This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. My name is Kokyo... I've come here for the 80th practice period at Green Dragon Temple, which just began a few days ago. Practice period is a time for practice. for Zen practice, which is always happening here, but during practice period, it's not exactly that there's more of it, but maybe it's like we just try to remember it more often, Zen practice during practice period, for six weeks, so we have more Zazen sitting,

[01:32]

we have more Dharma discussions, and so on. I don't know how there have been 79 of these practice periods here before this one, but somehow it's happened. I think it's just because people are interested in practicing Zen. At least enough to do 79 practice periods and maybe we'll complete this 80th one this year. Why would anybody be interested in such a thing? I think we're looking for something reliable. trustworthy in a world that is not so reliable and trustworthy in a body that's not so reliable and trustworthy in a mind that's not so reliable and trustworthy is there anything reliable and trustworthy

[03:02]

This practice period, our study topic, focus, is the jewel mirror samadhi, which I would propose is the only reliable, trustworthy reality there is. Of course, it comes in many names, but... This is one of many names of the one reliable, trustworthy refuge. This song of the dual mirror samadhi is a hit single in our... zen lineage one of the best it was taught we're not exactly sure who who wrote it actually but it was taught and transmitted particularly by our zen ancestor in ninth century china

[04:37]

whose name was Dongshan Lianjie, who lived on Mount Dong. And we call this lineage of Zen in China the Sao Dong lineage, named after Dongshan. In Japanese, we pronounce it So-to. Dongshan is Tozan. And the Sao or the So of Soto is the name of the place where the sixth ancestor taught Zen, Sao Shi, or Soke, Sao Creek. So our particular stream of Zen

[05:40]

is based on the teachings of the sixth ancestor, whose name was Great Mirror, Wisdom, Ability, and the teaching of Dongshan, maybe most known for this Jewel Mirror Samadhi, This song, it seems like, according to one story, was originally a kind of like Dharma transmission document.

[06:41]

So in this old Zen collection, we call it the Book of Serenity. In the commentary, Dungshan, when he was passing on the teaching to his student, Cao Shan, in his last instructions, he seemed to be passing on this song. of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi. And he said to his student, at my late teacher Yun Yan's place, I was intimately sealed with the Jewel Mirror Samadhi. Meaning that this was like his transmission from his teacher was this Jewel Mirror Samadhi. He says that in the record of Dungshan also. So maybe this song was written by his teacher Yunyan, but maybe it was written by Yunyan's teacher Yaoshan.

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We don't know how far back it went. It was a little bit like very intimate and maybe somewhat secret. So in this Book of Serenity, Dengshan said, at my late teacher Yunyan's place, I was personally, intimately sealed with the jewel mirror samadhi in which all matters are comprehended most clearly and essentially. Now I entrust it to you, Saoshan, my dear student. Keep it well. and don't let it be cut off. Later, if you meet a true Dharma vessel, only then should you pass on this dual mirror samadhi to them because it's so intimate and essential.

[09:00]

It should be kept somewhat hidden, not revealed too easily. I think that if this dual mirror samadhi is offered according to current conventions, it would be hard to connect with future descendants. So there's something about this song, right? It's very intimate. This is in the commentary to the 80th case in the Book of Serenity. If this dual mirror samadhi song is offered according to current conventions, it might be hard to connect with future descendants. What are the current conventions?

[10:02]

We don't know what he meant by that, but... We might imagine it as current conventions might be like being too flippant about the deepest dharma or too kind of superficial or just for people who just want a tiny tip-of-the-tongue taste of zen instead of offer to those who really want the full package. I don't know if that was the current conventions in his time. So it seems like the song was a very...

[11:06]

intimate and almost hidden kind of thing in the time of the ones who wrote it and originally passed it down. And in one record of our Japanese ancestor four centuries later, it says that his teacher Ru Jing, when Dogen received his teacher Ru Jing's Dharma in China before returning to Japan, His teacher gave him the teacher's portrait and gave Dogen this Jewel Mirror Samadhi, according to one story. So it seems like maybe for many centuries it was a kind of intimate transmission document. And we might say, well, we shouldn't even be talking about this kind of thing around here on a Sunday talk. But some centuries after Dogen, a teacher, very important kind of reviver of the Soto Zen lineage in Japan named Menzan, felt like this song is... It's kind of obscure, but...

