This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. Warm night. Tassajara. Summer of 2012. I think I want to start by saying a little bit about my personal history in coming to Zen, coming to practice. In terms of coming to Zen Center in 1997, I had dropped out of graduate school and moved to San Francisco.

[01:03]

I was a philosophy instructor in San Francisco. And I had dropped out of a neurobiology program in Rochester. And I came to San Francisco Zen Center because I wanted to study the self. I think that was my main interest in Buddhism at that time. When I was growing up as a teenager, I used to keep a journal. And I would write in my journal, who am I? And then I would try and define it. I would write down all these different things like, I'm a philosophy student. I'm interested in this. I like that. I don't like that kind of thing. I'd come up with really interesting lists of who I was and who I wasn't. And invariably, they ended up being lists of who I wanted to be and who I didn't want to be.

[02:09]

So personal identity was one of my main interests in being in philosophy and also in neurobiology. I was really interested in who we are and how do we get the way we are. Also, I was very interested in ideas about self-deception. I was very fascinated with the idea that we can deceive ourselves, which I feel like growing up I saw many examples and was afraid that I was also self-deceived. And if I were, how would I know? So I made pacts with my friends. Please tell me. Please tell me if I'm deceiving myself. And sometimes those pacts really worked and sometimes they caused lots of problems. However, when I came to Zen Center, I felt like I fit right in.

[03:15]

Here I am with a bunch of people who want to study the self. How wonderful. I think for all of us who come to practice, when we get involved in practice, we don't necessarily know what we're getting ourselves into. That was definitely true for me. So I wanted to talk tonight about one of my favorite koans. I'll start with talking about this koan. It's from the Book of Serenity, and it's Case 37. So some of you have probably heard me talk about this before. But it's about the self. Guishan asked Yangshan, If someone suddenly said, all sentient beings just have active consciousness, or otherwise karmic consciousness, if all sentient beings just have active consciousness, boundless and unclear, with no fundamental to rely on, how would you prove it in experience?

[04:23]

Yangshan said, if a monk comes by, I call him, hey you. If the monk turns his head, I say, what is it? If he hesitates, I say, not only is their active consciousness boundless and unclear, they have no fundamental to rely on. And Grayshawn said, good. So you can imagine the situation where you're walking down Tassajara Boulevard and someone says, hey, and you turn and then they say, what is it? And then there's a little bit of confusion. You might say, what are you talking about? There's this feeling of like, how do I place this into what's known for me, what I can rely on? How do I place it into a context that I can understand, that I can grasp?

[05:26]

So I'll say a little bit about karmic consciousness or active consciousness. Karma... Does anyone have a good kind of definition of karma? Action. What kind of action? Volitional. Volitional action. That yields an effect. So karmic consciousness is basically all the actions from beginningless time all the volitional actions of body, speech, and mind. So they're not just actions that you do with your body, but also with your mind, the way you think. It includes all of our personality, our habits, all of our preferences, our ideas about what's good, what's bad, what we like, what we don't like.

[06:30]

Basically, when I was writing out lists of who am I. I think that's what I was doing. I was like, who am I in this karmic body? I like chocolate ice cream. I don't like strawberry. I mean, that wasn't really on my list, but it could have been. So our karmic consciousness is like the vast... lifetime and even beyond the lifetime of habits and our preferences. It's our ready-made view of the world. It's what we think. It's what we believe. And oftentimes this we think that we perceive the world accurately. We believe that we have these senses and that something appears in our field of vision or our field of awareness and we apprehend it and we know it. And we actually believe, really, we go around believing that we accurately do this.

[07:39]

We accurately have a picture of reality that's true. So I want to read the verse to this koan. I think it's the verse that I really resonate with, but I just love this verse. One call and he turns his head. Do you know the self or not? Vaguely, like the moon through ivy, a crescent at that. The child of riches, as soon as he falls on the boundless road of destitution, has such sorrow. Let me read it again. One call and he turns his head. Hey you, do you know the self or not? Vaguely, like the moon through ivy, a crescent at that. The child of riches, as soon as he or she falls on the boundless road of destitution, has such sorrow.

[08:43]

So, what do you think this child of riches is? This child of riches that falls on the boundless road of destitution and that knows such sorrow. Who is this child of riches? Anyone have a thought? Why do they have riches? that you grasp. Thank you. Clinging. Josh? Just someone with a precious human birth. A precious human birth, a child of riches. Thank you. I think the child of riches, the child of riches is us.

[09:50]

We are the child of riches. And we fall on the boundless road of destitution, which is like what Deborah just said. We have ideas, we have thoughts, we have preferences, we cling to those preferences, and then inevitably the world is not the way we want it to be. And we suffer. So... The child of riches part is... Maybe I'll get to that a little bit later. I want to say something about the commentary to this koan. So in the commentary, it says that the Avatamsaka Sutra says that this fundamental affliction of ignorance, which is our karmic consciousness, is itself the immutable knowledge of all Buddhas.

