Do I have to do anything? Is it not? Can you hear me? The evening talk takes place right during Zazam time, so my understanding is that we'll end the talk about 920. Is that true? Yes. So good evening, everyone.

[01:01]

Thank you for coming. Even though it's cooler outside, it's warmer in the Zento, and we can all be in the steam bath together. I asked a couple of people what they would like me to talk about this evening, and one person said, well, it's the middle of the summer, or a little bit after the middle, and it's getting really hard for the students. How about talking about that and talking about joy? And somebody else I asked wanted me to talk about the heat. And a couple other people couldn't say what they wanted me to talk about. So right now I'm co-leading with Patricia Sullivan, Zen and Yoga Workshop. Where are you, Patricia?

[02:02]

and we've been turning and studying and looking at the teachings of emptiness, so the teachings of Prajnaparamita, and we took off from an old Buddha said, the entire universe is the true human body. The entire universe is the true human body. And the entire universe is the gate of liberation. The entire universe is the eye of Vajrochana. Vajrochana is the personification of the truth body of the Buddha. And the entire universe is the

[03:03]

dharma body of the self so in terming those teachings without trying to necessarily get a hold of what it is but allow those teachings to enter and enter us and And flowing from that, that these sayings have brought us to the Heart Sutra, the teachings of the... talking about the self. So the whole, the entire universe is the true human body and the Heart Sutra looks at what we usually think of as our human body and gives us the teaching, the wisdom teachings, the wisdom that's gone beyond teachings about the true human body.

[04:12]

So, in preparing for these talks during the day, I came upon a lecture by Suzuki Roshi that I'd never seen before. And in this lecture he says basically the true teaching of Zen and the purpose of Buddhism and the purpose of Zen is, and then he just lays it out, it's seeing or accepting things as it is and raising them up, which is Suzuki Roshi's way of saying in English, cultivating or caring for because the examples he uses after that is caring for a garden, planting seeds, and then even before the seeds come up, you watch and you water and you hoe and you cultivate and you stay very close and very attuned if you're going to have a garden. So these two things together, accepting or seeing things

[05:26]

things as it is, and this is not a grammatical error, this is what he meant to say, things as it is, and then we take good care of them, or we raise them up, is what he said. Like you raise a child. And in taking good care of things, everything that we see and all the objects of the mind. We have to attune ourselves. We have to be able to have relationships with beings and objects and talk with them and know what they need, just like you have to know what the garden needs. It looks like it doesn't need so much water today because the causes and conditions are such that... It's foggy or whatever, not down here, but... So we have to attune ourselves rather than thinking, well, I know what it is and I'm going to proceed in a certain way based on holding to some fixed idea, but we have to watch and listen.

[06:41]

And in some ways what gets in the way of that, watching and listening, is our own... strong ideas about the way things are. And our own suffering, our own greed, hate and delusion makes it difficult to see the way things are, the way things as it is, accepting things as it is. So someone mentioned to me that they felt that they should be or they wanted to practice being humble, humble. And I think, you know, in looking at the word humble, it comes from the word, you know, it comes from humus, the root of that. The meaning of humus is earth, ground, soil. And in other languages, the same word means soil and in

[07:54]

Latin, this humulus means low or lowly, but in the sense of down to earth, down to the ground, rooted, earthy. And also this humus and the cluster of words around humble are human and humane and homage. When we pay homage, what do we do? Well, one way of expressing that is plunging into a bow and getting our head down, down on the earth. This is expressing homage. And it's not humiliation, some kind of humiliation. It's expressing the truth of our life. which is not separated from everything.

[09:01]

So to express that, sometimes we just plunge into the bow or we get our head... we want to. The first bow that I ever made or enacted was before I'd been introduced to Buddhism. I was... co-captain of the cheerleading squad in high school. And it was homecoming in Minnesota. And the homecoming queen and the rest of the royalty was going around the football field in the convertible cars with their shoulders, you know, strapless outfits on, the women. And as they drove by the cheerleading squad, I said, let's bow to the royalty, right? The homecoming royalty. And so we all kind of, I guess the word at the time was kowtow, which probably is the Chinese for plunging into the bow, paying homage.

[10:07]

I don't know what kowtow means. Anyway, we went down into this bow, kind of fooling around. And down, when I got my head on the ground on the football field, I had this... incredible feeling of, yes, this is, I want to practice like this. Never having practiced before or known what Buddhism was or bowing. In fact, coming from a religion where you do not bow, where that was proscribed, somehow taking that posture, yogic posture of grounding head down was enormously powerful for me. And, you know, is Kaz Tanhashi-san here? Kaz. In the talk that Kaz gave the other night, I asked him about this term, ka no doko, which I'm very, very interested in, partially from this story, because this term, ka no doko, is translated as various ways I've seen it translated.

