There's a couple of extra copies here. Does everybody have a copy? Even if you're not going to – even if you're not taking the class beyond tonight, if you have a copy to look on tonight, maybe you could pass those out. And just so I can see who's here. Shirley Keeson, is she here? Barbara? Hi. Mark? Alex? Hi. Max is not here. Bert? Hi. Michael? Okay. Rick? Andrew? Eleanor? And Rebecca? Hi. And Sarah? Okay. So this is a course in Ehe Koroku, extensive record of Ehe Dogen. So I want to spend some time talking about what that is. It's Dogen's – it literally means extensive record of Ehe.

[01:11]

Ehe is the name of the temple and also the name that Dogen used. So this is – it's a 10-volume work. There have been tiny fragments of it that have been published as a little bit in Enlightenment Unfold. So do all of you know who Dogen is? Should I do some general background on Dogen? Have all of you seen some of Shobo Genzo? So Shobo Genzo is his best-known work. And those were kind of – based on informal talks, most of them, but they were actually written out in Japanese. Most of Shobo Genzo was finished by 1244, Dogen lived 1200 to 1253. There are a few essays from Shobo Genzo that were written later, but not so much. And they're also written in a very different style. So what the Ehe Koroku is, it's 10 volumes or chapters. Shiraku Okamura and I have been translating it. I worked with him in Japan and did the Ehe Shingi, Dogen's Standards for Zen Community,

[02:15]

eight or ten years ago. We've been working on this for a year and a half, and we have two more years of working on it. It's a long project. We're in the middle of the fifth volume of ten. So basically these – the first seven volumes are Jodo, they're called. They're short Dharma talks to his monks, and that's what we're going to be looking at, a selection of those. So, as I was saying, the Shobo Genzo, the form of the Shobo Genzo, they're called Jishu in Japanese, and they were more informal evening talks in the abbot's quarters, and then Dogen kind of edited them and expanded them. So that's most of what's been translated and published by Dogen. These Jodo, they're called, are much more formal. So these are – some of them are very short, you'll see. Some of them are longer. They go for their – in all of Ehe Koroku, in the first seven volumes, there are 530, some of them.

[03:17]

So most – so they were given by Dogen – Jodo means ascending the halls. They were given in the Dharma hall on the high seat, like if any of you have been to an abbot's installation, the mountain seat. So it was this very formal kind of situation. And the monks were actually standing, not sitting. So that's partly why some of them are very short. But also they were given in the morning, and it's the traditional form that was used in the records of the Chinese, the Chan masters. So the records of Joshu, or the records of Dongshan, or of the great classical Chinese masters, most – a lot of – Benef Mazu and a lot of those classical Chan masters from China were using this form, this Jodo form. And it seems like Dogen actually preferred it, because most of the – a lot of the most famous writings from Shobo Genzo were done in this short – in this little period between

[04:21]

like 1241 and 1244, when he was moving. Especially during the period in the middle of that, when he – there was about a year or so before he had his temple set up in the north of Japan, in Echizen, where Heiji was finally established. So he left Kyoto, and during that time he didn't have a formal monk's hall, a formal Dharma hall to talk in. So he did a lot of the writing in Shobo Genzo. But then he started doing this Jodo and pretty much stopped doing Shobo Genzo. So it seems like he actually preferred this form of teaching. So what we see in Ehikoroku is more than the kind of extended philosophical essays, kind of these short talks to his monks, his actual training of his monks in his last ten years. So a lot of them are commentaries on koans. A lot of them are these formal talks given like on Buddha's birthday or Enlightenment

[05:23]

Day or New Year's or the winter solstice. Some of them are just kind of short kind of admonitions to the monks. So really what we get in Ehikoroku is more like his training, his teaching for the monks that he was training. And I feel like you get more of a feeling of who Dogen was as a teacher and as a person. There's kind of more of some of his humor when he's playing with the koans. There's a feeling of who he was more, I think. So what I want to do in this class is just kind of go through some of these. I don't know if we'll get through all of this in the five classes, or if we do, I may bring in more. So we'll see. By the way, there's no class next week. I had a previously scheduled dialogue in Berkeley with a Benedictine monk on Christ and Bodhisattvas. So there'll be no class next week, but four classes after that.

[06:26]

So just before we get into the text, do any of you have any questions about any of that, about what this text is? So please ask questions as we go. I'm interested in your reactions and responses. And actually, if you have suggestions about... So we're in the middle. This is a first draft, and if you have suggestions about the wording, I would be receptive to that, too. Eleanor? Do you know about how large his assembly would have been? We don't really know. The guess is about 20, 20 or 30. But they don't really know exactly how many there were, and they may have varied at times. There were probably more... So actually, the section that I selected for us to work with is from volume three. It ranges from 1246 to 1248. Some of the very early ones were before he left Kyoto, and he may have had a larger assembly

[07:32]

there. And there's a particular style. So there's a formal talk, and then... You know, it's a little bit like Shosan, you know, where the students come up and talk to the teachers. Do you have that still at Green Gulch? Yeah. So how often do you...? Maybe once per practice period, so maybe twice a year. Uh-huh. Well, this was a little bit like that, except that what's recorded in Ehe Koroku is that it mostly doesn't include the monk's questions. And we don't know how often that happened. In a lot of them, it'll say... He'll present something, and then it'll say in the text, After a pause, Dogen said. And then he'll have some kind of capping phrase or further comments. And the scholars now think that it might have been that in the section where there was a pause, there might have been some dialogue. Mostly, it wasn't recorded. In the same form that was used in China by the great Chan masters,

[08:33]

sometimes that's when the monks would ask questions and there'd be responses. So we think there was probably some dialogue that went on. But they just recorded... So these were recorded by Dogen's... Collected and compiled by Dogen's jishas. So the section that we're going to be looking at particularly was written by and compiled by Koen Ejo, who was his dharma successor. But some of his other students were the kind of compilers for other parts of it. How did they record it at that time? He was sitting there and writing? Well... Or did he do it afterwards? We don't really know. Probably they took notes. It seems like Dogen did not mind them taking notes. Whereas the early Chan masters, they actually forbid those monks to take notes. Although the record of Yunmen particularly was actually written by one of his immediate students who surreptitiously...

[09:35]

He had a paper robe and he took notes on his robe. Some of the dialogues. But apparently Dogen kind of encouraged them to do that. Oh, the other thing about Ehe Koroko as opposed to Shobokanza was Ehe Koroko was all written in Chinese, which is more kind of the formal language for religious discourse in Japan up until Dogen. Shobokanza was the first serious philosophical or religious text that was written in Japanese. But Ehe Koroko and Ehe Shingi were written in Chinese. So Japanese uses Chinese characters so Japanese people can write in Chinese or Japanese. Is that when they were delivered though? They were delivered in Chinese? No, they wouldn't have been delivered in Chinese. They would have been delivered in Japanese, but then they were written down in Chinese with Chinese characters. It's very complicated. There's a way of pronouncing the Chinese characters that's a Japanese version of the Chinese. But the characters are the same. The characters are the same, but actually the Japanese language

[10:37]

and Chinese language are very, very different as languages, completely different. But Japanese uses these Chinese characters. Actually, Dokusan as a practice started because Japanese monks went to China and they couldn't talk to the teachers, but they could write and they could read each other what each other wrote. So they had these personal private meetings where they were writing these notes to each other. They couldn't understand what each other was saying, but they could write and understand each other that way. So they think now that that's when Dokusan started. Before that, the teacher would just meet with the students as a group or with small groups of students. So the individual interviews started as a result of that, and they just kept that practice up in Japan. Another question. How is it that this hasn't been translated yet? Is it an important work in sort of the tradition? Well, it's less known. Dogen in general, Dogen's writings were basically unknown from the time, from a little while after his death until like the 1920s.

