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. Wait, is this? Can you hear? Is this on? Yeah? Is that okay? You can hear? Okay. Good morning. Good morning. Nice to be here. Nice to see everybody. So let me begin by saying that as I look around, there's a lot of faces that I recognize, and there's a lot of faces that I don't recognize. So I should introduce myself. My name is Jeffrey Schneider, and I'm going to be talking. I don't know what else to say. The credentials, I don't think, need to be gone through. So anyhow... I first of all want to extend my gratitude and thanks to David Zimmerman, our Tonto, our head of practice, who invited me to speak.

[01:08]

It's always an honor to be invited to speak here in the Buddha Hall to you all. And, you know, it's always very interesting to speak on a Saturday because on a Saturday, it's a mix of people, right? So just out of curiosity, how many of you were here for your first time? Okay, a goodly number. So it's who do you talk to, right? So what I'm going to say today, so for you new people, you know, you may end up finding a lot of what I have to say confusing. And for those of you who have been around for a really long time, it'll probably be boring and you have my, you know, you've heard it all before, so you have my permission to go to sleep if you like. Although if somebody's snoring, please have... have the neighbor poke them. And so for those of you in the middle, I don't know what I'm hoping for. I guess maybe something like outrage. We'll see how that goes. When I give these talks, I don't speak very much.

[02:13]

I don't speak very much in public like this. But when I do, I don't really think of them as lectures. I don't think of them as anything as... exalted, if you will, as Dharma talks. Instead, what I think of them as, this is some of the stuff that I've been thinking about around practice, around my practice, around practice in general, and I kind of just want to throw it out and hope that it may spark some ideas, some questions, some discussion. So, from my point of view, the best part, the most interesting, the most rich part, of any Dharma talk or whatever this is, is afterwards when we get a chance to talk with each other and go back and forth. So hopefully something that I will say may or may spark something in some of you. I chose a statement, if you will, by Suzuki Roshi as sort of the jumping off point for my talk today.

[03:22]

Suzuki Roshi said... Nirvana is following one thing through to the end. Nirvana is following one thing through to the end. So, that's what I want to talk about today, right? What does it mean to follow something through to the end? To come to the end of something? So, for those of you who are new, I should just mention that Suzuki Roshi was the founder of Zen Center. He came to this country in 1959 to be the priest for the Japanese-American congregation up in Bush, on Bush Street, and he ended up sort of inadvertently, I guess, falling in with a bunch of dropouts, beatniks, barefooted proto-hippies, and that's how Zen Center started. He died in 1971, and yet still, here we are, right? It's interesting, I think it was in 2004, we had a celebration of his 100th birthday.

[04:24]

And at that time, we did a lot of things, but one of the things that was really cool was we had a big map, and we had little pins stuck into all the places where there were temples or sitting groups or Zen centers associated. who came from people who had studied here, or with him, or from this lineage. And at the time, there were somewhere between 40 and 50. All over the United States. There were even a couple in Europe. I think there was one in Mexico. And if I remember correctly, there was even one in South Africa. So he did pretty good for somebody who came over here, not knowing what he was doing, throwing his lot in with a bunch of dropouts, and dying early. So for those of you who may not know, that is part of who Suzuki Roshi was, who is our founder, and to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude. So nirvana is following one thing through to the end.

[05:30]

So I also want to just, for those of you who may be new, to discuss the word nirvana. You may have some idea of it, but it has, it's a Meaning is a word with a lot of different meanings, depending on time, depending on place, depending on who says it in what context, depending on particular school of Buddhism. Our oldest, I suppose, understanding of it, the oldest definition, is that nirvana is the complete dying away of greed, hatred, and delusion. The complete dying away of greed, hatred, and delusion. The etymology of of the word nirvana. It means to blow out like a flame. So greed, hatred, and delusion is blown out entirely. That's nirvana. Another shorthand way of thinking about it is nirvana is, however we define it, it's the liberation or it's the goal of the spiritual life as Buddhism understands it.

[06:38]

There are a number of different types of nirvana that get talked about. There's nirvana with remainder. So after the Buddha had his awakening experience, it was said that he was in nirvana, and yet he still continued walking around for another 40 years in teaching. And we're very grateful that he chose to do that. So that's nirvana where the karmic consequences of past actions continue to be in force. That's nirvana with remainder. Nirvana without remainder, our pari nirvana, is after the Buddha died. There was nothing to grasp, nothing to say that continued or did not continue. Something complete that we can't really talk about. And then later on, we come to something that has a lot of different ways of being... spoken of, but an unspecified or undifferentiated nirvana. This is the nirvana of the bodhisattva.

