This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So, you know, I really like that chant. It's great. I was just thinking, though, that the thing we're going to talk about tonight, that we're going to talk about tonight, reveals that it's only provisionally true, actually. In truth, we meet unsurpassed, penetrating, and perfect dharma every moment. And the only question is whether we take it in or not. So, without further ado, This is, I think it's Muankan Case 5, and it's this Tang Dynasty, I think, 9th century.

[01:18]

A Chinese teacher named Xiangyan once was teaching the assembly, and he says, you know... It's like, and just imagine this, you're hanging in a tree with a branch in your mouth like this, right? And you have no other support, and you're not standing on anything, you can't grab any branches, other branches of the tree. And somebody comes up to you, or underneath presumably, and says, oh, I got a question, why did, why did, why did Bodhidharma come from the West? And he says, you're really kind of in a pickle. If you don't answer, then you fail completely to, you know, if you fail your vow to meet people and bring forth the Dharma, right?

[02:27]

if you do answer, you immediately fall to your death, right? And that's the whole koan, right? There's no, some monk got up and said, what are you talking about? And so on, there's none of that. It's just, that's the whole story, right? So, hmm. So Sheng Yan was kind of an interesting case, right? and one that perhaps some people in here like me can relate to. He studied first with Bai Zhang and then with Kui Zhang. And when he was studying with Bai Zhang, he took a lot of notes at Dharma talks and read a lot and memorized everything and so on and so forth. I'm not totally clear on why he left Bajang's place.

[03:28]

But in any case, he shows up and he's practicing at Kui-shan's place and one day Kui-shan takes him aside and he says, you know, I see you're really studious, right? And that's a good thing. There's nothing wrong with being studious. But I just want to let you know that that's not really the thing, right? It's not the most important thing. And actually... you know, it seems like you might be a little trapped by it. So, how about this? Why don't you let me, why don't you tell me, how do you respond to the question, what's the, what's your original face before the birth of your parents? And, Xiangyan couldn't answer at all. And so he goes back to his room and he pulls out all his notes and he starts poking around and you know, reads a bunch of stuff, and he still can't find anything, and he's totally baffled by it.

[04:29]

And so he goes back to, he goes back to Koishan the next day, and he goes, you know, I just, nothing in my, you know, vast library of notes and sutras really comes close to getting a hold of this, and I don't, I can't, I can't come up with anything. So can you please tell me? And Kui Shan says something really great. He goes, you know, I don't really have a whole lot to say. And in any case, if I explained it to you, you'd curse me later. And at this point, Chang'an was very unhappy. He felt like he'd failed and that his practice was bad and so on. And so he goes... home to his room in another one of these famous moments. He burns all his notes, right?

[05:30]

Other people also burned all their notes in the course of the history of Zen, but this one, he burned them. The original note burner was, I think, Dershon, right? And Dershon kind of burned them after he realized that they were useless, right? The thing that's great about Xiangyan is that he burned them And so doing... He abandoned his kind of last support. He had nothing to hold on to and he still had no clue how to respond to his teacher's question. So that's pretty brave. And so he went back and talked with them and they decided that what he would do... There was an old hermitage that had belonged to... a teacher whose name I think was Nanyang, and it had kind of fallen into disrepair, and it wasn't doing very well, and so Kweishan said, well, what about this?

[06:34]

What if you go and essentially act as the maintainer of the memorial that's now at the site of that hermitage? So he essentially set up another little grass hut just like the one that Nanyang used to live in, and he would come out in the morning, sweep the grounds and make sure that everything was well taken care of and so on. One day when he was sweeping the grounds, the story goes, he was plying his presumably bamboo broom and he picks up a little pebble and it goes flying through the air and it hits a stalk of bamboo and it kind of goes and he woke up He was so startled by the sound and so sort of undone by that moment that he saw where he'd been missing it and he saw what had actually been there supporting him all along.

[07:46]

He just didn't know it. And so he goes and he puts on and he lights up some incense and he bows in the direction of Kweishan, where his teacher lived, and he said something like this. He says, your kindness is even greater than that of my parents. If you'd explained it to me, this would never have happened. And then he went back and he studied with and lived at Kweishan and eventually became a famous teacher in his own right. And at some point later he says this thing. He says, it's like you're hanging a tree from your teeth and somebody asks you, hey, why did Bodhidharma come from the West?

[08:49]

So pretty exacting. Like all the really kind of good Zen stories, it has a bunch of different aspects. There's a kind of conceptual and metaphorical aspect. And in some, when you read the commentaries on the koan literature, some people emphasize the conceptual and metaphorical aspects. So Aitken Roshi, for example, in his commentary on this koan, really kind of digs into the conceptual and metaphorical aspects of the koan. So he says something about it's one of a sort of collection of metaphors in the literature about the nature of human life, right?

