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. How's that sound? So do we have anybody here that's new this morning? Welcome. That's nice. Seeing nice new faces. Of course, everybody's a little bit new to me. I don't know if you know, I'm what's called a shinmei, which is a new abbot. So I just became the abbot of this place three weeks ago. And although I lived here for 10 years, that was 30 years ago, and amazingly, they've changed the customs here.

[01:05]

the ways of the temple have changed. And so I was teaching in a sangha north of here, and they asked me to come in and be the abbot, and I've been busy the last three weeks learning all the temple customs, which is a nice way of saying, making one continuous mistake. So any of you that are new or just getting used to our customs here, I have one piece of advice for you. First, based on my experience, everybody here is very nice and doesn't care that you're making mistakes all the time. So just, you know, try to do your best. That's one thing. And the second thing is when I first went to Tassahara, 44 years ago, I guess it was, and I met Suzuki Roshi and was making more mistakes than you possibly could ever make, he turned around at one point and said to me, don't worry. So don't worry.

[02:08]

Just try. So that's the first thing. So when I had my mountain seat ceremony three weeks ago, part of the mountain seat ceremony is after you ascend the mountain, you're supposed to do some sort of teaching. And one component is you say something about what your fundamental understanding of Zen is, and then you have a little mondo, question and answer back and forth between students, where they come up and ask you a question, and you answer it. And then the third thing you do is you pick a koan from the literature, our beautiful collection of koans, and you present that with some comments on it. And so I thought what I would do this morning is share that koan with you and talk about it a little bit because it's a koan that I love a lot and I think it's an interesting koan. How many of you are familiar with what a koan is? So we have a bunch of experts here too. Excellent. I'm in dangerous waters already, I can see.

[03:13]

Anyway, for those of you who don't know, basically a koan is a story, a public record of an event, usually that occurred between two people, in many cases a teacher and a student, and their interchange was recorded, and usually they're quite short. and they sort of epitomize an essential teaching in Zen in a very short few lines. And that's what this one is. And then, of course, over the time, everybody wants to make a comment on these four lines, so they publish books now which have pages and pages of many people's comments. So this lecture will be a presentation of the story, the koan, and some of the interesting comments that they made. And, of course, It's not sufficient that I just share their comments. I've got to make my own comments on their comments. This is pretty much how it goes in the world of Cohen discussion. So here it is.

[04:17]

The title is Not Knowing is Most Intimate. It's Case 20 in the Book of Serenity. So Dijon asked Fionn, where are you going? Fayan said, around on pilgrimage. Dijan said, what is the purpose of pilgrimage? Fayan said, I don't know. Dijan said, not knowing is most intimate. Isn't that beautiful? I'll do it again, in case you didn't catch it all the first time. So Dijon, turns out to be the head of this temple, asked Fayon, where are you going? And Fayon said, around on pilgrimage. And Dijon said, what is the purpose of pilgrimage? And Fayon said, I don't know. And Dijon said, not knowing is most intimate.

[05:25]

So here's the setup. Dijon was 1867 to 928 in China, and Fayon was... a little bit later than that. And it was very typical in China during this time. There were lots of monasteries around, and typically a monk would go to a monastery when he was young, get ordained by a teacher, and study with that teacher for a while, and then go off on a pilgrimage and visit all kinds of other monasteries all over China. And sometimes they would do that when they were already a mature teacher, and sometimes they would do that when they were still learning. For instance, Zhao Zhou, one of the most famous Zen masters in China, met his teacher when he was 20 and had a really good relationship with that teacher and studied with him for 40 years until his teacher died, and Zhao Zhou was 60 years old then. But he still set out on pilgrimage, and he said as he left on pilgrimage, if I find a seven-year-old that I can learn something from, I will sit at the feet of the seven-year-old and study with them.

