This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome to Green Gulch. So there's a story I think many of you have heard. We like to tell it. It's a very good story. It's about this Zen master. long, long ago, whose name was Birdnest Roshi. And he got that name because he liked to sit zazen up in a tree. So one day a monk came to visit and he called up to the teacher, what is the secret of Buddhist practice? And the Roshi yelled down, do good, avoid evil, and purify the mind. And the monk said, well, that's easy. Even a child of three can understand that. To which Birdnest responded, Yes, a child of three may understand it, but even a person of 80 years may not be able to practice it.

[01:07]

So a year or so ago, I saw this YouTube video of a little girl by the name of Tenna, not much older than three. I think she was probably five or six at the time. And she's giving a wonderful Dharma talk to her mother. So I'm going to share her talk with you now. No one else than me. Mom, are you ready to be his friend? Yes. Try not to be that high up to be friends. I want everything to be low. Okay? Okay. Just try your best. I don't want you and my dad to be replaced and me again. I want you, my dad, to be placed and settled and be friends. I'm not trying to be mean. I just want everyone to be friends.

[02:11]

And if I can be nice, I think all of us can be nice too. I'm not trying to be mean, but I'm trying to do my best in my heart. Nothing else than that. I want you, mom, my dad, everyone to be friends. I want everyone to be smiling. Not like being mad. I want everything to smile. Especially when I see someone, I want them to smile. Especially Nana, everyone. I want everyone to smile. And if that's for my dad and you mom, I think you can do it. I think you can settle your mean Your mean height's down a little to short height. Then it's both, okay? I'm not trying to be mean. I'm not trying to be a bully. I'm trying to be steady on the floor. Not way down. On straight.

[03:15]

On the middle where my heart is. My heart is something. Everyone else's heart is something too. And if we live in a world where everyone's being mean, everyone's going to be a monster in their future. What if there's a little bit of persons and we will eat them, then no one will ever be here. Only the monsters in our place. We need everyone to be in person. Everyone. Including me and my mom. Everyone. I just want everything to be settled down. Nothing else. I just want everything to be good as possible. Nothing else. Thank you, Tiana. I love you.

[04:19]

I love you too. No one else. That's probably enough for today. Last time I looked, I think this video had gotten something like 20 million hits. I think everyone's passed it around. So if you haven't seen it already, there she is. There she is. So this child... of not more than three, has a very good grasp of basic Buddhist principles. And if we missed learning those principles when we were little, according to Buddhist theory, it is never too late. There are a number of features in this talk that we grown-ups can easily recognize as within ourselves. You know, there's those upset feelings toward our loved ones that can turn into meanness, to anger, to agitation, irritation, and by-and-by regret. So these are toxic features of our human life.

[05:23]

And they're there from birth. And even before that, as it says in the teaching, there's a verse that we chant in the mornings. It's called the repentances. And all my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. So this I now fully avow means that I accept this ancient twisted karma arriving, right here today, in my body, out of my mouth, in my speech, in the forms of anger or greed, and that it's mine. It's all mine. And then, as Tenna advises her mother, we need to do something about it, you know, or else the entire human world is going to turn into monsters. You know, this may already be happening. We may be on the verge of turning the world into monsters. And these monsters are not coming from outer space. They are coming from inside our own hearts and minds. Yet I think it's really important that this quality that this tiny Dharma master has also comes with us at birth.

[06:30]

And it's called a moral compass. And this morning on the stairs, Tana's moral compass is pointing towards kindness and happiness and a wish for everyone to live in harmony with one another. Her dad, Nana. And everyone. So just like the Buddha in front of the assembly of monks. Tenna is holding up herself. Like a tiny dawn of flower. Inviting us to smile. And how can we possibly resist? When the Buddha sat down under a tree. With nothing whatsoever to do but to sit there. He began studying these very same aspects of himself. His perceptions. His feelings. His thoughts. And his bodily impulses. His own moral compass. And some of those aspects appeared to be on the inside of himself. And others seemed to be arriving from the world around him. I think the most striking of those arrivals took the form of Mara, the evil one.

