Morning everybody. Nice to be here on Sunday morning at Green Gulch. The sun I think just came out, so it's a beautiful day. Today I want to talk about a short quotation from the Shuringama Sutra, which is a Mahayana Sutra. It's kind of a fake sutra in the sense that it claims to be the word of the Buddha translated from Sanskrit to Chinese, but probably that's not true. Probably it was a sutra written in China. So some people don't like to study it for that reason. But this one line quotation appears in some of the Zen collections as a koan.

[01:05]

And this is actually kind of a common Zen technique to take one sentence or two from a text that might be four or five hundred pages long and sort of assume that that one line is the essence of the whole text. And if you can really penetrate the meaning of that one line, then that's all you need. You don't need to read the whole text. So this is good for busy people like us. It saves us a lot of time. However, when you hear this quotation, you might think that it doesn't save us much time. Here's the quotation. When I don't see Why can't you see my not seeing? If you could see my not seeing, then it wouldn't be not seeing.

[02:09]

Since you can't see my not seeing, my not seeing isn't anything. How could it not be you? So that's the quotation from the sutra. And admittedly, like a lot of things in the Zen literature, it sounds at first a little obscure. And maybe it would be a bit clearer if you put it in the positive rather than the negative way. In other words, when I see something, you might be able to, or you might think that you're able to see what I see. We could look at something and we could both think we're seeing the same thing. But you couldn't see my seeing itself. If you could see the seeing itself, then seeing would be an object like the object that we think we're seeing.

[03:19]

Seeing would be tangible and concrete. But you can't actually see my seeing, nor can you experience my seeing in any way. And so this actually means that seeing isn't a thing. There isn't anything that we could actually point to and say, this is seeing. Strange. So then you think, well, then what is seeing after all? Seeing is one of the ways that consciousness manifests itself in the world. In a way, you could use the analogy of wind. Seeing is like the wind. You can't grab something called the wind. There isn't actually anything called the wind. You can't see the wind. But you know that the wind is real because it moves the branches of the trees, it blows the door open, and it has a force on your skin.

[04:26]

In the same way, there's no such identifiable or graspable thing as consciousness. And yet consciousness manifests itself through our sensory, mental and emotional experience. As a matter of fact, there is no experience without consciousness. So we have this very odd I mean, you don't have to think about this very long to realize this strange paradox. Consciousness isn't anything. We don't know what it is. Scientists are madly scrambling with billions of dollars of research to figure out the nature of consciousness and what that has to do with the brain as a physical object, and they can't do it. So nobody knows what consciousness is and might not be anything. In fact, this quotation is telling us consciousness isn't anything. And yet, it is the most important thing, this strange paradox.

[05:33]

And we can't think about consciousness because anything we think is not consciousness. It's a concept or a theory or a memory or a feeling or an image. So whatever thoughts we have about consciousness are not at all about consciousness. And whatever experiences we have of consciousness are not really experiences of consciousness. And yet, it's thanks to consciousness that we can think and experience at all. So this is an odd predicament to be in. Now, naturally, in our living, we foreground content, sensory and mental emotional experience. And we background consciousness. We background it so much that we don't even realize that there is consciousness. We're like fish swimming in water. We can't notice the medium in which we're moving. And this is one of the beauties of meditation practice.

[06:41]

When you sit in meditation, you ever so slightly change the equation. You sit down focusing on breath and posture and you bring at least some measure of quiet the senses and to the thinking. And by this exact measure, a little bit consciousness, which is so far in the background, comes a little bit more into the foreground. So we have a feeling for it, even though we can't exactly experience it, because we can never get outside of it to look at it. It's the one thing we can never get outside of. in order to look at. Just like a fish in the water, if someone took us out of consciousness so that we could see it, we would be unconscious. If they took us out permanently, we'd be dead.

[07:44]

As far as any of us know, the dead don't see much. Still though, in meditation practice, we have some sense of or feeling for consciousness. And this experience of having some different kind of experience or feeling for consciousness gradually changes the way we swim in our lives. This quotation from the Shurangama Sutra refers to a famous dialogue that takes place in the Sutra between the Buddha and King Prasannajit. And in this dialogue, a little vignette of the Sutra of the King is 62 years old. we learn. And he's complaining to the Buddha about his advancing age and the loss of his faculties and the closeness of his death. And the king is a devout Buddhist and he's heard many teachings from the Buddha about impermanence and the unreliability of the body and physical things and so on.

