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. Morning. I'm not scared of you guys. I want to make that clear from the outside. But I am a bit out of my element. I live at Green Gulch Farm up over the bridge. My name is Jiryu. And I want to talk today, I want to share a teaching that has the potential, that has the promise of freeing us completely from everything.

[01:02]

like this fear and this self-concern and this social concern, this gnawing anxiety and this ill will. All of it. There's this one perfect teaching that will free us from all of that. And I'd like to share it. And it happens that that teaching, that same teaching, also brings us right back into the center of this world of interaction and suffering. And so this teaching that frees us and this teaching that calls us right back into the world we're now free of. So I'm not sure... how long it's been since any of you all were on Facebook, or how your feed feels these days.

[02:12]

Maybe there's some of you who have some optimism in your Facebook feeds. It is true, as many have observed, that there's less cat videos than there used to be. My feed, at least, is... It's pretty dark, pretty gloomy. There's a lot of fear and distress. A recent favorite post cited some credible sources predicting human extinction by 2020. So that's what my feed is like. So I don't know, 2020, maybe so, maybe not. We'll see if there's a world... even in the next moment. But the gloom, I think, is clear, the gloom and the fear. And we wonder, you know, we ask each other, what is the medicine for this gloom, for this despair?

[03:20]

And some people advocate hope. Some people feel that hope is really a good medicine for this. gloom and fear and despair. And that may well be so. I would be happy to talk to you all about hope and learn from you all about how hope can help, how hope can heal. But my default position on hope goes back to my early days at Zen Center when a stern elder sister of mine in the Dharma said, Hope is not a valid category for practitioners of the way. So what does she mean, you know? Hope may be the opposite of despair, but these opposites often share the same sickness. So the despair is this sort of ungrounded, forward-leaning vision of what the future holds.

[04:31]

And hope is just the flip side of the same. An ungrounded, forward-leaning dream of what the future may hold. Preferring one kind of baseless future lean for another sort of baseless future lean. Now, it's not to say that hope isn't Buddhist. I would not say that it's un-Buddhist to hope. There's plenty of strains of... of the Buddha Dharma that are really based in hope, the millennialist Buddhist visions of the imminent coming of Maitreya, that the Buddha Dharma will again be renewed at any moment in this declining world. So I won't say hope is un-Buddhist and I won't say it's necessarily unhelpful or a bad idea. It may be actually really important and just what we need. Certainly some of my... My good friends in the Dharma think so. But for me at least, today, I don't want to put my hope in hope.

[05:43]

I'm not really going to put my eggs in the hope basket right now. I think there's another teaching to turn to. That's a teaching I'd like to share. And I know there's another teaching because I hear it almost every day. I hear this teaching. that there is something or someone that removes all darkness, that brings light so that all fear and distress may be forsaken and disperses the gloom and darkness of delusion. Any takers? Brings light so that all fear and distress may be put aside. Who is this? Who is this person? Where is this person, this thing that will do this for us? Maybe this section from our daily liturgy here will ring a bell to some of you at least.

[06:49]

Homage to the perfection of wisdom, the lovely, the holy. The perfection of wisdom gives light unstained. The entire world cannot stain her. She is a source of light. and from everyone in the triple world she removes darkness. Most excellent are her works. She brings light so that all fear and distress may be forsaken and disperses the gloom and darkness of delusion. She herself is an organ of vision. She has a clear knowledge of the own being of all dharmas, for she does not stray away from it. The perfection of wisdom of the Buddhas sets in motion the wheel of Dharma. So there it is. Every day in front of our very noses. This teaching to which we can turn that will bring light and free us from fear.

[07:55]

This is the perfection of wisdom. Prajnaparamita. It's the great wisdom of emptiness. This Prajna Paramita character is the same one who says, by the way, no eyes and no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind. This Buddhist teaching that you're so enamored of? No. No suffering. No cause of suffering. No end of suffering. No path that will end suffering. Everything... is entirely empty. This is the teaching that brings light, that frees us from the gloom and darkness and fear of delusion. You see that light and you feel that spaciousness or that freedom.

[09:03]

No hope And no despair. Hope is empty. And despair is empty. And the ground is empty. And the sky is empty. The water is empty. And I am empty. And you are empty. Entirely vacant. There's a verse that says, how refreshing the whinny of a pack horse unloaded of everything. I love that one. So there's lots of ways to talk about this emptiness and what it means and what it implies and how it is that it might free us. But most basically, it dispels all this gloom and fear by freeing us completely from all of our thoughts and views.