[07:35]

Master of illusions. Who tried his best to frighten the young monk. And when he failed to do that, then he tried to seduce him. And then failing that, he confronted him. face to face now i will kill you well the miraculous outcome of that encounter was the buddha's recognition of mara as a projection of his own vivid imagination i know who you are buddha says to mara no you don't mara says well yes i do buddha says you are myself and with that mara vanishes and At that point, the newly awakened Buddha smiled. So I really appreciate how detailed and universal the teachings are that Tenna gives to her own mother, who is being faced by her own Mara, a Mara of her own devising, as a projection of her beloved husband, Tenna's beloved father. First, Tenna asks her mom if she is ready to be friends.

[08:40]

And I think that's base camp for our effort. If we're going to make any kind of effort inside of ourselves to find the source of these delusions, which lead to hatred and to its conjoined twin obsessive love. I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you. Over and over again. So are we ready to study ourselves? Are we ready to be friends? Are we ready to receive back any kind of feedback from a Roshi, such as up in a tree or... from a tiny little Buddha on the stairs who know us better than we know ourselves, who see us in our jammies without our makeup. In living our practice of the Buddhist teaching, we too start with a profound and tender willingness to be witnessed by others and then to listen quietly with our shields down as they do their best to tell us how it is that we're disturbing the air that we share and that our life depends on, you know, all of the air.

[09:42]

Not only inside the privacy of our own personal relationships, but in the neighborhood, in the town, in the nation, in the world. Are we ready to be friends with people who think we think are so different from us and we so different from them? Different in skin tone or ethnicity, in religion, sexual preferences, and happy Pride Month, by the way. Education, status, and wealth. styles of dress. It doesn't take very much for us to sense differences. So the hard work is in seeing the illusory nature of those differences, to recognize the conditioning that we have received since we were young children to prefer and to judge one person over another and to prefer coffee over tea. The teaching of the study of differences and of bringing them into intimate alignment, into harmony, is the key message of one of Suzuki Roshi's favorite Zen poems, The Harmony of Difference and Equality, in Japanese, the Sandokai.

[10:53]

The first line of that poem, the author, a Chinese Zen master whose name is Shito, in Japanese, Sekito, Sekito Gisen, he says, the spiritual source shines clearly in the light. The branching streams flow on in the dark. Grasping at things is surely delusion. According with sameness is still not enlightenment. The spiritual source shines clearly in the light. The branching streams flow on in the dark. Grasping at things is surely delusion. According with sameness is still not enlightenment. And as Suzuki Roshi says in the very first talk that he gives about this poem, He gave 12 talks and all down at Tassajara very shortly before he died, maybe a year or so before he died. He says that the source, the spiritual source, is something wonderful, something beyond description, beyond our words for things, beyond the discrimination of right and wrong.

[11:59]

And that whatever our minds can conceive of or can know or can put into words is not the source itself. That spiritual source shining clearly in the light is here, in some sense, is always here, waiting for us to stop, to sit down and to take a long overdue look at our karmic conditioning that has been driving our life for a very, very long time. Conditioning that is based in thoughts, in language, in naming things, and in how those things are related to the self, to myself. such as my car, my house, my friends, my religion, my gender, my beliefs, and my convictions. Once we perceive a thing and name it, we then fall into the vat of our emotional responses in order to determine whether that thing does or does not belong in my world, whether or not it has the same right to live and to breathe as I do.

[13:04]

So in the light of the spiritual source, all things exist within ourselves, our big selves, beyond thinking, beyond words, pure and stainless. Suzuki Roshi says that to think that things exist outside ourselves is a dualistic, primitive, shallow understanding of things. And yet it's that way of understanding that it's usual for us humans, you know. Just as Shito says in the third line of this poem, grasping of things is surely delusion. So grasping of things refers to us getting stuck on how we think, you know, like flies on sticky paper. We grab after things as if we have a right to own them or to disown them, to like them or to hate them, to welcome them or to forbid them to enter. On the other hand, once we have studied reality for a while, you know, quite a while, and come to believe the truth that there really is no thing outside ourself, our big self, that we are connected to everything just like a baby to its mother, we may then fall into the sticky trap of oneness.