[11:39]

I mean there were some Soto monks and priests and teachers who studied Dogen, and periodically there'd be new editions of Shobokenzo or Eihishinkyu, various things, but Eihikuroku has been kind of overlooked because Shobokenzo kind of has this more philosophical feeling, but I think it's now starting to be studied more. So there are little, there are translations, as I said, of little parts of it. One of the last, I said the first seven, so this is just giving you an overview of this work. There's some of it in Rational Zen, a tiny, tiny bit, and there's a tiny bit of it in Enlightenment Unfolds, and then the last volume is just poetry, Volume 10, and some of that is in Stephen Hein's Zen Poetry of Dogen. Volume 8 is kind of miscellaneous sermons and talks, including things like Fukuzo Zengi, but other things that haven't been translated. Volume 9, which I'm looking forward to, is just koans, a collection of 90 koans,

[12:45]

except it has Dogen's verse comments, like the verses in Book of Serenity. So one issue in this, so I want to get to the text, but also there's just all this kind of background to talk about. One issue is that Dogen, particularly Ehe Koroko, is just full of koans. I mean, not all of the Jodos, we translate them as Dharma discourse, but not all of the Dharma discourses are koans, but a lot of them are. He quotes some koan, and then he talks about it, more or less. So again, I've selected a kind of sampling from one of the volumes, from this one period from 1246 to 1248. Depending on how we get into it, I'm really open to how to work with it. Some of the stuff we can look at very closely. I'm also open to just kind of reading other things. We're about at number 360.

[13:46]

They're recorded in order, by the way, so there's this chronology. You can really see the sequence of his teaching of the monks. In terms of particularly the questions about Dogen's later years, there's issues in terms of Dogen's scholarship. Maybe some of you are familiar with this, that there's been the stereotype that Dogen became more interested in monastic, that he, earlier on, when he was first back from China in Kyoto, he was talking about how Zazen is for everybody, and lay people and monks and men and women, everyone can be enlightened and so forth. And then some of the scholars say that he changed later on. I don't really agree, but he certainly changed the focus of his teaching just because he was working with a group of monks way up in the mountains. So it's, Eheji is, in that, it's still very remote. I mean, it's as remote as Tassajara more so, and it was snowed in for most of the winter, and it was way away from the capital.

[14:50]

So he did have lay people who came and studied with him there too, and came to his talks, but his real focus in his last years was actually training a group of monks who would continue the tradition, and he was really successful. In some ways that was more important in terms of up until modern times than his writing even, really, because he managed to train a number of good disciples who kept the Soto tradition and allowed it to flourish over the next century or two or so until it became a very widespread movement. So whatever he was doing up there is very important in terms of understanding how the Soto tradition survived. And then in the writings you can get the feeling of how he actually was training his students and what his concerns were. So anyway, that's what Heikuroku is about, and it's a different style than the things you've seen from Shogokenzu. So other general questions about this work or Dogen or this one?

[15:55]

Okay, well, I want to save the first one. As I said, they're given in order, but I'm going to come back later in the class to that one. Let's start with this number 187. By the way, in this text, the italics at the beginning of each one is just something that Shouhaku and I have added just as a kind of way of getting an entry into the text so that part of the italics is not in the original text. They literally just read Dharma discourse and then proceed. So 187 is, I'll just read it. Dogen said, For nine years Bodhidharma bestowed a single utterance. Until now, people in various regions have mistakenly taken it up. Do you want to demonstrate it without mistakes? Ehei will again demonstrate it for the sake of all of you. The Iron Ring Mountains surround Mount Sumeru at the center. So this is a reference to Indian Buddhist cosmology,

[17:01]

and this is kind of just stating a fact. For us, it would be like him saying the moon goes around the earth or the earth goes around the sun. He's just kind of stating a basic fact. The Iron Ring Mountains surround Mount Sumeru at the center. This is just exactly right. Thus it is demonstrated completely. However, is it possible to demonstrate it unmistakably? After a pause, Dogen said, The jade woman recalls her dream of the triple world. The wooden man sits, cutting off function of the six senses. And Dogen descended from his seat. So in some ways, this is the typical structure of these things. Dogen will say something and talk about something from Zen history and then make some statements about it. And there's this thing of after a pause. And some of the time, certainly not always, but some of the time, there may have been some discussion that went on there. And then at the end, sometimes he gets down from his seat. Sometimes he pounds his staff.

[18:02]

Sometimes he throws down his whisk. So there's a lot of kind of performance that goes on, too, and it's some of the time. So any reactions, responses, or comments about this one? When it says, Ehe, will Dogen demonstrate it? Yeah, so he identifies himself as Ehe. So sometimes we translate it as I, but he actually says Ehe. That's his way of calling himself. So this is, you know, it seems a little stilted to us, but this was just their way of talking. And actually, before he changed the name of the temple to Eheji, this was earlier than this, it was Daibutsu-ji when he first moved up to the north of Japan. The name of the temple was Daibutsu-ji, which means Great Buddha Temple. So he would just call himself Daibutsu, Great Buddha. That's kind of funny. Then he changed it out of humility. He didn't want to... I think from what I read or something, he thought that was really presumptuous sounding,

[19:04]

so he changed it to Ehe, which I think means eternal peace. And Ehe is also the name of the era in China when the first Buddhist sutras were introduced from India to China. So he was kind of commemorating that. So he has this really strong sense of history. I mean, a lot of what he thinks is the history is not what we understand now, but he's always talking about the tradition, but he's also talking about the practice and how the monks are practicing there. And he often asks questions. And again, a lot of this is a kind of traditional form, so a lot of the Chinese masters would ask questions and then answer themselves. Sometimes there may have been, as I said, some discussion. And occasionally that's recorded in Ehe Koroku, but not so often. So the one question there, he's talking about Bodhidharma's single utterance.

[20:05]

Any comments on what Bodhidharma's single utterance was? Don't know. Just sitting. Good. Don't know, just sitting. Good answers. So there's a way in which, you know, even when he's not referring to specific koans, he's using koan language all the time. So there are kind of challenges, there's this kind of don't know or silence or just sitting. So he takes things from the Zen stories and turns them into teachings. So he says, just until now people in various regions have mistakenly taken it up. That's the kind of thing that some of the Chan teachers talk about, how, you know, Bodhidharma fooled everybody. There's this kind of rhetoric. You see it in the Blue Cliff Records and in some of the commentaries where the koan literature and the koan genre

[21:08]

is this layers and layers of commentary and commentary and commentary and they're always looking back and criticizing the previous statements. And Dogen does that a lot. So, you know, it's like saying Bodhidharma did too much, you know. What is the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West? But he asked this question, do you want to demonstrate it without mistakes? So does anybody want to demonstrate it without mistakes? It seems impossible to demonstrate it without mistakes. It seems like it's impossible to demonstrate anything. Because if you say anything about it or you do anything about it, it's defiling. Right, exactly. That's exactly the issue he's talking about here. So it's like this single utterance and then, you know,

[22:11]

how can we say anything more or is that too much? I mean, that's kind of the issue that he's... So there's a lot of talk about the problem of language in Dogen. For me, to demonstrate Bodhidharma's utterance to me could be just sitting still facing the wall. And that could be... I mean, I know that's stretching, but that could be the utterance too of just sitting facing the wall. Yeah. And he talks about just sitting a lot too in this, even though, you know, some of the stereotypes are that he emphasizes zazen less in later years, but he talks about being delighted with zazen sometimes. I thought he was... I took it to be an answer when he said the Iron Ring mountains surround Mount Sumeru. Mm-hm. And to demonstrate it without mistakes, he's like just saying, this is the way things are.