[11:20]

Responsive communion, a spiritual communion, resonance of awakening, let's see, a responsive communion between the person taking refuge or the practitioner and the preceptor or protector or the Buddha or something that resonates in the practice world, in the world of Dharma. and unbeknownst, without any idea, without any designs upon having any such experience, some resonating with, or some inter-connected feeling. And maybe many of you have felt that. This is not, this does not belong to any person. This interchange, this response,

[12:24]

I think many people experience, I think people experience it with Tassahara. They come into Tassahara. In fact, my son was saying he comes in through the gate and he can feel, this is a quote from Davy Weintraub, he can feel the peace of all the students who have been practicing for all these years. He isn't a practitioner, formal practitioner, and I would think that the guests who come through There's some resonance, right? Or maybe if it's your first time, you don't even know what it is, but or upon bowing or hearing a chant or hearing the Dhamma, hearing a teaching and just feeling met in some way. This is this resonance of awakening or from what I understand or what I'm studying, this response of communion. the entire universe is the gate of liberation. So Suzuki Roshi talks about Kano Doko in this lecture where he's commenting on something that was, it's a, it's shushogi, which is separate parts from all of Burwood's masterwork, the Zen master, 13th century Zen master,

[13:50]

He didn't write this piece, but in 1890, the Abbot of Aheji and the Abbot of Sojiji pulled, I guess, worked on this separate essay using different parts from Dogen to pull out what they felt was the essence of his teaching from the whole Shobo Genzo. And in that, Suzuki Roshi has a lecture on this Shushogi. And he says, calm means to respond to each other. And doko means true relationship. In terms of consciousness, it happens in this way to us. We feel some coherence or interrelationship or correspondence between Buddha and us.

[14:51]

But originally there is no difference between Buddha nature and human nature. So this is more than responsive communication or relationship. But it happens in this way. I think when he says this is more, I think it looks like it's talking about I'm over here and I'm responding to this. But the responding, just like two tuning forks, they're both... Their nature is the same, you know, and they respond to each other. So they're not really separate. I'm here responding to that. Because our nature is non-dual from awakened nature, whether we know it or not, we respond. So inquiry and response, and in Chinese cosmology, this... responsiveness between categories, different categories that seem disparate but are similar categories in these different ways of talking about the world.

[16:02]

So we have this in different poems that we chant, you know, when the wooden man begins to sing, the stone woman gets up dancing, this kano doko, this... inquiry and response. You ask and there's a response, some kind of response. So unless we're humble, grounded, our feet in the soil with our toes spread apart, which I'm really working on in yoga class, it's hard to ask for help, actually. We sometimes feel I don't need help. And there's, the word arrogance is very interesting. The word arrogance is, you know, I have it here somewhere. It's taking to ourselves that which doesn't really belong to ourself, is arrogance.

[17:08]

And in terms of the precepts, which Suzuki Roshi is, you know, bringing up, accepting and seeing things as it is and cultivating that and how do we cultivate and take care of and be responsive to one ways with our precept practice. So one of the precepts is not to take what is not given and arrogance is a kind of taking unto ourselves that which isn't, it isn't ours. sometimes when there's arrogance we won't ask for help when what we actually need is help. Someone recently was telling me about something that happened here and this happens, things happen in the zendo and in the temples where someone has an accident or some problem and

[18:12]

And there's a response. Someone was telling me that their son was at the baths in the evening in the outdoor plunge. And this son has a particular condition where he loses touch or loses consciousness. Epilepsy, I think... And the father, who's very attuned, has been working with this for, you know, the child's entire life, knew, could tell, it was in the evening, there were the only two there, and could tell that this was coming on. And this person, the father, just yelled out, Help! and out of the baths came a being, you know, immediately, probably with no clothes on, I don't even know, and rushed down, and it happened to be a nurse, happened to be, and helped the situation.

[19:22]

But this story, you know, the immediacy of just calling out help, calling for help, And how many times do we refrain from asking for what we need, calling out for help, because we have some idea that if I was a good Zen student I wouldn't need any help, or real adults don't ask for help, or I don't know, a whole maze of, or they'll think less of me if I do, or I don't know how to ask for help. So the Heart Sutra starts out with the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, Avalokiteshvara, or the one who looks down, or the, in Chinese, guanyin, or guanshiyin, or kanzeyon in Japanese, the one who hears sounds, or hears the sounds of the world, and responds.