[14:22]

As it says in the verse, the trap of according with sameness, such as all lives matter. A sameness which is still not enlightenment. So falling into sameness or into oneness is failing to discriminate in this very human world, the world of relative truths, the difference between right and wrong. And although discriminations are delusional, some are right and some are wrong. And either way are extremely powerful in the human world and in the world of needless sorrows. I recently watched a very good example of wrong. There's this documentary on HBO Max called The Crime of the Century about how the language of delusion, thinly disguised as compassion, was used to create great and outrageous fortunes through the widespread distribution of highly addictive prescription drugs. Some of you may have a young friend, I have several now, who have died from a drug overdose.

[15:30]

such as fentanyl, while celebrating a special occasion with their friends, like their birthday. Before we can find peace in this world, it is very important that we understand how delusion works and how we too can skillfully utilize the rules of logic and of law in order to protect each other from the evil one. Do good, avoid evil, and purify the mind. It's so easy to say a child of three can understand. It's so difficult to practice that even a well-educated, wealthy, older person, as recorded in this documentary, may not even have begun to put this basic law into practice. The next lesson from our little Buddha is an instruction on how to bring our emotional overloads back down into peaceful abiding for the sake of ourselves, our loved ones, and for the sake of humanity as a whole. The first step in returning to sanity is, as she says, not to be high up if we're going to be friends.

[16:36]

Not to be, as the Bodhisattva precept says, praising ourselves at the expense of others. We need to be consciously and intentionally placed, as in still, and settled, as in silent, on this very spot where we are Standing, sitting, or lying. Silence and stillness is the harmonious core of our spiritual life. And of reality itself. So this is step one in coming back to our senses. In the teachings of the Buddhist tradition, step one is called shamatha, or tranquility practice. Calming of the mind that allows us to see, to truly see clearly. And then step two, insight, vipassana. Reality itself flowing everywhere. When we're agitated by anger or lust, both of which are arising from a mind that's trapped in delusion, thank you, Mara the Evil One, we do not see clearly.

[17:39]

So if you imagine yourself riding on the back of a galloping horse or perhaps sitting in a little boat on the open ocean, everything looks like it's bobbing up and down until we get off the horse. or till we get out of the boat and stand quietly on the land. And then we look again. Are the mountains bobbing up and down? Or was it our agitated mind? The Buddha says that it's your agitated mind. So as a meditator, we can learn to establish ourselves in a relaxed and stable awareness, or what we call in Soto Zen, a silent illumination. Silent illumination is the literal backbone. of our sitting practice the upright backbone connecting the sky above to this very spot of earth on which i'm sitting right now you are sitting right now it's always right now this living backbone of ours is flexible allowing us to seek the balancing point or the tipping point between serenity on the one hand and energetic endeavors such as speech and action on the other

[18:51]

between a falsely perceived self and a correctly imagined world. So here's a wonderful poem by the master of silent illumination, Hongzhi, 12th century Chinese Zen ancestor of our particular branch of Buddhism called Soto Zen. All the myriad things in the universe emit radiance and speak the Dharma. All the myriad things in the universe. emit radiance and speak the Dharma. They all attest to each other and correspond in conversation. Flowers, trees, birds, and people. Corresponding in conversation and attesting, they respond to each other perfectly. But if in illumination, silence is lost, then aggressiveness will appear. Attesting and corresponding in conversation. Perfectly, they respond to each other.

[19:52]

But if in silence, illumination is lost, then you will become turbid and leave behind the Dharma. But when silence and illumination both are operating and complete, the lotus flower opens and the dreamer awakens. The hundred rivers flow into the sea and the thousand peaks face the great mountain. Like geese preferring milk, like bees seeking out flowers. When silent illumination is perfected and obtained, the teaching of our tradition is set in motion. So like our elder savant, Peng Zhur, our tiny savant, Tianna, offers some further advice on how to bring balance back into an agitated mind, a mind whose source is inherently bright and clearly aware. A brightness that is been temporarily clouded over by these pathological emotions of hatred, of greed, and of confusion.

[20:55]

Clouded over by our belief that those toxic formations are real and true. I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you. Over and over again. So Tenna says, I'm not trying to be mean. I'm not trying to be a bully. I'm trying to be steady, on the floor. Not way down, but straight in the middle, where my heart is. If we live in a world where everyone is mean, everyone will be a monster. We need everyone to be a person. Everyone, including me, my mom, and everyone. So a person really knows who they are. They know their tendencies, and they know that they make mistakes. And they realize how important it is to practice Zazen. Because before we know who we really are, we don't know why we should practice. Again, as Suzuki Roshi says, we think that we are free and that whatever we do is our choice.