[23:13]

Is that like saying 2 plus 2 equals 4? Yeah, sort of like that. But it's also... That's true, but there's also, you know, that part of what happens in this kind of discourse is that there's multiple levels. So when he says the Iron Ring mountains surround Mount Sumeru at the center, it's not that he's saying this exactly, but kind of poetically he's also talking about here's the mountain and there are all the little mountains around it. So he's actually talking about the teacher and the student. A lot of what he's talking about is teachers and students, and we'll come back to that in the first one where he talks about it very explicitly. But there's that kind of... Some zen masters were always named after the mountain, after the place they were at. So there's a way in which, again, he's not saying that exactly, but that overtone is there. So he picked that image for describing, you know... So it's like saying 2 plus 2 equals 4, but he's also saying something more. It's also more physical.

[24:15]

Yeah, it's a lot of concrete images. But it's also that he's just demonstrating the way a mountain demonstrates. I mean, mountains don't demonstrate. Well, except that he talks about the mountains as alive sometimes. Yeah, but it's just the not demonstrating kind of demonstrating. Right. Mountains just sit there. Until they start to get up and walk around. Yeah, it happens. So he says, this is just exactly right, thus it is demonstrated completely. However, is it possible to demonstrate it unmistakably? So that's kind of what you were saying, Bert. And he doesn't say it one way or the other. There are always these questions. Is it possible to demonstrate it unmistakably? But then it almost seems like it is possible, because if a mountain is just a mountain and a person is just a person, then it is demonstrated without mistake.

[25:21]

Is it both possible and impossible to do it without mistaking? It's impossible to do it without making mistakes. It's impossible to make mistakes. I mean, there's both sides of it. You can see it from both sides. Right at the same time. I mean, this is the kind of level of language that's going on. Is he saying, Ehe will again demonstrate it for the sake of all of you, as if like willingly venturing into the realm of defilement. Good. And then, thus it is demonstrated completely, as if that in and of itself is the complete thing. Exactly. Yeah, I'm actually working on an academic paper about the Lotus Sutra influence on Dogen, and how he says things again and again, not to say things about something else. His saying it is, that's it, as you just said. So, thus it is demonstrated completely.

[26:25]

His saying that is demonstrating it completely. He's not talking about something else there. It's like the way we use language when we say goodbye, or hello, or please, or thank you. It's like the language does something. So these little dharma discourses are very, there's kind of very intense use of language. I'm not sure whether I understood that completely. Can you explain it to me again? Yes, thus it is explained completely. That's it. This is it. Or just this is it. Or he said, no, it's actually kind of a subtle point. There's a way that Dogen talks, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about it myself. I wear two hats because I'm part of the time where I'm teaching academically, and here I'm just teaching as a dharma teacher.

[27:26]

How to talk about this is really tricky. That's actually the point. How do we talk about this? How do we find a language together to convey how amazing it is to just be here? So he says, thus it is demonstrated completely. Just saying that is this utterance. What's so fun about this is it's finding a language that will implode language itself. And that's what's so fun about it. It just like turns, it's like a little matter, antimatter machine or something. Yeah, right. It's really intense. That's right. Good. I just wanted to bring up a question about is it possible to demonstrate, and just noticing that the first question is actually, it's not, again, it's not this kind of abstract thing, like is it possible to demonstrate, but do you want to demonstrate? Yes. And then the second part. That's an important point, because he's always, a lot of these, he's challenging the monks.

[28:28]

He's asking the monks, do you want, again and again he says things like, do you want to understand this completely? He'll bring up a case or a story, and then do you want to understand this? How do you understand this? What is this like? How is it when this happens? So he's asking his monks, so that you can really feel this personal relationship going on with his monks. Mark, Mark, go on. You had another point. I wonder if I want to continue that reading of it not being abstract, but concrete that way, then could you read the last question, however, is it possible to demonstrate it by mistaking it for, maybe then since he does answer it, there also isn't a question like, is this possible, but just again a way of saying, will you, will you show me? Yeah, so it implies there, can you, in fact we could have translated that, instead of is it possible to, can you, are you able to demonstrate it completely? One of the things about translating this stuff, and I have the Chinese with me, so we can get into looking at that really closely

[29:31]

if you want to on some particular issue, but often in the original there's no pronouns. He doesn't say I do this, he doesn't say you do this, but sometimes he does, he'll say I say this, and sometimes to put it into English you've got to add a pronoun or else it just doesn't make sense. Sometimes you can get away without adding the pronouns and that's always fun. So you have to kind of decide, is he saying this to, is he saying do you want to demonstrate it without mistakes? I can look this one up, but he probably doesn't say, he might say, it might be literally something like want to demonstrate it without mistakes, and it means do you want to. So again, the second one you write could be read the same way. However, are you able to demonstrate it unmistakably? There's this little opening at the end of a sentence like that where you think both, it's possible, it's impossible, it's possible, it's impossible. Both of those kind of explode

[30:33]

in this little moment at the end of a sentence like that. Now, I'm sure some of you recognize his answer after a pause. The jade woman recalls her dream of the triple world. The wooden man sits, cutting off functioning of the six senses. So, Hokyo Zanmai, the Song of the Precious, Samara Samadhi, says the wooden man gets up to, what is it? The wooden man gets up to sing, the stone woman gets up to dance. Or the wooden man begins to sing. So this goes back to Dongshan, the founder of the Chinese Seto school. But in a lot of, Dogen refers to it a lot, and Hongzhe refers to it a lot. That's another thing I didn't mention about this. Hongzhe, I don't know if some of you have looked at Cultivating the Empty Field that I translated. But Hongzhe was the guy who wrote, picked the cases and wrote the verses for the Book of Serenity. And he also was the abbot of Chanton Monastery, where Dogen trained, where his teacher, Chanton Rujing, or Tendon Yojo in Japanese,

[31:34]

where he met his teacher, Hongzhe was the abbot there a few generations before. And in Hei Korok, we'll see some examples of that, he quotes Hongzhe a lot. And he obviously gets a lot of his style from him. And he actually quotes sections of Hongzhe. So I'm getting to translate more of Hongzhe, which is kind of fun. But you can see the stylistic influence of that. Anyway, I mention that because Hongzhe also talks about the jade woman and the wooden man, or the stone woman and the wooden man, in lots of different contexts, and they've changed it around. So do any of you have any sense of what that's about, this image of the jade woman and wooden man, or the stone woman and the wooden man, or the wooden man and the stone woman? Well, just that both jade and stone are images of stillness, and seeing the dancing or activity. Right. Within stillness there's activity. Right, right. So there's a lot of, actually, images. Zen uses, unlike Tibetan or Indian Buddhism

