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. Good morning. It's nice to be here. I have a lot of nostalgia for this building and this room. This is the first place I encountered the Buddha Dharma in this room here. And I'm so grateful. So I hope I can convey some of that gratitude back to all of you. I wanted to thank the Tanto. Tanto. Thank you for the invitation to come. And Central Abbot. And David. Is David here as well? And David. We have lots of Abbots. Very lucky. Someone asked Zhao Zhou, does a dog have Buddha nature or not?

[01:07]

Zhao Zhou said, no. Moo. So this morning I'm going to talk a little bit about koans. The word itself seems to refer to some kind of a puzzle or a riddle or some odd... nearly unanswerable question. But in fact, koans in the Zen tradition are recordings of conversations usually between two people, both of whom care a great deal about the secret of life. So a few examples of the kinds of questions one finds in a real koan are, what is it? Where are you from? Where are you going? Why did Bodhidharma come from the West? So how a student or a teacher answers these questions is what makes the exchange something special, something to be remembered and to be passed on, and in some cases for centuries.

[02:21]

This word con comes from a Chinese word that I can't pronounce, I'm sorry, I think it's gong. perhaps, maybe one of you knows. The word means basically a judge's or magistrate's and then on is a table. So it's a place where the ruling would be placed. Once the judge had ruled, also judge referring to justice or fairness, then the ruling is on the table. So that's a public case, a con. Decisive judgment as well as a good story. So the origin of the study of koans as authoritative teachings in Zen date back to the Tang Dynasty. That's between the 7th and 10th centuries in China, which is also known as the Golden Age of Zen. So these stories have been culled from various sayings and biographies recorded of the Chan or Zen masters of the past, and two of the best-known and earliest collections of these stories

[03:28]

are the Blue Cliff Record and the Gateless Gate, both of which continue to be used in the Zen tradition as teaching stories, important to us. In Zen teacher John Terrence's introduction to this koan about the dog, he cites Rainer Maria Rilke's advice to a young poet. I would like to beg you, dear sir... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions right now. And perhaps then, someday, Far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

[04:32]

So it may be that the first step in entering into spiritual practice is to find the words, to find this deep inquiry about life, is to find out what your questions are. What questions do you have? What is it about your life that seems unfulfilled, unsatisfactory, unrelinquished, or simply stuck? And although you may already feel the question, sometimes referred to as a great doubt, unless you discover a way to articulate it, it remains in the realm of what we think of as unrequited love. the unnameable, unlocatable, unrecognizable, missing piece of your own heart and mind, a kind of vague and persistent longing. Many years ago, I asked to meet with a Zen teacher out at Green Gulch, so I was pretty nervous. I climbed the stairs, entered the room, sat down, looked up and said, with a rather sad face, what about this longing?

[05:43]

So the teacher looked at me, smiled, and started to laugh. So then I started to laugh. And we just kept laughing. And that was the end of our meeting. Exactly. So that question to this day still makes me laugh. What about this longing? So questions like that one, the ones that seem to ache, are referred to in Zen as barriers or gates. such as in the title of the collection of koans in which Zhao Zhou's answer about the dog appears. This is called the gateless gate or the gateless barrier, the mumongkan. John Terence says that if a koan is interesting to you the way a song or a poem might be, then it might be worth your trouble to spend some time with it, writing it, chanting it, remembering it, and at the oddest times, as if suddenly the koan is remembering you. So this koan of Zhaozhou and the dog has been around a very long time, maybe a thousand years, and is still considered the best one for beginners entering into the systematic koan practice of the Rinzai Zen approach to what we might dare call a breakthrough, a Kensho, Satori.

[07:06]

So the question of breakthrough itself is one of the hallmarks of where these two major schools of Zen, Soto and Rinzai, seem to part ways, at least as far as emphasis is concerned. My understanding of Soto Zen, we place a greater emphasis on the path itself, as in the Buddhist teaching that the path is enlightenment and enlightenment is the path. And we put... place less emphasis on whether or not one has or will ever arrive at some sort of special destination, such as breaking through. And yet, regardless of such differences, I think it's okay to explore these Enlightenment stories and see what they have to offer us, and in the end, to remember that they're just stories. So what is the gate that we're trying to open to? Anyway, Tarrant calls it the gate of the heart.

