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. So I'd like to offer some words this morning that weave a combination of words from the Buddha and teachings from Dogen Zenji and the Genjo Koan. And I understand that the Beginner's Mind Temple is in the midst of a practice period studying the Genjo Koan. So I'm curious how many of you are part of that? Just a hand raise. And how many of you, so I can see, are not part of the practice period? Okay. And how many of you are here at Zen Center in the city for the first time?

[01:04]

All right. Great. So we are here this morning in rather fraught and divisive times. I sent a note to David, uh, two days ago maybe saying, are we on? Because so many things have been closing, shutting down as a result of the fires and the air quality. And I will say that I feel heartened that even in the midst of terrible air, that the temple stays open, that there's a place where where you and I and we can come together and share the Dharma as a kind of refuge, as a way of looking for words and practice and community that can support us in finding our way through this, in some ways, maybe unprecedented,

[02:24]

period of time. So I will start with some words from the Buddha. This is from the Pali Canon. He didn't write. He said, and so many hundreds of years later, someone wrote down these words. Friends, everything is is burning. The eye is burning. Forms are burning. Eye consciousness, seeing, is burning. Eye contact is burning. And whatever is felt as pleasant or painful, or neither pleasant nor painful, that too is burning. friends, everything is burning.

[03:27]

The eye is burning. Forms are burning. Seeing eye consciousness is burning. Eye contact is burning. And whatever is felt, whatever we experience as pleasant or unpleasant, painful or pleasant, neither painful nor pleasant, that too is burning. So he's describing human experience. He's ascribing how it is that we as human beings experience a moment. That we have sense organs, there are forms, there is consciousness that comes through the sense organs as seeing, as hearing, as tasting, as touching. And as form and consciousness come together through our sense organs, through our body we experience each moment i always say as having one of three flavors pleasant unpleasant or neither pleasant nor unpleasant and he goes on and says burning with what burning with the fire of greed the fire of hate the fire of delusion burning with birth aging and death with all human sorrow

[04:55]

and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair. So the Buddha is describing our experience as a fire. And he doesn't really say that a moment of experience itself is on fire, but our tendency to have it overlaid, colored, shaped. by greed, by hatred, by delusion, by our liking and not liking, by our wanting and not wanting, that that very fundamental activity of being alive as a human being causes sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair. sounds dire and yet if we look at it now there's a lot of question about you know what's caused these fires and maybe it was a spark maybe it was an electrical line maybe it was but the Buddha isn't talking here about causes and as in an event that happened the Buddha here is pointing to the source and

[06:15]

to the source of what brings burning, to the source of what brings our confusion, to the source of what leads us to being seated in these fraught and difficult times. There is, you'll excuse me for mixing metaphors here, but there is another phrase, from the Buddha that I've been speaking about a lot, that I think offers another way to hold what we are sitting in. He said, there is a tangle within and a tangle without. We are all entangled in a tangle. Tell me, who can untangle this tangle? And I think we see in our world so vividly right now how it is that what the Buddha is describing in the fire sermon, the words I read earlier, as this fundamental movement of greed, of hatred, of delusion, that that, when it is unseen,

[07:38]

unexplored, unexamined, unattended to, turns into fire. It turns into difficulty and pain and sorrow and lamentation. But that sorrow and lamentation is both internal and external. And right now we see it exploding in the world all around us. And I would suggest that the real source of the fire is not a power line that went down. but is, as he suggests, based in human greed, hatred, and delusion. And really, if you take those three pieces, those three flavors, they sometimes referred to as the three poisons, are a way of describing our entanglement. And one of the things that I like most about this teaching is that at the center of this trio, greed, hatred, is delusion, is confusion.

[08:49]

And what's suggested here is that it's because of our ignorance, it's because of our confusion, it's because we don't understand really who we are in our relationship. to ourselves, to each other, and to the world, that we are entangled in this tangle. Because every moment of experience that comes in is experienced as pleasant or unpleasant or neither. And when it's pleasant, our habitual reaction is to grab. It's pleasant, I like it, I want it. You may have noticed in yourself some flavors of greed. And we can see what happens in the world around us when that greed goes unchecked. On the flip side, we have unpleasant experience. It's the other option, right? Or one of three. So an unpleasant experience arises. A sight, a sound, a smell, a person, some words.