[06:30]

And if I find an 80-year-old that I can teach, I will teach. This is sort of non-traditional in China. It was usually hierarchical by age. And Zhao Zhou went on pilgrimage. He was already an accomplished Zen master for 20 years before he settled down at the age of 80 and founded a monastery which he lived at for 40 years and taught. But that's not the case with Feiyan here. Feiyan probably studied for about 10 years with his teacher and set out still wondering what was the nature of his understanding, still kind of not clear about what Zen was about. And he was off on pilgrimage. And I don't know if you've ever, you know, whenever you go on a pilgrimage, you're sort of, you have ideas about where you're going. He probably talked to monks along the way, and he was headed for some very famous Zen master somewhere who was going to solve his problem. But he got caught in a snowstorm. And in the snowstorm, he and his fellow travelers had to retreat into this... quote-unquote, relatively unknown monastery where this Zen teacher, Dijon, was the headmaster.

[07:38]

And Dijon says, he probably arrived at night, it was snowing, they stayed overnight, and in the morning maybe he met the teacher, and the teacher said, where are you going? Now this is a classic question, right? I mean, where are you going? Well... I'm going to Italy, I'm going off to some other, I'm on pilgrimage, is what his answer was. But it's a little bit more of a question when a Zen master asks you that, especially when he says, what is the purpose of your pilgrimage? Meaning, what is the meaning of your life? What are you doing wandering around here? And of course, with all these famous Zen stories, the story is not just about these two, a monk and a teacher in China, 1,200 years ago, it's a question for you. Where are you going? What is the purpose of your life? What's going on? That's the question that's posed here. Fortunately, Fayon was a mature enough student and probably vulnerable.

[08:48]

Maybe he was cold from a snowstorm or something that he actually didn't give a bunch of pat answers, which he probably had because he'd been studying Zen for 10 years. He could have said all kinds of things. But he said probably, honestly, I don't know. I don't know what's going on in my life. I don't know where I'm going. And it was honest enough and straightforward enough that the teacher gave him a great gift and said, not knowing is most intimate. Not knowing is most intimate. Probably at that moment, the two of them connected in some way. They actually met each other. And the teacher said, this is it. There's nothing else you need to look for. Your own questioning, not knowing mind is all you need. You have it. It's right here.

[09:49]

So according to the... the book I was reading, and there's many different books on these things, after this, it says, at these words, Fayon instantly experienced enlightenment. Isn't that fabulous? Isn't that what we all want? We want to go somewhere, meet somebody, and instantly experience enlightenment. So fabulous. I mean, it's just... I don't know why they write these things. I guess they write... Maybe it helps sell books or something. It's just fabulous. I mean, enlightenment is something we can talk about, and it's probably much better if you go back to your friends and say, I went to a Zen talk this morning, and we talked about enlightenment. I mean, that sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Or...

[10:51]

or awakening, or realization. Not intimacy. I mean, intimate? That doesn't sound as good as enlightenment, does it? But actually, what we're going to talk about today is not enlightenment, but intimacy. Because I think the trouble with enlightenment, at least the way it's come into America in the last 40 years, is it has this sort of big bang feeling. Wow, I'm looking for the big bang. And once I have the big, exciting, major, dramatic, experience in my life, then all my problems are going to be gone. But I'm sorry. Your problems are not all going to be gone, even if you have a big, exciting, and you will have some important experiences in your life. That's part of living. And if they encourage your practice, that's a good thing. But the issue we're dealing with here is, what does it mean to be intimate with your life? What does it mean to actually be close to what your life actually is?

[11:56]

What does it mean to be intimate with the world around you, to the sounds of the birds, to the wind in the trees, to another person? What does that mean? How do you experience that? What is life like if you're actually, moment by moment, actually intimately connected to your living being. I would propose that's what Zen's about. Zen is about a way to live your life intimately connected to it. So another way to say that is to intimately connect every moment in your life. And what does it take to do that? It takes a certain amount of courage.

[12:59]

It's vulnerable. It's openness. And partly why I brought this today is because it takes a beginner's mind, a mind that's not fixed, doesn't know everything. And the name of this temple is Beginner's Mind Temple. Suzuki Roshi was alive when this temple was bought. And as you know, many of you may have read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. A Zen mind is a beginner's mind. A Zen mind is a ready mind, an open mind, not a fixed, solid mind. So I want to talk a little bit about intimacy some more. This is intimacy with trees. Another very famous story by this same teacher, Zhao Zhou, who was 80 when he finally founded his monastery.