[08:10]

And I like that a lot, the gate of the heart. The gate that opens up our hearts to the simple joy of being alive. Another way to understand opening the gate is to think of it as entering into a new or a different space than the one you're already in. In the case of koans, that might mean opening to a new way of seeing things. such as the shift that can take place by focusing on the context in which the present moment is being lived, what Suzuki Roshi called big mind. Mostly, we humans seem to be wired and subsequently trained to focus our attention on the content or the foreground of our field of awareness, on words, images, memories, sensations, Or in Suzuki Roshi's terms, our small mind, our self-centered mind. So once you begin to identify with the background, with the context of your life, the foreground, the stories, in particular the ones that we call problems, may begin to show us how they truly are.

[09:27]

How one by one they arise and one by one they simply arise. fall away, like snowflakes on a hot iron skillet. For example, think of all the stories that you have ever told yourself or anyone else about death, injuries, cold weather, blisters, broken hearts, fear, hunger, money, anger, and where are they now? Just a story. But what I'm not suggesting in coming to see the content of our mind as simply transient appearance within some vast spaciousness is to disrespect or disregard those appearances. And even though it's just a story, at times it's a very sad or frightening story, and it has great power over our lives. And we all know this from reading the daily news. The deep intention behind seeing stories for what they truly are is to understand them.

[10:34]

The word satori, a near equivalent to Kensho, means to understand, to understand something. By understanding stories, we may then enter more wisely and compassionately into the world of storytelling. That veil of words the Buddha said is both creating and blocking our view of reality. So the purpose of this first koan about the dog, which directly invites us into an awareness of this foreground-background shift from our small mind to our big mind and back again, is to see if such an experience might be of use to us in our life, especially because it's already what's happening. Foreground-background shift. It's what the Buddha saw and knew when he said that the entire universe... in the ten directions, is the true human body. And still it's hard to believe without passing through the gateless gate of great doubt.

[11:41]

Koans, as I've said, have been around a long time, and through those centuries, many sincere humans like us have made use of them to understand themselves and the world, come to understand the problem. What's the problem? For Shakyamuni Buddha, the problem, was the suffering of humanity due to transiency. We might say that his koan was the koan of birth and death, just as it says on the Han that we strike each morning before Zazen. Great is the matter of birth and death. No forever, gone, gone. Awake, awake, each one. Don't waste your life. So many centuries later, it was another problem that drove Japanese Zen master Dogen across the sea to China. He said, As I study the many schools of Buddhism, they each maintain that human beings are endowed with Buddha nature at birth.

[12:44]

If this is the case, why did the Buddhas of all ages, undoubtedly in possession of enlightenment, find it necessary to seek enlightenment and to engage in spiritual practice? So what might be the driving question or problem for each of you? Finding your own question is the most essential part of the spiritual journey. It's the first place where you take a step. By making use of these ancient conversations between sincere seekers and those who had gone ahead of them, the ones we call our ancestors, we can begin to locate not only our own questions, but also the ones we didn't even know or suspect that we had. such as whether or not a dog has Buddha nature. So what this koan is basically about is the monk's own doubt about whether or not he himself, herself, or their self, the dog, has enlightened nature.

[13:44]

This very question the Dogen was carrying on his voyage to China. Technically, the correct answer to this question, according to the Buddha sutras, is yes. Yes. All beings have Buddha nature. Well, this the monk already knew, and so did his teacher, so how come Zhao Zhou says no? So that's the real koan, the one that none of us can easily escape, and still we might think, excuse me, that's not the right answer. That's not what I read. It's certainly not my understanding, and who are you anyway? It's pretty familiar when someone we hope will simply give us a nice pat on the head instead raises a barrier even higher than the ones we have already managed to jump over. Both an unattainable barrier and an unavoidable one, if you even care.

[14:49]

And if you don't, that's a koan too. There's a great kid's story called Charlie and the Lion. Charlie keeps saying to his parents when they challenge him on his consequences of not doing his homework or his housework, he just says, I don't care. I don't care. And then one day, Charlie, on his way to school, is eaten by a lion in one gulp. And it's very quiet for a while, and then there comes this muffled sound from inside the lion, I do care, I do care, at which the lion throws up, Charlie gets washed off and heads off to school, a changed man, so to speak. So what the teacher is doing, basically, is blocking the monk from using his usual tricks, intellectualizing, emotionalizing, or sheer willfulness to meet the obstacles in his life, all of which reek of selfishness, either as conceit or as self-effacement.

