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. Well, what a joy to be with you. My name is Ben. I have traveled here from Minneapolis, Minnesota. where I'm the guiding teacher at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, founded by Dainin Katagiri Roshi, who originally came to the U.S. to serve here. And I'm just accustoming myself to the microphone. Hello. Yet again, a new relationship. That's every moment. So yeah, I've been traveling around the country to talk about the material in this new book that I've written called Inside the Flower Garland Sutra, which I'll be talking about this morning.

[01:12]

And it's just very sweet to be here. There are many people here that I love deeply and people here that I'm just meeting. And I have enormous gratitude for the upholding of the practice that you are doing. And the care for the place. I come into the space and I see it is really beautifully cared for. And I know that is not magic. It is magic. But it is the magic of people actually pouring their lives into taking care of the possibility of the Dharma flourishing. So I'm really appreciative. So I'm going to talk about... Huayan Buddhism today. So, just to try and be pretty brief about this, but just some sort of historical context.

[02:14]

So, the Flower Garland Sutra, Avatamsaka Sutra, emerged in India about 1,500 years ago, and then was translated into Chinese. In China, the title of the sutra is Huayan. which means Flower Garland, Huayin Jing, Flower Garland Sutra. And the sutra itself gave birth to an entire school of Buddhism called Huayin, which was very influential on East Asian Buddhism and still is. Probably many people here, even if you've never heard of Huayin Buddhism, your body has done things deeply informed by the teachings of the tradition. It is a living tradition. You can find Hawaiian teachers and temples, but it's not one of the big, well-known ones at this time. And the reason that I am interested in helping people understand Hawaiian Buddhism is because I think the themes and the emphasis of the tradition are very timely.

[03:21]

Also, the sutra itself is... absolutely staggeringly gigantic and incomprehensible. So I'm aware that most people are not going to be diving fully into the whole thing. So the themes that I'm going to be emphasizing today that I think are deeply inherent to the tradition are celebration of abundance, celebration of sensual experience. For anyone who knows a lot about early Buddhism, you might be aware that those are not the emphasis of the early Buddhist tradition. So celebration of abundance, celebration of sensual experience, celebration of interdependence, celebration of the fact that each thing depends on everything, everything depends on each thing, and each thing depends on each thing, so much so that they are not actually separate in any reasonable way. Celebration of social engagement, celebration of the diversity of people, of their needs,

[04:24]

and of their practices. So these are the themes I'll be talking about today. And when I was thinking about writing a book about Hoa Yen, I thought these themes were really wonderful. And it's not really an innovative thought that these are really timely teachings. If anyone's familiar with the Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, He takes Hawaiian teachings as one of his main sources of inspiration and from which he derives teachings. So as he was thinking about how do we make a modern or postmodern movement of engaged Buddhism, he looked very closely to two traditions, Yogacara, about which I've written two other books, and Hawaiian. So I'm basically just following him around at this point. And I feel pretty good about it. So I was like, these teachings are very powerful and beautiful, but I could not find any way to write a book about it because the Flower Garden Sutra is abundant in and of itself.

[05:29]

It's just abundant in words. It's about 1,400 pages in small print and large volume text in English. One student recently told me, a Chinese national, that it has one million Chinese characters. So that's about 1 million words. So just to give you a sense of scale, this book is 40,000 words. So the sutra itself is about 25 times longer than this. And I thought, how am I possibly going to get my head around writing a commentary on that? And then the Hawaiian tradition has, it's very diffuse and expansive. They celebrate constantly proliferating new ideas. So I was just sort of relieved because I didn't have to write a book because it's too hard. Happy days. You should always remember this if you're going to think about it, write a book. You can always find an out. Anyway, I went to a lecture by a wonderful professor named Dr. Jin Park, who was visiting Minneapolis from Washington, D.C., and she was giving a talk on Yogacara, Huayin, and movements for liberation, which...