[09:54]

And we don't like it. And so we reject it, we deny it, we push it away like that. And so this kind of grasping and aversion is what causes the tangle. It's what causes us to be propelled through our life, you know, liking and not liking, wanting and not wanting. There's this fundamental reverberation. And what it means to untangle the tangle is to untangle our confusion, is to see clearly, is to understand, not cognitively understand, but understand in our bones, in our being, who we really are, which is not a separate solid entity, but a series of relationships. And as we begin to clarify that, the truth. In ourselves, among ourselves, between ourselves and the world, those relationships are no longer driven, compelled, habitually turning in the wheel of samsara by greed and aversion.

[11:18]

We have the opportunity to respond instead with love. We have the opportunity to meet ourselves and each other and our aching world, our burning planet, with wisdom and with kindness. And if ever there was a time that this was needed, that might be right about now. So I thought that I would... lay this sort of foundational piece of teaching and then pose to you and me the question, so what is it that the great Zen master Dogen might have to say about this? How might his words help us understand how to untangle the tangle?

[12:19]

How to wake up to the truth? how to disengage from our habitual patterns of greed, hatred, grasping, aversion, wanting, not wanting, and find our seat, drop into the depth of who we are so that we can respond in a skillful way to the world. I first met Dogen in 1987. For those of you who don't know who he is, he wasn't alive anymore. But that's when I met him. I was a fairly recent college graduate living for the summer at Tassajara. And I had taken the summer off to go be at Tassajara before...

[13:22]

my plan, which was to go to graduate school at Berkeley in the fall. And I remember so vividly when the welcome packet arrived. You know, we say there's email and snail mail. At Tassajara, there's very snail mail. It's a very slow mail system. And this packet arrived, which was welcoming me as a graduate student, to the university and I opened it and I read about social policy 101 and statistics and I was supposed to be in school in social welfare and public health so it was on one side social policy statistics and on the other side I had been introduced to Dogen's teachings that summer in classes so Which would it be?

[14:22]

These classes or the Fukanzo Zengi? These classes or the Genjo Kalon? And there was no contest. It was very clear. So I never went to graduate school. I stayed and got to know Dogen better and better. And for those who are new here or who... are not part of the practice period. The Genjo Koan is one of Dogen's seminal texts. He was quite a prolific writer. And I saw in the City Center catalog or the website that it described the Genjo Koan as the koan of everyday life. And a koan is a teaching story. And Zen practice is full of teaching stories, literally means a public case.

[15:24]

And usually it's an interaction, an interchange between two people, often a teacher and a student, but sometimes somebody else. And I think it's useful to pause there because that tells us something very important. Because we might think that insight, that waking up, that realization happens only when we're sitting quietly by ourselves on a cushion, in the middle of a retreat on a mountaintop or an ashram or wherever you might go. But these stories suggest that insight, illumination, comes in relationship. It comes in interaction. It's a beautiful kind of not directly stated dimension of the teaching. So in some schools of Zen, there's a whole curriculum of these koans. And each one is pointing to a different aspect of reality, of illumination, of waking up.

[16:30]

And they are studied. But Dogen has just one koan, the Genjo koan, which I like the translation, the koan of everyday life. When I first heard the Genjo koan, I heard an alternate translation, which was something like the Genjo koan means the koan is of this moment or the koan of what's arising right now. This very directly points to the heart of Dogen's teaching, which is that he's pointing us here. He's pointing us to the opportunity to drop deeply into a moment. And as we drop into a moment, we discover what a moment is. And we discover how to meet our life. Not meeting our life in this habitual grasping and aversion, liking and not liking, wanting and not wanting, but actually to find our seat, to find our way.

[17:40]

So I am proposing for this morning... that we can take a look at some of the passages. I'm going to give you two of my favorite passages from the Genjo Koan. It's a long text. As a way of hearing Dogen's instruction for how to untangle the tangle. It's kind of his pointing us to how to do that. Here's the first passage. This isn't the beginning of the text. This is a passage that in some ways has been inscribed on my heart for 30 years. It's so beautiful. I hope that you will find it as inspiring as I have. He writes, When you sail out in a boat to the middle of the ocean where no land is in sight,

[18:47]

and view the four directions. The ocean looks circular and does not look any other way. So let's pause. So you sail out in a boat to the middle of the ocean where no land is in sight and you look around and what the eye sees is a circle of water. That's how we see. And on one level, it's true. You're in the middle of the ocean in a boat and you're in a circle of water. But, he says, but the ocean is neither round nor square. Its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as your eye of practice can see at that time. My favorite line, all things are like this. When you sail out in a boat to the middle of an ocean where no land is in sight and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular and does not look any other way.

