This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Fourth day of Sashin. Pat's cell phone back. Come on, everybody. So how are we, you know, thumb-wise? Thumbs are good. That's good. So I guess it was cloudy this morning. I didn't see the moon. But I looked it up. It rose at 1.20 this morning. And it's up right now.

[01:01]

It will set at 11.48. It's a waning gibbous. Tomorrow's the third quarter. We can still see Mars. It's over there at night. So if you can locate Orion, which is over there, go to your right and ever so slightly down, and you will see Mars. And right now it's in... the constellation of Taurus. You can tell it's Mars because it's a little bit pink. Yesterday I saw a pair. You know, we live in 3B, so we have this wonderful view of the creek. And we have, you know, these big boulders. One of them we named Half Dome. And the other, we don't even know what its name is.

[02:02]

But we kept an eye on these giant boulders during the rains. You know, like, okay, water is halfway up Half Dome. Water is coming over the top of Half Dome. You know, it's still rising. Anyway, yesterday I was looking at the creek and I saw a pair of common mergansers. I don't know. ever remember seeing that at Tassajara. Maybe I was too busy chasing little boys around, but first there was, I saw a male and I thought, what? And it was, you know, kind of getting pulled by the current around one of the giant molders and it kind of ducked under and I didn't know where it went and then it popped up and along came the female. Mergancers are great. I mean, I hope it's a resident pair of mergancers so that you can see them. I think we can still eat the maple blossoms.

[03:07]

I haven't tried them in a couple of days, but, you know, the maple flowers, you can eat them. Just saying. You might want to... Some people... Like if you're a vegetarian, you might want to look and see if there's any insects in them and give a little shake. I'm not a vegetarian. We want to congratulate Joe. Who's Joe? Congratulations. How wonderful. How wonderful. Such a gift to the Sangha and such a gift to Sashin. Thank you, Greg. Where's Greg? Where do we keep Greg? He's sick. Well, that's something we all share also, isn't it? So, this is my chattery open, my cold open.

[04:19]

before I get started on my topic, but several people have asked me about diffraction grating, you know, the reality tools that I passed out. So I want to take just a minute to explain. The way it works is that white light, same with a prism, a white light hits the surface of the diffraction grating, which is scazillions. that's a big number, of parallel lines scratched in what's probably some kind of plastic. And so the light hits it and sorts out in color. And it sorts it in an angle. So that means that the light comes down and then it's going to sort out according to color. And the colors correspond to wavelengths. So the The shorter the wavelength, the more energy is carried by that color. The shorter wavelengths are the blue-purple end of the spectrum.

[05:26]

So those are more energetic waves. It means they bend a little more. So basically the light is sorted out in terms of its energy and its color. So that's why when you look at, you know, there is white, but around the edges of the white, there's the color spectrum because the light has come down and then it bounces like that. And all of the lines, all of the parallel lines are making, are creating a sorting, have our little sorting mechanism. And so all the reds get, from all the lines, kind of go off in one area so you see a swath of red. So this is important to people like me who spend time underwater because underwater there is no red.

[06:28]

Red light doesn't have enough energy to penetrate more than about like 20ish, 20, 30 depending on other factors. So below 30 feet, there's no red. And that's why so many sea animals are red, because it's camouflage underwater. The reds go brown. So when I'm swimming long underwater, and if I have my camera and I'm not using a flash, most things are blue and then there's a lot of brown. And I know the brown is actually red. If I pull out my flash, which I do, I take pictures, and, you know, the colors, because I brought my own light, I'm applying the light. And so the light, the pigment, which is in the animal or the plant, is visible to me. And since I swim around underwater with my flash,

[07:34]

I have a lot of pictures of surprised animals. What? You know, this doesn't have to do with the topic, but there's this shark story I've been meaning to tell you since the beginning of practice period. So we're just going to take a little moment for a shark story. Is that OK? So this is another one of those, oh, silly me, stupid me stories. I was swimming along the bottom of the ocean one day in Papua New Guinea. And I told you that most of my diving is I've done in Monterey. And in Monterey, the visibility is what it is. I mean, I can't say it's poor because it's always like that. It's limited. And this is because the waters in Monterey are so rich, which is why we have so many animals on our coast.