[09:57]

Yeah, so, we're all like that, right? We're hanging over this, it's even worse than falling out of a tree, we're hanging over this bottomless abyss, right? And if we fail to act and respond, then we fail at life completely. I don't even know what that means, actually. And if we respond, then we fall eventually all the way to the bottom and we're dead. The only thing that's misleading about that as a metaphor is it implies that you can somehow hold on with your teeth, which is total nonsense. There's nothing to hold on to. But anyway, and then it's also, it's a great metaphor for exploring this notion of the difficulty of talking about the Dharma in words, right?

[11:09]

He said, talking about the Dharma in words. You know, if you And by talking, I mean even talking to yourself about it, even thinking about it, in terms of words and concepts. Everyone, eventually, when they start sitting and they start digging into it, they sit as a sheen, and these significant moments arise. Something happens, something unexpected. deeply informative on a level that really goes beyond words and concepts. And almost immediately what happens is the thought comes up, whoa, look at that, or gee, I wonder what that was, or am I enlightened now, or something like that.

[12:13]

It's almost inevitable, and it's because we can't help ourselves. We're the conceptualizing beings, right? We're who we are, you know, bottom to top, and we're built that way for a lot of good reasons, right? But the minute you open your mouth to speak out loud or even open your sub-vocal, you know, cognitive, narrative, facility to tell yourself a little story about what just happened, you kind of fall into the secondary. You fall into the domain of concepts and everyday thinking. It's okay. Again, that's how we are. It's a complicated proposition. How to meet that.

[13:14]

How to And my favorite story about it, which I've undoubtedly told before, and so everyone will have heard it, but it goes like this. So I know someone who was at Tassajara and walking by the garden, and she looked at the flowers in the garden, and they were so beautiful. They just... kind of reached out and pierced her heart. And she was so full of kind of this grateful appreciation that she started to cry. And then immediately the thought arose, and she was moved to tears. And then the thought arose, what a jerk you are.

[14:16]

commenting on your own experience in this way. So she went from deep, inexpressible gratitude to kind of self-punishing commentary within, what, two or three seconds or something like that? That was about all that took, right? You fall into the secondary. You lose that. You can't grasp, even with your teeth, that moment, and instead, you have to just do the next thing, right? Even if it's, you know, beat yourself up for loving the flowers. And then, some... commentators on this material are not so into the whole metaphorical and conceptual aspect.

[15:30]

This story has an experiential aspect as well. The experiential aspect of it is pretty clear. It essentially brings up an impossible situation. There's no right answer to this thing. You can't say, well, let's see, what if you let go and then flailed around and tried to grab a branch? No, it doesn't work that way. There's no real way out of it. It's impossible, just like zazen is impossible. Well, I mean, so... The nice thing about this is that the metaphorical and the experiential feedback on each other, which is how you'd expect it to be, particularly if you have somebody who's kind of a poet telling the story in the first place. Yes, absolutely. Life in that sense is impossible.

[16:31]

Using language in the context of the Dharma is impossible. It's not the... We don't do it, and it's not that it's not helpful. It's just essentially impossible. But zazen especially, right? So you sit down and you bring to the experience all of the aspirations for practice that you can muster, right? And then you're supposed to sit without aspiration. How does that work exactly? Is that even possible or is it episodically possible? How do you do that?

[17:36]

The classic one is the breath. how is it possible to become aware of the breath and never once in an entire hour and 15 minutes of sitting stray into fiddling with it even just a little bit, right? Nobody does that. We're all sitting there just watching the breath go in and out at the rate that it somehow magically picks, right? Impossible. And then it goes on from there, right? So the precepts, right? We take the precepts. Great, right? Pretty much the whole, you know, all the literature in Zen about the precepts and even the ceremony itself hints around that actually the precepts are kind of impossible.

[18:42]

Yeah, it's good to have them. It's good to take them. It's good to set them up as a vow, right? And then to watch how that reveals coming and going and what you could conceivably call failure and success, right? And then as if that weren't bad enough, think about the bodhisattva vow, right? So that's the real thing, right? There are infinitely many beings, and I'm going to save all of them. Every moment and every... cubic millimeter of space is a Dharma gate.

[19:49]

I'm going to enter all of them. It'll be great. Delusions are inexhaustible and I'm going to end them completely. And the Buddhist way is surpassable, fundamentally unobtainable, and I'm going to embody it personally. No. So, from an experiential point of view, this story, this statement, this really kind of, in some ways, comedic setup, right?

[20:52]

It's almost like it's something you'd find in a Three Stooges cartoon, or a movie, right? I don't know how you'd set it up, but it seems like they'd do a good job, right? And then they'd say, well, anyway. It's pointing to all of that impossibility, right? That's what practice is like, right? That's what we're doing when we sit down day after day to Siddhasana. That's what we take on when we take the precepts. And... in some way, the way practice is structured, particularly, I think, kohan practice, but pretty much all practice is structured, is that it presents this impossibility, this difficulty, and then uses that to dissolve something about the self that stands away in the way of realization.