[10:12]

It's the basic teaching that nothing you think or have ever thought or can ever think has anything at all to do with reality. And none of our ideas correspond to anything. There's nothing to them and nothing behind them. All of our words and our thoughts and our views don't actually refer to anything except themselves. You can open the dictionary and there's a word and then you want to know what the word means so then you see some other words and then you can go look up those words in the dictionary and each of those words just has another set of words. The words refer to words. And the ideas refer to ideas. They have no contact with reality. They have no traction with reality. And it's not just these kind of sophisticated views that don't match reality.

[11:23]

It's even the very most basic views, like that there is reality. That there is or isn't anything. That's a really heavy one, by the way, that the Buddhist teaching points out. That we don't really know we carry around this view. Jeez, there is something. That view has a big weight. Or, jeez, there's not anything. That view is a great weight. And neither of those views has anything to do with what's happening. And so the flow of whatever this is, this present life, is totally apart from, totally beyond our grasp. I can't grab it with my hands. I can't capture it with my eyes. And certainly my thoughts and words I don't reach. I can say me and you and right and wrong.

[12:38]

life and death, presence and absence. These concepts correspond to nothing. So teaches Prajnaparamita, who we go out of our way every morning to praise. Praising the thief that robs us, you know, of everything. So all there is in our views is views. There's just names here. There's no lectern here. There's no table. There's no me. There's no planet Earth. And we can appreciate that. And we can sit here even now with some presence. And notice that we reach for some thought, for some view, for some concept of reality.

[13:48]

And we can feel the distress of that reaching. Once we know that everything we can grasp is empty, we slow down that reaching a little bit. Great Theravadan monk, Ajahn Chah, is said to have said, all your thoughts are garbage. I appreciate that teaching. I'd like to point out that that one also is garbage. So don't get stuck there. Because as liberating as this teaching of emptiness, as totally freeing as it is, it can also be quite terrifying. the total vacancy of everything we think we are and value. And it can also be quite reckless. It can be a reckless thought as soon as we attach to it.

[14:55]

As soon as we say, oh, I know what's really true now. The Buddhist told me nothing is true. So then you're hooked again. You're hooked again on some view. The great ancestor Yunmen says, it's better to have a whole mountain of views that there is stuff than even a particle view that there's nothing. So this teaching isn't offered as just the next thing to grab onto, as just the next concept that is claiming itself as true. This teaching points to being free from all of the ways that we see the world. So to enter into this freedom of emptiness, we need to really deeply renounce our ideas, our views. I'm not quite ready to let go of everything I think being true.

[16:04]

Or maybe I'm ready to let go of most of it. But there's one or two non-negotiable truths. So in Zazen, In our practice of sitting meditation, the invitation is to go there. Even that one. Let it go. So in the mornings here, before we use our mouth to give homage to Prajnaparamita, we give homage to this great emptiness in our sitting practice. We sit upright. And we notice... That something here is flowing, something is going on here that doesn't seem too perturbed by my ideas about it. My thoughts come and go, but something is happening. We don't even need these thoughts like, here I am sitting.

[17:09]

You may have had this experience in Zazen where the thought, here I am sitting, doesn't need to describe what's going on. You don't need that one. Or I have a body. You don't really need that view. You don't really need that thought in the practice of zazen. We can feel this basis of our life as flowing somehow much deeper than all of our views about it. And that the views we have about it don't need to push us off the seat. Like, I can't bear this pain. We don't need that one either. We sit practicing this freedom from our thoughts and views, letting them go and noticing that they don't need to move us.

[18:16]

And as we train in this, as we express this truth, of emptiness by sitting and letting go, we can come to find this, a real space. I use this image of space a lot. I'm not sure what's exactly on this side of that space, but there's somehow space around all of my thoughts and views. So they may be present, but they're surrounded by this space. They don't grab me. Or at least I see that I don't need to let them grab me. And then they grab me. You can ask my family about that if you have any doubt. But there's an entry point here, a gate into this deep composure where even our most despairing or gloomy thought is surrounded by this incredible space of knowing that it doesn't actually mean, it doesn't make hard contact with reality.

[19:18]

So there's refuge here. Right in the middle of our despair or our gloom or our hope or our righteousness, there is this sense, this quiet understanding that also none of what I think actually reaches. And in that space, actually, reality can surprise me. Something else can happen because I'm ready for a little bit of a difference between reality and my thought, you know, reality and my view. Are you with me here?

[20:28]

You know this feeling of spaciousness around an idea? I think so, but maybe not. How about I think so, but maybe not with respect to everything. Like I exist. I think so, but maybe not. Or I don't exist. I think so, but maybe not. Or that hurts. I think so, but maybe not. And I don't need to tell other people that. I can just say this hurts. But I know. I know deeply. I'm free. This is about my own freedom from my own view. The ground of my life can be resting on somewhere deeper than the flow of my changing thoughts. So the way I've been talking about emptiness is the sense...

