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. Thank you, everyone. Can you hear me okay in the mic? Sounds good. former Tanto Ana for inviting me, our current Tanto Tova for hosting me, and thank you to Paul Haller, always, for being my teacher and guide. I've been investigating things in our liturgy that really pop out for me.

[01:00]

And lately, it has been the two truths. And there are different ways that I explore this. One is conceptual, and I enjoy that. I like the history of Buddhism and how different... ways of practicing that have actual names and have explored the two truths. And sometimes when people hand to me, as books do, as people do, as teachings do, the two truths in a conceptual way, it feels like a puzzle. Just like one of those puzzles that you get as a child that are all these pieces of metal that are all kind of tangled up.

[02:05]

And, you know, some gesture eventually undoes them all. And that the koans are like this too. You know, one is Mu and the other is too. And they kind of function like that sometimes. But what I'm going to be talking about today is different. It feels very different. I've become increasingly interested in how what we refer to as the two truths is a contribution to our understanding of the varied dimensions of human feeling. And the two truths are a very significant way of understanding the the entire range of human feeling. I'm including emotional life in this understanding of feeling and emotional life that has its dimensions in relationship.

[03:10]

You all know by now that I'm quite interested in Dogen, and so I'm about to refer to Dogen, but only in this one instance because I find that it is rare in Dogen. So I'll start with this quote. with some background being that often Dogen refers to sentient and insentient being. And what I see now in these words is a way of understanding what is meant by what we refer to as the relative and the absolute, not so much in philosophical terms, but as a way of describing what an emotionally grounded life in community feels like. It wouldn't read that way unless it were an experience, as it reads to me now, sentient and insentient. And so here's the quote that interests me. Dogen is describing chanting the robe verse in the morning.

[04:20]

And he writes... This was the first time I had seen the Oquesa held up in this way and I rejoiced, tears wetting the collar of my robe. In my joy, I also felt sorry that there had been no master to teach this to me and no good friend to recommend it. What's rare is to see in Dogen's words, such a powerful expression of emotion such that his collar is drenched by his own tears. I can't recall any other place where I've read that in Dogen's writing. I see it as how

[05:22]

sentient feeling becomes a true or wholesome religious feeling. There's a way in which what is sentient becomes true, wholesome religious feeling. And many of us here have expressed this very feeling ourselves, one in which joy and sorrow are felt without boundary between them. In this Same passage, Dogen also continues to say, to see or hear one line of the verse of the Okesa is not limited to seeing and hearing it as if we were trees and rocks, but pervades the nine realms of sentient beings. What he says here is that the verse of the Okesa includes and emotional life.

[06:23]

This is how I'm reading it. The robe is not simply the expression of our stillness in an all-pervading absolute realm. It permeates through emotional feeling as those feelings would occur in all the nine states of China. What truth is there in emotion and how does that truth count is what I find myself exploring. Suzuki Roshi writes on emotions, it's easy to destroy intellectual understanding. You can just hand a child a puzzle. But to deal with emotional difficulty is like splitting a lotus in two. Long strings will follow and you cannot get rid of them. The strings remain. It's important to speak of those emotions that are unwholesome because we live with them.

[07:34]

In psychoanalysis, they speak of bad feeling, not as feelings that have immoral weight. It's not a judgment that calls them bad in that sense, but feelings that come from emotional pain. I feel bad. And an emotional pain that prevents one from living a joyful life. From generations of analytical work, there are three big ones recognizable as quite prevalent in our social world, and these are disappointment, shame, and envy. It's helpful in understanding the ways that we inter-are as suffering beings to see what therapists see in working with bad feelings. But first I'd like to mention that I've chosen psychotherapy because it speaks to me. I definitely encourage people to have a look at Joan Halifax's Standing at the Edge, which is an excellent way of understanding how virtues, such as altruism, empathy, and respect, can slide into suffering.

[08:51]

But I find the psychoanalytic turn personally revealing. And so here's how Roy Schaefer describes them in his book titled Bad Feelings. And these are, as I'm reading to you, kind of like caricatures, but I think caricatures that are recognizable that you may even identify with in bits and pieces or in a great big chunk of So for disappointment, for disappointment, there's a tendency to strong and fixed disappointment. It's known to be cultivated in one who's been given a strong diet of humiliation intended to shatter self-confidence. Someone with fixed disappointment becomes very armored and the therapeutic relationship is very fragile.