[12:33]

it really could be a smash hit. So we should make it more widely known. So this was in the 1700s. And so Menzan then suggested that this song be incorporated into the daily liturgy in Soto Zen temples. And it has been since that time. In other words, in temples of this lineage of Dungshan. In Japan, every Soto Zen temple would chant this song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi every day or every other day, usually, along with some other songs. So here, too, we chant this song regularly in our morning. And this practice prayer, we're going to chant it every day because we want to make it a smash hit around here.

[13:44]

So what was originally a very private, intimate kind of thing has for many centuries now been widely spread and celebrated as the kind of one of the heart Teachings of how to practice Dungshan's Zen, Soto Zen. The title of this song is The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi. Samadhi is a Sanskrit term from the Buddha that means like the unified mind, the unification of mind, the one-pointedness of mind. That's how the Buddha defined samadhi.

[14:46]

Mind is often scattered or dispersed or split into subjects and objects. these kind of dualities, but samadhi is a unified mind, one mind, one pointed mind, undivided mind. In the Buddha's early teachings, we have the Eightfold Path, important summary of the Buddha's practice methods and the foundational teachings. And without going into that, just know that the eighth, the final fold of the eightfold path is right samadhi. And in the Indian yogic traditions, like we have Patanjali's Yoga Sutras is a

[16:04]

central teaching of the yoga tradition some centuries after the buddhist time and there's it's there's eight eight limbs in patanjali's yoga ashtanga is the eight limbed yoga and it so happens that the eighth limb in the eightfold yoga path is called samadhi Is that just coincidence? So not exactly that the Eightfold Path is a progressive kind of thing. They're all aspects of one path. But maybe there's some significance that the Buddha and Patanjali put Samadhi as the kind of

[17:05]

final practice on their list of the essential practice unified mind undivided mind one-pointed mind and then in the later great vehicle buddha dharma there's many many names of different samadhis colorful names And in Zen there's many names of samadhis. The Limitless Meanings Samadhi, the Storehouse of Radiant Light Samadhi, the Self-Enjoyment Samadhi, and the Jewel Mirror Samadhi. These may be different names for something very similar. But in this case, this song is called The Jewel Mirror, The Precious Mirror, Unified Mind.

[18:15]

And I hope we can explore this song for the next six weeks in this practice period and in some Sunday talks and in the Sashin retreats. many verses so we won't hear them all today but as a kind of introduction to this Samadhi how we might relate to it before we even go into the verses these jewel mirror verses one of my many favorite Zen like teachings that I think is is a nice way of talking about this Jewel Mirror Samadhi in more modern times. I think it may be kind of accessible even for newcomers.

[19:16]

Maybe not, but let's see how this introduction is for you. This is coming from The teachings of Douglas Harding, who has a book called On Having No Head. Subtitle is Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious. That's a hint that it's maybe kind of accessible. Something really obvious here. And it's something that I think he... Douglas Harding, this author, at one point discovered that he had no head.

[20:19]

And at some point he started talking to people about this and thought, maybe people just think I'm really weird. Maybe I am kind of crazy. But then he... he's discovered Zen teachings and he said, oh no, these people are onto it. The fact that we don't really have a head. I think he's comforted by that. So what he discovered, his headlessness, what he later called the headless way, is basically that he had no head and the way, experientially, he had no head. And the way he kind of points this out as a kind of method that we can all try now is try to get into this kind of open-minded space of kind of naive,

[21:31]

exercise here. There's nothing tricky about this. We're trying to just stay with our direct experience. So this particular method that I think is kind of good entrance into the headless gate is we take our finger, you know, finger often points at things. So we can like point at the ceiling. and like follow our finger to what it's pointing at. And see if you point your finger at the ceiling and then kind of look along your finger at where it's pointing to, what do we see? We see like what we call the Zendo ceiling. And it's like, it's over there at a distance from me. And we call it, in Buddhist terms, we often call it an object. It's an object of mind. The mind knows objects.