[20:03]

But the ocean is neither round nor square. Its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like this. I think in some way this teaching is the underpinning of beginner's mind temple, of Suzuki Roshi's phrase of encouraging us to remember and to recognize over and over That no matter how smart we are, no matter how much we can see, no matter how many hours we've sat, that there's always more that's possible to be seen and to be willing to be humbled in knowing that we can only see our circle. But if we know that, it can allow us to soften.

[21:07]

It can allow us to listen. It can allow us to unhook from holding on to our tight views and opinions. We could use a little bit of that these days, maybe. A little bit more of not being righteous and sure, but being humbled, being open, being receptive. And not just receptive to anything, because there's plenty of... I'm using some swear words in my mind. There's a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now. Right? And we have an evolutionary wiring, they say, that causes us to tend to go to what the bad stuff is as a way of trying to keep ourselves safe. What Dogen is pointing to is something different.

[22:11]

He's suggesting that we remember beauty, that we remember a sense of wonder, that we remember to see how precious our life is. Sometimes I like to say that we as human beings are living in these two dimensions. This is not true. Right? But it's useful. So we live in the horizontal direction and we live in the vertical direction. And the horizontal plane is about getting, you know, from here to there. I like to line horizontal up with what's called chronos or tick-tock time. It's about moving across the surfaces, getting from A to B, being efficient, being productive. You get the idea. And being efficient and productive and so on is good, but it's not enough.

[23:16]

So there is this other dimension, which I think Dogen is pointing to here, which is to remember the vertical, to remember another, the alternate Greek word for time is kairos. Kairos is deep time. Kairos is, as Dogen is pointing to, the truth of a single moment that when we meet it fully, opens into a kind of timelessness. It's the capacity to be fully present with what's here, and when we do that, what's here opens. It reveals itself. If we're willing to see, if we're willing to not be so sure that we already know what's happening, if we're willing to not be habitually pulled to everything that's wrong, but to remember the sense of beauty and wonder. So I think this is the first step in Dogen's teaching, which is so important and particularly important for anyone of us, anyone here who feels...

[24:40]

distressed in some way by the smoky air and the lives that are being burned in our midst and our planet which is struggling to help us take care of it and maintain our home. And the first step is that we need to drink in a sense of beauty and wonder. We need to nourish ourselves. Probably not enough could be said about this. How essential it is that we let ourselves be filled with a sense of beauty and wonder. Be filled with a sense of not knowing, of beginner's mind. of remembering the mystery of ourselves and of life itself.

[25:45]

That we start there, from that place. So that the what or where that we're acting from is not, we're not acting from greed, we're not acting from aversion, we're not acting from confusion. We are, as I said earlier, acting from a place of love. That we're acting from a place of It's so magnificent. How could I do any harm? There's a great old Zen saying, in all the world, there's not a single place to spit. It's like that. That we recognize that the whole world is our jewel, is our palace. It requires our eyes to see and then allowing ourselves to drink it in to be filled. So the second part from Dogen that I want to share is the closing paragraph of the Genjo Koan, which is, in a way, it's Dogen's... I was taking off my watch so I could see what time it was, and then I thought, if I take this off, I'm never going to be able to get out of this seat and get my watch and my stick and my everything back on.

[27:08]

So I'm going to keep it on. So... So Dogen had this personal question that kind of inspired his whole practice, which was something like, if we're already enlightened, why do we need to practice? And this final paragraph of the Genjo Koan, in some ways the whole of the Genjo Koan, but particularly this story, is his answer to his own question. So here is the... that Dogen tells. And it is, as I was describing before, an interaction between a teacher and a student. So I'll read it and provide a little commentary. Dogen writes, Zen master Bao Che of Mount Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place It does not reach.