[20:26]

That's the, first there's listening, though, there's great listening. And in the listing, the listing and the response are really non-dual. If you're listening, there's response. If you're truly listening. So, I'm going to check my time here. Where did that go? It's underneath. So the Heart Sutra is a joyful, you might not experience it as joyful, but a kind of celebration of enlightenment and Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of infinite compassion, which is the heart of wisdom, seeing things as it is, seeing

[21:33]

that all things are impermanent and without a separate abiding self and that's how they are and that is how everything is so things as it is and they are empty of own being empty of separate self and full of complete independence with everything Avalokiteshvara realized that upon looking at what we call the psychophysical stream that we mistakenly call I, which is narrowing it and at the same time giving it too much credence, and Avalokiteshvara was awakened and was saved from all suffering. So then the rest of the Heart Sutra

[22:35]

is this teaching of what Avalokiteshvara saw and accepted things as it is. And I think embedded in there is how to take care of our life. And when you come to the end of this Heart Sutra, there's just pure joy, a kind of exaltation of joy in the mantra at the end. A mantra is, you know, syllables that have meaning and we absorb ourselves in the meaning while we're chanting them. And in this mantra, at the end it says, and this was, there's no other wisdom gone beyond wisdom sutras and there's many, many sutras, a thousand line, 25,000, 8,000, lots of wisdom beyond wisdom teachings. This is the only one, according to Dr. Kansa, that has a mantra in it, where they give a mantra.

[23:40]

This mantra is for us as a helpful practice. So there's this mantra at the end, and the words of the mantra are gate, gate, paragate, parasam gate, bodhisvaha. And this... gate is gone, gone, gone, gone beyond, altogether beyond. And then this bodhi is awakening and it can be translated as, oh, what an awakening, oh, what an awakening. And one translation of svaha is all hail or hallelujah or, I don't know, yippee or something. And svaha is used for feminine, it's a, it's a, it's used in relation to, whoops, somebody's calling on me, to a feminine emanation of, of these energies of wisdom and compassion.

[24:48]

And prajnaparamita is, iconographically, is the feminine, takes feminine form. Other wisdom figures, like Manjushri on the altar, take masculine form. But prajnaparamita, this, Wisdom gone beyond wisdom is called the mother of the Buddhas, the mother of the awakened ones. Out of this realization, Buddhas are born. But not just this realization of emptiness or things as it is, but this is why it's Avalokiteshvara in the Heart Sutra, but the compassionate vow to help beings and to... live with beings and attune with beings and speak with beings and practice together. So Buddhas are born out of this wisdom and the heart of this wisdom is compassion.

[25:52]

And the two are really you can't pull them apart and have them be the teaching. So we've been in our Zen Yoga workshop, we've been practicing with this mantra actually and Patricia had offered to us a, when we chanted in the morning at the Heart Sutra, it's a very monotone like the rest of the chanting is pretty not much melody which is a kind of traditional kind of chanting but there's also in other actually in there are other Zen chantings that are very melodic like the full moon ceremony for example but this mantra has a melody similar to Pali

[27:04]

kind of Pali chanting. And when it's chanted this way, and I thought we could do it tonight, and Patricia agreed to teach us this mantra, it has an extra gate in there. So it's gate, gate, para gate, gate, parasam gate, bodhisvaha. So those of you who know that mantra, there'll be a little extra something there that will wake you up. So I thought we could learn it, and then there won't be any question and answer tonight, so we'll just end the talk with chanting this mantra, and then we'll close with our after-lecture mantra. Oh, one other thing. Just one other thing. I just wanted to say to Tanahashi-san how... grateful I am to you.

[28:06]

I realize as I was looking through my Moon on a Dew Drop, which is one of Tanashi-san's translations, it is so dog-eared and so written and little notes from years and things I've memorized and your devotion to Dogen and to translating. And I realize it's really your words with your collaborators. Dogen did not speak English, you know? So what I've memorized and learned and has met me is your relationship with Dogen coming through. So I just wanted to thank you so much. So, Patricia. Patricia and Will are going to do it together, okay? Thank you.

[29:10]

Thank you. Bodhisattva. Om Gathe, Gathe, Pala Gathe, Gathe, Pala Sam Gathe, Bodhisattva. Om Gathe, Gathe, Oh, what an awakening.

[30:23]

Oh, what an awakening. you very much.

[30:41]

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