[10:53]

He says, this principle is most profound and mysterious in the extreme. Difficult to comprehend. At that moment, a boy happened to be sweeping there. Yunnan called to him and the boy turned his head. Yunnan pointed to him and said, is this not immutable knowledge? When Yangshan calls a monk and the monk turns his head, this is precisely this situation. Yunnan then asked the boy, what is your Buddha nature? The boy looked around at a loss and left. Yunnan said, is this not fundamental affliction? In the Yogacara school of Buddhism, of which our school of Soto Zen is... has some of its roots in Yogacara. The Yogacara school focuses on the question of how is a self constructed?

[12:02]

How is a self born? And how does it exist? How is it maintained? And it looks at mind. It looks at the transformations of mind. In it, it talks about how... this ready-made world, this world just kind of appears to us. And it appears, it just kind of comes in through these senses. But it talks about three different kinds of transformation, the transformations of consciousness that happen when we apprehend an object that seems to be out there. So rather than thinking that there are objects out there that are truly existent, that we interact with, In this system, it talks about how all objects of awareness, all dharmas, whether they're thoughts or people or situations or conflicts, whatever it is, anything that comes into the mind is transformed in these three ways.

[13:05]

The first way is pretty straightforward. Things come in through the senses. So they either come in through the eye consciousness, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body consciousness, or mind consciousness as a mental object. They come in through the senses. And as we all know, our senses can be fallible. They can be distorted from what is, you know, a true sense. But even if, I mean, the idea of a true sense is like, what is the color red? What is a feeling of pain? It's got to come in through some path in these sense gates. So that's one way in which the thing that's supposedly out there is transformed by our individual sense consciousnesses. That's the first transformation of consciousness. And the second is what's called the storehouse consciousness, otherwise called Alaya consciousness. And this is basically a repository consciousness. It's the storehouse of all your past experiences from before you were born, your culture,

[14:14]

the belief structures you grew up with, the values that were ingrained in you as a child, all the habits that you had in your past, everything that you've ever experienced. It's kind of like, I guess some people call it like the unconscious, but it's more vast than that. It's everything you've ever experienced and how you've experienced it. And so anything that you experience today is going to be flavored by how you've experienced it. something similar to that in the past. So let's say you had a very bullying older sibling. You had an older sister or something like that who just bullied you all the time. And now you're on a crew or you've got a co-worker who's a little older than you and is kind of dominating. Your perception of the experience is going to be completely associated with your past experience, right? So that's another way in which the situation is not objective.

[15:20]

It's going through this subjective transformation into your own consciousness. And so the aliyah, which you can say, oh yeah, I can see this particular habit of mine and that particular way of thinking and how that colors my current perceptions. But it's so vast. Even if we know just a small percentage of little things in it, it's like how much of it is kind of unknown to us. We just take it as that's who we are. That's how life is. So that's the second transformation. I mean, they're not in any particular order, but that's the second one I'm talking about tonight. And then the third is called Manas. And it basically, what Manas does, Manas is called the defiled consciousness, What Manas does is it takes the alaya, which is the storehouse of all our past experiences, and it says, ooh, that's me. That's who I am.

[16:22]

And it mistakes all of those, that whole body of experiences and thoughts and feelings, all of that, and says, that's who I am. And it thinks it's real. Not only does Manas... think of it as that's who I am. But experiences that come in through the transformation of manas, they come in through the filter of how does this experience out there, how does this person out there, how do they affect me? What do they have to do with me? And how are they going to affect who I am or how I feel or what's mine? And so those are the three transformations of consciousness that the Yogacara School proposes. And just to say, they don't propose these three consciousnesses as like these are reality. It's just a story. It's not a metaphysical truth.

[17:22]

So, Yogacara describes how our minds construct a world and then live in it. And we see things according to that world, that worldview. One description of this that we hear quite a bit in Buddhism is the story of the glass of liquid. How convenient. So this glass of liquid, it's said that human beings perceive it as water. We can drink it. It's perceived as water for human beings. For gods, this would be perceived as nectar. And for the hungry ghosts, it's perceived as pus. So how are you today? Like, who are you today? Are you a god? Are you a hungry ghost? Or are you a human? How we perceive things is conditioned by our habits.

[18:33]

The world we think is real out there that we grew up with. So what do we do about this? What do we do about this karmic consciousness that's boundless and unclear with no fundamental to rely on? Oftentimes we come to practice. We say, hmm, I'm not so happy with the way my life is. Or I really, I notice that I have all these bad habits and I want to change them. I want to live for the benefit of beings and I want to do some good in this world. And so we come and we sit. We come to a place like Zen Center or another practice place. Now, in this koan, Greishan asks Yangshan,

[19:40]

to prove this statement all sentient beings just have active consciousness boundless and unclear with no fundamental to rely on so you might think well what is this no fundamental to rely on I think oftentimes when we come to practice we have this idea that well if we practice hard if we're good Zen students then we won't suffer. And then we start sitting zazen. And we find that there it is. There's our human condition of suffering. Oftentimes, it's easy to kind of ignore our suffering and go along without kind of doing things to avoid it. And some things work for a little while, and then they stop working.