[09:55]

such that the person with fixed disappointment effectively becomes the disappointment. And then shame. This is spelt internally and externally through ostracism, experienced as a form of death. Shit as a profound humiliation. For example, calling someone an asshole is a casual and frequent relative of more explicit references, and losing face through disregard or defacement, causing a lack of composure that leads to hyper alertness. So there's a profound humiliation. There is... a profound feeling of being outcast.

[10:58]

And there is a hyper alertness that are cultivated through shame. Envy. Envy produces a spoiling attack against the goodness of others that disrupts relatedness. It's the opposite of gratitude, and in psychoanalysis, envy is understood to be a pervasive and existential given. The active projection here is to try the spoil of goodness, spoil the goodness of others, including those who wish to help. In other words, biting the hand that feeds you. In a therapeutic setting, there might be idealizations that mask envy and the therapist might in turn become defensively humble so that they aren't tempted by their own latent grandiosity.

[12:02]

So in psychoanalysis, in the world of the therapeutic understanding of psychoanalysis, these are the three bad feelings that are major hindrances toward living joyful life. And what's helpful in understanding them through the learning of the psychoanalytic tradition and its various conversations is that it's not located in any one person. It's generated dynamically with many causes and conditions that are moving among people in relationship. And it's curious that even therapeutic presence, which is something that we value so much in our tradition, can cause pain in someone who's really suffering from any of these three

[13:17]

major hindrances. Presence can be seen as controlling, invasive, voyeuristic, manipulative, punitive, or a critical form of surveillance that leaves no place to hide. Presence can not only be received in these ways, it can be used in these ways, consciously or not. people do learn to have an overbearing presence with harmful known effect. And this is the double-edged sword of the charismatic person that we speak of in spiritual traditions. So we need to be able to speak of these things with an intimate awareness of what they are for ourselves and for others. The reference to psychoanalysis that I'm making is provisional, something we would call provisional, something that comes from our historical moment as a study of human behavior that makes sense to us.

[14:28]

In psychoanalysis, there is only ever an imperfect goodness in anyone. Even in a mature and integrated life, there can be an ambivalence that we can never overcome completely. And I would say that this is how most of us are, much if not most of the time, even right now. It's a significant aspect of our sentient beingness. One of the things that I think Suzuki Roshi means by not knowing mind, and is that so, is that when ambivalence can be held without anxiety, it can exist for us without being an existential problem. As he says, it's only when we are selfish that we have problems. So what are the two truths then? Like psychoanalysis, these are provisional terms, truths for us that we use in the Buddhist tradition to understand the dynamics of a realized life, empty as emptiness can be.

[15:42]

They can only really come alive for us in the gritty world that we live in, and oh, how gritty it can be. The teachings that are in our chant books are devotionally offered as an expression of sangha, and they are teachings that have been handed down to us in support of our life together on this earth. In particular, the two truths are a way of describing what liberation feels like so that we can better understand our hindrances in realizing the truth of what is beyond them. I'm referring here to the Sandakai, or what we translate as the harmony of difference and equality in our sutra book. If any of you have visited another Zen Center, you've seen how different the language can be for any chant that has been translated into English. What has now become the standard translation is what we chant today.

[16:49]

It is a choice that was made 25 years ago, and I'm in agreement with it. I think it's a good choice, but I do want to bring forward a translation arranged with Shinryu Suzuki's words that, as I understand it, was once chanted here in this temple. In the context of publishing Suzuki Roshi's lectures on the Sandokai, Mel Weitzman and Michael Wenger also published a translation of the Sandokai that was a composite of his translations in consultation with him. And of note is that Suzuki's words were presented to students who are practicing together in community. In this, and by necessity, they allow a human feeling that other translations do not, a human feeling that is also evident in his commentaries, which are commentaries on how the two truths are lived among community.