[21:30]

which is one of the traditional ways of understanding emptiness, which is that words and concepts are empty. They don't touch. Nothing about the word or the idea table here touches this thing in the slightest. But there's another aspect too of emptiness that I want to share. It's really important to me as a bridge to the next point that I want to make. So emptiness is really the bottom line of Mahayana Buddhism. And it can be the bottom line of our life. But if we look closely in the Buddhist teaching, there is... you can see a little trace of a line underneath that bottom line of emptiness.

[22:35]

Because in a way, the teaching of emptiness is nothing more than the implication, the working out of this even more basic truth, which is interdependence. So why don't my concepts track with reality? Why don't my ideas and views match or meet reality? teaching is in part because they're conditioned. So no matter what view I have, it's totally contingent on my past and present conditioning. I didn't decide to have my views. I learned my views. And the process of learning my views means that they came forth in interaction with other things. That's what we mean by conditioned. My viewpoint is not self-created. It's in relationship.

[23:38]

It's based on things. And I can track some of those, and a lot of them I can't. But it goes all the way back to beginningless time, you know? Things influencing each other and giving rise to this so-called person with a view of how the world is. So my viewpoints are totally conditioned. They depend on things, everything around them. And everything is like this in the Buddhist teaching of interdependence. So I say that hope is empty and despair is empty. And you are empty and I am empty. And you could ask, empty of what? What am I empty of? And the Buddhist answer is you're empty of self. Empty of independent existence.

[24:39]

Empty of individuality. And we're empty of self. We're empty of independence or individuality. Because we only exist in relationship. if I really was a self, if you really were a self, the Buddhist teaching is that you could not be in relationship. Selves can't be in relationship. Only dependent things can be in relationship. Something that exists on its own, self-contained, inherently, can't interact with other things. But the truth is, the whole world is nothing but interaction. All I am, all you are,

[25:40]

is the interaction of things other than you and me. So we look at this table. This table is just the interaction of its parts, right? You can see it as legs and a top. You can see it as wood or atoms or molecules or water and earth and air. There's no table apart from the relationship of the parts that make it up. And there's no me apart from the chemistry and the thoughts and the views that make me up, right? I exist only in relationship with these parts. And like the table two, I only exist in relationship with the whole. So this table also depends. It has no existence separate from. It's totally inseparable from the floor and the space that it occupies. And... we living beings who are perceiving it.

[26:41]

There's no table that can be found here. There's only a set of relationships. When we see a thing, all we're actually seeing is relationships. And so we say it's empty of self. This table is not a table because it's a table. It's a table because of everything that's not a table coming together to make it a table. Are you with me? This is important because it's about me and it's about you. That we are nothing but what is around us. We are nothing but our past and our context, our environment. We are creating each other in every moment. And we don't exist apart from that relationship. All there is is relating. Relating. There's nothing fixed. So this is the teaching of interdependence. And those of us who have been in this Buddhist thing for a while tend to grow numb to this teaching of interdependence.

[27:54]

Don't start again on interdependence. There he goes with the interbeing thing. Come on. I know. It can, like any slogan, you know, it can stale. But it's actually a mind-blowing and life-changing teaching that all there is here is a network of relations. Lifting my hand is... just a network of relations from beginningless time involving the whole earth and all beings. One way of enlivening the concept of interdependence that I appreciate is this word intercausality. It's one thing to say that everything is dependent on everything else.

[28:59]

Like I'm dependent on the rain and the sun and the green gold charred That's one way of seeing it. The same truth could be expressed the other way, which is that that charred causes me. That charred creates me. And that I create the sun and the rain. This dependence, this mutual dependence that we're all part of, also involves us mutually causing each other. So I am causing you right now. And if that sounds... megalomaniacal, we can bring it down to scale. This particle of dust beneath my fingernail causes the sun and the rain and you. Each thing isn't just a little part of what makes things happen, but each thing actually has the total power to cause the whole cosmos.

[30:05]

It shakes up for me the teaching of interdependence. That little bug crawling across the floor, I owe my life to that bug. It causes me and it causes the whole world. There is no world without that particle. There is no other world but precisely the world we have right now, which depends totally on each thing that's in it. We could say each thing in that totality causes each other thing. This morning I thought, so that means...

[31:13]

Rex Tillerson caused my mother and my child, caused Shakyamuni Buddha to be born. So this is a gate into seeing things as they are, perfect as they are, complete as they are. And there's great peace and equanimity in that vision. In both of these visions, actually, in the vision that everything I think is not quite it, there's a lot of peace and freedom there. And likewise, in this teaching, that every particle of the world must be exactly as it is for me to have life at all. The moment before I complain, at least to notice, that I have no life apart from everything that's in the world, just as it is, and then I can complain. So both of these teachings are about freedom and peace and equanimity.

