This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. What is the great meaning of Buddhism? That's what I'm getting from you. That's what I'm... You're all looking at me. Good evening. So what is the great meaning of Buddhism? we've been doing some cooking today in the Finding Yourself in the Dasahara Kitchen cooking retreat.

[01:12]

And we've been sitting some zazen and enjoying each other's company. And I hear in the yoga retreat, there's a yoga retreat going on right now too, and I hear that doing a lot of yoga. So, in a way, this is the great meaning of Buddhism. When someone asked Dongshan, you know, what is the great meaning of Buddhism, he said, three pounds of sesame. He was the, my understanding is that he was the Tenzo at the time, the head cook of the monastery.

[02:25]

And someone asked him this, I imagine while he was weighing out three pounds of sesame, That's the image that I have in my mind. So just this, just this is the great meaning of Buddhism. What's just this? Do you feel it? Do you feel just this? So what if it was that? What if it was just this? Is that enough for us? Guishan answered the question.

[03:46]

He answered it with another question. Someone asked him, you know, what is the great meaning of Buddhism? And he said, he asked the question, what is the price of luling rice? can you imagine if it was just that? Like a dollar figure? It's 99 cents a pound. So maybe if you've got 99 cents a pound, if you've got 99 cents, I'll give you a pound of the meaning, the great meaning of Buddhism. My understanding about Lu Ling Rice is that it's kind of like the gold standard of rice.

[04:55]

So all the rice, the price of all the other rice was based on the price of Lu Ling rice. So he was kind of like saying the inseparability of all things, the interconnection of all things. There's two things now that you have, answering the question that you all seem to be asking me when I walked in here. You know, kind of like, what's going to happen now? Well, the price of Lu Ling rice happened, and

[06:00]

some sesame seeds happened. Later on, Guishan said about this matter, he said something like, after I'm dead, maybe a hundred years from now, I'll be reborn as a water buffalo. at the foot of Mount Gui, the foot of this mountain, or his mountain, or the mountain of the monastery that he was staying at. He'll be reborn a water buffalo, and this water buffalo will have some letters on its right breast, and the letters will spell Monk Guishan. And then he said,

[07:03]

did he say? He said, if you call me monk Guishan, I am the water buffalo. And if you call me the water buffalo, I am monk Guishan. What will you call me? So this is another superb, very helpful answer to the question, what is the great meaning of Buddhism? I think he was pointing out that when we name something You know, the name of something and the reality of something are two different things.

[08:12]

They're different things. Our idea about something and the something itself are different. There's a little bit of writing by one of our teachers, by our grandfather in Japan, Zen Master Eternal Peace.

[09:35]

He wrote a paper on the instructions to the cook. And to make matters worse for us, he said this. Getting to eat a single grain of luling rice enables one to see the water buffalo. Getting to supply a single grain of Lu Ling rice enables one to see Guishan. The water buffalo eats monk Guishan and the monk Guishan feeds the water buffalo.

[10:42]

Is my measurement complete or not? Now you're looking at me like I know what this means. So... What I take this to mean is that there's an equality to all things. The reality of the situation is that there's an equality to all things and that when we put a name on something and believe it to be true, we place it above or below other things that we've named.

[11:52]

I take it to mean that when a single grain is taken away, another grain is added. Or that there is no increase or decrease. So there you have it. Here's the great meaning of Buddhism, all in like 15 minutes. You might have come to a Zen place to learn something about Zen.

[13:10]

they might have said, yeah, go to the talk tonight because the teacher will really illuminate something for you. Or maybe it's a good idea to do zazen instruction and sit some zazen, sit some meditation. Maybe that will reveal the great meaning of Buddhism to us. So when we Siddhasan, maybe we were given the instruction to follow our breath. So we apply our attention to the breath.

[14:17]

And then we try and sustain our attention on the breath two different things happening there. There's an application of mind. And then there's the sustaining of mind. So we might do this and we might say, okay, this is going to reveal the great meaning of Buddhism to me, so I'm going to do this. And maybe we become somewhat absorbed, you know, in breath. Maybe we come to a realization that the breath is not separate from me. Or maybe that the breath is my own mind. Maybe we have that realization. So we realize that maybe we're meditating on mind.

[15:20]

We've been meditating on mind all along. And then pretty soon, We forget that we're meditating on mind. We've totally forgotten that we're meditating on breath, but now we've forgotten that we're meditating on mind. And we notice something else happening. I don't know, maybe this doesn't happen to you, but I think it has. We notice something coming in, some notions or some thoughts, some ideas. and we kind of grab hold of them and follow them. We start thinking something like, I've got to give a talk tonight. What am I going to talk about? I don't know. I have no idea what I'm going to talk about tonight. I'm going to talk about the great meaning of Buddhism. That'll be really good.