[17:56]

He doesn't go so far as to examine bad feelings per se, but he does speak to a relationship in some very important and relevant ways. It begins with the mind of the great sage of India was handed down closely. It's not intimately transmitted, esoterically transmitted, intimately communicated, but handed down closely. which for me has a very different somatic quality, warm hand to warm hand. And I'm just going to read a few lines from Suzuki Roshi's translation so that you can have a feel for the difference between his words as something

[18:58]

direct and for people's everyday practice in the room. So for example, I find very simple and straightforward, recognizing truth is not always enlightenment. In other translations, It might be something like, instead of recognizing true union with principle, something very conceptual. And sometimes when I'm chanting translations that are very conceptual like that, I care deeply about the words, but there's a sense that I'm also kind of chanting along. without really, you know, feeling them as an embodiment possible in my everyday life.

[20:09]

So when he says recognizing truth is not always enlightenment, I just want to repeat Dogen's words earlier. To see or hear one line of the verse of the Kesa is not limited to seeing and hearing it as if we were trees and rocks, but pervades the realms of sentient beings. We have this stone Buddha up here, which is such a beautiful expression to me of how in the settled deepness of zazen, were saturated through and through, that everything, all beings, is included in that saturation of a kind of unified, direct experience, inclusive and inexhaustible.

[21:22]

And that recognizing this is not always enlightenment is important to say. As much as we venerate stone Buddha, the relative world is so varied that what comes to light in that world... may not always feel like stone Buddha. And that enlightenment can handle that. So here's something else that Suzuki Roshi says that is so very different than what we chant. The words we use are different, good and bad. respectful and mean. But through these words, we should understand the absolute being or source of the teaching.

[22:33]

There's such an emotional tone here when he says, good and bad, respectful and mean. He's talking to people, people who are relating to each other every day in a whole variety of ways. that have an impact. In his commentary, Suzuki Roshi explains that the precepts are like the front and back foot in walking. There's no known to teach unless it's truly for another. In this sense, do not kill is something that can't be broken. And in that sense, it's not really a living precept within the two truths. It's a dead precept. He explains that a living precept is forgive me.

[23:41]

And most important here is that he asks us to trust our feeling to guide us. If you feel that you've broken the precepts, you have to accept that feeling, he says. It's only from this feeling that authentic forgiveness could even be possible, is the sense of it. And it's how the precepts become alive for us, not individually, but in community. There are other things, too. Within brightness, there is actually utter darkness, but you should not meet someone just with darkness. He's talking about meeting each other. It's not abstract. In other words, he says, don't meet your friend with your eyes shut. And again, within darkness there is brightness, but you should not see others only with the eye of brightness.

[24:50]

Here he explains, if you create an enemy of someone, you're killing Buddha nature for both yourself and for them. These aren't his words. I'm just expressing the main point of it in my own. Some of you have been in an argument that ends in laughter because each one of you suddenly realizes how ridiculous that argument is. That you've begun to argue for argument's sake. And I've had such a moment where we both catch each other doing that and just begin to laugh. And it comes from closeness. That moment. But Suzuki Roshi says that living in community, any moment of anger is coming from that closeness. Whether you can have this kind of fun moment or not, the closeness remains.

[25:59]

And harm is lessened by realizing that. So in the Suzuki Roshi translation, which... has the title, Oneness of One and Many. It concludes, If you stick to the idea of good or bad, you will be separated from the way by high mountains or big rivers. Seekers of the truth, do not spend your time in vain. For me, it was the Sandakaya that converted me into the Buddhist faith. This was a long time ago and I was new. The Zazan was great, but I couldn't call it my religion without being able to truly say all of the words for it to be a truth for me. And it wasn't until I chanted with others the identity of the relative and the absolute that I understood something

[27:13]

deeply revealing, affirming, and open as a way that I could call my religion. And the strength of Suzuki Roshi's teaching as well as the patience and guidance of my own teacher and all of you has revealed this to me in more ways than I can count. So I'd like to end by saying that if I've ever expressed confusion or caused harm from disappointment, shame, or envy, please forgive me. Like two friends in a fight, it could be humorous, but for any longstanding effects that these... bad feelings could have living in a community life.

[28:16]

I truly hope that what I say is helpful and that all the strings of broken lotuses will leave lighter traces behind them. It's such a small offering, but it is an offering for the oneness of one and many. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. 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.

[29:01]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.51