[06:37]

She's probably my cousin or something. I don't know. She loves my favorite things. It was a great talk. And afterwards, I said, you know, I really would like to write a book about Boyan, but it's just, it's impossible. It's too big. I can't figure it out. And she said, oh, it's no problem. Just find, no problem. Also, later on, when I was like, I'm giving up, she said, no, you're not. She said, just look up Wee Sang's ocean seal chart. It's a very short Korean Hawaiian text. In Korean, they call it Huaom. And this short text was designed as a compact summation of all the teachings of the tradition that can be chanted on a daily basis so a person can feel like they're staying in steady engagement with it. So I looked that thing up. It's 30 lines long, 210 Chinese characters relative to 1 million. Seemed way more appealing to me. And so this book is a new translation of the ocean seal chart that I did with my translation partner, Wei Zhen Tang, from Dharma Drum University in Taiwan.

[07:44]

And it's a line-by-line commentary, which I have written on that translation. So, first theme I want to talk about, abundance. Abundance. Celebration of abundance. In We Sang's ocean seal chart, we encounter... these lines, the abundant manifestations of wish fulfillment are inconceivable. This rain of jewels benefits all life, filling all space. All beings benefit according to their capacities. So the rain of jewels. So Flower Garland Sutra and the Wayan tradition are very visual. So I just invite you to, I assume you have seen rain. Just imagine your sea, it's raining, and every raindrop is a jewel, like a diamond or an emerald or a ruby. So this is an image that is like an unbelievably vast array of beautiful, precious things.

[08:53]

And this teaching is saying that's how it is, an unbelievably vast array. beautiful array of vast, vast, precious things. So the two main ways in which this teaching on abundance is medicine is, one, the idea is to view the world with such a degree of abundance that you feel no interest in holding on to anything, so you're actively involved in giving people what they need to meet their material needs. So this is the The idea of abundance is to help us see the world in such a way that we are focused on understanding people's material needs and meeting them. The second way in which this is generally interpreted, and many of the Korean commentators will point this out, they say, what does this reign of jewels represent? The jewels represent skillful means. So what does skillful means mean?

[09:57]

It means the capacity in any moment for any sentient being to do something that is conducive to liberation for everyone and everything. So one of the most central ideas in Buddhism, if you look at the Four Noble Truths and the original teaching, is that if there is consciousness, and that includes when you're asleep, like any kind of consciousness, there is the capacity to do something that is conducive to liberation. They're suffering, and you can do something about it. So this rain of jewels, you say, represents this unbelievable array of capacities to do something that would help everything be free from suffering. And if we are just very limited in our understanding, we just limit this to human beings right now. 8 billion human beings, including, of course, you, which right now can do something conducive to liberation for everyone. And that's always true.

[10:59]

As long as you are alive, every single moment. And that's very, we're just, I'm just limiting the human beings right now. And not to mention all the deities or plants or animals, whatever they're up to. Amazing. 8 billion people and you. If it was just you right now, able to do something conducive to liberation for everyone, already astonishing. It makes the image of a rain of jewels pale if we really take it in. And if we live with this understanding, moment to moment, we and everyone we meet and everyone is capable of doing something conducive to liberation, it profoundly changes how we live for most of us. Unless you're already there, enjoy. If you're there, you can just keep going. Find another medicine. I'm going to read a short passage from the book related to this. Thank you.

[12:19]

This teaching is to evoke a sense of abundance. It is to cut through anxiety, alienation, and clinging. Early Buddhist texts focus on giving things up so we can be free of our clinging. Huayin emphasizes seeing a world so replete with riches that we feel no need to hold on. Huayin teachers understand that these abundant manifestations require our actual giving. In his commentary on this line, Bob Young writes, It may be compared to the wish-fulfilling gem possessed by a wheel-turning king. If it is kept in the royal treasury, it does not rain down all manner of treasures. In a Pali canon text, so that's from the earliest layer of Buddhist teachings, in a Pali canon text, a king gets wise counsel on how to deal with bandits overrunning the realm. His advisor tells him that punishment and violence will not end the epidemic of crime. But, and here I quote the sutra, With this plan, you can completely eliminate the plague of crime.