[16:21]

It's going to be a good time. And then, you know, it could go on and on. You know, I could be thinking about something in the future. I could be thinking about something in the past. Oftentimes when we, you know, everybody in the zendo sits pretty much, I mean, everybody sits facing the wall except the tanto and the abiding teacher and an abbot or two if they're here or three if they're here and myself. And So we get to kind of watch what's going on. My imputation, and I have a little bit of experience as well, embodied experience, is that when I'm thinking about the past, my posture kind of crumples a little bit, and I kind of sink. And when I'm thinking about the future, I'm kind of like this. I'm kind of a little bit forward. You know? traditionally, we used to do it here too, but we don't do it anymore, there was somebody whose job it was to be aware of your posture, and they'd come over and they'd hit you with a stick.

[17:51]

The stick is right behind the altar. I'm not joking. We don't do that anymore here. But it's not as a punishment, but as a kind of wake-up. So it's very interesting, you know, this notion of concentration, you know, to me. It's interesting to me. It might not be to you. But it's... This application of mind and this sustained attention of mind on an object of our awareness. Applying the mind onto something and then sustaining it on something. This is very difficult to do. And it takes practice. So it's like kind of they're like muscles. And we need to practice. We need to practice that.

[18:54]

in order to maintain a concentrated mind. If that's what we want to do. It might not be what you want to do. What happens when you become really concentrated is those notions or those thoughts don't don't come in so easily. These notions or these thoughts, they're called, in Sanskrit, they're called asharava, or outflows. Sometimes they're translated as, it's translated as leaking, or oozing, or perspiring.

[19:56]

Sometimes it's translated as intoxicants. Anyways, the more concentrated you become, the harder it is for them to enter in. And in some schools of Buddhism, and maybe you learned about this a little bit this afternoon, those of you who took Eric's class, some schools of Buddhism, they really take this very far. And they develop a diamond-like concentration. So much so that only wholesome qualities of mind can arise in that state. You can't have any defiled states of mind arise because that concentration is so strong. And maybe this sounds pretty good to you. Maybe this sounds really good not to have any defiled states of mind. That's not really what we're doing here.

[21:08]

Sounds really good. I'm up for it. But it's not really the kind of meditation we do here. Some of you may be doing it. Actually, that may not be totally true. I have an idea, though, about the kind of meditation that we do here that may or may not be true on account of, I really don't know what you're doing when you're sitting. It's a funny thing about Zen, is that we don't actually want to get rid of our defilements. We don't actually want to get rid of our problems. Can you believe it? So, yeah, it's kind of disappointing.

[23:19]

Maybe we thought that we were coming here to get rid of our suffering. That hasn't been my experience. My experience has been that the style of meditation that we do here is an all-inclusive style. So it holds it all. Not only does it hold it all, but it doesn't begin or end. So it's not like... I mean, we do come in here, you know, we come in here pretty early and we sit zazen.

[24:26]

We name it, we say, okay, this is what we're doing. We're coming in and we're sitting down and we're doing this meditation. This meditation, it looks kind of like just sitting, actually. It looks kind of like just sitting. It looks kind of like including everything. Now, this doesn't mean that we get to follow our fantasies. That doesn't mean that. But we grasp at nothing. Grasp at nothing and reject nothing. Can you do that? It means that we don't try and be anything. We don't try to become anything.

[25:30]

We don't try and be a meditator. Just let it be. So, I went to this, a number of years ago, I went to this retreat at Berry Institute outside of Boston. And it was a study retreat, and we were studying this particular aspect of Buddhist studies. And at the end of the day, the teacher would always say, OK, go and practice. you know, go and practice these things, or something like that. And it always, it kind of was like, it couldn't quite understand. You know, but after a couple days, it clicked in that actually what he meant was, go sit and get rid of your defilements.

[26:47]

Go and practice getting rid of your defilements here. Whereas coming from the Zen situation, where practice happens day and night, there's no event that actually is more or less practice than another. It struck me. So, When we meet someone, when we stand in front of someone, we're not trying to get rid of our defilements. We're not trying to get rid of their defilements. When we stand in front of someone,

[27:52]

Someone might come up to me and say, Graham, you're a bad person. Or something. They might say, when you get angry, I'm really scared. Or when you do this, it's like this. You know. And... trying to get rid of the defilements, part of me gets defensive and gets angry at them. The part of me that doesn't want that to be true, the part of me that doesn't want to include that, that part of me gets upset at their being upset at me. So if we practice in such a way that we are trying to get rid of our defilements, we're not going to like it so much when someone points out some of our defilements, some of our problems.

[29:05]

But if we're not actually trying to get rid of our problems, then it's not really a problem that they're bringing up our problems. I think this is a very important point. We should be very nice to people who bring up to our attention the difficulties that they're having with us. This is very important. We want to include it. We want to be an expression of the truth of Lu Ling Rice. We want to... We want to live in harmony with others in our environment

[30:19]

That includes all the problems. 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 SSCC.org and click giving.

[30:51]

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