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. Well, good evening. So I heard Ed's talk on Saturday. I was sort of I wanted to not kind of be a nuisance on the last day of Sashin, so I sort of, I came in my samoe and I sat down and then went and kind of scuttled up to the dining room and listened to his talk in the dining room. And I was sitting there, and it was a lovely talk. He talked about Mahakasyapa and the Buddha and the... the Buddha sitting in front of the assembly and twirling a flower and thereby transmitting the Dharma to Mahakashapa.

[01:03]

He placed it in this historical context of establishing the idea of face-to-face teacher-to-student or ancestor-to-ancestor transmission and so on and so forth. It was a great talk. And, of course, I was completely devastated because that's exactly what I was going to talk about. I was like, oh, my God, what am I going to do now? So I kind of moped around for a while. Then I decided I was going to give the same talk anyway. Because, you know, all this stuff bears repetition. And in any case... what could be better than to give the same talk that, you know, somebody else did such a great job with, right? So, anyway. So the real, the thing that strikes me about the story of Mahakashiva and the Buddha, right, is that it's presenting an underlying question, right?

[02:19]

What is it? Actually, it's a two-part question. It's a question. No, there are two questions. The two questions are, what does it mean to hear the Dharma? How do you actually hear the Dharma? And the second question is, how do you demonstrate it? So, clearly the Buddha demonstrated it by twirling this flower in his hand while he was sitting there in front of a crowd of presumably a thousand people plus a whole bunch of gods and demons and swamp monsters and so on and so forth. And in spite of the fact that no word was spoken up to that point, Mahakashika heard it. As though it was... something he'd been hearing all his life. And what could he do but smile?

[03:24]

And the Buddha met him in that and said, okay, well, I'm going to transmit my robe and bowl to you. But in fact, the Dharma had already been transmitted. The bowl and robe were just, as Ed said the other day, the robe and bull were just, um, these kind of, um, totemic, um, symbolic, um, tokens, right? Nothing, nothing more, I mean, nothing more and nothing less, right? There's nothing wrong with totemic and symbolic tokens. That's pretty awesome, but, um, it's not the same thing, right? Um, So what exactly does that mean? How does that actually work? And the Zen school in particular, and I think maybe Mahayana Buddhism in general, stresses this idea that hearing the Dharma and demonstrating the Dharma is something that happens face-to-face in a...

[04:46]

in a connection that's like that connection between the Buddha and Mahakashipa. So they meet and something, some understanding is shared. Some kind of spark of, not even understanding, some sort of spark of accord, flies between their minds and bodies. And I think generally that's true, although if you look at the koan literature, there's a whole lot of examples of other kinds of transmission. So the most obvious historical one is that The Sikh's ancestor, the story about him is that he kind of overheard the Dharma.

[05:47]

He was in a market and he heard somebody who was a customer in the market reciting a passage from the Diamond Sutra and something went bang and he kind of woke up. The guy wasn't even talking to him. Who knows who he was talking to. He might have just been blathering away to not anybody in particular, or chanting it because it was his job to stand in the market and chant the Diamond Sutra. And nonetheless, there was this transmission. Amazing. Xiang Yang, I think I might have talked about this one before, maybe the last time I was here, but... he woke up as the result of sweeping his broom across the grounds of this old monument slash temple and kicking up a piece of rock and it hit a stalk of bamboo and made that kind of sound.

[06:55]

And that's what transmitted the Dharma to Xiangyin. And that was after a lifetime of study, deep thoughts, very skillful, engagement with the teachings and skillful debate and discussion of the Dharma and so on and so forth. But what it took was this moment all by himself when he was in a state of discouragement having failed in his view to understand anything about the Dharma. I think he might have been one of those people that burned all his books, I forget, but something like that anyway. He left them all and went off to be the caretaker of this country shrine and in the end woke up after whacking a rock into some bamboo. So that's not exactly face-to-face transmission, that's something else. That's a different kind of exchange.