[08:44]

And also going north, the water is full of nutrients. So it supports a huge population of animal life, except that you can't always see them because the water, the visibility. My friends and I, of course, have adapted to this situation. We don't mind. It means that when we're diving in Monterey, and therefore anywhere else, we tend to look up close. Even if the visibility is like 100 plus feet, we're always looking up close. So we have a lot of jokes about each other. We're looking up close at some sea slug, or what we really get excited about are flatworms. And there's this, you know, shark that swims right by us and we miss it. I've missed tiger sharks at least twice in a very large hammerhead once, although I have seen hammerheads elsewhere.

[09:46]

Anyway, so I was swimming along the bottom of the ocean with great visibility in Papua New Guinea. And I was really excited about the sponges. And I was just kind of swimming along with my camera, you know, looking for the good angle on the sponge or the something or other. And I was swimming this way. My friend was over there watching this whole thing. A shark. was swimming toward me. So I was swimming toward the shark. The shark is swimming toward me. And the shark is kind of going hum-de-hum-de-hum-de-hum. The shark, you know, here's this amazing animal that has ampullae of Lorenzini. Remember that crazy term? It means they have a sense which perceives electrical impulses from a very great distance, like a mile. So here's this amazing shark swimming along going humdy humdy humdy hum.

[10:48]

And here's me, amazing me with my brain that can assimilate all this information and make white. And I have opposable thumbs. I'm amazing. The shark's amazing. Everybody's amazing. But we're swimming toward each other going humdy humdy hum. We get like close, like a little closer than Norman is to me right now. we both look up at the same time, and we both have exactly the same reaction. So the shark takes off that way, I take off this way, and I look over at my friend, and she's laughing. Underwater laughing is probably the most dangerous thing that was happening in that scene. So I suppose... if we're going to use that story somehow, not that it needs to be used, in a Dharma setting, there's a, what I want to talk about today is a koan in which our good friend Zhao Zhou has something to say that

[12:09]

kind of, for me anyway, reflects that shark story. The favorite koan. It's a favorite for many of us, I'm sure, and one of our very favorite male ancestors. And the koan is, the way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing. So it goes like this, in case you don't know. Zhao Zhou, teaching the assembly, said, the ultimate path is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing. As soon as there are words spoken, this is picking and choosing. This is clarity. This old monk does not abide within clarity. Do you still preserve anything or not? I want to read it again because it's so nice. So Zhao Zhou is teaching the assembly. The ultimate path is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing.

[13:11]

As soon as there are words spoken, this is picking and choosing. This is clarity. This old monk does not abide within clarity. Do you still preserve anything or not? Then a very interesting dialogue continues. But for me, for today, this much is enough. And I'm especially interested in the line, this old monk does not abide within clarity. Do you still preserve anything or not? I'll get back to that in a bit. So to give you a little bit of background, or to remind you of a little bit of background if you know this koan well, The Just Avoid Picking and Choosing is from a verse from the third male ancestor's seal of faith in the heart.

[14:15]

And it goes like this. This is according to Thomas Cleary's translation. The ultimate path is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing. Just don't love or hate, and you'll be lucid and clear. we have the sense that Zhao Zhou's discussion of this koan shines a light on that verse is a little problematic you know especially that line just don't love or hate you know well okay you know then you'll be lucid and clear so we'll go back to that in a minute so Zhaozhou, a bit about Zhaozhou, he settled down to teach when he was 80 years old at the Guanyin Temple in northern China. He lived and taught there for 40 years, died when he was 119 or possibly 120.

[15:24]

And that was after serving his teacher, Nanchuan, for 30 years. then wandering around meeting other Zen folks for another 20 years. He apparently came to Nan Quan's temple as a fairly young man. We're not sure about his early life. Zhao Zhou was known for asceticism. He ate only vegetarian food, You know, I don't think of our vegetarian food as ascetic. It is so delicious. Thank you, Kitchen. There were no shelves in the monk's hall. And when a leg of his rope chair broke, he tied on a leftover piece of firewood with rope to support it.