[08:50]

So he's imagining that the Buddha will commiserate with him in his complaints. But the Buddha doesn't The Buddha seems very doubtful of this whole thing that the king is bringing up. And the Buddha, in his usual Socratic way, starts to question the king. And he says to him, can you remember the first time that you saw the Ganges River? And the king thinks about this and all of a sudden he has a rush of emotion and he remembers when he was a little boy maybe three years old, his mother took him to see the holy Ganges, which is, after all, a tremendous experience for anybody in Indian culture, to first set eyes on the holy mother Ganges. So he remembers this. And the Buddha says, well, it may be true that, as you say, the body that was at that time young and supple is now old and brittle,

[09:58]

But how about the seeing itself, the seeing itself that you practiced when you were three years old, does that differ at all from the seeing itself that you are practicing now? And the king thinks about this for a minute and he says, well, my eyes aren't quite as good as they were and my mind is a bit less sharp, but now that you mention it, the seeing itself, the seeing itself is really not any different. now than it was when I was three years old." And then the Buddha says to him, Great King, your face is in wrinkles, but the essential nature of your seeing is not wrinkled. What wrinkles is subject to change, and what does not wrinkle does not change. What changes will become extinct But what does not change is fundamentally free of production and extinction.

[11:05]

So how could it be subject to birth and death? And this of course, the king gets this and he becomes delighted and realizes that the death of his changeable and impermanent body will not be the end of him. Because he realizes, what has been the essential engine of his life from youth through mid-age until now, consciousness, which has always manifested through his seeing and hearing and thinking and feeling, that consciousness will not die. And consciousness, he now realizes, is not something abstract or conceptual or distant. It has always been exactly in the middle of all of his acts of perception and feeling. And even though he can't define it or grasp it as a thing, he is it and it is him.

[12:08]

So again, this may sound a bit abstract, but when you really feel it and you live it, it's not abstract at all. And to appreciate this point is to experience what the king experienced at this moment, a radical shift in the way that you think and feel about your living. And therefore, a radical shift in the way that you live. We don't think about this much, but the real question for us in our living is, what are we? What do we identify with? Who do we think we are? Do you think you're the body, the thoughts, the feelings, the memories, the experiences, and so on? Well, no one can tell you you're not that. But is that all you are? If that's all you are, then it's true.

[13:19]

You're in a big trouble. But if you're all of that, And more than that, all of that plus the luminous consciousness in which it all swims, in which makes it all possible, then you're actually in wonderful shape. It is not necessary for you to feel small, isolated, diminished by the various things that will happen to you in a life that will necessarily be full of many indignities. If you're over 35, you know this. And just like King Prasannajit, you no longer need to feel discouraged by life's seeming shortness.

[14:21]

Because although, yes, of course, something dies, You yourself, as you most fundamentally are, won't die. And that's the burden of the last line of this quotation. How could it not be you? How could consciousness not be you? Who else could it be? Who else could you be? As I was thinking about this passage from the Shurangama Sutra, I remembered that my mother died at exactly the age of King Prasenajit, 62 years old. And I was just the other day, you know, it's a custom in the Jewish tradition, the tradition of my birth, to visit the grave of one's parents. And my parents are buried in Miami, Florida, a place that I don't visit so often. I don't go there as often as I would like, but I did.

[15:24]

I went there the other day and I went with my 89-year-old aunt and we got a little lost and when we found the cemetery, it was closed already. So we broke into the cemetery. We scaled the fence and we managed to hoist my 89-year-old auntie over the fence into the cemetery. It was very sweet. And we took a video of this on our little camera of my aunt being hoisted over the fence by my brother and sister-in-law. And we're trying to figure out how to put it on YouTube. Anyway, we did see my mother and father are buried side by side in this Jewish cemetery in Miami. And it made me remember about her last days, a long time ago by now.

[16:27]

My mother never gave too much consideration, emotional or philosophical, to the question of death. And even though she was diagnosed with metastasized terminal cancer, everyone, including the doctors, avoided mentioning the reality of it. And she never actually would say or felt that this was going to kill her, even though everybody knew it would. She got it that she was very sick. But, you know, being sick is one thing and dying is something else. She had been, after all, sick before, so she knew about being sick. But she never died, so she had no reference point for it. And so she didn't talk about it. She didn't know what to say about it and neither did anybody else. In addition to its being a bit discouraging when applied to oneself, the idea of death is also quite a difficult idea to grasp.