[32:36]

or South Asian Buddhism, where there's more of a philosophical, Zen is very poetic, so it finds these images to express something. So Dogen also talks about the, he talks about his staff a lot, his staff and the whiskers, which is an authority. He talks about, we're just translating something today, about his staff is covered with blossoms, or there's a blossom at the end, or a plum blossom opens at the end of his staff. So there's this image in a lot of these Zen images of, as you say, inert or supposedly non-sentient entities suddenly awakening and blossoming and dancing and singing or whatever. So this is part of that. But somehow this image, particularly in honor, I find it kind of stimulating, the jade woman and the wooden man, and there's this kind of interactive quality. But there's also the image of the, one of Hongshu's teachers was,

[33:38]

talked about sitting, sitting like a burnt, like a dead stump. And there was one earlier teacher who had a Zendo that was called the dead stump hall because they were supposed to sit so still. But then there's places where it talks about the, I think it may be in here, he does in a series of the New Year's, or I don't know if it's the New Year's or the Enlightenment day, talks, let me see if I can find one in here, he talks about, the woman plays about the plum blossom, the plum blossom opening on the same, on a dead branch or on the same branch as last year. It might be in here, actually. Yeah, on 213, look on page eight. This is a real short one. So this is from 1246, this was the Enlightenment day Jodo, so a Buddha's Enlightenment day in December, in the 12th month.

[34:41]

And so this is a real short one, but it's an example of that. The old bandit Gotama entered the temptations of the demon Mara. When Gotama afflicted the human and heavenly realms with confusion, stirring up disturbance, people lost their eyes, and so could not look for them. So that's the same kind of idea as bodhidharma, causing confusion. The plum blossom opens afresh on the same branch as last year. So, you know, he talked, and you have these series of, in the Heikuroku, these series of talks on Enlightenment day, these series of Buddha's birthday talks. And he used, sometimes he'll use the same images or he'll refer to the same earlier story for them. But this idea of vitality growing out of stillness, as you said, Rick, is one of the big motifs there. That one line struck me, people lost their eyes and so could not look for them. I heard it for a moment, as people lost their eyes because they were looking for them. That's why I looked at that.

[35:42]

It would be a tolerable translation according to the original. Okay, I'll look it up. That is the plum blossoms? The human. No, lost their eyes and could not look for their eyes. That's how we read it. And it's in some of these, sometimes we'll spend an hour going over a paragraph or a few sentences trying to figure out what did he mean by this and thinking about it. And finally, my experience is often that, you go back to the literal reading and suddenly it's really clear. But then how to say it so that it's clear to somebody reading it in English is a challenge. Okay, this is a short one. People lost eyes, eyeballs, no place to find them.

[36:46]

Literally. People lost their eyeballs, so what did we say, what did we say? So could not look for them. No place to see them, nowhere to find them. So it's like the image of trying to see your own eyeballs. Anyway, that's just an example again of this, going back to when we started on 187. The jade woman recalls her dream of the triple world. The wooden man sits, cutting off functioning of the six senses. In this case, now it kind of echoes the wooden man begins to sing, the stone woman gets up to dance. It's clearly referring to this image of vitality arising out of stillness, out of calm, out of settledness that is part of that image of the, sometimes it's the stone woman, sometimes it's actually the character for jade. But in this case it's a little different,

[37:52]

it's interesting. The jade woman recalls her dream of the triple world. So it's not, she's not getting up dancing, she just remembers her, the dream she lives in. So the triple world, sometimes, the triple world usually just means the three times. I have to look this one up now. Sometimes it's, sometimes depending on the character, I think this is actually kai, which is more realm, which means the, do you know about the desire realm, the form realm and the formless realm, are the kind of three realms of conditioned world. So we live in the desire realm, but the form realm is, maybe if you've experienced it during session when forms seem really vivid, that's kind of the form realm. And the formless realm is still in the condition realm, but it's very up there. Mostly we don't dabble in that. But they're all part of the realm of samsara. Anyway, so this is just a way of saying that the jade woman recalls her dream of the world,

[38:56]

of the phenomenal world. So it's not that she's getting up and dancing, but there's something going on. Well, the term dream is sometimes slightly derogatory, meaning illusion or ignorance. Yeah, and that's another example of something really interesting with Dogen, because he turns that upside down. Actually, it's in Enlightenment Unfolds. I translated it with Kaza. There's a fascicle of Shobokenzo called Muchu Setsumu, within the dream, expressing the dream. So one of the ways that Dogen works again and again, and we'll see it in some of this, is that he turns language around and makes something that seems to be negative. He kind of shows the non-dualistic aspect of it. So in that essay in Shobokenzo, he says, all Buddhas and ancestors abide within a dream and express the dream. In this particular thing, could it be conjectured that the triple world is a metaphor for the dance itself, the three realms being the dancing, and the jade woman realized the dancing itself is, of course, illusion. We still do it, we have to do it,

[39:57]

but it's not to be taken too seriously. Yeah, one can conjecture that, and you just did. Yeah, I accept all of that, yeah, sure. Yeah, I think that's all there. I mean, this is part of what's needed in this kind of language, is that you can play with it and see these meanings. And part of what Dogen is encouraging his students to do is to turn these phrases, to use them as ways of seeing more deeply. So exactly as you just did. I have a question. Maybe going one step back, the triple world, is the triple world, the notion of it encompasses the entire phenomenal world? Yes, everything. Okay. Actually, and it is not, it's not the three, there's a character which means world, which actually when it says three worlds, sanse, it means the three times, past, present, and future. This is sankai, three realms, so it does mean the formless realm, form element. Excuse me, desired realm, in this case.

[40:59]

Thank you. So recalling her dream is like, there's a kind of awareness there. She comes, she brings back her dream, calls forth her dream of the triple world. And then the stone, the wooden man sits, cutting off functioning of the six senses. And that's really interesting, because usually when it talks about the wooden man and the stone man, or the wooden man and the stone woman, or whatever, that he gets up and starts to sing. In this one, Dogen has him kind of doing shamatha even more strongly, kind of cutting off sense awareness. Are there other copies of the text we're using? Maybe you could share. We're looking at this text from Dogen, so on page two, number 187. So that's really interesting. This is again, this is all about Bodhidharma's single utterance.

[42:00]

What is Bodhidharma's single utterance? How do you demonstrate it, mistakenly or unmistakenly? And his answer is this stillness. But there's a kind of, there's some play there. The jade woman is actually bringing forth her dream of the world, including everything that Rick said. But then he has the wooden man just sitting, and just sitting in this very kind of focused way, cutting off the six senses. It's a real strong shamatha practice. So in this particular jodo, he's really encouraging strong sitting, very strongly, as a way of expressing Bodhidharma. And yet, there's all that play in there that we just talked about. And then he just gets down, which happens sometimes. Yes, that's right, that's right.

[43:11]

Would these have been things that he had premeditated, or written down himself, or something like that? Yeah, you know, one of the things that's really interesting, as we're going through them, they're mostly chronological. Today we hit one where it was clearly out of, there were several that were out of order a little bit. But mostly it's chronological, and you can see connections. So sometimes the connection is because he's talking about mazu, and so he'll talk about mazu. Maybe not each one sequentially, but a couple times later he's talking about them again, or talking about the same phrase, or he's talking about a particular theme. So clearly he's thinking about stuff. He's working with stories, he's working with themes, he's working with ideas, he's working with practice issues, and coming back to them. And I imagine that he was also talking with the monks, and so he's addressing the things that they're bringing to him, too. So you can see that. So I would say it's not just, I don't think he's just coming in and talking off the top of his head. But once he starts talking, different things come up, I think.