[16:32]

He turned down repeated requests by monks who wanted to make a new leg for his chair. And then it goes on, the description goes on, as abbot, Zhao Zhou upheld the custom of universal labor in the community of monks, a practice of the Chan school initiated by the fourth male ancestor, Daoxin, and established as a rule by Bai Zhang Huihai. The well-known and highly esteemed Chan, that is, Zen teachers of the time, were sometimes referred to board-carrying... They were referred to as board-carrying fellows, referring to this custom of universal labor. So in India, monks did not work. It was forbidden for them to work. They begged for their food, and they just meditated and did ceremonies, I guess.

[17:39]

but they did not work, they could not work. And when Buddhism came to China, probably partly because the population didn't know Buddhism and didn't know the custom of supporting the monks who would come through the village begging, partly that reason, and partly because probably, as I read through this, I'm thinking probably for political reasons, Many of the monasteries were in remote places in the mountains where there were no communities where they could beg for food. And so they had to grow their own food. Many of those monasteries had very harsh winters. So they had to grow their own food and they had to fend for themselves. They had buffalo and a lot of stories... You know, a lot of koans say something about buffalo.

[18:41]

So that's where the custom of working came from that we uphold to this day. So back to the koan. The ultimate path is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing. As soon as there are words spoken... This is picking and choosing. This is clarity. This old monk does not abide in clarity. First, so first of all, mulling over the question of how we can avoid picking and choosing, can we avoid picking and choosing? Are we really picking and choosing? Or could there be a time lag between what we do and how we conceptualize it? how we place it in language, the language that we assign to it, so that the concept and the language may actually tag along behind the experience, kind of like our dog.

[19:51]

Our experience of creating concepts tends to be so fast that we can't even see it. And I've talked about this a lot, you know. certainly in terms of white. I have another story of a little girl in my class many years ago. It was my first year of teaching, and I taught second grade. And this little girl was very bright. She was a good reader. And this story is about how this... Creating concepts and creating stories and lumping them all together is really how we work. It's how we learn. So it's not something that we can get rid of by lots of zazen. So here's the story. So I... My first year of teaching, all of my second graders kept a journal, and they wrote in their journal every day.

[21:00]

And I took all their journals home, and I answered them every night. This is what first-year teachers do. It's pretty wonderful, but, you know. But I actually kept doing it for a while. And with second graders, you know, they're struggling to write anything, some of them. And so it's not like I have... I had to write long essays or letters back. So I would sometimes assign them a topic, and sometimes I would let them choose their own. Sometimes I would send it home as a homework assignment. So one night, on a full moon, I said, take your journals home and take a look at the moon and write about it. Just that. So I got... this pile of journals back and this one little girl wrote last night I saw I don't remember exactly what she discussed but she said I went outside with my mom and we looked at the full moon and she spelled fool f-o-o-l the full moon are we good

[22:21]

So I thought, oh, well, that's interesting. I'll talk to her. I'll clarify this. You know, there's full and there's fool, and they sound almost alike. So I talked to her. I said, you know, this is wonderful what you wrote, but I just wanted you to know that when we say full moon, we're talking about full, like a full glass of water. And she said, oh... I thought it was the full moon because he's the man in the moon. And the only time we can see him is once a month. We can see all of him. And the reason he's a fool is because he eats green cheese. So she had constructed this whole story, which made perfect sense. It makes perfect sense to me. It probably makes sense to you. And that was her operating assumption.

[23:24]

It's a full moon. Because once a month you can see the man in the moon and what on earth would he want to eat green cheese for? So with kids, educators want them to assimilate information and then tell what they've assimilated and then... You can talk to them, you know, talk to them and say, well, that's a wonderful story. Let me tell you about the word full, and here's a full glass of water, you know, and we go on like that. So it really is how we learn. We can't actually learn something new unless we have couched it in that which we know and that which we think. And then, you know, through discussion and through interaction, things get, you know, readjusted over time.

[24:25]

So picking and choosing. Picking and choosing experiences and making stories is something that we do without much awareness of our doing it. But we do know that we end up with a story of me. a story which is me. I like dark roast coffee. I like dark chocolate. I like purple. I like the ocean. And that makes a me. A person who walks around liking purple and liking the ocean and liking dark chocolate, that would be a me. And that's just who I am. So much so that if you give me something yellow, or light roasted coffee, or milk chocolate. I might even feel diminished. I might feel unseen. I might feel unimportant. How could you not know that I like purple?