[14:09]

A very eager young monk, probably traveled a long way to find him, walked up to him and said, what is the meaning of bodhidharma coming from the West? This is a very fancy way of saying, what's it all about? What's the meaning of Zen? They kind of did it in those ways then. And Zhao Zhou said, the cypress tree in the courtyard. Probably not the answer the monk was thinking about. But what does that mean, the cypress tree in the courtyard? I was in China a few years ago and I visited Zhao Zhou's monastery. Zhao Zhou's monastery obviously was 1,200 years old. during the cultural revenue revolution everything was torn down but the massive seven-story pagoda that was there and since then it's been completely rebuilt or most of it rebuilt and and some of the cypress trees either the children of the cypress trees or the original cypress trees are still there and they have these massive courtyards between the buildings i mean courtyards that are several blocks at least a square block wide and they have these

[15:13]

gorgeous cypress trees in these courtyards. And the monks would travel from the Zendo where they sat to the Buddha Hall where they would do their services past these cypress trees. And what Zhao Zhou is saying is, don't talk to me about a bunch of intellectual stuff. Do you actually experience the cypress tree that you walk past every day? Can you feel intimate with that tree? How many people are good at being intimate with trees. Do we have any tree intimate people here? Excellent. I've been a walker my whole life. I was raised in the mountains of New Mexico at 7,000 feet, so I used to hike in the mountains all the time when I was a kid. And I've been hiking ever since. And it's a wonderful thing when you can sometime come across a tree and you look at it and you see exactly... how it is how it's supposed to be every limb is where it is supposed to be to catch the sun to avoid the other trees that are around and in that moment when the wind is blowing it's blowing exactly in the right way and then for a second you realize that you're part of this too you have a intimate experience of being with a tree I recommend that practice next time you run into a tree a beautiful tree so so

[16:40]

But what stops us from being intimate with the things that we run into in the world? And part of it is how busy we are running around filled with ideas. I was snorkeling in Maui on vacation with my wife in September. How many snorkelers do we have here? So they have beautiful big sea turtles in Maui. Maui. So I was out there. I went out every morning. I was out there. I was all by myself. And there was a sea turtle. I was chasing a sea turtle. And there was a little parrotfish. I was diving down to get close to the parrotfish. I was rushing around. And I was having this experience like there just aren't very many fish out here this morning. You know, it's just one fish here, one turtle there. And I was about to swim out a little further to some other area that I thought I might see some more fish in. But I just stopped. I just decided to just stop there and just stop.

[17:46]

And all of a sudden, there were thousands of fish around everywhere I lived. Schools of fish, fish flying everywhere. It was like, where did these fish come from? I think they were there all the time, and I just hadn't seen them. I don't think they were hiding in the rocks waiting for me to stop. I think I was so busy chasing after fish that I couldn't see any fish. So a lot of times we're so busy chasing after whatever we think we're supposed to be doing in our life that we're not living our life. We're not alive to the life that we have. So now we get into what this not knowing is about. So there's a famous quote that was put in the commentary here about the not knowing, and it goes... Here we are at the Joujo again.

[18:48]

I like this guy. He keeps showing up all the time. So when Joujo was training under his teacher, he said, how can I know the way if I don't direct myself towards it? And his teacher said that the way is not subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion, not knowing is blankness. If you truly reach the genuine way, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can this be discussed at the level of affirmation or negation? I'm going to read that again because that's pretty dense stuff. The way, our way of practice, is not subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion, not knowing is blankness. If you truly reach the genuine way, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. That's what we want. vast and boundless outer space. So the beginning of my story was not knowing is most intimate.

[19:51]

So we were thinking, well, the best way here is to be just not filled with a bunch of thinking ideas. I'm not going to know anything. But now they presented the idea that knowing may be also not knowing is not so good and knowing is not so good. So what's the way here? The way is beyond knowing and not knowing because clearly we know that we have to know a lot right i was a mathematician when i was young and uh i did a lot of mathematics and you know some things are true and some things aren't that's just the way we used to get these papers all the time submitted to us by quote mathematicians and they were just nonsense, right? I mean, you know, there is a truth in mathematics that you have to be able to prove, and so we have this massively brilliant mind that can know things. And if you want to go to the moon, you better be able to solve those differential equations properly so that the thing lands in the right place, right?