[44:26]

I don't know, that's just my guess. But it's an interesting question. So I wasn't sure how this would work in terms of how much we'd get into each one. I really want to talk about the first one tonight, but I want to do one more first. So let's see if we... This next one is kind of nice, and it's kind of a different side. Let's try the next one, 188. It starts at the bottom of page 2. And again, these parts in italics are just the little titles that Shiraku and I have given to them after translating each one. So we call this one A Peaceful Lifetime of Wearing Through Straw Sandals. Why the brackets? Oh, the brackets are... Literally, it doesn't say Dogen said, it just says, After a Pause said. So I don't know, when we get to editing, it's going to be published by Wisdom Publications, and we'll work with our editor. Some of those brackets we'll take out. In other places where there's brackets, it's stuff that we added that sometimes it's not in the text,

[45:31]

but it makes it clear. Sometimes it's... Sometimes there's something that's not explicit in the text, but it's clearly what it means, and then maybe we don't use brackets. So anyway, there. Where it's just bracket Dogen, he doesn't say his name. It's kind of written as if it's written in third person, and yet it's him talking. So there's a kind of different style about how to write that's a little strange to us. That's what that's about. So anyway, this one, 188, which was the next one given after the previous one. Under the heavens all is very peaceful. Wherever the monk's staff travels, you can eat rice. So part of what's going on, he has these monks who he's training, and the way monks were, they'd wander around, and all the monks have the monk's staff for traveling around. So he doesn't say the monk's travels. He says wherever the monk's staff travels, you can eat rice. And that was actually... I mean, that's still the practice in Japan. If you're a priest and you go to a temple in Japan,

[46:33]

you don't have to pay anything. Most temples, you don't have to pay anything. You just go in, and you're fed, and then you go out on the begging rounds, or you're fed from the donors. Anyway, here he's saying, though, under the heavens all is very peaceful. Wherever the monk's staff travels, you can eat rice. This kind of means traveling around, practicing, you'll be taken care of. Don't worry, there's kind of that feeling. All the myriad common people have peace and bliss. Whenever there is teaching amid temple pillars, flowers blossom. Therefore, a smile broke out on Mahakasyapa's face, and Huike, the second ancestor, made prostrations and attained the marrow. So those are Zen stories that maybe I can go on, for any of you who don't know of them. But he refers to this, so that's Mahakasyapa smiling when the Buddha held up a flower, and the second ancestor expressing himself to Bodhidharma

[47:34]

by making prostrations. He does it in eyelashes. Please tell me, in what place does this practiced person pacify the body and establish a life? Do you thoroughly understand? So often he says, please tell me, and he's kind of asking the monks to express something. But I don't think it's really there that you put the brackets practice. Well, that's... I think it just means this person, but it meant the practitioner. So it's just this person, but it's referring back to the person wandering around, the monks traveling around as a practitioner. Oh, I see. So just to clarify. And then there's some notes. The Flower Treasury World is the name in the Flower Ornament Sutra for the Dharmakaya's Buddha field, for Vairagyana's Buddha field. And Constant Tranquil Radiance is a name in the Lotus Sutra

[48:35]

for the Buddha field, so these are the realms of Buddha. So he says the Flower Treasury World of Constant Tranquil Radiance, he kind of uses both names together, is completely included in our eyebrows and eyelashes. So this is kind of a Huayan or a Flower Ornament Sutra kind of idea of all things existing, the whole world existing on the tip of a hair, everything is expressed in one thing. Heaven exists within one grain of knowing. If one is a practitioner. Well, he says this is... That's an interesting question. He's talking about practitioners, he's talking to monks. I mean, that's kind of assumed. The reason I highlight that is the whole thing sounds like kind of a hymn of praise to the oneness of practice and realization. Yes, absolutely. But he also says all the myriad common people have peace and bliss. This is just the way things are. And yet, you know, as he says in Bhandawa, you have to express it, you have to put it into practice. But then there's this other thing,

[49:41]

tell me in what place does this person practice, pacify the body and establish a life? And that's a kind of common Buddhist expression, but usually it's pacify the mind and establish a life. So he plays with common Buddhist phrases, and the emphasis of that is to actually do it physically. It's not just some idea, it's not just pacify the mind, but pacify the body, really, in your physical activity, in your conduct in the world. Pacify that and establish a life. Do you thoroughly understand? After a pause Dogen said, crossing mountains and rivers, you polish and break straw sandals. Having accomplished this, just as before, you are still deceived by your eyes. There's a couple of really interesting things in there. Crossing mountains and rivers, you polish and break straw sandals. That's like talking about wearing out zafus.

[50:41]

But in Japan, there's this practice they do, still called takuhatsu, where you do begging rounds. And so traditionally monks who are traveling, and still when you do begging rounds, you wear these straw sandals, maybe some of you have seen them, that you tie up around your legs, and they're neat. I actually got to like walking around in them, but if you don't walk very mindfully, your feet will end up bleeding, because you're walking on straw, and it's kind of rough. And once you get worn in, you really have to walk mindfully on them. But they do get worn out. I mean, they absolutely get worn out. They get worn through. I mean, I saw them where there was like holes in the bottom and stuff. So just wrap that straw, and your toes are kind of over the edge of them. Anyway, but this straw sandals, you know, is an image of doing lots of practice.

[51:47]

Crossing mountains and rivers, you polish and break straw sandals. So he's talking about walking around and visiting teachers, but he's also talking about just sitting and just doing practice, you wear through straw sandals. But then there's this last thing, having accomplished this just as before, you are still deceived by your eyes. Any responses or thoughts about that? I mean, this whole thing he's talking about, this is the world of peace and bliss, and all the oceans exist on the tip of a hair. Heavens exist within one grain of millet. I mean, this is a very poetic expression of, as you said, how wonderful this world is. Practice, I guess, practice doesn't change you, but still you can practice. But you're still deceived by your eyes. Well, worse than because you think you're practicing. Right. I don't read that.

[52:51]

Do you read that? Yeah, I thought there was some more warning about putting on sandals. Well, I don't know. Or the danger, you know. Well, I think he's saying, if you think you're practicing, and that makes you better than the common simple people who also live in the world of peace and bliss, that's a delusion. But, you know, I kind of, myself, I kind of feel like anything anybody says about any of this is part of the truth, at least. So, you know, whatever you have to say about it, there's no such thing as a stupid comment. These were particularly, you know, he's talking to a group of monks like this, except that he was sitting up in the high seat and they were all standing, you know, and he's kind of, he's trying to encourage them to deepen their practice. I mean, that's what these are all about. And yet, he says, having accomplished this,

[53:53]

you know, all this wonderful stuff, just as before, you were still deceived by your eyes. Well, Suzuki Roshi would say not to have a gaining idea. Okay. It's a similar admonition, you know. Practice well. It means practice, make your best effort, but don't think you're going to get anything from it. Right. Yeah, I can see that there. There's also this issue of how we know. We can't see, you know, the ocean existing on the tip of a hair. Don't, I mean, I hear in this, don't be deceived. You know, what's the line in Genjo Koan? We only see as far as our eye of practice can reach. And we don't see the blissful world. Or maybe we don't see the, we do see the blissful world, but we don't see the suffering world. I don't know. But I mean, when he described that, all the people, all the married people, this and this,

[54:53]

it's something that's available to a Buddha-I. Right. Right, yes. Just as before, nothing's changed. Uh-huh. And yet, in a way, everything has changed. You've broken through straw sandals. No longer having sandals. One thing has changed. And then also, in what place does this practice person pacify a body and establish a life? Right. In what place? Yeah. In what place is it, like, the relative conventional? Yes. And ultimate discussion. That's part of this, absolutely. And conventionally. And he's also saying, where are you right now?

