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 evening. This evening was the last... of the practice period. Some of you know it's been going on and maybe some of you don't. It's a period of time of eight weeks where we set aside to give some more attention and energy and intensity to the process of practice. And then once a week we have teas where we drink tea and then we discuss a topic of the Dharma. And here was tonight's topic.

[01:02]

It was based on a koan by Master Ma, by Basso. And in that koan, the monk asked Master Ma, what is Buddha? And Master Ma says, this very mind is Buddha. And then the person who compiled the koan is one of a book of many. Does that seem lied to me or does it seem lied to you or is it just me? No? Okay? Okay. The person who compiled the collection of koans wrote this commentary to that statement, this very mind, this Buddha. Manifesting this mind is wearing Buddha's clothes, eating Buddha's food, speaking Buddha's words, and living Buddha's life. then for good measure I added the question.

[02:08]

What have you learned, experienced, or realized during the practice period about being, about awareness, about being Buddha during this practice period? Some ways we could say That awareness, the essence of Buddhist practice, is, to put it in psychological terms, it's about reframing the experience we're having in contrast to having a different experience. So I was asking myself, okay, how am I going to communicate something that's essentially experiential?

[03:13]

And then I arrived at the obvious conclusion, I'll try to construct an experience. And that's what we're gonna start with, the dreaded, repeated questions. for those of you who don't know I will illustrate and I'll illustrate with this poem by Shinkichi Takahashi I don't take your words merely as words far from it I listen to what makes you talk whatever it is and me listen I listen to what makes you talk, whatever it is, and me listen, what makes me listen. Usually, we're inside the constructs that the moments experience

[04:32]

has bringing forth. We're completely living our life, but in an almost mysterious or magical way, we're not aware of it. We're totally invested in it. We're having all sorts of feelings and conclusions and anticipations. So when I say reframing, it's like the way this poem captures that. Listen to what makes you talk. And to what makes me listen. Not so that we can separate from the life we're living. You know, in our thinking mind we can do that.

[05:36]

Let me just think about that. And then we go into abstract thinking. And sometimes that's very helpful. You know, in some ways you could look at the questions that I posed. What have you learned? Ponder and reflect and conclude. But really, it's just to nudge towards not being so lost in the middle of it. Wake up a little bit. In some ways, asking what have I learned is a wonderfully skillful way to not be caught up in the right and wrong and what I want and what I don't want and what I fear and what I love, you know. What are you learning from having all those feelings and all those thoughts. So often it's a skillful place to start.

[06:49]

And yet it's quite demanding because in a way it's saying, can you wake up in the middle of your experience you're having and letting experience it be your teacher? Can you wake up in the middle of the experience you're having and let the experience be your teacher? I have a good friend who's a Rinzai teacher and he also happens to be a very skilled skier. He's one of those people who helicopters to the top of impossible slopes. And I don't know if he jumps out of the helicopter or if it actually lands. And then skis, you know, done.

[07:50]

I've almost never skied so... A lot of it was lost on me, but here's how he described it. He said, in skiing, it's like you're always falling forward. But by moving with the motion, you stay balanced. When we watch this mind, it's always generating energy. and images and memories and listening to sounds and identifying them as the grandfather clock in the hallway or whatever else it's doing. It's got this motion. It's got this movement and energy to its being. And if we think balance is stopping everything...

[08:57]

we're actually, it's like trying to stop the world from spinning on its axis. Can we, can our awareness move with it? So in a moment, we're going to break into twos. And then, actually, why don't you start by doing that? Then I'll give you the rest of the instructions. For convenience I would suggest you just pick someone close by. if you could get fairly close to the person.

[10:03]

Is there anyone without a partner? No? Okay. Looks like you're going to be a threesome. Everybody else is parallel. Oh, good. Isn't it so interesting? As fun as you As soon as you come into contact with another human being, the impulse is to start talking. For almost everybody, not everybody. So this question, here's the process of repeated questions. One person asks and one person answers. And then the question is repeated. and the question is what's happening now?

[11:12]

And in a way it's impossible because to verbalize something is to verbalize something that happened a couple of seconds or one second ago. It's to take and turn it into words. But still, clumsy as this exercise is, it can offer us an experience of entering into the flow of experience, of phenomena. Like when you watch carefully, The mind hears the bleeping, then it hears the rattling of the chair, then it notices the movement of the hand. And the person says, what's happening now?

[12:19]

The beeping of the truck. So just give as best you can a concise and accurate description of the experience of that moment. It's not a narrative. It doesn't go on for five minutes. It's just, as best you can, notice, acknowledge, and verbalize the experience of the moment. And then the person who's asking the question gets to play the enlightened Zen teacher. And they say, this very mind is Buddha. So you say, what's happening now? Hearing the sound of the truck. This very mind is Buddha.

[13:23]

What's happening now? And so the person who's asking, you ask like the poet. I listened. I listened. to what makes you talk, whatever that is, and makes me listen. So the questioner is also practicing awareness, experiencing the moment. And in that way, you support the other person to answer. You don't rush them with your question. You don't go so slow, they kind of start to get distracted. Okay? So if you could decide who's going to go first, and who's going to ask first, and then who's going to answer... That figured out?

[14:40]

Okay. So you can pause. Kim? Kim? Did you just turn this? Oh, it's okay. So if you could pause for a moment and then I'll say begin and then you can start. So but for a moment just close your eyes and return to that wonderful source of awareness, awareness of the body and awareness of the breath, awareness of the state of mind, awareness of the emotions, the thoughts. Okay, you can start asking and answering. And just ask what's happening now.

[16:25]

Thank you. So if you could just finish your answer and then both of you close your eyes.