[07:39]

The bodhisattva is one who has vowed that even while awakened, enlightened, to remain in the world of suffering for the benefit of other suffering beings. So while he or she is in nirvana, they're also still here. Nirvana, of course, is not exactly enlightenment. It's not the same as the Buddha's enlightenment. The early followers of the Buddha, the Arhats, those who had completely finished the spiritual life, who had nothing left to do, were not considered Buddhas. They were considered Arhats, ones who had finished the course, who had nothing left to do. but they were not Buddhas. There's only one Buddha at a time, at least in the older school understanding. So it complicates things a bit, right? And it really is. We've had 2,500 years to think about this stuff and elaborate on it and talk about it in different ways.

[08:47]

But just for the sake of our conversation today, let's consider nirvana, however you or I may understand it, as the goal of practice. Nirvana is following one thing through to the end. So I'm going to offer a statement now here, which I invite you to consider. And if you like, we can discuss this later, afterwards, after the talk. And the statement is this. Everything that is examined breaks. Everything that is examined breaks. So just as this cup of water, examined very closely, breaks into its constituent parts of water and clay and glaze and further down into molecules and atoms and subatomic particles and ends up with quantum uncertainty, if you like.

[09:48]

So ideas, truths, teachings, beliefs, When examined, closely break apart. And what do we find at the end? So this can be, in Buddhist terms, I suppose, one way of looking at the teaching of emptiness. However, I want to say here, just to caveat, that emptiness can be misunderstood quite easily. Emptiness is not a state of being. It's rather simply the way things work. There is a saying that I've read someplace, and I... I didn't track it down, but I've read it in several Buddhist books, so I don't remember who said it. But it goes like this. Emptiness is medicine for those entrapped by phenomenon. But for those entrapped by emptiness, there is no medicine. So things break down. Things break down. And perhaps at the bottom is emptiness.

[10:53]

Or perhaps not. But let's look at this statement that everything that's examined breaks in terms of a few Buddhist concepts or particularly Zen concepts. I think we'll stick to Zen because it's more polite only to talk about the family, you know, if you're going to criticize. So I want to examine a couple of different mainstays of the Zen tradition in these terms. The first and one of the very important, perhaps in many ways the most important differentiating concept of Zen Buddhism is that of transmission. So the story is that there is an unbroken line of awakened masters who have transmitted the practice and teaching from the Buddha himself to the present day. To give it its more formal name, mind-to-mind transmission of the Dharma seal.

[11:54]

This is called, usually, the succession of patriarchs. So these days we say ancestors, but actually, to be historically accurate, it's been a boys' club until very recently, and it still remains one in Japan. So using the idea of patriarchs rather than ancestors rather than patriarchs, is another way that we rewrite history in the light of current practice, which I believe is pertinent to our topic today. So let me read you how the first transmission in this line of transmission is described in Zen literature. It's very short. The first patriarch was Maha Kasyapa. Once, the world-honored one, the Buddha, held up a flower and blinked. Kashyapa smiled. The world-honored one said, I have the treasury of the eye of the true Dharma and wondrous mind of nirvana, and I transmit it to Maha Kashyapa.

[13:10]

And then we've got a whole book full of who Mahakashapa transmitted it to and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down to the present day. So one of the interesting things about this, what I just read to you, is of course it never happened. I can pretty much say I'm 100% sure that never happened. And I think it's pretty much true for the greater part of the so-called lineage, succession of ancestors or patriarchs. It doesn't take much digging to discover that the lineage as we have it is actually quite impossible. Some of these folks probably didn't exist. There's no historical data for them. And some of the ones who did exist may have existed but could not possibly have been the teachers or the disciples of the people that they are paired with. Right? So we can say, well, mistakes were made, perhaps it's just a charming fiction or a pleasant myth.

[14:18]

That would be nice. However, that's not true, really, either. A little more research will show you that the lineage charts have been tinkered with many times over the centuries. Primarily to initially establish legitimacy, when the Zen school, the Chan school, rose up in China, it had to establish its claim to legitimacy. Other schools, you know, established their claims on the basis of the scriptures, particular scriptures on the basis of, you know, the vinya, the rules of discipline, what have you, or philosophical or practice tradition. So Zen needed its own claim. And so its own claim was that it was a special transmission outside of the scriptures. So that was done to establish legitimacy. And then as time went on, it was also used in various shapes, shifting as time and circumstances required to either establish or maintain hierarchy, privilege, and power.

[15:30]

So this is what happens when we follow the notion of transmission of the teaching of mind to mind and an unbroken succession from the Buddha down to us, to the end. We followed this to the end. And what we are left with is the familiar sad tale of the struggle for fame and gain. However, here we are. Right? Here we are. sitting here on a Saturday morning in the Buddha Hall, hearing a talk about the Dharma. So something was transmitted. And we're going to find out what that was in just a moment, right? Something was transmitted, right?