[20:58]

And if we want to solve global warming and save this planet, we better do science real well. We better be smart about it. So knowing is part of what we do, and not knowing is part of what we do. So what is this thing that he's talking about that is beyond knowing and not knowing? Well, first of all, I would submit that as great as science is, with our latest revelations about the Big Bang being 14 billion years ago, and we've got string theory, but basically we have no idea. LAUGHTER What's going on here? All right? I mean, we got galaxies upon galaxies upon who knows, you know, what's going on here. I was reading an article recently about some guy that imagines that they're going to track every neuron that's going on in the brain and be able to replicate it in a machine. Good luck.

[22:00]

You know, I think that'll be fantastic. But so at some fundamental level, Even though we know a lot and we think we know a lot, we don't know anything about what's really going on. Like, how did we get here? What's going on? How do I meet another person? What's going on in their head? I mean, you know, isn't that right? I mean, can we all agree on this part of it? Yeah, that's the not knowing part. That's the fundamental not knowing part. So that's the problem. because we would like to be intimate with other people. We would like to conduct our life in a way that's kind and generous with a certain amount of wisdom. And how do we do it? And what Zen proposes, and this is a quote from, again, the commentary on this wonderful koan, which will probably leave you somewhat confused, but that's...

[23:03]

part of what we do here too, if I can find it. So there's this guy Chizzo said, in walking and sitting, just hold to the moment before thought arises. In walking and sitting, hold to the moment before thought arises. Look into it and you'll see not seeing and then put it to one side. All we have to do is observe before our thoughts begin what's going on. It's not so simple, actually. Our thoughts are coming so fast. Is there a place before our thoughts come in? Where do our thoughts come from? Interesting question there. Are we actually running our thought machine? I don't think so. I think if you pay somewhat careful attention to your thinking...

[24:07]

you'll realize it has a mind of its own. That's for sure. And a lot of it isn't good. A lot of it's creating a lot of problems for you. So our recommended way is to sit zazam. We have this form of meditation that if you come here at 8.15 in the morning or have been around a while, you practice. And we try to sit and pay attention to our breathing. get intimate with our breathing. Have an intimate relationship with our breathing. And I would recommend as a general thing, having intimate relationship with your breathing will be helpful to you, even if you're standing in a Whole Foods line and it's busy. You can just pay attention to a few breaths and it will calm you down. And... While you're having an intimate relationship with your breathing, you'll notice that your breathing is kind of connected to the rest of your body.

[25:10]

So why don't you have an intimate relationship with it, too? In fact, you can put your attention and let it fill your entire body. And meanwhile, of course, the mind is spinning along, telling many stories, as it does. And one of the wonderful things that Groshi once said was, you can't stop the mind. from thinking. I mean, maybe you can. Sometimes you can. And sometimes you can get quiet enough that it sort of stops on its own. But you don't have to invite the thoughts for lunch. It comes in, wow, that's fascinating. Why did Bill say that to me? I'm so mad at him. Two minutes later, oh, where did I go? You don't have to invite your thinking machine for lunch. You can just say, Oh, that's an interesting thought. I think I'll let that go and listen to the bird out there or have an intimate relationship with something else. So Sazen is our fundamental way to find a silent place.

[26:18]

There is a vast silent place in your life and mind. And that silent place is where all of this fantastic activity that you have comes from. And when you can remember that silent place, when you can have some intimate connection to that silent place, you will know what your life is about and where it is going. And this silent place Sugirishi called it big mind. The little mind is busy running your life, which many things have to be taken care of, and we have to have that. The big mind abides in a silent place, sometimes called emptiness, out of which many things arise. I wanted to talk about one of our other forms besides zazen.

