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. I'm going to try and keep this short partly because it... It would make sense for me to spend as little time as possible just plowing away up here, and also because it would be great to have a discussion. So we'll see what happens. So I decided I was going to talk about a koan, and embarrassingly, the koan was going to be the first case in the Blue Cliff record, which is, you know, it's like, Everybody says, you know, the Heart Sutra is the most chanted piece of Buddhist literature in the entire Mahayana canon, right?

[01:02]

Well, at least in the Soto Zen School, or at least in this Soto Zen School, the first case in the Blue Cliff Record is the most recited case in the entire, you know, koan literature. And the reason is that it shows up lots of places, including the... She says ceremony, right? And this thought came to mind, like a number of years ago, I think the last time we did this, my family and I went to see the Nutcracker at Christmas, right? And we were sitting there and listening, and it was really, really great. And there were all these families around, and they were all watching the Nutcracker. And there's a, you know, there's a... about the structure of the nutcracker is that they do a bunch of stuff and then kind of near the end they reprise it in these little brief snippets right and there's a there's one dance and i forget exactly what it's called but essentially the the the intention is that it sounds a little bit middle eastern and there's this sort of mysterious dance with it and so on and so forth and and uh and the second time it came around this incredibly adorable little girl that was sitting directly in front of me goes

[02:22]

Not again! And it was loud enough so they could hear her all the way down on stage, which is really kind of great, actually. But I figured that's what everybody was going to say about that. The first case in the Black Cliff record. But... I'll try and make it interesting, right? Like... It's about Bodhidharma and the Emperor Wu. And the Emperor Wu is unquestionably a historical figure. Bodhidharma is a lot more questionable, right? And even scholars that think that he actually is a historical figure, and that not everybody thinks that, completely disagree on

[03:26]

when he lived, where he lived, where he came from, how he got to China, how he moved around once he was in China, whether he really went up to Shaolin or not, and so on and so forth. And then they also recognize, every one of them recognizes that a lot of components of his life story are, a standard life story, are totally mythological. Like, the most famous part is... Three years after he died, an advisor to the emperor was walking along, and he was actually going to Shaolin to meet with the emperor. And he bumped into Bodhidharma on the road, and Bodhidharma was walking along with a stick over his shoulder, and hanging from the shoe, the stick was a single shoe, right? And the guy says,

[04:27]

hey, what are you doing? You're dead. And he goes, I'm going back to India. And he goes, don't tell anybody you've seen me until you get to Shaolin or things would go very badly for you. And then he walks off and disappears. And so the guy gets all the way to Shaolin and then he sits down and he tells the emperor what happened. And the emperor says, you're lying. And you can't lie to the emperor, so I'm going to have you execute it. But just to check, the monks went out, and they essentially dug up Bodhidharma's grave, and they found only a single shoe in the grave. And various people wrote poems about it. But anyway, so... That clearly didn't happen, right? But there's a lot of other stuff that might or might not have happened. And the encounter with the Emperor Wu is actually one of them, right?

[05:31]

But none of that matters, right? Because the... the the story is not about being a true story whether it's true or not the story the story is about um and this is one of the reasons why that it feels mythological right it's such a set piece right and so it goes like this right so um bodhidharma kind of storms in because he was that kind of guy and and and you know presumably um you know says and and does something respectful to the emperor and then um And then the emperor says, okay, so I'm this great Buddhist emperor, and I've built all these temples, and I've translated all, I've paid to have all this stuff translated, and I studied really hard, and I really know my dharma front to back. What's the merit in that? And Bodhi Dharma goes, there isn't any merit in that. And the emperor says, okay, fine.

[06:37]

So what's the... What's the essential, the highest, it's funny, the word he uses actually is the grading term. It's the term about grading on the civil service exams in China. So what's the highest grade you can get on the holy truths, right? And Bodhidharma says, empty, not holy. or maybe even, no, I was going to say unholy, but no, it's not unholy. It's sort of not holy. And interestingly, that's almost the correct answer. If you poke around and you look for the highest meaning of the holy truth, generally speaking, at least in the Mahayana canon, it's emptiness, right? So he's not, Bodhidharma is not being particularly deceptive about that.