[18:00]

Just notice the consequence of that interaction as it reverberates through your being. And in a moment I'll ring a bell. And you can change roles. The person who is asking now answers. The person who is answering now asks. I think it's kind of like services.

[20:18]

Amen. Just sit where you are for a moment and ask yourself, what did I learn about practice from doing that? And as thoughts formulate,

[22:05]

can the thoughts incline more towards experiencing and less about creating and conceptualizing a version of reality? Okay? And then if you could Thank your partner. And then you can just turn back in this direction. Yep. Thank you. when even for a moment you sit upright in this continuous contact the Buddha in the three activities body, speech and thought and the whole world of phenomena become the expression of Buddha.

[23:40]

and the entire sky turns into enlightenment. So, I take it that's how it was for you? You know, our normal way of referencing is that how does this have a relevance me you know not that we think that question but you know we reference in that way but it's also we can also it can take us out of me you know falling forward into the moment and letting it be rather than something about me.

[24:46]

There's an old Zen story that I think many have heard where this great scholar comes to visit a Zen teacher and he's a master scholar in the Prajnaparamita literature which is vast. And the teacher gets perplexed because every conversation they have about Zen practice this person just presents all these exquisite formulations and concepts and conclusions and referencing his great body of literature. And the teacher's thinking, how can I have this person experience the moment? And apparently the teacher didn't know the exquisite nature of repeated questions, so He said to him, what were you before your parents were born? What is that consciousness before all the formulation of me, all the conditioning that reaches out, takes hold of it and tells it what it is?

[26:06]

And I think having someone else ask us, being challenged to respond in the moment, to come out of me and express something to us, to interbeing. And maybe you can reflect on where you self-conscious when you answered? It's a very interesting term. You know, usually we mean it to mean, well, me was dominant in an interfering way. I was very self-conscious when I was doing it. And if you contrast to that, I was conscious of the play of me expressing itself.

[27:17]

That consciousness went to sound, physical sensation, hearing a voice, noticing the other person's eyes. So in contrast to self creating the world, self-expressing being. Inevitably, we're a conditioned existence. We're woven into this net of interbeing. And Dogen Senji says, when even for a moment you can bring this continuous contact, something happens, something turns, the referencing, the reframing can shift it into some other experience.

[28:32]

And then me, rather than being a way of reinforcing a definition of reality that circulates, that orbits around this myth of me. It's like something is opening into interbeing. What did you learn? What did you experience? What did you realize about the nature of being? And we can say that in Master Ma's comment, this very mind is Buddha, that all these attributes are there to be discovered, engaged, as we

[29:41]

practice awareness. And in a very interesting way they support our life and they create within us the confidence to wake up Like if you go back to the skier, the skier needs the confidence to fall down the slope in a skillful way that's both falling forward and staying balanced. That fear, I assume, would want to pull back and stabilize. But being...

[30:43]

flowing with the motion. But sometimes in that repeated question, you might find yourself preparing your next answer. The next time they ask me, I'm going to say, feeling the inhale, because that's a good answer. But it's not a real answer. It's the one you prepared to save you from. the nakedness of the moment. That's unpredictable. So there's a kind of a confidence and a trust. I'm going to trust that even though I don't know what's going to happen, when it happens, I'll meet it and I will express it. This is a kind of an existential working that no matter how much you think about it, you can think about it and get intrigued.

[31:50]

You can think about it and get an idea of the challenge. But it's engaging it that we learn what it is to do it. We learn to trust what it is to do it. And we learn the confidence that when you do this, Something is energized. Something opens rather than chaos. But what if I'm not keeping everything in control? What if I'm not figuring it out? If I have my answer ready, then I know what's going to happen and I'll be okay. If I don't have my answer ready, I don't know what's going to happen. And in terms of the preservation of me, I don't know if I'll be okay.

[32:51]

And of course, when we pay even a little bit of attention to our lives, we see that lots of times we don't know what's going to happen. Has there ever been a day in our life when we knew exactly what was going to happen? Was there ever a period of meditation that ended and you thought, oh, I thought of everything I thought I was going to think of. And I had all the images and feelings I thought I was going to have. We could say that awareness meditation is learning to trust the moment. And then the structure of the repeated question. Why not just sit there in unstructuredness and experience?

[34:07]

Why not? Because the patterns that are ingrained within us, as anyone who's meditated a while knows very well, have a tendency to take over. So the structure is to help us not just be taken over by habituation. not just be taken over by the urgencies of self-generated agendas. And then what can happen there is that somehow we've reintroduced the notion Given the structure, something specific is supposed to happen.

[35:15]

But the structure is a great paradox. The structure is to enable liberation. The structure is to enable the spontaneity of the moment. And this is something to discover within our practice. Dogen Zenji says, when we do this even for a moment, the whole phenomenal world becomes the Buddha Mudra and the entire sky turns into enlightenment. We're offering consciousness the great gift of liberation. And the paradox is, In the Zen world, we do that by following the specific guidelines of posture and relating to breath and noticing and experiencing and not grasping.

[36:34]

And this paradox, almost ready-made to be an exhausting struggle, It's only when we get into it and pay close attention to it that we can see there is something other available than just struggling. And again, we can think about that, and it's helpful to think about it, but going beyond the thinking and discovering it in experience is what... literally enlivens. So we have the trust, the confidence, and we have the experience enlivening. And Master Ma says, this very mind is Buddha. And then,

[37:41]

We re-enter the self with all its intrigues and agendas and structures. And we forget. What was that? What was that liberation that happened five seconds ago? And to sustain a steady attention, a steady engagement that rediscovers, that rediscovers the awakening awareness, the liberating awareness that's available any moment, every moment. So in the Zen world, Master Ma, this very mind is Buddha.

[38:51]

It's like, oh yeah, easy to say and a lifetime of practice. 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, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[39:41]

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