[13:26]

To those in the kingdom who are engaged in cultivating crops and raising cattle, let your majesty distribute grain and fodder. To those in trade, give capital. To those in government service, assign proper living wages. Then those people... being intent on their own occupations, will not harm the kingdom. Your majesty's revenues will be great, the land will be tranquil and not be beset by thieves, and the people with joy in their hearts, playing with their children, will dwell in open houses. So you may have heard this idea that Trying to eliminate crime through punishment and state violence is ineffective, and a much more effective means would be to provide people the material they need, things they need to thrive. It floats around in our culture. It's the basis of a couple movements, police abolition and prison abolition movements, but also many other maybe less hardcore worldviews.

[14:29]

It's not new. It's... right there in the foundational texts of this religious tradition. And I had a pretty lively sense of this abundance kind of flavor of experience just from my practice and from this study. But I will say that in the last several months, it has become... yet more profoundly and amazingly vivid. So in Minneapolis in early December, a friend of mine was like, well, we understand, we've seen that ICE has been bringing a lot of violence to a number of cities and they're planning to come here. So I'm going to set up a new mutual aid network. We're just going to have a Google form that allows people to sign up if they want someone to deliver groceries to them because it's unsafe to leave home. And then we'd have another Google form so people can sign up to deliver the groceries.

[15:31]

And it's just called Neighbors Helping Neighbors. It's just a neighborhood thing. And then by mid-December, I was at a meeting, and they were like, you know, we have like 30 or 40 volunteers, so I guess I'm going to need a volunteer just to manage the requests and the spreadsheet and stuff. And then a couple months later, there were like 3,000 or 4,000 people signed up and hundreds of requests being processed every day. And we decided that because the encouragement of ICE had caused thousands of people to be unsafe leaving their homes, we'd start raising rent money to pay people's rent. And we raised $5.7 million. And it's not like a nonprofit organization. It's just like some people in our neighborhood who did this for a couple of months. And it's actually one of many, many other local things in our cities, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, who've done this. There's millions and millions of dollars just raised because we're like, we can do this. We have the capacity to take care of each other.

[16:33]

And this did not come magically out of something that happened in December. I have been working with activists all over the Twin Cities for years who've been focusing on recognizing we have the material needs to take care of everyone. The material needs of the world are beautiful and replete so we can stop extracting so much. This was the basis of a movement to stop the construction of a tar sands oil pipeline that we had. So there's been community engagement around this worldview that has produced results, which I have found to be incredibly inspiring and beautiful. So another central theme of... Hawaiian traditions, interdependence. I would say most people who know just a tiny bit about it, if you say, what's it about? They say, I think it's like interdependence or that Indra's net thing. I'm not going to talk about Indra's net today, but it's cool.

[17:36]

Anyway, so we have a series of lines in Wiesong's ocean seal chart that are expressions of this idea. So it says, within one is all. Within many is one. One is all. the many are one. Within one mote of dust is contained the ten directions, and within each phenomena it is also thus. Immeasurable distant eons are one moment of mind, and one moment of mind is immeasurable eons. So the entire universe is contained in any particular thing because that thing is dependent on all the things in the universe. And likewise, the entire universe only exists as it is expressed in every and each particular thing. They have to be here. There's no universe without you right now. There's no universe without this lectern. This is how it actually is.

[18:37]

So I'm going to read just a little bit related to this teaching. Weesong is the author of The Ocean Seal Chart, a Korean monk from about 1,500 years ago. When Weesong traveled to China for the Dharma, he met a woman named Sonmyo who fell in love with him. He told her that his vow of celibacy meant he could not requite her love, and her order to protect him on his path transformed her into a dragon. After years of caring for him on his travels, she became a great stone, hovering over invaders outside one of the first temples he founded. She is perched there still, now, a great stone guardian overlooking the Temple of the Floating Stone, Busaeaksa, near Yongju City in Korea. The times of myth, of history, and of the present can collapse in a good story.