[07:40]

But then the emperor, who it seems like he might be a little vexed, says something like, well, who's standing before me now? And my guess is that something like, who the hell are you, right? And Bodhi just don't know. And then he walks out. And supposedly crosses the Yangtze River and ends up in the kingdom of Wei where he, sits in stairs at a wall for nine years. And there's some stuff that happens after that. But if you look at the set piece there, it's clear what's going on. The Emperor Wu represents human effort and conventional understanding. Right. So he's he's paid to have a whole bunch of conventional understanding delivered to him and his monastic communities.

[08:42]

And he's done a lot of reading and he really he actually knows what the highest meaning of the holy trees are, too, because he probably he studied it carefully enough so that you got a sense of it. Right. So and he and he's he's not an unvirtuous guy. He's engaged in all this. incredibly virtuous, helpful effort. And he was, you know, there's a little tendency on the part of people who read and study this con to kind of be dismissive of the Emperor Wu, but that would be a mistake. He's actually kind of awesome, right? And so if that's true, if he represents conventional understanding, you know, kind of the sort of standard definition of human right effort, even in the human right effort in the presence of a kind of privilege that allowed him to have a pretty broad scope, right?

[09:43]

What does Bodhidharma represent? Bodhidharma represents the ungraspable and the unknowable, right? And so here you have these two people that are... you know, the mouthpiece for conventional understanding and the ungraspable standing up and having an exchange, right? Does that sound like pathology? Yeah, maybe. But in any case, that's what it's about. And it's intentionally about that. And it's not like it's the only case in the literature that has that flavor. Like if you look just a few cases later in the Blue Cliff record, There's a story of, what is it, Dushan. And, you know, he goes to, he's a famous Buddhist scholar and an expert in the Diamond Sutra. And he... He hears about the Southern school, and he's incensed.

[10:47]

He strats on his straw sandals, and he throws the scrolls that have his commentaries on the Diamond Sutra in a backpack, and he storms off to the South. And somewhere way down South, he finds a roadside tea shop, and he goes in, and he said, I need some tea and cookies for refreshment. And the tea lady is like, What's that in your backpack? He goes, I'm a famous Buddhist scholar. These are my commentaries on the Diamond Sutra. She goes, oh, well, Diamond Sutra says, you know, present mind is ungraspable, past mind is ungraspable, future mind is ungraspable. What exactly are you trying to refresh? If you can answer me, I'll give you some tea and cookies, otherwise get the hell out of my shell. And he's like, whoa. And so... She throws him out. And then he ends up going to see this guy, Lung Tan, which means, I think, dragon pond.

[11:49]

And he storms in and says, you know, I'm here, but I don't see any dragon and I don't see any pond. And they kind of go around. And after a while, they have this exchange, which maybe I'll describe in a bit. And he has a moment of realization. right and and so he gets up in the morning this is not the only person that's ever done this in the history of of uh the zen koan literature and he burns all his commentaries on the diamond sutra and and walks off to um to you know find a teacher or something like that and that's you know that's that story and then there's there's also um i think it's um and um he was studying with question i think and and just he also was a scholar and he never kind of got it and he had trouble um he was really stalled in his practice and he got more and more miserable and finally left and he went and became the maintenance guy on a on a memorial shrine and and the story is one day he uh he kicks up a um

[13:06]

kicks up a stone with a, with his broom and it hits a piece of bamboo and it makes this sort of noise. And, uh, and he wakes up and he, he immediately goes and puts on his robe and bows in the direction of his teacher way off there. Right. And, uh, and he writes this poem that says something like, uh, I'm so grateful if you'd explained it to me, I would never have gotten it. So, uh, It's a persistent theme. That case is like case five in the Mimumon Khan, right? The standing up conventional understanding and cognition against the ungraspable and realization, right? And I have to say it's tempting to conclude from those cases that the compilers of the Cohen literature were sort of deprecating conventional cognition and understanding.