[55:56]

You know, he says in Genjo Koan, here is the place, here the way unfolds. So where are you doing this right now? Where are your eyes right now? How is your zazen right now? How are you hearing this? How is your practice today? So I feel, and this is just, you know, I think we all have our reactions to what he's saying, but I feel in a lot of these this kind of edge of he's really kind of pushing his students. But he's also kind of encouraging them and supporting them. You can see both sides of it. There's one line at the top, whenever, and we put in there as teaching to kind of make it intelligible, but literally it's whenever, when every inside temple pillars flowers bloom. And there's other places where he talks about being inside the temple pillars and it's kind of weird. I don't quite get what he means, but he talks about it in this very literal way. Like if you go to temples in Japan, you know, there's these big rooms and there's actually these big wooden pillars. And, you know, he talks about it.

[56:59]

And I think there's a reference to something, some saying like this from young men about being inside the pillars. And I don't quite get what they're talking about, but it's kind of about, it has to do with that aliveness and inertness too, and about really inhabiting the temple and really inhabiting space. But it's this kind of funny image. And that's, we put it where we said there is teaching. I think that's one way to read it completely, but there's also this other thing that is kind of, sort of implied in that sentence there. If you're inside a pillar, when you perceive, the perception defines an eye. So there is a perceiver and a perceiver. Okay. So if you're inside a pillar, it's just, it's messing with the idea of existence of a perceiver because we're so, that's why when you put dogen in brackets, in Japanese it sounds like the language allows there to not be an eye.

[58:05]

That's right. Not be an existing subject in the language because the subject defines being, and if there's no subject it's easier to have the non-existence. Yeah, and I would say Chinese even more than Japanese. Really? Because Japanese you have verb endings, you have objects and particles, and so actually in this text that we're working from, each, so this is the one we were looking at before, but this is in Chinese, this is the same thing in Japanese. So it's written out with Japanese, so this is a kind of modern Japanese translation of the Chinese. So as we work on it, she walks off and looking at the Japanese, I'm looking at the Chinese. But it's so interesting how hard it is in English to have language without a subject. Yeah, so there's a way in which English is the language of the world now and the language of science and technology because it's so precise

[59:06]

and because you have to have a subject and an object, and in Chinese it's really open and often, there's some grammatical rules in Chinese but often in terms of translating it into English, this one might be the verb and that one might be the verb. And also the way this is written now, there are periods and commas, but actually that was written in later, so it's possible to divide the sentences in different ways. So you kind of have to, translating each one of these, you kind of have to, it's like a koan. I feel like I'm having dogan all the time because I'm trying to figure out what he's saying and where does the sentence end. Sometimes it's fairly clear, but sometimes, is this a separate sentence or do we combine this? There are valid ways to translate it both ways. And even in a sentence like, please tell me in what place does this practice person pacify the body and establish a life, it's almost like I defy you to find a subject. I defy you to find an existence of this whatever

[60:11]

that supposedly is pacifying its body and establishing a life. Tell me, do your best, try to show me an existence of whatever this is. Right. Can you show me an existence? Yeah. And you can't really, but our language keeps making it up. But on the other side, what you say is true and that English is particularly dualistic and in Chinese and to a large extent in Japanese you can get away without, there's just no subject. Also, there's no singular or plural. So you have to decide in context how to put this into intelligible English that means something and you choose. And in context sometimes it's fairly clear, which it is, or it could be read one way or the other, but you have to be consistent in the passage to make it make sense. However, having said all that about the horrors of English and the wonders of Chinese from a point of view

[61:13]

of non-discriminating mind, human consciousness, whether you're speaking Chinese or English or Japanese, there's still this kind of subject and object split. So they basically have the same problem we do. Many philosophers would say that's not the case, that the language is so, oh well. Yeah, that's an interesting long discussion. Yeah, definitely there's a difference in the way in which we discriminate if we're speaking, if we're thinking in English or thinking in Chinese. All I'm saying is that even in Chinese there are subjects and objects. It may be kind of looser, but we still, Chinese people aren't all these great enlightened beings who have seen no distinction between self and other. So human consciousness is wired for this fundamental delusion. Yeah, it just gets harder to defy it in English. Or we had this wonderful opportunity of overcoming even English.

[62:14]

Yeah, exactly, yeah. We're the lightest, brightest, greatest shadows. So anyway, does anybody have any other? We could talk more about that, but I wanted to get to at least one more tonight. But if you have questions or comments or thoughts about anything in that one, please feel free. Okay. A lot of these are fairly short, and then some of them are really long. I'm going to do one more short one before I go back to the first one. I'm going to see if we can do this. I'm going to skip one and go to 191. And this is also kind of the, because this is kind of a typical example of one where he kind of is encouraging practice. So Dogen said, I remember a monk asked Tosu Datong. In that case, we're just filling in the full name so that you can look. We'll have a name glossary at the end like we did in Eheshingi,

[63:16]

Dogen's Pure Standards. Anyway, a monk asked Tosu, so it's not Tosugise, whose name we say in the morning here. It's a different Tosu. What are the causes and conditions of this single great matter? Tosu said, Minister Yin asked me to open the hall and give a Dharma discourse. Anyway, we don't know who Minister Yin was, but it was one of his lay devotees. Dogen says, if it had been Ehei, I would have not spoken like this. This is a common pattern. He'll quote a story, and then he'll say what he would have said. If someone asks me, what are the causes and conditions of this single great matter, I would just say to him, in the early morning I eat gruel, and at noon I eat rice. Feeling strong, I practice zazen. When tired, I sleep. So, very straightforward. What are the causes and conditions of this single great matter? But the other answer is kind of in need, too.

[64:18]

This lay patron asked me to open the hall and give a Dharma discourse. Here we are. I like it better than Dogen's. That's fine. What are the causes and conditions of this single great matter? He talks about causes and conditions a lot later on in Ehei Koroku and karma and how that works. Again, in this very poetic way. But Dogen's answer is, in the early morning I eat gruel, at noon I eat rice. When I'm strong, I practice zazen. When I'm tired, I sleep. So, if you want to tell the Tenkin that you're tired and you're sleeping in, cite Dogen for that. I'm looking at what the...

[65:21]

It does seem like Dogen wants to expand. I don't know what he wants to do. But there is a difference in the... What's the single great matter that's being talked about? What is the single great matter that's being talked about? I think for the first person it's... It has a feel of... there's a dharma talk involved. There's like... That's what's happening, here and in that case. Somehow just that even it's a dharma talk is kind of distracting from... And it makes sense because he's given the dharma talk. But somehow Dogen's answer doesn't have anything to do with... a dharma talk or not a dharma talk. In fact, you see how you could appreciate the first response as also not having anything to do with a dharma talk or not a dharma talk.