[19:44]

Trauma, too, can make the interpenetration of times vivid. Yesterday, someone described being overwhelmed by emotions during an argument with a friend. Suddenly, they had the jarring experience of being a three-year-old child feeling the same rage, the same need to hold someone at bay who won't say no, that was showing up in their present life. This collapsing of time and identity rang true to my own experience when I was receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress. Somehow I could be totally aware of my own bodily sensations, my own present moment sensory environment, my own agency and adulthood, and also absolutely be the terrified child consumed by shame, terror, and rage who in linear time had grown up 30 years ago. Teachings on karma have much in common with contemporary theories of trauma. So does the Huayan emphasis on the interpenetration of past, present, future and there are many analytical methods in the Hawaiian tradition like a sort of philosophical meditation approaches to helping us recognize interdependence from all different angles they love to just proliferate methodologies viewpoints ideas celebrate every possible angle of things but

[21:15]

Fortunately, I think the best way is the simplest. When we sit zazen and we have the opportunity to not divide the world up with our mind, then what is revealed is the world which is already undivided. It's pretty simple. So one of the implications of the teachings on interdependence in this tradition that is particularly influential on Soto Zen is the idea that since the entire universe can only be expressed in particular things, that means each particular thing is utterly precious, valuable, and worth taking care of. So if you've ever been like, I don't know, I don't know what you do for Soji around here, but if you're ever like, I'm cleaning the floor again and it's perfectly clean, that just emphasis on like, just take care of this thing right in front of you.

[22:20]

It really matters. Just placing the cushions in a way that is beautiful. Moving around the room in a way where the bodies are moving harmoniously. All of things, all of these approaches to practice do not seem to have been... heavily emphasized in earlier types of Buddhism, but as we move into China and the Hawaiian tradition, this emphasis on what we might think of as the world of things becomes really important. Early Buddhism, there's a lot of emphasis on looking at consciousness itself. What is the feeling here? Is there aversion? Is there a desire? Is there concentration? Is there distraction? And that is really valuable. but it's also valuable to turn the intensity of that presence and lens out towards taking care of these friends that we have everywhere we go. So I'm going to read a little bit regarding this aspect of Hawaiian.

[23:29]

So as I said, this book is a commentary. So we have 30 lines of text, seven Chinese characters each, and one chapter per line. So this is a commentary on the line, Within one is all, within many is one. If you want to sum up Huayin teachings in a single line, this is as good as it gets. The idea that each thing contains everything and everything is holding each thing pervades the tradition. The implications are vast. When I interviewed folks for an article about Tomoe Katagiri, who was central in transmitting the practice of hand-sewings and religious garments to North America, her student Andrea Martin said, Tomoe-san continually showed that everything matters. If the whole world is here in this cup of tea, this stitch, or this bough, don't you want to care for it? The Hawaiian master Jian wrote, Because in the Hawaiian teaching, phenomena are the teaching, whatever phenomena are brought up in exhaustible teachings are included.

[24:40]

Because everything is precious, discernment about how to care for things is precious. Once Tomoisan was carefully making us tea, apropos of something we'd been talking about a moment before, I began to quote a line from the Metta Sutra. She put down the tea things and faced me with her whole being, relaxed, poised, and alert. When the sutra quote was over, she returned to making tea. In Wiesong's commentary on this poem, he repeatedly refers to the teaching of the ten coins. This is a common Huayin metaphor. If you have ten coins, any one of them completely contains all ten, for if you remove that one, there is no ten. Within the ten coins, each one is completely contained in the ten, for if the ten were gone, so too would be the one. More subtly, if part of the ten were gone, the one would no longer be the exact same one it was.

[25:43]

It wouldn't be the one that is thus, in this particular relational context. If a bowl of soup costs ten coins, the one as part of ten coins is sufficient. As part of nine, it is not. It is practical for people to Let us practice looking at money not just in terms of what we have and what we can get, but how this money impacts the whole and hence particular individuals within that whole. Our shared agreements about money often hide the fact that within the whole of our economy, many individual people work all day for just enough money to live beneath a freeway overpass.

[26:54]

These shared agreements can make it seem that someone who doesn't have a job deserves to live under a freeway overpass. Seeing that one is all, we can do better. So Hannah Arndt was a Jewish philosopher who escaped Europe in the late 30s and emigrated to the United States. And she wrote many amazing things, but... One thing that she focused on is trying to understand how authoritarianism comes to be and how it can be countered, which for some reason is feeling really interesting to me lately. So she once wrote, even the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness.