[17:39]

What is it? So my mother, excuse me, My mother didn't try to grasp it. Now, although this sutra quotation might seem, as I say, complicated philosophically, the truth of the matter is we all completely understand it. Because we all, think about this, we all have the idea that we are eternal, that we will exist forever, even though logically we know it's not so, somehow deep inside of us we have the idea that this subjectivity that we know as ourselves cannot possibly end. Which is why if you really think about death it's really hard to comprehend how that's possible. And I think my mother somehow knew this and so she didn't ever entertain the idea of dying.

[18:44]

But at one point in this process I remember she asked me and she posed this as a theoretical you know, theological question. She said to me once, what do Buddhists believe about life after death? And this was a very memorable conversation, as you can imagine. And I remember that it took place in a bagel restaurant in Miami. We were eating bagels. She asked me this. And I said to her something like, well, it's certainly true. that the body dies and when the body goes all the thoughts and experiences and memories go with it but the real person that we are the true self the original self doesn't die that's what I told her and I'll never forget the look on her face when I told her this

[19:48]

she looked completely perplexed by it. She had no idea what I was talking about. And in the inimitable way that my mother had in moments like this, she simply changed the subject and went on to other things and that was the end of that. So I assume that like many of the other things that I had tried to tell my mother over the years, it went in one ear and out the other ear and didn't influence her at all. When I was thinking about this the other day, I wondered whether perhaps those words were of some comfort to her in the last delirious semi-conscious moments of her life when she was in a morphine delirium and gradually with a difficult time passed away. True self, original self, true person of no rank, these are all Zen expressions used to point out this person that we all most fundamentally are, have always most fundamentally been.

[21:03]

This person, unnameable, undefinable, ungraspable, unknowable, who has been using the body-mind of our human life to accomplish his or her work because without us she can't do anything. So back to the original quotation about seeing. And of course it's about seeing but it means all the senses, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, feeling. If you and I stand side by side down at Muir Beach and look out at the ocean, we will think without needing to investigate that we're both seeing the same thing. And we will both assume that this thing that we're seeing, the ocean, is a real thing in the world. But if for some reason, while we're standing there, my consciousness were to go somehow blank while I was still standing there, and even though my eyes were open, all of a sudden, I would not be seeing the ocean.

[22:17]

you would not be able to tell unless I said something that I was not seeing the ocean. Just as the quotation says, you cannot see my not seeing. And you also can't see my seeing either, even though you think you can. So we would stand side by side and we would agree, even though we had no idea what we were talking about. Yes, isn't the ocean beautiful? Assuming that we knew what was going on within each of us, but really we wouldn't know. Because in truth the activity of the senses and of human experience is deeply mysterious and private. It's not that there's no seeing of course, there is a function that we call seeing and there are effects of that function that we can investigate and talk about. But seeing itself, you know, what is it?

[23:19]

Is it knowable? But since it functions, we can't say it's not anything. That's why it says, if you were actually able to see my not seeing, it wouldn't be not seeing. It's not seeing. So how could you see it? And my not seeing is indistinguishable from my seeing. So seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, and so on are hard to define, impossible to grasp. And yet, we don't have to go to school. We just automatically see and hear and feel. It's the most natural thing in the world, even though we have no idea what it is or exactly how it works. So the senses are radically subjective. So when we all have this odd sensation that I think we all have, that we will never die, and that the disappearance of our subjectivity is an impossibility, there might be something more to this than we think.

[24:40]

We're quite right to have that sense. It's true. We will never die. The problem is that we have identified this permanent, never-changing self that we all secretly believe in with the body-mind life, which we all know is definitely not permanent and it is not unchanging. That's the problem. So that the work we have to do on our cushions and in our practice is to shift the ground of our identity from this seeming concrete body-mind life to consciousness itself, which isn't not this body-mind life, but at the same time is beyond it. So what makes this misidentification?

[25:47]

It causes us so much suffering really. What makes it so compelling and so natural? So let's assume that there is an objective world. The only way we would ever have any contact with that world is through our senses, through our feelings, our thoughts. So we experience an object, the world over there mediated through the senses and then over here is the subject who's standing here looking at the ocean. The one who's peeking out through and evaluating with the senses, the knower, the knowing. Since the senses themselves are so mysterious and we can't see them, but we can see the world, we assume by analogy that our sense consciousness is an object just like the world.