[08:03]

You know, the Zen literature, our literature... Well, let me... Let me talk about this part of it first. There is this idea in the in the kind of philosophical and historical framework of Buddhism of the ages of the Dharma. I think that's Sanji in Japanese. The first one is the age of the true Dharma. These ages are assigned different lengths, depending on who you listen to.

[09:07]

In some formulations they're 500 years long, in some they're 1,000 years long, I think in some they're 2,000 years long. But anyway, so in the first one, the age of the true Dharma, which I think is the Shobo, right? It's like everyone who hears the Dharma is enlightened, right? So obviously, initially it was just because the Buddha was around and everybody that listened to the Buddha, something happened to them, right? So... But even after, for the 500 years afterwards, there was this kind of glow that lent this power and vitality to the teaching. And people were, according to this sort of description of the world, people were woken up just by hearing the words of the Buddha recited or reading them in a book or something like that. And then... And there was this sort of dicey 500-year period called, I think, the Zoh, which is the... It's essentially the imitation Dharma, right?

[10:17]

And the idea there is that people kind of acted as if, right? And there was still some way to kind of get at something there, but it wasn't as good as the previous 500 years. And finally... there began the Mapo, which was the Age of Decline, which was supposed to last for 10,000 years. And the specific date of the start of the Age of Decline was 1052 AD, just so you know. They nailed it down to, I don't know if it was like, if it happened on... midnight of the first day of 1052 AD, or whether it was delayed, or maybe it happened on Midsummer's Day, or whatever, 3 o'clock, I don't know. But anyway, at that point, the age of decline started. And at that point, they say this really interesting thing about it. They say, the teachings of the Buddha are still correct, but they've somehow lost their power to awaken people.

[11:29]

in the age of decline. I think in the Tendai school at the time they were saying, it's because people are all messed up, which I think we can all agree people are all messed up. But the way in particular that they were all messed up was that they stopped being able to hear the Dharma, even though the Dharma was correct. And in some ways... you can see why people might have drawn this conclusion, right? Like, think about the vast weight and thud factor of the teachings, right? So, if you started, if you collected it all here, right, and you started just laying down pages from the Pali Canon and then the Mahayana literature and then after that, you know, by this time, by it, you know, by 1052 there was already the co-on literature and the commentaries and all the rest of that sort of thing.

[12:36]

If you stack that up, it'd probably go through the ceiling and up, you know, maybe through the ceiling in the next room as well, even if you printed it on kind of skimpy paper. And yet, and you know, by now, well into the age of decline, really almost another thousand years into the age of decline, we've generated just insanely more literature. If you take all the Buddhist literature of today, particularly if you include all the magazines and all the rest of that sort of thing, it'd probably go to the moon or something like that. even if you sat down and you read it all cover to cover, the question is, would you be automatically awoken? No, probably not, right? Maybe, but I think everyone's experience is, I've read a lot of Buddhist literature, and it was interesting and thought-provoking and so on, but maybe in some cases,

[13:50]

people experience deep life-changing insight as a result of reading a passage from the Diamond Sutra or something like that, but maybe not. Maybe not very often. So in some ways the Tendai monks in the in Dogen's time, we're right. People, for some reason, have lost the ability to automatically just turn around and lead awake, lively, skillful, comfortable, and helpful lives just as a result of reading a book about Buddhism. something else has to go on.

[14:54]

And in the Bendawa, Dogen is actually asked about this, and you know the whole story of the Bendawa is that it's kind of this, it has this simulated Q&A session at the end, which is undoubtedly just all the questions that everyone in Kyoto asked him after he got back from China, right? They all said, basically, your stuff is awful and you should get out of town. And here's why. And one of the questions is, okay, so here we are in the age of decline. How can this stuff even work? And Dogen, in his response, is pretty dismissive. He says, nah, age of decline, age of decline. And he says something like this. He says, everyone... attain the way through practice. That's what he says. So maybe you don't attain the way by reading a book on Buddhism, but he says everyone can attain the way through practice.

[16:14]

So what is it about practice that allows that? That does this thing that allows that transmission that passed between the Buddha and Mahakanshipa to blossom like a flower? So arguably the Koan literature is, the function of the Koan literature is to answer that question by giving examples. And there's another example that involves Mahakashapa, but in this case it's not the Buddha, it's Ananda.