[22:35]

The eyes see objects. The ears hear objects. The objective world is the world of experiences that are happening to our mind or to our senses. So particularly we're focusing on the visual sense in this exercise. So we see this... Something that has a particular color, kind of brownish, different shades of brown, and a shape of kind of like rectangular, looks a little bit, from our angles where we're sitting, looks a little bit like trapezoidal shapes, if we stay with our experience. So there's shape and color. And then we can point at something else, like a window in the window. something over there. It's also kind of rectangular and has a frame and so on. We can point to a cushion on the floor.

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It's kind of a round black thing over there. These are visual objects we can point. Then we can point down to our knees, our lap. Follow your finger down there. Oh yeah, it's another object called my lower body then you can like move your finger like a little bit like this now it's you can't look quite along it but you're but you can if you look down you know you can see your torso barely if you're if you stretch your neck right it's still just like the ceiling and the And the cushions, right? It's another object that has a particular color of the clothing we're wearing and shape and so on, right? So it's feeling a little more intimate because it's this body, but it's still the same category of this stuff, color and shape and so on, right?

[24:38]

Now keep moving your finger up your torso further and further. And what's at the end of your finger now? We're not talking about some memory you have of it or something you've heard about it, but in your direct experience, what is that finger pointing to? And if you say a head, I would say that's just an idea from the past. In your direct experience right now, is there any head there? Yeah? Laughter is good because... You maybe got it. You really can't find any head there, right? I mean, you might say, well, that's silly. I know there's a head. But without hitting it or going to a mirror, there's really nothing really there called a head or a face, right?

[25:44]

And where we thought our head used to be, where we thought our face was, what do we find instead? It's almost like a, it's not something with color and shape, right? It's more like a transparent window, something like that. We might say, well, I'm seeing out through my eyes, my two eyes. But in our experience, it doesn't even seem like two eyes, really. Doesn't it seem like one big window with no edges, really? Doesn't it seem that way? We might not have noticed that because we just kind of feel as if and we think as if we have a head and we're experiencing through our head. But in our direct experience, When we look at that, it's not like all those other things we were looking at. It's not something that has color and shape. It's not something that has a size or even a location.

[26:50]

It feels like when we look for the edges of this window, we don't really see the edges. Maybe at some point we feel like the window doesn't go all the way back behind our heads, but it's kind of blurry, the edges. It's like an empty space, clear space. But where there used to be a head, it's not that this empty space is nothing at all, right? Experientially, what is here is kind of like an empty, spacious window, but it's filled with everything, isn't it? It's filled with the zendo and all the people here and all those things we were pointing at earlier are like appearances in this empty, boundless, edgeless window.

[28:00]

We could say window or we could also compare it to a mirror. It's like a very clear mirror in which everything in the room is reflected or appearing. Can you grok it? Can you verify the presence of headlessness? experiential headlessness, facelessness. And then we sometimes talk about our original face before our parents were born. It's another name for this one.

[29:03]

The faceless one is also our original face. original face here does it not experientially for each of us when we stay with this exercise is it not true that this original face has no particular size or shape or color or sound or texture or or race or past history. It's always just present, open, mirror-like window.

[30:13]

And it's inseparable from everything that we see. It's not like there's a window over here and all that stuff is out there. Isn't it more like this empty space is filled intimately with all appearances without any distance really between this faceless face? and the appearances. So this is, I would say this is Zen practice. Maybe some Zen practitioners might even think like, that's not how I practice Zen. But we can, this is a nice practice because we can practice it sitting on a cushion silently. And we can practice it walking around throughout the day, and in every activity, this headless space never leaves us, right?

[31:31]

It's always available. We're usually focused on the things being out there, and we forget that they're actually experientially not really out there. They're actually just the play, the images on the surface of this jewel mirror. And it was Douglas Harding, the Headless Way discoverer, said, I lost my head and gained a world. Where I thought my head was is actually the whole world. I hope you can kind of taste that a little bit. I would say that's basically what the Song of the Dual Mirror Samadhi is about. But then there's lots of details in this song. This then tradition of Buddha Dharma

[32:49]

uses this metaphor, this analogy of a mirror quite a lot. And I think if we... Various ways of tuning this mirror and looking at basically this metaphor of the dual mirror. So here's one of them from the Flower Ornament Sutra, which is a... scripture these days around this temple, I've heard. The Avatan Saka Sutra. In chapter 29, called The Ten Acceptances. See if you can accept this. This is one of the ten acceptances. It's bodhisattvas, enlightening beings. acceptance of being like a reflection in a mirror.