[16:33]

Many, many people... centuries of men and unacknowledged women have devoted their lives so that the practice and the teaching would continue to this day. For the last 2,500 years, there has been something passed down. You know, we may look at the official story of and say, you know, we can't believe it, it's full of hooey, it's about, you know, privilege and rank and power, and that's true. But here we are, here you are, warm hand to warm hand. We're not left with what we thought. We're not left with the agreed-upon version, not the efficient one, official one, pardon me, but something much more tenuous. and to my mind, something much more lovely.

[17:34]

What is it? So let's look now, turn our attention to another staple of the Zen school, particularly of the Soto school. We here at Zen Center are in the Soto school lineage. So this is Shikantaza. Dogen Zenji's meditation practice. So Dogen, for those of you who may be new, was the 13th century Japanese monk who went to China, studied there, and returned to Japan after a few years and founded this particular school of Zen in Japan. We consider him our founder. Brilliant, brilliant thinker, brilliant writer, amazing religious genius. So, Dogen promoted the idea that this practice of Shikintaza... I'm sorry, let me go back.

[18:44]

Shikintaza is usually translated as just sitting, just sitting, okay? And it is a practice that, according to Dogen, is not really either of the classic practices. one of which is called shamatha, which is calming and concentration, and the other is called vipassana, which is investigation. It is something other. So Dogen would claim that this both combines and transcends both of these meditation practices. I'd like to read a few lines from the Fukan Zazengi, the universal recommendation for the practice of zazen. Zazen, by the way, just means seated meditation. It's a primary text of Soto Zen. It is so important that it is actually chanted here. So I'm going to just take out of that text a few lines.

[19:50]

This is Dogen. You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding. pursuing words and following after speech. And further down he says, cease all the movements of the conscious mind. And further down, the zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. And finally, although it is said that there are as many minds as there are persons, still they all negotiate the way solely in zazen. That is the Fugan Zazengi. So Dogen presents this particular style of meditation practice as being not only the one true practice, but also as the one handed down directly from the Buddha himself through this succession of ancestors.

[20:53]

So I have no reason to believe that he did not believe this. I don't think he was being honest. I think he was being completely sincere. However, he was also wrong. Historically wrong. So, I guess it was last year, I taught a class here on early Chinese Chan literature. Chan is the Chinese word for Zen. And so I got to read the very earliest texts associated with the Chan, the Zen school. And what was very interesting is that there's not a whole lot of specific instruction on meditation in them, but where there is, what it talks about is what we would call concentration practice. You know, finding a particular object of attention and narrowing down on that. So this is basically shamatha practice, concentration, calming practice, not Dogen's meditation.

[21:58]

open awareness. And if we go back farther, if we go back to the earliest written texts that we have about meditation, it's also quite different. So if you go to the texts, what you will find is that there's a bunch of different meditation practices suggested. Some of them are concentration practices where the meditator would be instructed... to concentrate, to bring the mind on things like the breath, clay discs of various colors, water, fire, things like that. And some of the other practices are meditation objects which very definitely use speech, phrase, and the conscious mind, quite contrary to what Dogen is writing here. So, for example, some of the topics given where the meditator actually sits down and uses logic, the mind, following these things intellectually are things like the vileness of the body, meditation on corpses, either imagined or real, and more pleasantly, meditations on compassion, on loving-kindness.

[23:24]

or very specifically conscious intellectual examinations of things like the Four Noble Truths, dependent origination, the characteristics of the Buddha, and many, many other meditations to be investigated intellectually and with conscious thought. And in fact, the earliest written stories we have about the Buddha's awakening talks about how it came about through his conscious examination, his intellectual conscious examination of the rising and falling away of phenomena. It also says, interestingly enough, in early meditation manuals, that different personality types require different meditation practices. One size does not fit all. Buddhist meditation is not a moo-moo.

[24:25]

So Dogen's claim that Shigantaza is the way handed down from the Buddha and the one way for all serious people to practice the Buddha Dharma has no historical validity. The one style fitting all seems to have much more to do with with the Japanese social value on conformity than with the Buddha Dharma itself, with awakening itself. So investigating this teaching and practice of Dogen, of this school, following it to the end, if you will, brings us to the deconstruction of its claims and to recognizing them as being just as socially and historically derived as any other phenomenon. And yet, right? And yet. Shikintaza is what I practice when I sit down, or try to.