[28:08]

Why then do you fan yourself? Now this is then poetic language, but it's Dogen's question, right? We're already enlightened. Awakening is already here. The nature of wind, the nature of our very life is already awakened. Why are you working so hard? Why are you fanning? It's already here. Why bother? Bao Che replies, Although you understand that the nature of wind is permanent, you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere. Although you understand that life itself is magnificent beyond our comprehension, that everything is already awake and enlightened and perfect just as it is, you do not understand what it means for that to be realized, for that to be made manifest, for that to be the truth arising in any given moment, which is what the Genjo Koan means.

[29:23]

So the monk says, well, what is the meaning of its reaching everywhere? So you understand that you're already enlightened, we're already enlightened, but you don't understand why it is essential for us all to practice. So the monk says, well, why is it essential for us all to practice? What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere? And Bao Che just keeps fanning himself. So he doesn't say, you are so stupid, how come you don't get it? No, he demonstrates his point. This is the aim of our practice, is not to come up with a smart answer, but to be, to embody the teaching itself. So the master just keeps fanning himself, and the monk bows deeply.

[30:25]

He understands. He gets the point. Dogen offers some commentary on this story. He says, the actualization, the being made manifest, the genjo koan of the Buddha Dharma, of the teaching, the vital path of its correct transmission is like this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you will understand neither permanence nor the nature of wind. Dogen's a little sharper than Bache. Bache was kind of gentler in his response, right? This is my interpretation of what that means. And it is an interpretation that maybe is stretched just a little bit to meet what seems to me to be the severity of our time.

[31:34]

the Buddha Dharma is everywhere. But it needs, it needs us. It needs us to fully engage. It needs us to take our seat. It needs us to untangle our own internal and external confusion so that we can the karmic forces of greed and aversion that keep the fires burning, that keep the tangle tangled. In Dogen's teaching, there's a beautiful term, bendowa, bendowa, the wholehearted way. He's asking us, each of us, even if you're here for the first time, this means you.

[32:40]

He's asking us to engage wholeheartedly in our life, in being ourselves, in meeting the moment. Not as a selfish act, but because the world itself needs us to do that, desperately needs you and me and all of us. So the first part, of Dogen's teaching that I was describing is a kind of foundational instruction, which I would describe as something like, please fill yourself. Please allow yourself to be touched, moved, nourished by the immeasurable beauty of the world. Don't allow yourself to only be pulled into the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion, internally or externally.

[33:46]

But fill yourself up. And from that place of being filled, don't stop. But fan, engage, come forward. That from a place of being filled with beauty and wonder, that we want then to let all of that pour through us as our activity, as not so much what we do, but the how of what we do what we do. That we want, as I said earlier, our engagement to come from love. That we want it to be wholehearted. It's not easy, any of this. It's not easy when our internal and external fires are flaring, when the sky is smoky, when it's hard to breathe.

[34:59]

This morning, I got my little dog out of his bed. And he looked at me with those big, wide, little dog, innocent eyes and began wheezing. And I was heartbroken. Because he was looking at me as the adult in the room, you know, assuming that I would take care of him, that I could And I just felt, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry to have made such a mess. Not just of my life, but of the world, so that you little dog with big, wide, innocent eyes can barely breathe. So we have to feel the pain of our confusion, the pain of our delusion deeply enough

[36:08]

that we can allow ourselves to understand that it's not the only thing. That there is also how deeply we care for each other, for ourselves, for the planet. There's another famous Zen image that I like using a lot. which is that all of us are walking around looking at the sky through a straw. And that straw circle is our, you know, it's what we know. It's what we believe. It's our ideas. It's who we take ourselves to be. All of that. It is seeing the ocean as a circle only. And we might say that our practice, this... of allowing ourselves to be filled and then engaging is a practice of softening, widening, opening our straw so that we can see more of the sky with the understanding that no matter how much sky we see, it's always partial.

[37:24]

And this is the last piece that seems so embedded in Dogen's teaching, which is that It's not just that the world needs us, but as all of you courageously who've shown up at the temple on a smoky Saturday morning know, we need each other. We need to meet each other with a sense of wonder, of beauty, of love, so that we can find our way together through the tangle, that we can understand that it's only together that we can see the whole sky. Maybe that's a good place to stop for now. Thank you.

[38:26]

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.

[38:52]

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