[32:19]

Unfortunately, though, we're not invited to rest there. We're not invited in the Buddhist tradition to make a nest there in that personal peace and equanimity. in the Mahayana especially, this interdependence is something that only really matters if we enact it. It's not enough to see the interdependence or to know the interdependence. We need to enact the interdependence. This This teaching, this principle of enactment is really central to our Soto Zen tradition. There are some forms of Buddhism and Zen really want you to see emptiness and to see interdependence and to see Buddha nature.

[33:37]

Soto Zen is a little bit ambivalent about this whole like seeing emptiness thing. Understanding interdependence, understanding Buddha nature. Yeah, okay. If you want, you can see it. If you get lucky, you can see it. What's important is not the seeing or the understanding. What's important is enacting it. Can you bring this truth of interdependence to life by living it, by enacting it, by acting like it? Can you act like you're empty and interdependent? That's what matters. And that acting interdependent, that enacting interdependence is not exactly a matter of seeing it or keeping it in view. Does that make sense? It's kind of a different register. So we put a little less energy into the like, are you sure you saw it? What did it look like? And a little more into, please show me what this interdependence, what this you needing me and me needing you might look like.

[34:46]

while we have coffee here, while you walk down the street? Can you enact your relationship with all things? I have seen emptiness and interdependence. Fine. It has no value in the world. It has no function in the world. It's not alive in the world. It's just another empty teaching, actually, unless it's enacted. And the same with Buddha nature, with all of these teachings in Soto Zen. How do we live them? So how do I live the freedom of emptiness and wholeheartedly from that same principle enact my interdependence? This is the point I'm trying to make today and I hope it's coming across. emptiness, my lack of self-nature, my lack of understanding the slightest thing about reality frees me totally.

[35:57]

But that same principle demands that I enact interdependence. So I'm not sure how to do that. Maybe you have some ideas and maybe we can help each other with that. There are some pointers in the tradition. I think the precepts The 16 bodhisattva precepts are good pointers for how to enact this interdependence, how to make it show up. It's true, but does it show up? Does my life make this truth show up, or does my life obscure this truth? Most of the time, the way I live my life kind of obscures the truth of interdependence. Can I live in a way that actually enacts the interdependence? for myself and for all beings. So the precepts, not killing, not stealing, not lying, are guidelines on how to enact. This is what enacting interdependence might look like.

[36:59]

It might look like less killing and less lying. Or even better, it might look like the positive aspects of these same precepts. I get sort of bummed out by all this not stuff you're supposed to do. There's also positive teaching in here about how to enact interdependence, which is to... Support life. Don't just not kill. I mean, even that is pretty hard to not kill. Not lie, not steal. But this enactment of interdependence is asking even more than that. Can you totally support life? Can you enact generosity and honesty? So there's an ongoing discussion in the Buddhist community about whether Buddhism is political or not.

[38:21]

It's been talked over and over, so I have no desire to talk it over still further. But I would like to say sincerely that whatever you think of Buddhism being political or not, there is a deep admonition, a deep demand, in Buddhist practice, that we enact interdependence, that we base our life on the freedom of emptiness, and that from there we enact interdependence, we enact our togetherness. So I have some ideas about what that looks like, how it invites me to reach across chasms, to reach over walls and across rivers, to stand up for our togetherness, to stand up for interdependence and to live interdependence and to notice division and to be suspicious of division.

[39:28]

So I feel that call very clearly in this teaching. But what about you? How do you see it? How will you... fully live the freedom from all fear and distress that emptiness invites us into. And at the same time, from the same truth, fearlessly enact our inconceivably profound connection with each other and the great earth. So I'd like us to be free, you know, to not be caught by any of the confusion in the world. And that not being caught, some people fear that, oh, if you're not caught, you're not caring. If you're not caught, you don't care. And I'm saying, not caught and caring are together. They're the same teaching, the teaching of emptiness, which is the teaching of interdependence. The emptiness side means I'm not caught, and the interdependence side, which is the same teaching, means I care, I enact interdependence as the path.

[40:41]

as the only path there is. So thank you very much for coming today and giving me life. I hope that our gathering here, the practice that each of us brings to this room, has generated some merit and generated a little bit of light, a little bit of freedom from fear and distress. And if it has, may we dedicate May we turn that over. But I want that light. I want the freedom. It's so tasty. In this path, we turn it over. We give it away. May the fruit of practice be offered to all beings. May all beings taste this liberation and know and enact their profound interconnection, intercausality. with each other and with all things. Thank you very much.

[41:43]

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 sfzc.org and click Giving.

[42:14]

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