[26:47]

seems to be an object. And so we ourselves are objects, just like the world is an object. We think of ourselves as being an object, just like the sea or a stone or a boulder. We're a thing in the world, we think. By analogy, we imagine this. We all have this concept. And we believe it and we behave this way. Think about this. Whenever you judge yourself or love yourself or hate yourself, or are disappointed in yourself or congratulate yourself or get mad at someone because they did something to you. The only way you can have those emotions and those feelings is if you assume that there is an object in the world called yourself. If you didn't assume that, then none of these emotions or thoughts would ever occur to you. And yet the real truth is you are not an object in the world. You are a subject and the essential nature of that subject is consciousness itself, which is not something and therefore cannot be limited or defined, cannot be insulted, cannot be broken, cannot be diminished, cannot be hated.

[28:05]

Another place in the sutra that Buddha gives the example of a square box filled with empty space. And he says, if you decide to put the empty space into a round box, from the square box and put it into the round box, do you have to change the shape of the empty space in order to fit it into the round box? Do you need to get a saw and hammer or somehow knead it somehow that you can get it into the other box? Of course not. Because the empty space, no matter whether it's in a round box or a square box, never changes its shape. It has no shape. But when you look at the empty space, you see it as square when it's in a square box and when it's in a round box because the only thing you can see is the container. And consciousness is exactly like this. In fact, it has no shape or size or characteristic, but its effects appear as seeing or hearing and so forth.

[29:10]

So we naturally mistake its nature. And this is why we sell ourselves short time after time after time after time trading in our noble Buddha nature for a very limited and unsatisfactory sense of ourselves as objects in the world. And when we sit down on our cushions just in sitting with the intention of being with our breathing being in the present, being with our body. We see this point immediately, literally, without mediation, immediately. And we see it warmly. And we can't really explain it or tell anybody about it because it's not an object in the world. And all the things where they always say, oh, it's beyond words.

[30:15]

That's just another concept. wonderful analogies of the Shurangama Sutra are just trying to point out that the ordinary way we carve up the world and live in the world is just not true. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny. All of our naming is ultimately artificial. It's useful. It's practical, of course. We can't do without it. But we have to know that it's fundamentally artificial. If we knew that we wouldn't suffer so much under our own, under the tyranny of our own definitions. In reality the world is appearing whole, warm and we persist in taking it apart

[31:22]

and keeping it at arm's length. Our everyday experience of the senses is usually again so subtle that we don't notice this. It's usually mixed in immediately with desire. We don't just see something because we think we're over here on this side of our eyeballs And what we're seeing is something over there on the other side of the eyeballs. We're reaching out in our seeing. It's as if we have little hands inside of our eyes reaching out to grasp that which we're seeing. But we never can quite manage to do that. That's usually the way we see, which is really grabbing with desire more than a seeing and a frustrated grabbing. In Buddhist psychology, this ordinary practice of seeing is called the outflow of sense desire.

[32:29]

We're literally leaking out of our sense doors, losing ourselves in the very acts of perception as we moment by moment construct a world of suffering. Through our sitting and through our paying attention in daily living, Little by little, we are softening this. Little by little, we are changing this deeply ingrained habit. We practice just being present with the whole body and mind. With awareness of the breath, we try to have enough calmness to pull those little hands back so that we can just see and not try to grab anything. then we will know in the middle of our seeing and hearing and tasting, touching, thinking, feeling, that there's consciousness, the brightness of consciousness that stands behind and inside of and is our actual seeing and hearing and feeling and tasting and touching and thinking.

[33:47]

And we can feel the wholeness, the oneness, the warmth of the world and its beauty. And then we don't have to worry so much about trying to grab something we think we don't have, or fix something we think is wrong. And we don't need to worry so much about dying and losing our body. So, that's the teaching of the Asura Gama Sutra. And really, I don't like to talk so much about all this complicated stuff. Really, our practice is quite simple and practical. It's just the skill of living every day, working with our afflictive emotions, trying to practice loving kindness, compassion, mindfulness, and so on. That's really mostly what it's about, and we don't need to get into all this stuff.

[34:52]

But the truth of the matter is that in order to do these practices, the basis of them is an accurate sense of what we are, who we are, which involves some investigation of the nature of consciousness, of awareness itself. So we have to have a feeling, an accurate feeling about this, and since this feeling isn't anything by itself, yet we have to know it firsthand so that we can train ourselves in it and build up our conduct around it. So every now and then we have to talk about it. So the sense of life expressed in this quotation is something basic and necessary. And without it, the Buddha Dharma is only a bunch of nice concepts and self-help.