[22:13]

of awakening, of living in a way that doesn't consider impossible. And, you know, look at Xiangyan, right? So he was, you know, presumably his initial approach to practice was, okay, so if I learn all this stuff and I really know it, then that's going to, fix my life, right? No, that didn't work. And Kweishan compassionately broke it to him that that was going to work and thereby, you know, took away his last support, right? So then he's out there just sweeping the ground in the presence of the impossible and something happens that undoes him, right? That undoes his... the conceptual framework that he was inhabiting and that was standing in the way.

[23:20]

The fascinating thing about that is, you know, was there anything special about that particular rock and that particular stalk of bamboo, right? you know, was the sound that it made particularly loud, soft, you know, poignant, resonant, you know, funny, who knows, right? But, I mean, the basic answer is no, right? There's nothing special about Chang'an's broom and the rock and the bamboo. Every moment, and this is what this is why the chant that we say at the beginning of the lecture is sort of a little funny. Every moment, the world is presenting this vast, infinite array of events, any one of which has the quality of

[24:42]

Xiang Yen's rock and bamboo, right? My knee hurts. There's cars outside in the street. The clock just rang the quarter hour, three-quarter hour. The only thing that stands in the way of being undone by every single one of them is our our ceaseless, unstinting effort not to be undone. We're constantly making that effort to take in past experience, take in present experience, craft out of them a narrative and a self-concept and construct that kind of looks okay, and then, you know, take that and push it forward in the next moment, right?

[25:50]

So much work. And it requires so much energy and attention and kind of repetition, right? That it's the... It's that activity and just the noise that comes along with it. How much noise are we constantly making in our minds that somehow stands in the way of hearing a rock striking the bamboo? A lot, right? And so... we have to practice in this way that butts up against the impossible and trains both gradually and in cases like Shang Yan, suddenly a mind that can respond to the world differently.

[27:01]

It doesn't have to be too different, just subtly differently. That can... meet the world without pre-judgment or pre-conditions that can be both curious and compassionate about what's happening and can step right into the middle of present experience in a way that allows it to inform us and everything else. And just as a supporting point, why did Bodhidharma come from the West? It was exactly to point that out and to demonstrate for people who would listen a mind that allows that to work.

[28:07]

the mind of don't know, the mind of intimacy with the present moment, of boundless compassion and skillful unceasing action. So here's a question. Does anybody have any questions? Well, Zachary. Also, this guy over here laid on me...

[29:21]

22 years ago, another name, Anshi Daigi, which as I understand it means something like peaceful warrior, great integrity. That's one of those things that slowly works to undo the self. It will take me the rest of my life to figure out how that works. How it works to be named that. Just having it as a as a a place to refer to or a place to occasionally stand on has been tremendously helpful.

[30:29]

Anyone else? Well, what would I do?

[31:44]

Of course, right? That's what the impossible asks of you is to let go, right? That's what running up against the impossibility of sitting Sashin asks is just to let go. just to let go of the things, the propositions that are making it impossible. In terms of koans, I don't think you need to do anything different. Of course people, no matter how many times Yuan Wu or somebody says, you shouldn't jump to to intellectual interpretations, meaning is not in the words. Everyone does it, right?

[32:46]

It's just, it's how we're built and it's okay, right? So the thing to do, it's like, it's like learning to speak a foreign language, right? When you go to speak, your initial response is, I don't know how to say this thing I'm saying. When you listen, your first response is, I don't know what they're saying to me, right? And the trick is to wait that out and just be with that reaction and your habitual response to the point, past the point where something else starts to take shape. And even if you make your habitual response, you can still, even if you have that thought, even if you say that thing, something still can take shape.

[33:54]

It doesn't even have to take shape today. It can take shape in a week. So absolutely. There's no reason to do anything different. Allow yourself to look at it both from the point of view of the conceptual, because that's how we are, and the experiential, right? What does it feel like to be in this moment and grappling with this thing which either I understand or I don't, right? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, so here's what I'd say, right?

[35:37]

So yes and yes, right? But when you, but I think probably everyone in here who's taken the precepts will agree that in the process of, you know, sowing, your robe, so this thing took me two and a half years, that's a long process, right? And going through the ceremony, something quite remarkable and unexpected moves into the center of your life, right? It has been my experience, right? the sort of old saying that comes most, the closest is something like somewhere it says, and I'm blocking on where it is, but it says the power of Buddha's vow reveals coming and going.

[36:54]

So just to take that on and to and to vow to embody it reveals something crucial and valuable about what it's like to be not just a human, but to be you, right? And about your particular intimately detailed version of the human condition, right? And with that comes up support for living with it, right? Something like that. Let's see, what time is it? I think we have time for one more question. Does anybody have another question? Okay. In order to really make a mess of things, I decided to write a poem about this.

[37:59]

Then it goes like this. It says, but wait, wasn't I already falling just a moment ago? Oh, yes, I remember. And the moment before that, too. Wow, this tree really smells like cinnamon. Bodhidharma, what was that old guy doing anyway? Not sure why, but I feel like singing. How about this? Amazing grace, how sweet. The sound. Anyway. Thank you. 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, please visit sfcc.org. and click giving.

[39:00]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[39:03]

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