[66:22]

But somehow... Dogen's you're less likely to confuse with some kind of dharma. Yeah, but I can see both ways. What are the causes and conditions here? Well, this morning I woke up and I drove into the city. What are the causes and conditions here? Here we are having a classic green gulch. What are the causes and conditions? Well, when I'm tired I sleep. There's different levels. There's two different levels there. But they're all part of the causes and conditions. Maybe there's more than two. I think it's kind of like poking... It's like the single great matter. It's like sort of poking it in the head. Oh, the single great matter? The single great matter. Suzuki Roshi said, what is the most important thing? Or the Han says, written on it, the single great matter of life and death. Life and death is the single great matter.

[67:24]

There was something about his own... It seemed like he was saying something a little bit also about his own being as a teacher of sorts. Like Tosu was saying, well, I was asked. And Dogen is sort of saying, well, it's like my breath. I have to expound it. Very good. Yes, yes, yes. It doesn't seem like... I'm not going to wait to be asked. I'm not going to be invited. It doesn't matter. In the early morning I eat gruel. In the middle of the morning I come and give a Dharma discourse. At noon I eat rice. It's just part of... It's the everyday stuff of... So the context of this, again, is this intense practice up in the mountains in Eheji. And they're far away from anything. And I don't know which time of year this is. Sometimes you can tell what time of year it is. And he refers to the weather a lot. But it's very cold. And Eheji now, if any of you have been there,

[68:30]

is this very elaborate event. But then it was quite rustic, as you can imagine. So I don't want to rush through these. We could spend an hour and a half on each one of them. But I wanted to talk about the first one, but I didn't want to start with it because it's a little bit heavy and a little bit complicated. And we may not even finish it tonight, so we'll talk about it at the next class in two weeks if we don't. So there's some history involved in this. And this helps kind of set what's going on in his monastery. So some of the Dharma discourses, there's some explanation of a particular event. Some of them are like to, as I said, for Buddha's birthday or Enlightenment Day, or sometimes to invite the new Tenzo or to congratulate the director who's finished taking that position, things like that. Here, there's a Dharma discourse given at the request of head monk Ekon

[69:32]

in memorial for his late teacher, Wayfarer Kakuan. So there's some history in this. It's in the note. So again, this is summer of 1246. And one of Dogen's disciples was Kakuzan Ekon, who is the one who requested this. And Ekon had Dharma transmission from Buchi Kakuan. And Buchi Kakuan was a Dharma heir of Dainichi Nonin. So this is an important part of the history of Dogen's monastery. There was this sect, maybe some of you know about this, the Darumashu, that was an early sect, an early school of Zen before Dogen that was in Japan. And this guy, Dainichi Nonin, had a lot of followers. And he had died before this. He never himself went to China or had direct transmission from a Chinese teacher. In fact, he sent one of his students to one of the prominent teachers in China who brought him back a transmission certification

[70:33]

kind of without having met face-to-face. But a lot of Dogen's disciples were from this school. Koen Ejo, who was Dogen's main Dharma successor, had been a disciple of Kakuan also. And when Ekon, Kakuzan Ekon, so he's the one who requested this Dharma discourse, when he came to study with Dogen in 1241, he brought with him his own disciples who later became very prominent disciples of Dogen. So Tetsu Gikai, who was the Dharma successor of Koen Ejo, the third ancestor in Japan. Kan Gan Gien, these are all very important people in Soto history. Kan Gan Gien was a student, disciple of Dogen who went to Kyushu. I saw his temple in Kyushu. His lineage survived in Kyushu like into the 1700s. It was really significant lineage in Soto history.

[71:33]

But it's not, it hasn't continued to now, but it survived for 500 years. Ehe Gien later became abbot of Eheji. They all came with Kakuzan Ekon and Tetsu Gikai became the Dharma heir of Koen Ejo. But this has a lot to do with the kind of teaching that Dogen was doing. Because it seems like, and it's in some of the stuff in Shogo Genzo too, that Dainichi Nonen and his disciples, in his teaching he had emphasized this idea of all being is Buddha nature, which Dogen also talks about. And this idea of original enlightenment, that everything is, and Dogen, we've already seen places where Dogen talks about everything is peace and bliss, even for common people. But there was a kind of little edge that we see him playing with in his training of his disciples because there was this subtle idea that they seem to have had from this teaching that it's not really so necessary to practice.

[72:35]

If you just understand that everything is Buddha, then it's all cool and go with the flow and whatever, man. So we have our own version of that, and I think it's a kind of common kind of problem in Zen teaching and Zen practice that when you see that this life is wonderful, as well as being a life of suffering, it's possible to kind of feel like, well, we can take it easier. So anyway, this isn't necessarily so much in this Dharma discourse, but this background is really important in terms of his whole style of teaching. So again, I was referring to the stereotype of Dogen's career in modern academic Buddhist scholarship and the idea that he changed and became more emphasized monks and so forth, less emphasized Zazen. I don't really think so. I don't think he changed his viewpoint so much. He does change how he talks about certain teachings sometimes,

[73:37]

but he was addressing a particular group of monks who had a particular orientation, and that's really important to see in terms of how he's working in this. So it's not like he's trying to establish some philosophy. It's not like he's trying to talk about this is the true doctrine. He's talking to particular monks about their practice and encouraging them in particular ways. So I think that context is really important. But this particular Dharma discourse, it's a little longer than some of the others, is about the relationship of teacher and student. So I didn't want to start off with this, but it gives you a sense of Dogen's view of that. So okay, I'll read through it. After offering incense, Dogen took his seat, held up his whisk and said... So again, the whisk is a symbol of authority. So you may have seen some of the abbots carrying whisks, and now it's incidental.

[74:38]

When people get Dharma transmission, they receive whisks. It's an image of authority. We don't use it so much, but apparently when he gave, like the little Yogi, when he gave these Dharma discourses, he was carrying his staff or he was carrying his whisk. We don't know if he was always, but often he refers to it. So it represents the authority of the teacher. Okay, so he said, Who can equal Ekon in their conduct of filial responsibility? Today's memorial dedication will be clearly examined by the sacred spirit, but it refers to the departed sacred spirit of the teacher. It's very clear in context, that's what he means. The deep determination of the disciple yearning for his late teacher is known only by the late teacher. The late teacher's compassion while sympathizing with his disciple is known only by the disciple. How can someone else know it? People without such a relationship cannot match it. So it is said, it cannot be known with mind, it cannot be attained with mind, it cannot be reached by practice enlightenment,

[75:40]

and it cannot be measured with spiritual power. Having reached this ground, how can it be calculated? So again, this is a... This is a memorial Jodo for this guy's teacher, and the one who requested it was now a student of Dogen's. So Dogen pounded his staff and said, Only this staff always knows it distinctly. Why does the staff always know it distinctly? Because, this is the case, all Buddhas in the past are thus, all Buddhas in the present are thus, and all Buddhas in the future are thus. Although this is so, this is exactly the affair of the Buddha ancestors' realm. How is this the true principle of knowing and repaying our debt of kindness? So that's the kind of phrase, knowing and repaying our debt of kindness, that is in Zen language, but it does have this kind of Confucian filial responsibility,

[76:41]

filial piety aspect to it. So a lot of the Zen culture has this feeling of ancestor veneration, which was just totally part of Chinese and Japanese traditional culture. So this is part of Dogen's feeling about this teacher-student relationship. After a pause, Dogen said, Alas for the days of the past, as the teacher becomes a single piece of emptiness. So he's talking about the Zen teacher. Confused by flowers in the eyes, the great earth is red. Blood and tears filling my chest, to whom can I speak? I only wish that the teaching of the staff would spread widely. These are the very sayings that know and repay our debt of kindness. What is this matter of going beyond Buddhas and ancestors? Dogen threw his staff down before the platform and descended from his seat. So this is kind of dramatic. I mean, you get a feeling of his emotional quality. So I didn't want to start with this. But this is one example of Dogen's view of what the teacher-disciple relationship is.