[35:56]

tools, which is, don't get me wrong, very useful and important. But it will be shaky without this fundamental basis. We have to know the real nature of our minds and hearts. And we have to know it for ourselves. We have to be convinced about it through our own experiences. And once we are, we can forget about all this stuff You don't have to think about it. It's better not to think about it. Because we will just feel a closeness with the world, a closeness with ourselves, a closeness with others. And we will know in our bones, without having to go into a whole bunch of complicated philosophical rigmarole, We will just know in our bones that we and the world and others are not different things bumping around against one another.

[37:04]

There's another old sutra that says, it's one of the most beautiful things in all of Buddhist literature, I think. When in the scene there is only the scene and in the herd there is only the herd, then there is no inside, no outside and no in between. And in Zen, this is called intimacy. There's no me and no you, there's not even any us. There's just the indivisible, indefinable reality, shimmering and transforming in front of us, moment by moment by moment, warm and light with absolutely nothing to fear. And then loving kindness becomes not a nice sentiment Not an aspiration, but simply the expression of how the world actually feels to us. So now, if you don't mind, I'm going to change the subject slightly.

[38:13]

Just a few words at the end here. Because I wanted to mention to you, if some of you don't already know, This afternoon at 3.30, we're having a very important ceremony over at the city center that we don't have too often called a mountain seat ceremony, which is a ceremony for installing a new abbot of Zen Center. It's called a mountain seat because a new abbot ascends, they build a mountain in the temple and the new abbot ascends the mountain. So Steve Myoga and Steve Stuckey, who is honored that you're here today, Steve, with all this going on this afternoon, that you would come and listen to the talk. Thank you for coming. He will ascend the mountain this afternoon. And he will be co-abbot of Zen Center with Paul Haller. And even if you don't care about Zen Center or never met Steve and will never meet him again, this is a spectacle to see.

[39:22]

It's the max of pomp and circumstance. It's quite something. And yesterday we had a stepping down ceremony, stepping down from the mountain for Jiko Linda Ruth Cutts, whom you all know, to thank her and acknowledge her for her seven years of service to Zen Center as co-abbot. It's just not an easy job. to be Abbot of Zen Center and seven years is a long time to do it. So I'm sure that Linda stepped down from the mountain with a sigh of relief. As far as I know, Zen Center is the only Buddhist organization in the Western world, possibly in the entire world, that practices a form of leadership that combines the ancient Buddhist tradition of monastic seniority and ancestral hierarchy with Western democratic values and processes, a very unusual system that we have.

[40:34]

The abbots of Zen Center are elected by a council of elders. The council of elders is appointed by a board of directors, elected by all the members of Zen Center. and their selection of Abbott must be approved by the board of directors. And Abbott's of Zen Center served for seven years and then they stepped down as Linda did yesterday and they either get out of town like I did or they remain in residence at Zen Center as Blanche Hartman and Rev Anderson have done. and this is what Linda will do. So every time an abbot gets elected it's a new moment, it's a new era in the history of Zen Center and I think this is no exception. With Steve's election, it was the first time and I've been involved in this all through the years

[41:47]

It was the first time that we had a whole generation of qualified, excellent and able candidates ready for this role. So we had disagreements and issues and problems. The first time it quite happened that way. So we had to disagree and converse and stay peaceful. and keep loving one another. And we were able to do that. And I'm sure most of you know this is not the usual way things go in the world or in religious institutions. So I, for one, am really proud of all of us in our community and our process in coming to a peaceful unanimous choice. And also, Steve is the first Abbot of Zen Center in our history to come back into residence after many years of having left the residential community to live in the world.

[43:02]

And so he will necessarily bring all of that into the community. A new perspective for a new time and a new generation of leadership. And it will be a time of renewal for all of us, I think. So maybe some of you today will say hello to Steve and you'll meet him again many times in the future, I hope, as you all participate in whatever way you find appropriate for you in the Zen Center community and in this time of renewal. So I want to thank all of you in advance for your support in that. Probably nobody knows more than I that Zen center is not perfect. And neither is Buddhism perfect as a social and cultural phenomenon. But the world is, as usual, in a kind of a mess.

[44:13]

Zen Center is a group of people and an institution that is a force for good and for sanity and for peacefulness in this world. And it really is that. And there's no question about it with all of its problems. We're all human beings. It really does uphold an old-fashioned thing that's in short supply virtue. in the world. So I'm really happy that every time we elect a new abbot, it's a new moment, a new strength, a new time to go forward. And I hope that all of you will continue to support Zen Center in its mission to bring some spirit of awakening and peacefulness to this world, which needs it, as one could say, at any moment of history, more now than ever.

[45:14]

Thanks a lot for listening. Please take care.

[45:17]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.72