[17:20]

And they're talking and Ananda says, hey, You know, that day on Vulture Peak there, when the Buddha twirled that flower and stuff like that, he said, I'm transmitting you my robe and ball. What else did he transmit? And Mahakashima says, Ananda. And Ananda says, yes. And Mahakashima says, go outside and knock down the flagpole. All right. So, in commenting on this, Aiken Rishi says something like this about the whole flagpole thing. He says, at the monastery, when somebody was going to give a talk, they'd put up a flag. So that's why the flagpole. And one possible interpretation of this is, okay, well, no more talking.

[18:26]

just knock down the flagpole, right? But not exactly, right? There's something going on here that's transmission using words and interaction, and yet it has this other flavor, right? It's like twirling a flower. It's like smiling. It's like meeting face-to-face, right? So, you know, Mahakashmi says, Ananda. And Ananda says, yes. Sometimes it's like that. And that's sometimes the way in which practice reveals the Dharma is like that. It's this intimate, intimate exchange, either with another being or with maybe even with yourself, right? Sometimes it actually comes from reading or remembering or reciting or understanding the literature, right?

[19:36]

It's not the case that no one gets insights from reading sutras, right? And in fact, you know, Sikh's ancestor, right? It's that the... the process whereby that happens goes beyond our conventional understanding of understanding. It arises in some other territory than the conceptual understanding of the scriptures. And then sometimes it's wordless and signless. So I have a couple of examples of that that are sort of part of my experience recently. So I've been trying to learn how to do calligraphy because I'm going to need to do it one of these days.

[20:40]

And the first thing I need to say about that is that I'm terrible at it and I'm not going to live long enough get good at it. Period. Never. I don't know. Maybe if I live orders of magnitude longer than I expect to, I'll be kind of okay at it. But really, probably not. But in spite of that, I'm practicing it pretty diligently. And here's the thing that happens that's really interesting, right? No matter, even, you know, even if you're terrible at it, even if you're terrible at practice, right? Nonetheless, so the way I'm practicing is Kaz Tanahashi wrote this tremendously helpful book, right, that has

[21:52]

has a large collection of classical period examples of characters, and then his own rendering, and his renderings extend from very formal all the way up to just wild, like the one for Zen, right, so you see the classical period, formal script character, the semi-cursive script character, the cursive script character, and then Kaz's rendering, and he just took a giant brush and he went, right in the middle of the page. And, you know, that's it, right? But anyway, so you look at these things and you work with them. And the idea is you just look at the character and you write it. And then you look at what you wrote and you throw it in the bin and you look at the character and you write it. And then you take it and you throw it in the bin and you just do that

[22:52]

for hour upon hour upon hour. And it's this wonderful process actually. It reminds me, there's a story I heard by a really famous kind of mid-century concert pianist. I'm blocking out her name now. Anyway, so she grew up in Austria and she studied with a really famous pianist and teacher And she said this great thing about how they work together. She said she went in, she was very good, even as a teenager, right? And only because she was very, very good and everyone heard her and said that she was really destined for greatness and so on, did she even get to study with this teacher. She goes in all kind of I would say slightly full of herself to this teacher. And she sits down at the piano and is prepared to, you know, she assumes the teacher is going to ask her to play something.

[24:02]

And she doesn't. The teacher moves her over to the side and says, and plays a single figure on the keyboard, right? And then she says, play that. And so the student sits down and plays it and the teacher goes wrong. And she said this went on for months, right? You know, the same figure, and then when she started to get a little feel for one, the teacher would switch it up, right? And in some ways it's the same thing with this thing of, you know, even, you know, with... you know, my complete lack of skill over if you do this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, something starts to take shape, right? It's like the, you know, here you have a character written by a, you know, Tang Dynasty calligraphy master, right?