[15:54]

Instead, we find ourselves, as the monk did, with no escape, no easy way out, or so it seems, just no. In such a situation, the human body and mind tends to freeze, which, by the way, is a very interesting neurobiological fact about our human evolution. Our line of biological ancestry, starting with mushrooms, so I hear, apparently passed through tortoises on our way to mammals and then to what we call humans. The nerve that connects our brain and our stomach is called the vagus nerve. And in fact, it's the vagus nerve that conveys sensory information about most of the body's organs to the central nervous system up here. Our executive function, so to speak. In the tortoise, when frightened, the vagus nerve signals the animal to freeze inside its shell.

[16:58]

In mammals, the nerve signals them to fight or to flee. And in humans, we have the same two reactions depending on our level of fear. Or, if we feel safe, we have the option of opening our hearts, relaxing and inquiring further into what it is that has just arrived in our field of vision. What is it that thus comes? Welcome. Nice to see you. And so on. Safety is an essential ingredient for us if we are going to feel curious, empathetic, or compassionate about the other that thus comes. Safety, in other words, is a very important component of our vow to live for the benefit of others. The Zen understanding of this process of freezing and then melting away is called realization. Dropped body and mind, body, mind, dropped were Dogen's words to his teacher at the moment of his realization.

[18:03]

Or as Rinzai said, when he melted away, there's nothing to it. Or the second Chinese Zen ancestor who had been sent off to search for his mind. I've looked everywhere and I can't find it. The mind cannot be had. And finally, our founder, Tozan Ryokai, on looking at his own face in the water, just this person, amazing, right there all along. The moment when no self realizes itself. So one way to work with koans, as I understand, or any problem for that matter, is to see how your judgments arise around the problem and then turn that over and turn it over again and again and again. Is this a real problem or did I make it up myself? Little by little one may come to understand, as John Tarrant and others have testified, how intimate and tender life truly is. After years of struggle, my heart was at rest, and the world seemed like a much kinder place.

[19:08]

Could this openness be the way things truly are? Oh my, wouldn't that be nice? In Tom Cleary's introduction to his book, Unlocking the Zen Koan, he says that awakening liberates the mind from limitations and burdens of narrow views, dogmatic assumptions, and circular reasoning. This is figuratively called taking off the blinders and unloading the saddlebags, in reference to shedding binding fixations and clarifying the mind, thereby becoming bare and untrammeled, radiantly bright, or to use another Zen image like the moon emerging from behind the clouds. Awakening or enlightenment has been likened to a lotus blooming in the midst of flames, meaning that the mind... has become liberated in the very midst of the commodities and distractions of the everyday world. I would imagine most of you are familiar with the terms nirvana and samsara, the first nirvana being the cessation of suffering, and the second, samsara, the aimless wanderings of the mind out of which suffering arises.

[20:25]

In Zen teachings, nirvana, called the land of eternal silent light, is ultimately the peace or tranquility of samsara. Samsara, on the other hand, when met with correct knowledge, is recognized as the land of true reward. So the harmonious integration of these two domains is the complete fulfillment of our life here on earth, also known as complete perfect enlightenment. Some koans, such as this one of Zhao Zhou's dog, are focused on realization of the land of silent light, nirvana. Others on the correct understanding of our everyday mind and life, also known as our karma. The key to unlocking the gateless gate or the Dharma gate into the land of silent light are boundless. And yet here in this koan, we are given just one such opportunity to try the door. Thomas Cleary suggests translating the title of the gateless gate as the border pass whose doorway is no.

[21:34]

Zen in itself can be seen as a radical disentanglement from thoughts and conceptualizations. No, therefore, symbolizes both a cornerstone of Zen logic as well as a fundamental Zen exercise. The logical principle of Zen is that no human conception, no words can grasp reality as it truly is. Words cannot reach it. The Zen exercise is to allow oneself the possibility of entering past the veil of illusion into a realization of the truth of that logic. No. There is nothing... that is holding us hostage except the mind's attachments to its own thoughts, opinions, and projections. Zen is nothing more than the realization of the mind's innate freedom. So here's the koan, Zhao Zhou's dog. A monk asked Zhao Zhou, does even a dog have Buddha nature?

