and actually quite devoted. There was a very sincere love of the cactus, not especially mature, but sincere. And I paddled a lot. And it took me a while to recognize that my paneling wasn't just effort. It was also aversion. And in particular, aversion to myself. I really wanted to get away from the parts of myself that I didn't like.

[32:01]

And I didn't want to be there. And I was remembering today, as these men were just kind of walking around Tosnahara, I was remembering a yoga song that I had in this first practice period that I was here. And I was struggling quite a bit during that practice period, particularly with my bloodstream, a type 1 diabetic. And any change in schedule has things go, hey, what? Which has been a little bit true since I've been here this time as young. But I was waking up in the night, you feel blood sugar and a cold sweat, and then kind of stumbling to the hall, exhausted in the morning. So I went to this doctor and I said something like, I wish that I could have just left My dad is on the other side of the hill.

[33:03]

He's reasonable, doesn't he? And the teacher said, no, you don't. And I thought, this guy clearly knows nothing about what it's like, right? I said, yes, I do. And he said, no, you don't. And I paused for a moment, and we go and I smiled at Virginia, and I thought, what's going on here? And I said, why are you saying it? And he said, because your diabetes is the thing that needs your kutashi. And I said, This was not what I expected. And it wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to come and be in the monastery and have all my troubles to go away.

[34:09]

I'm warning those of you who are still coming to the monastery, it doesn't work out. But it actually is better. What happens is better. What happens is you get to be yourself. One of my other favorite songs of awakening, this is not from an early Buddhist, now this is from a Japanese woman who lived a very full life in the world of the core of the Indian, meaning of Japanese politics. Her name is Izumi Shikuri. And late in her life, she came to practice this poem. It says, watching the moon at midnight, solitary, mid-sky. The moon is a symbol for the moon.

[35:13]

Watching the moon at midnight, solitary, mid-sky. I elude myself completely. No part left out. So you can hear in these songs of awakening, these women, as you could hear in the advice, in the counsel that I was given, that this is a practice that asks us to reorient really This is a wisdom path. This is a path in which we, how do we see? I sometimes think that that's what we're up to, is learning to see.

[36:15]

That this learning to see is not just about our ideas or our vision. It's about transforming our power. It's about allowing all of us in, all parts of ourselves and all of each other. And this is part of the teaching of the Buddha's radical creation. It is a teaching of radical inclusivity. It's for us to be radically inclusive to the rightful parts of ourselves, to the table, to the body, to the seat, No part left out. And it's the high-reacting inclusivity and immunity in our community and the people who practice me. Three more days, where the place is the same.

[37:35]

I have to assess. Well, I'm going to read one more poem, because we spent a good amount of time speaking about poetry today, . It is recognized as the founder of the non-sangha, the Dikrini Sangha. And sometimes when you read these stories about our ancestors, you take on this kind of golden world. These stories are super few and holy. And one of the things that I really love the most about these poems from that, for the Guru's mind, is how few they are, is how tender they are, is how emotional they are. that we could come to recognize that these people practiced long ago and woke up.

[38:40]

They were human beings like us. So this is Mahatajapati's poem. I know you all. I have been your mother, your son, your father, your daughter, You see me now in my final word. Kindly, grandmother, it's a fine heart to go out on. You might have heard how it all began. When my sister died, the Buddhist mother, when my sister died and I took her new boy's son, can raise as my own, people still ask, did you know then what he would become?

[39:43]

What can I say? What mother doesn't see a Buddha in her child? He was such a quiet boy the first time He reached for me the first time I held him while he slept. How could I not know? To care for all children without exception, as though each will someday be the one to show us all the way home. This is the path. So we have been talking about the ways in which these voices, these women's voices in particular, have been underrepresented, in large part left out.

[41:02]

And I wrote a book, my book, called The Bigger Sky. I became very enchanted with the women surrounding Ibure, his mother, Maya, and his wife, Yatsavara. And I wanted to tell their stories. And there was so little information about them that I ended up writing their stories, especially But this is one of the ways in which we want to invite the voices and perspectives of the fully stronger, of the monks, and the lions, and the men, and the women, and everybody. This is for all of you.

[42:04]

This is a but it is teaching, it is huge and welcome and invitation. Whoever you are, whatever your gender, whatever your color, whatever your race, whatever your culture, whatever your physical ability or disability, you're welcome. This was what the data did 2,600 years ago. And this is because you understood, you understood the preciousness of each of us, even if we may not feel it ourselves, at least not yet, that you can entertain the possibility that all of you is welcome, that all of you is invited

[43:09]

to any deposit kind. Come, see for yourself. Discover the richness, the happiness, the aliveness, and spirit in your sleep. 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 sfcc.org and click Giving.

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