[25:07]

And your instruction is just to write it, right? And over time, something gets transmitted, even over that gulf of time and, you know, copying. I mean, these characters were probably written down and then copied and then placed on a big piece of stone and chiseled into the stone and then, you know, well, a thousand years later... you know, rubbed with a crayon and then they took the rubbing and they kind of restored it to some kind of, you know, pristine state and then they put it in the book, right? And so, but even over that vast distance and space of time, something gets transmitted, right? It's amazing. Something about the it's hard to even put a handle on, but something about the spatial arrangement of the elements of the character, something about the subtle angles and stuff like that, it just shows up.

[26:20]

It doesn't have to, you don't have to think about it, it just is, right? Same with the piano example. And it's exactly the same thing with zazen, right? That's essentially zazen. There, you know... Thousands of years ago, somebody came up with this posture, right? And it's been transmitted through generation after generation down through the years, right? And, you know, sometime in the 13th century, Dogen said, oh, and you know what you should be doing with your mind? You should be thinking of not thinking, okay? And that gets transmitted. And people elaborate on it as they see fit. But in the end, what we're doing is we're essentially drawing this figure with our bodies. And over, you know, weeks, months, years, hour upon hour of practice, something is transmitted from body to body.

[27:31]

Something is transmitted from mind to mind that gets implanted here and changes everything. So does anybody have any questions about all that before we go on? Or any comments? and very hard to put a handle on.

[28:44]

But I'll give it a go. Everyone is kind of a complicated bundle of things and minds, right? And the most obvious ones are this kind of self-construct that we start building when we're one and over time put together that gets more elaborate and better founded once we really get a handle on language.

[29:46]

And I've probably told this story so many times that everyone has heard it, but I remember my now adult daughter, we were talking on the phone when she was still not yet two, and she said, you know, Dad, I discovered today that I could talk to myself without saying the words out loud. So that like that, right? So we start, we develop this capacity to talk to ourselves without saying the words out loud and to spin a narrative of self that gets more and more solid and well-defined and comes to be underpinned with these, the thoughts and concepts that arrive arise out of it come to be underpinned with these powerful emotional tags that are designed to keep our attention on ourselves and motivate action.

[30:56]

So there's that. But simultaneously living in this body and mind, there are other radically different ways of being in the world that are constantly being expressed. So we have this really astonishing empathic capacity that takes in signals in vocal inflection, posture, way of moving. I remember I remember when I was probably three lying in bed and listening to my mother walk across the floor and realized then I could tell whether she was happy or unhappy by just listening to the way she walked. Maybe I was four, something like that. But anyway, it's amazing. We can do that. We all do that. And we do it all the time, actually. We're constantly taking in that information and using it

[32:00]

in the context of our self-construction and self-animation, but we're not really aware of it as a thing in itself, right? And similarly, we have a way of meeting the world that is pretty unconstructed and quite unloaded, actually. It's not loaded up with the same kind of emotional weight that the activity of self-construction has. The sensations that arise in it come with tags, but they're more like pleasant and unpleasant. They have a substantially more manageable load and don't really have any habitual action associated with them at all, right? And so this is the, this is sort of the geeky, my geeky take on awakening, but it's this, right?

[33:14]

So this and more is the full content of, of, of a human body and mind, right? It's, it, you know, we have, you know, that mental stuff plus we have this massive interoceptive network that tells us in every moment what every part of our body is doing and how it's doing, right? And we have this massive allostatic network that feeds back on our body and regulates posture, muscle tension, and so on. And these are things that we're aware of, right? We're not directly aware of fiddling with our muscles to relax them, but we're kind of aware of them, right? They're part of our conscious experience, right? And so all of this together is what it's like to be a human being and to live a human life. And the truth is that for a lot of our human lives, after we're, you know, after our self-construct really gets rolling,

[34:22]

we're only aware of that. It seems like it's the most important thing in the world, and it seems like it's the only thing in the world. And the ability to separate out the self, to animate the self in the world, to come up with agendas and execute them, to grasp after the things we like, to avert from the things that we don't like, those things are... from the point of view of the world according to the self, they're everything, right? And my take on it is that waking up is breaking down or softening up the boundary between that capacity and facility that are sort of capacity for self-construction and these other things that are constantly running in our mind and body all the time and living in a way that's aware of all of it.