[27:58]

Even the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness. And if you quoted this to me and said, oh yeah, that's in a Hawaiian text, I would just say, that sounds right. I would believe you. But her point here is that, generally speaking, when it comes to authoritarianism, there's a tendency to sort of look at an authoritarian leader and their immediate cronies and be like, those are the bad, evil people and we need to get rid of them. And her point is that authoritarianism exists only based on millions and millions of acts of active support for authoritarianism and sort of passive complicity with authoritarianism. And this is... Pretty similar, you know, if we think with a karmic Hawaiian worldview, the collective situation we're in is made by millions and millions of billions, I don't know, I'm not a mapmologist, a lot of tiny acts.

[29:03]

And they all matter. And we always have agency. So this is one of the reasons I have been part of a crew providing trainings in non-cooperation with authoritarianism in Minneapolis for the last six months. And it's really weird because the training curriculum is designed by social scientists who've looked at authoritarian takeovers of countries, and they've tracked what works in opposing them and what doesn't work. And then they've made a curriculum saying, well, why don't we just do the stuff that works? And it's really similar in that it's just focused on, like, people can do all different kinds of things. It's not like a thing that you do. It's like many, many people do many, many different kinds of things, and that ends up removing the foundational structure that enables an authoritarian state to be violating and dominating people.

[30:07]

So one more thing about taking care of things I want to say, a particularity, difference in taking care of things, is regard to George Floyd Square, which is, I live a couple miles from George Floyd Square, which is a site where George Floyd was murdered, and then where Alex Preddy and Renee Goode were killed by ACE agents in the last few months are also about a mile apart from that place, which is very sad. But when George Floyd was murdered, kind of immediately there was a lot of rage. And that was concentrated outside the third precinct police department, where the officers that killed him were based. And that building was eventually burned down a few days later. But the site where he was murdered immediately became a site of spirituality, vigil, and community building. And it still is.

[31:12]

So there's been a morning meeting at 38th and Chicago like every day, you know, for six years now. And it's great. I mean, I live in Minnesota. So it's like 10 degrees below zero and you're driving down the Chicago Avenue and you look over and there's people with a little fire pit sitting outside with chairs figuring out how to do public safety and community building every day. And one of the things that happened there is people just started bringing things into the square. So right away, it was just filled with flowers, religious icons, poems, dolls, artworks. And I mean, it was overwhelming because people come from all over the world at this point. But at first, it was just local people. But it was just kind of massive and it's filling the street. And, you know, sir, what are we going to do here? And a number of people, but I'll single out Janelle Austin, who's kind of the main curator, just said, we're going to acknowledge that every single one of these things matters.

[32:14]

They were all brought here by someone who really cared, and we're going to take care of every single one of them. And so she and a crew of other people, they curate that space, and they find a way to make... And it's like the city is not managing it. It's just people. And so, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've been there... And someone just shows up with a truck full of plants and they redo the plants in the space. And then when they decommission something, they dispose of it in a way that's respectful or they actually have a huge archive of things. So back to this theme that what happens when we acknowledge that everything matters and really take care of what's in front of us? Something very beautiful. So my last theme here, and I guess this is kind of a segue, is social engagement and diversity of practice. So I'm going to read here a little bit.

[33:16]

So the Flower Garland Sutra was actually originally compiled from a bunch of other texts. And three of the chapters of the Flower Garland Sutra were already very influential and are sometimes studied on their own and viewed as individual sutras. So I'm going to talk about one of these right now. The Gandavyuha Sutra, or Entry into the Realm of Reality Sutra, is the third of the key stand-alone sutras that were incorporated into the Avatamsaka. It constitutes the final and longest chapter of the sutra. It tells the story of a young man, Sudhana, who commits his life to liberation from suffering for everyone and everything, and of his long and wondrous pilgrimage on the path. He meets with 53 teachers. each of whom shows him a staggering level of spiritual attainment, and then ends their meeting by saying they can't possibly know the way to liberation. Each one sends him on to visit another teacher to keep practicing.