[20:47]

So maybe that's when we come to practice. Like, okay, I've tried drugs. I've tried sex. I've tried listening rock and roll. Time for zazen. And yet there's no fundamental to rely on. So... We have to come to terms with our strategies and what happens when none of them work. What do we do? What do we do then? There's a quote. I think it's from the Bodhisattva Bhumi Shastra. And the quote is that ordinary beings live according to their karma, their karmic habitual tendencies, whereas the bodhisattva lives according to vow. I brought this up the other day when we were doing our half-day sitting and had an interesting conversation about that.

[21:55]

Ordinary beings live according to their karma, meaning their habit formations, whereas bodhisattvas live according to vow. I thought about this, and just thinking about vow, kind of wondered, how many people, like, where does vow, like, come into most people's lives? Do people, like, feel like you have vows? Just in a day-to-day way, do you have vows? You did today? What kind of vows did you find that you had today? That's a good one. How did it go for you?

[22:55]

Great. That's wonderful. Brendan. I don't have any sort of time where I reflect or assess on that one either. I notice that since I take the precepts, I have a pattern and I have to, you know, reflection. I think, you know, I do look at them or work with them in various ways, but never explicitly I know the precepts. Uh-huh. I see. You know, we do have a lot of vows. In Buddhism, there's a lot of vows that we chant. In fact, we chanted one before we even started this talk. An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. That's a long time.

[24:07]

A hundred thousand million kalpas. One kalpa is defined as something like If somebody came, if there was a big vat of poppy seeds 10 square miles and somebody came by every thousand years and picked one out, a kalpa is when the vat is empty. So it's a long time. 100,000 million kalpas. And it says, having this to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. So, like, it's so rare, it's so rare, but, like, I vow to taste it. Michael? Yeah, those are called the immeasurable vows, for good reason. they seem a little bit more tangible like that might be doable.

[25:21]

But vows to save all beings, and I think you can also understand that when we get that first part where I think I'm grasping white speech, maybe it is more unfathomable. And I think that the vow, as opposed to maybe having commandments or promises as far as how I will live, goes much deeper, because then it's personal honesty. It's like, as opposed to getting results, You know, I vow not to kill, but my intention is not to kill. Then it has to do with how I'm living and how I'm honestly interacting with people around me and not so much about the end result, whether or not somebody got killed. So I know I like vow because it seems to go much deeper and place the responsibility on me. Yeah, it's interesting with vow as well. Or any kind of commitment. Like, we can... measure ourselves as to whether or not we're upholding the vow. And then there's these vows that are the immeasurable vows. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them.

[26:22]

Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. These immeasurable vows. We're saying we vow to do this thing that is impossible. So is the vow, is having a vow or setting an intention, if you're at all shy about like, well, I'm not going to say I'm going to do something if I can't do it, then you can't make the vow. But that's, like, ends-oriented. It's like, if I can't do it, then it's not worth making the vow. It's, like, doesn't really... It's not a normal kind of, like, setting an intention for oneself that's kind of like a personal intention. So vow is very different from, like, a personal commitment. You can think, you know, well, I have a personal commitment. I'm going to lose 20 pounds this summer. Or, like, you know, I'm going to... You can say, I'm going to be nicer to people, and that's it. These may be good vows or good intentions, but in terms of vow, vow transcends that realm of our personal likes or dislikes.

[27:26]

It's like, why do I want to lose 20 pounds? Because I want to look in a bathing suit or something. It could be something like that, but why do I want to save all beings? Are we really in it for our selfish concern? Why do we want to end all delusions? Maybe that could have an element of selfish concern in it. But yeah, if we look at vows as the end result and not in how we live them, then we're missing something pretty fundamental. Yes, the person who's outside. Welcome. Between being time and vow?

[28:36]

Well, I think that... I'm not sure, first of all. But I might say that... The vow is timeless. Or for all time. It's beyond time. Maybe. I have another thing to say in conjunction with this the statement that ordinary beings live according to their karma, but bodhisattvas live according to vow. In a sushin with Shohako Gamora many years ago, he made this statement that I thought was quite startling. He said that when we sit zazen, we don't generate new karma. And I was like, what? What are you talking about? How is that possible?