[22:00]

But actually, we are creating karma for ourselves and for others. When we don't know who we are and what we are doing, we don't see any need to practice. But he says, we have to pay our own debts. No one else can pay them for us. Brightly luminous without defilements, you directly penetrate and are liberated. You have from the beginning been in this place. It's not something that is new to you today. And although this is the case, you must act on it. Cold and like dried wood, practice the great rest with broad and penetrating comprehension. If your rest and cessation is not complete and you wish to go to the realm of the Buddha and to leave this world of birth and death, there is no such place. If your rest and cessation is not complete and you wish to go to the realm of the Buddha and to leave this world of birth and death, there is no such place.

[23:04]

Just as you are, you must break through. You must understand without the defilements of defiled thinking. and be pure without any worries whatsoever. So this style of Zen, as Reverend Angel calls it, is the no-big-deal approach to enlightenment. We are already imbued with awakened consciousness, and so the teacher calls out to the monk, Hey, you. The monk says, Yes. We just don't believe it, though, and therefore we don't understand what to say or how to act like Buddha. So the teacher calls out again, hey you. Yes? What is your Buddha nature? The monk at a loss shrugs her shoulders and quickly leaves the room. So that's why the Buddha talked to us and gave us some sound advice on how to realize who we really are and then how we can retrain ourselves to be it. So this teaching begins with the unshakable confidence in the truth of the Buddha nature within us.

[24:10]

As Chena says to her mom, If I can be nice, I think all of us can be too. I'm trying to be nice in my heart, and everyone else can too. I don't like being mean. I want everyone to smile, to settle our mean heights down a little to short heights. And then it's both. Not way down, but steady. In the middle, where my heart is. My heart is something. Everyone else's heart is something too. So this work of coming home to ourselves and to we have always been, even as the clouds of doubt, anxiety, and self-protection roll in, also needs to be balanced in terms of effort, the kind of effort that we make, and to remind ourselves as serious seekers to harmonize the goallessness of nirvana with the undermining effects of striving for it. In some forms of Buddhism, the focus of study is on the clouds themselves, on the activities of the deluded mind, the meanness, the lust, the confusion.

[25:16]

And a strenuous effort is made to purify the mind of illusory thoughts and desires, what we call the dusts. Such an effort may result in something called temporal enlightenment, a kind of realization that is known by oneself and possibly one's teacher and so on. maybe one's friends, such an awareness when we attach to it is already wrong. When we are not aware of our true nature, we have everything already. But when we mistake our true nature for ourself, this is a big mistake. As it says in the song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, another wonderful Zen poem, you are not it. You are not it. In truth, it is you. Look around. It's everywhere. Already you, without the slightest gap from the very beginning of time. And for this reason, Suzuki Rashi says that enlightenment is not something that can be known.

[26:19]

That the true source is beyond our thinking, is already stainless and pure. When we describe such a thing, we put a mark on it. We stain it with defilement. Each being itself is true source, and the true source... is nothing but each being. And then he goes on to say, you cannot say there is no enlightenment or that there is enlightenment. Enlightenment is not something about which you can say there is or there is not. At the same time, real enlightenment is not something that we experience. It is something that we realize, that we become, by good daily practice, by how we live our life. So what is the real teaching of the Buddha? The student asks the teacher. And if the student doesn't understand, they just keep on asking. So what is it? What is it? What does it mean? Such questions are demanding answers that the student can understand. And this is a mistake.

[27:21]

One continuous mistake. And yet, surprising to say, that is good. To recognize our mistakes, both the ones we feel inside ourselves, And the ones our friends and our family are helping us to name, like Tenna has done for her mom, proud, high up, and mean, is good, is very, very good. As her mom says at the end, come and give mommy a bit too. I love you. And Tenna says, I love you too. And there we have it, you know, all of it. How to recognize the true value of each and everything, of each and every person. both dependent, like a mother and her precocious child, and independent, like a mother, like a child, like a flower, like a song, like this day and like every day. No big deal, Zen. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[28:23]

Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost, 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[28:42]

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