[25:37]

I was sitting and trying to practice Shikintaza shortly before I came over here for this talk. When I sit, that's what I do. I find it the most nurturing. as well as being difficult and beautiful. And we, Shikintaza and I, have chosen each other for better or for worse. And I will follow it to the end, whether it is the best, the only, the right, the wrong. Closer to home then, so to speak, it's useful to follow to the end the Sangha. The Sangha, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, is the collection of people who practice together, right? So, not to the end exactly, but perhaps to the end of our assumptions. So, I have often, in my many, many years at Zen Center, have seen people come here and sort of fall head over heels in love with the practice,

[26:48]

with the community, and generally those folks who fall head over heels in love are not the ones who end up staying here for very long. Once they find out that we are not perfect, that we're just a collection of men and women trying to do our best and failing as often as we succeed, or once they find out that the practice is perhaps not what they thought it was. I mean, hello, I've been here for six months, I said zazen every day, I even did a seshin, and I'm still not enlightened. Something is wrong, definitely. I better try something else. So, you know, we're just human humans with virtues and flaws, doing our best, which at many times can seem both disappointing and not quite enough. And the same with the practice. So I believe that real practice begins only once we have become thoroughly disillusioned with ourselves, with our companions, and perhaps with what we thought practice was or should have been.

[28:06]

So I want to tell you a couple stories here about perfection. So once upon a time... there was a young man who lived in a village. And he was getting, you know, he was growing up and he and his friends were, you know, about the age when it was time to, you know, start looking around and getting married, finding, you know, finding a spouse, raising families. And so all of his friends, you know, started finding young women and getting married. And, you know, they came to him and they said, well, so, you know, what about you? I haven't even been thinking about, you know, getting, settling down and raising a family. He said, yes, I have. I really want that. I really want to be married and have... children and to perpetuate the line but none of the women in the village you know kind of do it for me i'm looking for the perfect woman and his friend said okay he said as a matter of fact i'm so serious about looking for the perfect woman that i'm going to leave the village and i'm not going to stop until i find her so he left the village

[29:10]

And a year went by, and two years went by, and maybe three or four as his friends got married and had her first kids and were establishing their lives in the village. And one day he comes back. And all by himself. And they go, hey, guy, it's great to see you. You've been gone a long time, but so how did it work? So I guess you never found the perfect woman, right? And he said, No, no, I did. I found the perfect woman, but I found out she wasn't interested in me. Yeah, it's kind of like that, isn't it? Let me tell you another. This is a personal story about perfection. So this happened many years ago when I was very new to the temple. And one of the first jobs I was given was doing the flowers for the altars, right? And this was like, I was really... This was a great thing. I loved doing it.

[30:11]

But I was also rather anxious. I wanted to do the perfect arrangements because there are a few rules about what you can put on the altars, how high they have to be, blah, blah, blah. And so I was doing them one evening, and one of the senior monks, for those of you who knew or have heard of him, it was Isan Dorsey, came through the kitchen where I was doing my little arrangements. And he said, oh, you're the flower cheating, right? And I said, yeah, I'm really... trying to, you know, make some nice ones. And he said, well, you want to know how to do a perfect flower arrangement for the altars? I'm like, yeah. I'm like, okay, here it is. I've been waiting. Here's the secret, right? And he said, you take a bunch of flowers, you stick them in a vase, you step back, and you say, that's perfect. That's perfect. So, you know, when we follow our ideals and our expectations to the end, they are inevitably, I think, found to be perhaps well-intentioned, even noble and high-minded, but perhaps not entirely sustainable.

[31:24]

So we are left with ourselves. We are left with the world as it is. When we do the bodhisattva vows, chant them, as we will shortly, we say that delusions are inexhaustible and that dharmagates are boundless. So in my mind, this makes delusions and dharmagates coterminous. Each delusion, then, is a potential dharmagate. And I think I have found for myself that following something to the end, or as far as I can follow it right now, is not finally about finding answers, but perhaps refining the questions. I'd like to read you part of a poem that I came across quite by accident when I was looking in a book about something else.

[32:28]

The poem is by the American poet Wallace Stevens. It's called Prelude, two objects. And I'm going to edit a little bit for clarity here. If while he lives he hears himself sounded in music, if the sun is the color of a self, as certainly as night is the color of a self, if without sentiment he is what he hears and sees, And if without pathos, he feels what he hears and sees, being nothing else otherwise, having nothing otherwise. He has not to go to the Louvre to behold himself. That may have been a little hard to follow, so I'm going to read it again.

[33:29]

Certainly. if while she lives she hears herself sounded in music, if the sun is the color of a self, as certainly as night is the color of a self, if without sentiment she is what she hears and sees, and if without pathos she feels what she hears and sees, being nothing otherwise, having nothing otherwise. She is not to go to the Louvre to behold herself. So we follow our life, our breath, our thoughts, our feelings, our mistakes to the end. And it is very important, I believe, to stay in one place to do this, not to run away, to find a place and a practice we can commit to.

[34:43]

It might not be here for many of you, and I wouldn't argue that it should be, but to find a place where you can stay and follow one thing through to the end. This is what Suzuki Roshi called nirvana. And I think for now it's a good enough word for us. So I thank you for being here, for letting me speak to you today. And please accept my apologies if I have confused, bored, or distressed you. Keep what you like and leave the rest. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

[35:53]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[35:56]

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