[77:50]

So there's a lot to talk about here. Anyone want to start? I was just thinking, it's kind of this beautiful, sort of jarring admonition against sentimentality, in a way. But I don't know, it's kinder than that. It's not just like, I mean, there's something more about the love and devotion you feel, and the desire, you know, if you have a student-teacher relationship, the desire for that bloodline to affect. And yet he's, you know, is he being sentimental himself? Blood and tears fill my chest, to whom can I speak? Yeah. So he's kind of getting emotional there. And yet, I think you're right. He's talking about something that he says, you know, that can't be spoken of, in a sense, that goes beyond. But it doesn't seem like totally like, not sickening, but more just like, and then you just, and then drop it, and walk away from it.

[78:53]

And that's repaying your debt of kindness. But it's also, I only wish that this staff would spread widely. You know, there's this commitment to spreading the teaching. And then there's the thing we were talking about before, about the words themselves. He says, these are the very sayings that know and repay our debt of kindness. Just saying these things is the way to express and spread this. I get the impression in the first three sentences after a pause that he's feeling a lot of grief. Yeah. A lot of grief. Yeah. I think so. I think he's thinking about his own teacher. He's willing to feel that grief, but he's not turning away from it. He's thinking that it's wrong to suffer. And that he's going to turn that grief into a blessing by trying to help the staff spread the teaching widely.

[80:00]

And in the middle of that, he's very poetic. Confused by flowers in the eyes, the great earth is red. So it's like the earth is bleeding. He's hurting. He's hurting a lot. Yeah. And I don't know. I'm not sure if anyone knows what his relationship was to Kakuan, who was Kakuzan's teacher. I don't know if he knew him himself. I'm not sure if Kakuan had come and studied with Dogen or not. But he certainly knew him through his students, who had become Dogen's own main disciples, were all students of this guy. So he had some very strong feeling about it. I'm also really struck by the conveying of the intimacy and the relationship between student and teacher. It's only within that of two-some, knowing this depth of relating. How can anyone else know it?

[81:03]

Yeah. I think this is kind of challenging to us. This is Dogen's view of the importance of a teacher. And I think for our practice we have at Zen Center and in American Zen we have a range of ways that we work with teachers. But anyway, this is how Dogen felt. It cannot be reached by a practice of enlightenment. Right. It's very powerful. It's not even, you know, yeah. It's not even, yeah. It cannot be known with mind. It cannot be attained with no mind. I meant that sincerely. Yeah, but this, it cannot be known with mind. It cannot be attained without mind. It could be, but it cannot be attained with no mind. So he's talking about the Elbert. The which? The Elbert, or the word love. Sure. I don't like to use too much. I do.

[82:05]

I think it's a good word. That some people haven't used until recently. There's a new wave of love coming. Oh, I'm so happy to hear that. That's lovely. I'm happy about it, too, actually. Oh, good. And, yeah, no matter how, I don't think you can actually attain love through any kind of spiritual practice. Right. It's beyond practice of enlightenment. There's an idea. I like that idea. About going beyond, you know, that the good student has to surpass their teacher. But that not being, I thought, I was thinking about that in terms of, like, you can't calculate in order to figure out how much repayment of debt there is. You know, if you do that, then it's beyond calculation. Yeah, it's a mystery. And so just the activity is actually, like, this great act of gratitude. And so there's also the performance aspect of all of this, right? He's doing a memorial service for this guy.

[83:08]

And this is his utterance as part of this memorial service. And then there's the thing about throwing down his staff. And I really, I don't know, I have a problem with this, because this one is really clear. It says he threw his staff down before the platform, before the altar. There's no other way to translate it. A lot of times it says he threw down his whisk. And the word that's used, subete in Japanese, it means to throw down. And yet, you know, I'm trying to, you know, is he really going to fling his whisk down on the ground? Oh, I didn't mention the floor was not like a nice hardwood floor. There were stone floors. That's still the way a lot of the traditional monks' halls and dharma halls are in Japan. So, you know, I just have this image of him with his whisk and him flinging it down. So we've translated it in some places as he placed his whisk down.

[84:10]

And it might be translated as that. I just don't know what he actually did. We don't know. There were no videotapes there. Throwing is much more dramatic. If it symbolizes the teaching or your idea of the teaching, placing it down doesn't have the same effect. That's true. Well, the Buddha said all the Buddha's were his staff. Yeah, that's right. So the staff is like this. He wants the staff to spread widely. And he talks about his staff a lot, you know, and the whisk. There are times when he asks some dharma question and he says, can you tell me how is this for you? And then after a pause he just pounds his staff, and that's his answer. So he uses these props. There's this performance going on. So, yeah, I think you're right, Bert. You may be right. It may be that later on he wrote it and he flung down his staff because it was more dramatic to read it that way.

[85:13]

And I'm translating it and kind of wondering, well, should I translate it in terms of his rhetoric or in terms of what the performance was actually? So I don't know. We just case by case kind of make a guess. I mean, it could be translated. It could mean he placed it down. But it's also the word that's usually used to throw down. So, you know, there's no perfect translation. So, anyway, this one is kind of intense. There's the other thing that's going on in this, and it's almost time to stop, but there's this thing about the spirits that's in here that early on, in which, where Dogen kind of takes himself out of it,

[86:16]

except that I kind of feel like he's also thinking of his teacher. And in some places in the Heiko Roku he talks about his teacher, and there's one where the record, the recorded writings, the teachings of his teacher, Tiantong Rujing, Tiantong Yojo, arrive from China, and he gets very excited, and he does this service for them and talks about how he's walked across the ocean. Anyway, so there's that overtone. But explicitly here he's saying that Ekan and his lay teacher Kakuan are the only ones who can see each other, and still they can see each other, even though he's in the spirit realm, he's departed. So there's this other thing going on there, that this relationship even transcends life and death. The lay teacher's compassion while sympathizing with the disciple is known only by the disciple. And the deep determination of the disciple is known only by the lay teacher,

[87:18]

and it's like he still knows it. So there's that going on there too. It's, I think, pretty powerful. Any last comments on this one? We can start by talking about it again in the next class. So go ahead and read this. It's not that long, really. So again, there's no class next week, because I'm going to be doing a talk in Berkeley, but then there will be four classes in the weeks right after that. And we'll continue where we left off, and we'll start again with this one and go through some of these. And probably there's enough material here for four more classes, but I may bring in some of the other ones that we've translated to talk about. So thank you all very much. They are our tension.

[88:19]

They are our tension.

[88:20]

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