[29:41]

So not generating new karma, it's kind of like if karma is generated by action, and in sitting zazen, we don't generate new karma. Is it just because we're not acting in zazen? So this was confusing to me. But I wanted to bring up zazen in conjunction with vow. So in zazen, there's many descriptions of zazen. In the fukan zazengi, There's this one line that says, I don't think I brought that quote with me, so I'll have to think of it. What do you see? Dogen says, this is the essential art of zazen. What is the essential art of zazen? Non-thinking? He says, don't think. He didn't say don't think. He says, think not thinking. What is not thinking? It's non-thinking. This is the essential art of zazen. So in terms of our karmic tendencies, it's like we think we encounter the world as it is without our own subjective input.

[30:54]

We think we just encounter it, and we think about it, and we have concepts, and we put things in boxes. And we can do the same thing with our vows. We can say, well, today I vow to be kind to people. And at the end of the day, we can say, check, I did it. But that kind of goes against what Michael was just bringing up. It's like thinking about the end result of the vow as opposed to the living of the vow or how it's manifesting. It's like, do you want to find the answer to the question, who am I? What is the self? Like when we investigate that question, what I was trying to do way back when was write down a list, this is who I am. Why? I don't know. Maybe because I wanted to know something. It's a strong feeling of wanting to know myself. But actually, when you ask the question, who am I, without trying to find the right answer, then what happens is you live the question.

[32:03]

And the same thing is true of vow. It's like we can put this vow out there and... When we sit zazen, we come into the zendo or we're in our work and we want to be in zazen. And what are we doing? What is zazen? What is this think-not-thinking? When we come into the zendo and we sit, we bow to our cushion, we bow away from our cushion, we sit down, we find an upright posture. And then what? What happens next? We attend to the present moment. We attend to the present moment. I heard somebody over here say... We start thinking. We start thinking. Yeah. So yeah, we do kind of both of those things, right? We start thinking, and then we attend to the present moment.

[33:07]

We realize we're thinking. You know, do we stop thinking? Michael? is sitting in that path where you're not grabbing onto the fun things to think about and you're not pushing away the ugly things that pop up. And so I think it starts with that intention or vow to sit in that middle place of not wasting any emotional energy pushing things away or clinging to things and kind of like this balance beam that you well and then you fall off on one side and then you fall off on the other side. But the attention is what I think helps create the chance that I would come back. Right. Stay off. We're pushing something away. One description of Zazen I like a lot is in Zazen, you stay close and do nothing. I really like that description. It's like you really attend.

[34:08]

You pay attention. You know, when the Buddha was asked, if you could sum up your teaching in one single word, what would it be? And he said, awareness. So we take, you know, we pay attention. We attend to whatever is arising in the moment. And, you know, we're going to think. We're going to start clinging to things. We're going to start pushing things away. So does that mean we're not doing zazen when we start thinking? said by Dogen is saying that Zazen and no in Zazen no new karma is created and if we think during Zazen and if karma can result from thinking then in essence can't karma arise from Zazen in any moment which we are in thought is not considered Zazen because thought arises maybe maybe however that was a mouthful however I think that

[35:16]

When we sit zazen, we can't cut off thoughts. We can't cut off our thoughts. And think not thinking is not thinking. It's non-thinking. It's beyond thinking. This fundamental teaching of awareness, however, it's like if you're thinking and you're caught in thinking and you bring your awareness to that thinking, Is it the same thing as being caught in thinking? Something's changed there. So let me bring this back to the koan, because I think I have two minutes. So let me talk about this little bit that I last read from the commentary. He says, At that moment, a boy happened to be sweeping there.

[36:19]

Yunnan called to him and the boy turned his head. Yunnan pointed to him and said, is this not immutable knowledge? There's a call and a response. There's an awareness. It's like the call happens and awareness. What is it? And then Yunnan says, what is your Buddha nature? Now, if you were walking down Dasahara Boulevard and somebody just kind of said, hey, what is your Buddha nature? Maybe you'd have a response because you've been studying here and you've got it somewhere in your consciousness. But maybe not. Maybe it's, what? Huh? What is my Buddha nature? My Buddha nature? What is Buddha nature? What are you talking about? Is this not active consciousness, karmic consciousness? boundless and unclear, with no fundamental to rely on.

[37:20]

So our vow to wake up, our various immeasurable vows to save all beings, to end all delusions, to live for the benefit of all beings, even though this is impossible, we still, we come in and we, it's like, I'm not going to cut off my thinking, but I can, bring it to my awareness. You can always bring it to my awareness. And so the child of riches in the poem, maybe this is the child of riches. The child of riches is that we have this ability always with us to be aware. We are naturally endowed with the ability to be aware. And maybe we can vow to bring that bring that awareness to every situation, knowing that our minds like to construct realities.

[38:26]

This is what our minds do. They construct realities that we then either happily or unhappily live in, whether we're gods or humans or hungry ghosts. I think I may be out of time. Aino is nodding. So let's end this. and chant the immeasurable vows. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[39:12]

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