[25:33]

So this picking and choosing, this thing we do without much awareness, has consequences, and it causes suffering. And to the extent that we are even aware of picking and choosing, we've been taking this practice on of not picking and choosing at Tassajara, taking the food that is served, perhaps taking the serving size that we have decided upon in advance, regardless of whether or not we like that particular food. responding to the bell or han, whether we're in the mood to go to the zendo or not. We do what it is time to do. We eat what is served. We wear what the guidelines tell us to wear, and so on. Yet, even within these parameters, we may find our preferences and our attachments popping up.

[26:45]

sometimes taking over our bodies and minds completely. I call it let's-go-shopping mind or predator mind. Always looking for opportunity, making value judgments about our prey, evaluating strategy, considering the cost-benefit analysis, and all of that. And we do this with people We do this with information. We do this with our experiences as well as with objects like food. And I think through this practice we discover the beauty of the practice of avoiding picking and choosing. which is like much of the craft of our Zen practice, in that we are strengthened and opened by it.

[27:53]

We learn that we are perfectly fine if we don't have our favorite food, if we don't have our choice of how we spend our time, that we don't really need all the things we think we need to be happy and healthy and vibrant. In fact, we can be perfectly miserable, sick, and tired when we have everything we want. With this practice of refraining from picking and choosing, it's not that our preferences disappear, but maybe sometimes they take a back seat to what each moment has to offer. And we allow each moment to take the lead to unfold our life. And this takes a kind of faith to trust that we'll be okay and a strength and a confidence that we can find a way with what is given.

[29:06]

We may find that our life force is fueled by something deeper than our concepts and our preferences. Not sure what, but we might see a flicker or catch a glimpse of something deeper and very familiar. Then there's the question of clarity. We love clarity. I don't know if it's our species or our culture or our times but it seems to me that we believe in clarity. We prioritize clarity. We even live for clarity. In fact, the word enlightenment almost means clarity. The phrase, this old monk does not abide in clarity, is about our attachment to clarity.

[30:15]

kind of like our attachment to the concept of enlightenment. Maybe clarity is the closest concept that we can come to. The peculiar thing about the word enlightenment is that it stands for no word, no concept. Yet the word itself has a strong image, having to do with light, having to do with seeing. That's why I would rather use words like thusness, or in Maureen Stewart Roshi's term, as it isness. There's not that much of a concept or an image there, though any word we use denotes a concept. So the topic of clarity... It throws me back to thinking about hierarchy. That is, our internal hierarchy and how we uphold it.

[31:22]

Clarity has a higher status than attachment. When we have clarity, we feel good about ourselves. We might feel especially good if we notice that others around us are in a muddle or a frenzy of attachment. And that's when we might realize that we are clinging to clarity. And again, the problem with attachment to anything, whether it's clarity, whether it's love, whether it's enlightenment, our favorite experience, our favorite food, is that we become dependent, protective, possibly even competitive, and so on, all based on feeling dependent, weakened by how tightly we are grasping and how diminished we find ourselves.

[32:27]

We don't want to lose something so precious. Of course, then, we miss the point that we already lost what was precious by our very attachment to it. And now we're guarding and protecting something that we don't even have. We might think further about our inner hierarchy. For example, which of our senses is king? My guess that it is sight for most people. Just as we like mental and emotional clarity, we like visual clarity. We like to see and we like to be seen. In fact, I think if we were given a choice, if most people were given a choice between losing our sense of sight or our sense of smell, my guess is that most people would not hesitate to say, smell goes, sight stays.

[33:33]

So we have this concentration of energy in different senses, concentration of consciousness, concentration of energy in different senses and different places in our body, which describes our internal hierarchy, our investment, the buildup of picking and choosing over time in our own lives, in our culture, and in our inheritance. like how much energy and awareness we have in our face. I got ordained in 1980. I remember when I shaved my head the first time. I was astonished. I felt my face spread over the top of my head and down the back of my head. I felt my whole head was face. I had never felt that before.