[14:26]

But I think that's completely untrue. If you look at the Buddhist philosophical system and all the things that people say in the koans and the commentaries and everything else. There's a lot of conventional understanding involved. And they're full of the Buddhist texts of the day and, you know, the Mahayana texts that they were all reading are full of dualistic schemas and, you know, programs for practice and all the rest of that sort of thing. They're loaded with conventional knowledge and understanding. Fundamentally, as far as I can tell, nobody has a problem with that. It's more like, how many people here went to Hampshire College? Any of you?

[15:27]

I know Catherine did, but I don't think she's here. So you know what the motto of Hampshire College is, right? It's non satisfgere, which means to know is not enough, right? And I think it's more like to know is not enough, right? Like understanding in the conventional sense and realization are not the same thing, right? And if you... If you focus on conventional understanding, it actually ends up being a distraction from the practice that you need to engage in to have a more fully, yeah, more comprehensive and full realization of what it actually is to be human, right?

[16:30]

I know what it comes down to. And so the interesting thing about conventional understanding and realization is even though they're not the same, they're definitely complementary. And if you look at the comments, both on these comments that I was just talking about and pretty much everywhere else, they basically say... Dogen says this too, right? He says cease from practice based on intellectual understanding. Yeah, exactly. But that's not the same as saying abandon intellectual understanding. It's more like if you practice diligently the relationship between intellectual or conventional understanding and realization becomes clear and The commentators also say, if you don't do that, you'll never get it in a million years.

[17:33]

That's kind of what they say, right? The realization is contact with the ungraspable nature of reality, which means fundamentally, when he says, who you don't know, what he's saying is I really don't know. And, and my experience with that is that it arises in a, in a bunch of different ways. And we're going to talk about that a little bit more in terms of how it arises out of practice, but, but, but fundamentally it's the, it's the, it's the fruit of practice that there's been, there's a lot of, talk and a lot of program, programmatic stuff about how it happens during the context of Buddhist practice.

[18:36]

There, you know, there's programs for Koan study that are designed to produce that insight, that awakening, right, to the ungraspable nature of reality and the way in which emptiness in that ungraspable nature can actually reach into your body and grab your attention, right? So it comes from experience aided by practice. Let's put it that way. Does that make sense? Or what do you think? Experience. It's the last word I didn't pick that up. Experience supported by practice. Actually, not just supported by practice. It comes from the experience of practice. Yeah. The... you know, a model and not the only model for a practice that can give rise to that experience and that realization, right, is Aten.

[19:37]

Obviously, that's what we're all doing here, right, which is great. The important parts of that have to do with learning to hold your, um, your conventional understanding sufficiently lightly so that it doesn't, um, it, it doesn't stand in the way of development in your practice, right? And that's, that's essentially the, um, that's why Dogen says season practice based on intellectual understanding, right? Is that, that, um, if you, if you, if you study the self, if you practice in this particular way that involves kind of unloaded attention to the process and arising of the self, then naturally something else starts to happen after a while.

[20:47]

If you kind of mess with it by trying to control it, trying to drive it with your expectations by making judgments about your practice one way or another, et cetera, et cetera, it's much more difficult. And that, you know, obviously is what Suzuki Roshi is saying in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, among other places, right? And also with Doug and Seth's, right? And so it's interesting that the, you know, the fly leaf basically and... In my beginner's mind, it says something like, in the beginner's mind, there are lots of possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are a few possibilities. That sounds really good. It's actually not true at all. If you ever talk to a real expert about something, chances are mostly what they'll tell you is what they don't know, or if they're a real expert.

[21:54]

because they've come up against the boundaries of their conventional understanding in the process of becoming experts. And that's a marvelous thing. But as a rubric, it's not bad, right? And that's kind of the essence of Zazen practice, is that it pushes you up against the boundaries of your conventional understanding, And the boundaries of your capacity to make the right kind of effort, make an unloaded, wholehearted effort to be present and to allow things to be just as they are. And so I think pretty much for all of us, it's certainly for me, but my experience when talking with people is that pretty much everyone has this has a bunch of stories to tell about the frustration of being pushed up against the, uh, the limits of your physical capacity of your, um, your conventional understanding of your, you know, your ability to, um, uh, to, to, to make an effort that's not either, you know, pushing too hard or not pushing hard enough and all of that stuff, all of the, all of that whole complex of issues around practice.