[33:55]

Bodhisattvas, those who wish to be really awake for the benefit of all beings, have a lot of things that have to accept. Ten big ones may be here. And this one is the acceptance of that they themselves are like reflections in the mirror, and everybody else and everything is also like reflections in the mirror. And this is how the bodhisattva, Samanta Bhadra, in this chapter, teaches this acceptance of awakening beings, bodhisattvas. He says, just as the sun, moon, moon, men, women, houses, mountains, rivers, springs, and so on. A lot of duality there, right?

[35:00]

A lot of dualistic appearances. All these things, just as they are reflected in something clear, like still water, or a jewel or a mirror, just as the sun and the moon and the mountains and the rivers are reflected in a mirror and the reflections are neither one with nor different from the mirror, are neither separate from nor united with the mirror, Can you follow that? Those of you who've entered the headless way, we're talking about this mirror-like headless space is not really separate from the images that are appearing within this window or mirror, but it's not that the...

[36:17]

that the images are exactly united with this faceless face either. They don't really fall into that category of one way or the other. We can't really say they are the mirror because the mirror seems to be the same as we walk through the day, the same in in the sense of it's always just open and clear. It's always in that same kind of state. But the appearances are constantly changing, so they can't be, we can't really say they're exactly identical, but we can't say there's the slightest bit of separation between the mirror and its images either, right? This is something to contemplate. So just like these mountains, rivers, and so on are neither one with nor separate from the mirror. Appearing in the mirror without the mirror being affected by them.

[37:28]

These are like some nuances we can explore. Does this headless space where your head used to be, is that space affected by by the different colors and shapes that appear within it. It seemed like it's always in the same condition. It's not really affected by them. And yet, at the same time, it's completely inseparable from the changing content of the reflections. So similarly to this analogy, great bodhisattvas, great awakening beings, know their own bodies and others' bodies are all appearances of cognition or of mind and do not understand them dualistically as self and others.

[38:47]

And simultaneously, these bodhisattvas appear in their own lands and other lands. Maybe we could understand that as their own lands is their own original face. They always appear there. They can't escape it, no matter how hard they try. They can't leave their original face. But then if they walk over to someone else's house, they can... their friends land too. Just as there are no roots, sprouts, stalks, nodes, branches, or leaves in a seed, the seed of a plant or a tree, yet this seed can produce the roots, sprouts, stalks, nodes, and branches. So also do great bodhisattvas distinguish duality in that which is non-dual.

[39:58]

Their skillful means completely fluid and all-encompassing without hindrance. This is called great... Bodhisattvas, great awakening beings, acceptance of everything being like a reflection. That's a kind of old scriptural presentation of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi long before Dungshan's time. There's another old sutra called the Sutra Unraveling the Deep Mysteries, the Sandhya Nirmocana Sutra, where the Buddha says to Maitreya Bodhisattva, I have explained that consciousness, your mind, is fully distinguished by the fact that

[41:14]

that it's objects, all these things we see and sounds we hear, that these objects are just cognition only. The appearances are the headless open space. I've taught that, Maitreya. And then... Maitreya says to the Buddha, Bhagavan, if that image is not different from the mind, then how can the mind reflect on itself in order to know these images? How could that happen? How could it do that? It seems like the mind is being aware of images, but how could the mind just reflect on itself like that to know these images? if you're saying that they're really not different. The Bhagavan, the Buddha replied, Maitreya, although no thing ever looks at any other thing, nevertheless, the mind that is generated in that way appears in that way.

[42:32]

For instance, based on form, form is seen in a perfectly clear round mirror. But one thinks, I see an image. The form and the appearance of the image on the mirror appear as different things. Likewise, the mind and the images in the mind appear to be separate. It's also a prelude to Dung Shan's Jewel Mirror Samadhi. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support.

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For more information, visit sf.com zc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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