[27:26]

When we go into the zendo for zazen, Most of you that have gone down there, the first thing we do is we bow to our cushion. And if there's somebody sitting on each side, they bow back to you. And then we turn around and we bow back. Well, it's in some ways a social convention. You've just wandered into the zendo. This person is quietly sitting there and you're interrupting their sitting by having to get up on the cushion and fluff your cushion and make a lot of noise. So it's polite. to say, I'm sorry, I'm going to be making a lot of noise getting under my cushion, and the other person says, that's okay, welcome. So it's a polite convention, and that's useful. But it's also intimate. You're meeting them. You're not having a conversation verbally. You're meeting them physically. How many of you are sitting in this asheen that's starting tonight?

[28:28]

You'd think I was in marketing and not a polling I'm doing here. But anyway, that's the lucky people that are sitting the sashin. So for those of you who are not aware of us, sashin is where we sit from, what, five in the morning till nine at night for seven days? Six days this time. And we don't talk much. We just sit, get up, walk, sit, eat, sit. And it's a way of being together and... encouraging each other to find some silence in our life to settle into what we're actually about to find what's going on in our life and it's an extremely intimate activity you have 40 or 50 people sitting all day long in a room passing each other bowing when they pass sitting right next to each other so this intimacy that i'm talking about is not a function of having necessarily long, deep conversations. It's a function of being open and aware of what's going on around you.

[29:37]

And I think, just like when I stopped and saw the fish, that if you stop a little bit and just be whatever you are without trying to change it or criticize it or adjust it in any way, you will quiet down a little bit. I've got two more things I want to share. The next one is a more humorous aspect of the commentary on this koan. I'm going to read it straight from the text. This is a dialogue between the different parts of the face. I don't know how many of you have heard this before.

[30:38]

This is actually a translation of a Chinese text that's 1,200 years old. The mouth asks... the nose, eating is up to me, speaking is up to me, what good are you that you are above me? The nose is above the mouth. The nose said, among the five mountains, there's five famous mountains in China where Zen teaching went on, the central one occupies the honored position. The nose then asked the eyes, why are you above the The eye said, we are like the sun and the moon. Truly we have accomplishment of illumination and reflection. We dare ask the eyebrows, what virtue do you have above us? The eyebrows said, we really have no merit. We are ashamed to be in the higher position.

[31:40]

I love these eyebrows. if you let us be below, that'll be okay with us. So anyway, some Zen master later said in a lecture, an ancient said in response to this little dialogue, in the eyes it is called seeing, in the ears it is called hearing, but tell me in the eyebrows what it is called. And he said after a long silence, in sorrow we grieve together, in happiness we rejoice together. Everybody knows the useful function, but they don't know the useless great function. This silence is the useless great function. This silence is what allows us to

[32:42]

Grieve intimately together when we need to grieve together. And rejoice when rejoicing is the time. That's our life. That's what we do. We share our sorrow and our grieving when that is what we need to do. And we share our joy and gratefulness when that's what we need to do. And every mood that we have is a mood that is valued and can be shared because it is a human, emotional thing. And our not knowing is our openness to be connected to all of that and live that together with the rest of us. It's beautiful. In sorrow we grieve together, in happiness we rejoice together. According to the ino, I have three minutes.

[33:44]

So I'm going to end by reading. I follow the instructions of an ino. I'm a new abbot here. I would recommend that you do similar things. I thought I would read this quote from Suzuki Hiroshi. I just think it's sort of a beautiful way of saying the same thing. And this applies to those of you who are sitting this machine and for those of you who are out busy solving the problems of the world. If you are aware of your exhaling and inhaling, if you feel your heart beat one after another, then you will understand what is going on in this world. Then you will feel your being. Step by step, you will feel yourself. Even walking on the floor is the actual feeling of your reality, your being. Here we have real gratefulness and feeling of being.

[34:55]

That feeling is the feeling which is called essence of mind. We do not know what to say. In this sense, this is something beyond our knowledge. We do not know what to say. It is not because the essence of mind is so great that we cannot even say how it is great. It is not a matter of great. We do not know what to say because actual reality is quite simple. In this simplicity, we must find our goal moment after moment. Thank you very much for your time this morning. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

[36:02]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[36:05]

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