[23:26]

Um, brings us up to this point of frustration and difficulty like over and over and over again and and what it's offering in that moment is uh is an invitation to let go and The first 10,000 times we get that invitation, or at least easily the first 10,000 times I got that invitation, I didn't take it. It slipped by so quickly that I didn't even notice it. But eventually, maybe you take the invitation, right? And then something else happens, right? Then there's a there can be a broadening of the sense of what it actually means to be human there's this rising up and sort of the this this sort of broad receptive continuous attention that we always carry with us but is obscured by our conventional thinking rises up and kind of at least for a little while takes its natural place in our awareness right um

[24:42]

And so what helps with that, right? What, what are some examples of, of how that works? Well, in the, in the case of, um, uh, you know, Dushan, right? The, the exchange he had with Lung Tan at the, um, at the key at this critical moment. So, um, uh, he, you know, they talked deep into the night and it was kind of dark. And so as he's, as he's leaving, um, uh, Lewentown says, here, let me give you a lantern. And he lights up the lantern and he hands it to Dershon. And just as Dershon is grasping it, he blows it out. And all of a sudden, it's really dark. And that was the moment in which Dershon was startled sufficiently out of his skin to have a moment that went beyond conventional understanding.

[25:47]

And to recognize it as well, because that's the other thing is you can have it and not recognize it, right? And so surprise is good, right? Interestingly, another thing that helps with that is if you really attend carefully, sufficiently carefully to the the process of conventional emotionally tagged cognition in the course of your everyday life, you pay close enough attention to it to realize what a burden it is and to actually feel the burden of it, right? And for me, this is true, but also I've talked to a number of people who at one point or another, they're just like, oh, wow, this is really heavy. I can put it down, which is lovely. Sometimes the, just the simple yoga of sitting, it provides an opening.

[26:59]

Just the, you know, deep unbreakable connection with the body. and with the intimate details of sitting is sufficient, right? And then lastly, and oddly, almost paradoxically, sometimes it's our ideas, right? Which is amazing, right? It turns out that... that the idea your entire life in practice takes place in this tangle in between conventional cognition and this other mode of being that that um isn't as concerned with the self grasping aversion the agendas of the self and so on and so forth and is is

[28:06]

more directly connected to the you know interdependent co-arising of all being right and we carry both of those around in our body and they they're tangled together inextricably right they information from this side impacts information from this side and the other other way around and so an obvious example of that is um Well, here's one from my practice. So for years, I studied the literature, and there was this whole thing about this mind or everyday mind is Buddha. And I read it, and I read it, and I read it, and I was like, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. And then one moment, one time, in the middle of sitting a sushin, all of a sudden, it became clearer exactly what it means. And it's not like... my conventional understanding of it shifted. It was that my experience of it shifted.

[29:07]

And that experience was both aided by my holding of that idea and the experience changed the nature of the idea. Amazing. So they're actively entangled and interacting all the time. And And what that means is that realization is just the practice of living in and navigating skillfully in that tangle. That's it, right? So that's the highest meaning in the holy truth, just in case you wonder. So any... Oh, I brought a poem. I wrote this poem to go with this case once a little while ago, and I thought I'd read it. So... It goes like this. An encounter at the bakery. The croissants are babbling in an unknown tongue that up till now everyone had assumed was French.

[30:12]

The dough, rising on a back bench, shouts to no one in particular, I've been up since 3 a.m. working my fingers to the bone. Does that mean nothing to you? And the sugar shouts back, nothing. The white-aproned baker smiles and asks the customer who's just wandered in, may I help you? To which he replies, do you know who I am? His clothes are frayed and soiled with long travel, his beard and hair shockingly red. Well, great. Thank you so much for listening. 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.

[31:14]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[31:17]

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