[34:20]

The teachers include beggars, queens, boys and girls, monks, nuns, rich men, mathematicians, sailors, perfumers, doctors, musicians, goddesses, bark-clad outcasts, folks who change genders, people dressed in rags, those bedecked in jewels, a prince who almost loses his life, working to free all the prisoners in his land, and great bodhisattvas, such as Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri, and Samanta Badra. They teach in myriad ways, all different and appropriate to themselves and those they meet. They teach by feeding people, through physical touch, by making beautiful scents and palaces, by writing, by teaching meditation, by expounding the Dharma, by revealing suffering, and by guiding people through storms. This sutra provides inspiration for those of us looking to create multicultural, engaged Buddhist communities.

[35:21]

So this sutra is so much about relationship, And, you know, if you look at Buddhist teachings, the majority of them are conversations. Koans are usually conversations between two people. The Pali canon, even if it's a very sort of philosophical or like a deep investigation of consciousness, it's usually one person, often the Buddha, teaching someone else specifically because of what they need and how they are. But this sutra really, I don't know, it puts this aspect of things in a very rich light. And I think this is very wonderful because, I don't know, it can seem like, oh, I have to figure out what the right practice is. And, you know, I think we can just keep figuring out what the best practice we can come up with right now is. And that will be sufficient. And I've seen so many different wonderful ways to practice.

[36:27]

I've been to ten different Buddhist centers in the last two weeks, and there's a little different flavor everywhere. It's wonderful. Different types of meditation. And then if I think more vividly about my recent experience, in early, about mid-December, ICE brought an incredibly large number of people to Minneapolis. Like it was about 20 to one more ratio of people to population than they'd ever brought to any other city and just started rapidly deploying to sort of brutalize predominantly people of color in the streets and harass people. And within just a matter of days, there were hundreds of people who'd figured out how to make a network so they could figure out where this violence was happening and go there and bear witness to it. and document it. And within maybe a week or two, there were thousands of people. And I mean, it happened so fast. And these are people who are willing to go and bear witness in situations that are really dangerous, where many of them were detained, often illegally.

[37:32]

It had to be really fast because the strategy ICE was using was to come in. They were trying to be out within five or six minutes. So on multiple occasions, People I know witnessed like they grab someone out of a car and drive away and the car was actually still literally rolling down the street. They hadn't even put it in park. So this was like it took so much energy and coordination for that. And, you know, if you've seen images of violence in Minneapolis in the last couple of months, it's because people did that and you wouldn't probably know about it if they hadn't. Amazing. An amazing practice. But that was just a tiny... There were people just making sandwiches and delivering them. There were people having school patrols, just, you know, all the neighbors just standing outside of school, making their kids feel and be safe. There were network... I met so many people who I didn't think they were even paying that much attention. They were like, well, I have been driving my neighbor to work every day for two months.

[38:33]

people raising money, people managing spreadsheets. I never had more appreciation for spreadsheets than I did after January and February in Minneapolis when we were coordinating thousands and thousands of people to take care of each other. And all those people who thought, oh, you know, I don't want to go to a protest realized I have a practice that can be profoundly liberative. I can help people figure out how to give each other food. And I could just go on and on. We had like a nightly, I helped organize a nightly. where people who were doing rapid response could do somatic meditations because it was very traumatic to view all that violence. On and on, just so beautiful. Singing resistance. Hundreds or thousands of people flowing into the streets to sing about how we love each other and want to care for each other. So many different kinds of practices. You don't have to do what other people are doing. Actually, you can't. It's too late. You know, one day I got up in the morning with a big crowd of people and we sang some nice songs to a bunch of riot police.

[39:38]

And then I went back to the Zen Center and led a weekend meditation retreat. And every day we just got up, we had our morning meditation, we had our evening meditations, we had our classes on the polycanon or whatever it was we were studying. Myriad, myriad things. boundless, limitless, unimaginable capacities for practice and liberation that you all have. And I've been talking about all this wonderful stuff I just witnessed, but I have utter confidence that you are doing beautiful and amazing things. So I am really grateful to be among you. And even though I may not hear the stories of your practice, I trust it. profoundly. So, thank you all very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[40:43]

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 sfzc.org. And click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:06]

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