[22:41]

Zhao Zhou said, no. Wu Man, who is the 12th century Chinese Zen master who authored the Gateless Gate collection and also made comments throughout these various koans. Wu Man says, to study Zen, you must pass through the barrier of the masters. For ineffable enlightenment, you need to interrupt your mental circuit. If you do not pass through the barrier of the masters and do not interrupt your mental circuit, then your consciousness will be attached to objects everywhere. But tell me, what is the barrier of the masters? This one word, no, is the unique lock on the door to the source. So it is called the barrier of no, locking the door of Zen. Those who can pass through the barrier not only see Jiaojo in person, they will then be able to team up with the Zen masters of all time and be on a par with them. See with the same eye...

[23:42]

and hear with the same ear. Would that not be joyous? Isn't anyone who wants to pass through the barrier? To arouse a massive doubt with your whole body inquiring into this word, no, bringing it to mind day and night? Do not understand it as nothingness. Do not understand it as the non-existence of something. It will be like having swallowed a red-hot iron ball, which you cannot spit out no matter how hard you try. Washing away your previous misconceptions and misperceptions, eventually it becomes thoroughly familiar in a natural manner inside and outside become one. Like someone without the power of speech who has had a dream, only you can know it for yourself. When you suddenly break through, startling the heavens and shaking the earth, It is as though you have obtained a great warrior's sword.

[24:44]

Meeting the Buddhas, you kill the Buddhas. Meeting the Zen masters, you kill the Zen masters. On the shore of life and death, you attain great independence. In the midst of all sorts of conditions and states of being, you remain perfectly focused even while roaming freely about. But how do you bring it to mind? Using all of your day-to-day energy, bring up this word, no. If you do not allow any gap, you will be like a torch of truth that lights up the moment fire is set to it. So that's all there is to it. Wuman has a verse as well. He says, a dog's Buddha nature presents the true directive in full. As soon as you get into yes and no, you lose your body and forfeit your life. Zen master Wuzu also offers a verse on this Koan, Zhao Zhou shows a sword whose cold frosty light blazes.

[25:45]

If you go on asking how and what, it cuts you up into pieces. Zen Master Xu Shan Ru also offers a verse. A dog has no Buddha nature. Kind compassion deep as the sea. Those who pursue words and chase sayings bury the hearty mind. And finally, Tiantong Ru Jing, who is Dogen's teacher, offers a verse. When thoughts are flying around, your mind in confusion, what do you do? A dog's Buddha nature? No. This word, no, is an iron broom. Where you sweep, there is a lot of flying around, and where there is a lot of flying around, you sweep. The more you sweep, the more there is. At the point where it is impossible to sweep, you throw your whole life into sweeping. Keep your spine straight day and night and do not let your courage flag. All of a sudden, you sweep away the totality of space and all differentiations are clearly penetrated so the source and its meaning become evident.

[26:59]

So in this koan, the dog represents the unenlightened state. and Buddha nature represents the possibility of realizing enlightenment. The unenlightened state is traditionally likened to a dream state, and enlightenment is to awaken from the dream. Any concepts we have about consciousness are themselves a product of consciousness, and not the experience of consciousness itself. So one way to understand this koan is to ask, Is it possible to be fully awake while habitual and random thoughts are still rambling throughout the mind? The dog? In other words, the unenlightened state? Can you awaken from there? The master says, no. But actually, the no is an instruction for stopping the rambling mind in order to see for oneself whether it's possible to awaken in the midst of confused and habitual thinking. No is not an answer to whether or not the dear dog has Buddha nature, but rather it's to stop asking such dualistic questions like yes or no, right or wrong, self or other.

[28:12]

No can also be used as a concentration device for clearing the mind and achieving what the Buddhist meditators call stopping or cessation. Once the mind is stopped, it's possible for self-view, worldview, and one's own personal ideas about reality to be suspended for a time. It is possible for big mind to peek out from behind the clouds. The purpose of this device is not to make the mind blank, as in cutting off your head, but rather to see how the mind can be flexible and truly open to reality, as in fresh and fully present. Or as Shushan says in his verse, know Properly utilized means releasing of the hearty mind. And as John Tarrant says, just forget who you are and make use of nothing. By practicing with duality, know what about yes?

[29:13]

Know what about me? Know what about you? Know what about no? Know. Thank you very much. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[29:51]

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