[34:42]

I began to notice how much of my awareness was in my face, especially my eyes. I was very aware of my face, certain other body parts too, but certain places on my back or my elbow, like I could go for weeks without even thinking about them. So noticing what I'm calling an internal hierarchy, I started doing this meditation. I call it smash the hierarchy or redistribute the wealth or dissolve the hegemony. And it is closely related to the amoeba way. it's a meditation on allowing our body's awareness our body's energy to evenly disperse so let's try this feel the gravitational pull on your particular bag of bones

[36:13]

your particular location, subject to the Earth's gravity. Feel the life force of air flowing through your nose, chest, and belly. Allow that life force to lift you up. Now allow the Earth's gravity fall into the earth even as the life force of breath lifts you up. Now bring to mind an image of warm water or rain washing over you or flower petals falling all over you dispersing energy that may be concentrated in your face, your shoulders, wherever you find it.

[37:18]

The concentrated energy is dissolving and spreading throughout your whole body. Allow this dissolving and dispersing to occur on its own by your mental image of being washed by that which is not yours, water or flower petals or whatever comes to mind. So, Zhaozhou in the koan says, I do not abide within clarity. I think he's saying that he does not attach to a concept of enlightenment, of emptiness, or of anything else.

[38:22]

He dwells nowhere. He's ready for anything, depending on nothing. You know, his enlightenment story is the koan. from which Norman took the name Everyday Zen. It goes something like this. Zhao Zhou was a monk studying with Nanxuan, had been studying with Nanxuan for a while. He asked Nanxuan, what is the way? And in the book it says, Zhao Zhou earnestly asked Nanquan, what is the way? Nanquan answered, ordinary mind is the way, or everyday mind is the way. Zhao Zhou then asked, how should I direct myself toward it?

[39:27]

Nanquan answered, if you try to turn toward it, you go away from it. Zhaozhou then asked, if I do not try to turn toward it, how can I know that it is the way? Nanxuan said, the way does not belong to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion. Not knowing is blank consciousness. When you have really reached the true way beyond all doubt, you will find it as vast and boundless as the great empty firmament. How can it be talked about on a level of right and wrong? So Nan Quan says to him, knowing is delusion. And then later Zhao Zhou says, I do not abide in clarity.

[40:35]

I think he's saying clarity or knowing is delusion. It's one of those states we come and go from. I don't need it. If it comes to me, it comes to me. I don't need it. I can let it go. The thing about this story for me and so many Zen stories is that we must read between the lines to see how much heart and soul there is in these words. Zhao Zhou reached an understanding through this conversation and then he stayed on for 30 years until Nan Quan's death. This is extraordinary devotion and love, especially by our culture's standards. That the words between these two people or any

[41:38]

any of the koans, which are mostly guys, are pithy and enigmatic. It's because to nail the thing down tight would be to squeeze the life and the beauty and the love out of these dharma relationships. So we get hints and pointers, a lot of humor, not so many clear statements. So this statement of Nanshuan's is very clear, and it's rather rare. So he must have taken this conversation really to heart. He must have really wanted to help Zhaozhou. He must have felt Zhaozhou's broken heart to answer in this way. We have many indications in Zen that a broken heart, longing, knowing something is missing, is closer to awakening.

[42:50]

We can hear his broken heart in the lines of his question, if I do not turn toward it, how can I know it? And... Nanquan answers, knowing is delusion. Excuse me. Clarity is delusion. A broken heart is closer to the enormity of this life on earth, the enormity of just this particular location, this particular bag of bones. Do you know Isa's famous haiku? So Isa... the great haiku poet of Japan. He lived in the late 18th, early 19th century, and he was a layperson in the, I think, Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism.

[43:53]

He had a wife and they had children, and the children died one after another. I think he lost a baby and then an older child and then another one. And he had a lot of sadness. He lost his wife, too. So he wrote this poem on the occasion of the death of one of his children. This dewdrop world is a dewdrop world, and yet, and yet. the very famous haiku, this dewdrop world is a dewdrop world, and yet, and yet. He's saying, yes, it's all impermanence, just as we are taught, but the enormity of our human life is not diminished by that.

[45:02]

It captures the human sentiment of our bodhisattva vow. Yes, impermanence, like dewdrop vanishing in the grass. But it's not flimsy. It's not trivial. It's not uncommitted. We are fully committed to this vow, to this practice of tending our meditation body. And it is seamless. with hearing the cries of the world. It's not a concept. It is exactly our human life. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, Visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[46:05]

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