[35:36]

Something like that. And is therefore intimately aware of our interconnection, that's aware of the provisional nature of of mental formations and so on and so forth. And from the point of view of self-construction, all that stuff is essentially invisible, right? From the point of view of this other mode of being, everything is visible. Nothing is hidden, right? It's just, well, not nothing. You're probably not... carefully watching your cerebellum or something like that. But, you know, within the boundaries of our senses, nothing gets hidden, right? So that's what I'd say. Does that help? Yeah.

[36:38]

And so, and my sense of how it happens is that somehow, either through practice or just totally, or through some chance encounter where the circumstances are right, either because you meet somebody that you care about and they reflect yourself back onto you in a way that's startling and new. Ananda, yes. Go out and knock down the flagpole, right? Yeah. something slips past our usual way of being in the world, which is to skate over most of our experience, to take in information about the world, hammer it into a little frame, and then draw, snap conclusions from that and act as quickly as possible.

[37:47]

Something skates, something... slides through that and registers itself in here in a way that is startling and kind of undoes itself. It can happen suddenly or gradually. And it doesn't matter which. It happens both suddenly and gradually. It's like earthquakes. Are earthquakes sudden or gradual? They're both. So... I wrote this a little while ago, but it's about that. So I thought I'd read it. It says... Just let go. When it's light, the noonday sun illuminates earth and sky.

[38:49]

everything speaks clearly in its own voice. When it's dark, like free diving in a sea of ink, there's no other choice but to feel your way along in silence. In either case, request and response are the same. A thousand blackbirds rise together like sudden smoke from a field of golden grass. Clouds and mountains pair off in their long slow dance. the world reaches deep inside the body and calls forth an answer for which the best translation, however incomplete, is yes. Ananda, yes. To Ananda, does anyone have any questions? Yeah, it's great.

[40:21]

Well, I would say first this, right? So, you know, Dogen's posture instructions are pretty good, right? So if you want to dig in deeper, you can... There's a couple of sources for stuff about posture and breath. There's yoga and there's also... particularly about breath. Suzuki Roshi mentions this briefly in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, but there's a whole lot of stuff in Japanese culture, particularly around martial arts, that has to do with how to breathe, right? How to bring your attention to your hara, how to focus your breath so that, I think Suzuki Roshi says this, it's like so that when you breathe out, there's a stone pressing the breath out of your body. so that it lands right here, right?

[41:25]

And then kind of evaporates and the breath comes and fills the body. So, you know, dig into that, right? But the main point is this, right? Just to pick a posture, whatever it is, and wholeheartedly... take that posture over and over and over again for as long as you sit. Just to always be sitting. Always be forming that posture, not aggressively, not, oh wait, oh wait. Just firmly and gently and with this kind of subtle, continuous, unstinting effort. And typically what happens when you do that is that your attention to the posture comes and goes, right?

[42:26]

That's okay. That's how we are. We are all like that. Our mind is built to have these cycles of attention. It's like you paid attention to something for a while, and then it goes, okay, I really need to pay attention to something else now. How about if we think about what's... what's going to be on for breakfast? Or how about if I think about what I'm going to do after this? I need to worry again about what I said to that person and why it was the right thing or the wrong thing, etc. To study that cycle and to study it in the context of this injunction to just pay attention and just form this posture wholeheartedly and unstindingly, that's self-study. That's what Dogen's talking about. And over time, what happens is this. As I was saying earlier, the boundary between just forming the posture and just being present with body and breath and

[43:39]

this sort of discursive, self-constructive thinking gets really fuzzy. And your mind can just, your attention can just slide back and forth between them as things come up, right? So I'm thinking, oh, look at that, okay, not so much thinking, right? Et cetera, right? But it's just a matter of practicing with that, with your own particular version of that cycle and with the content that your body and mind produces when you... when you practice with it, right? Something like that, right? And you do that for a while. Anyway. That's all I say every Saturday during Sazen Instruction. Well, thanks really a lot for listening. I really appreciate it. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[44:58]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[45:01]

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