Good morning. Welcome everybody to Green Gulch. I see some big friends here and also some little friends. But I'm having some trouble telling who's the big friends and who's the little friends. So I wonder, is there anybody here who thinks that they're kind of little? There's a couple. Do you think that those people are little who are sitting there? Seem a little bigger than you. Do any of you up here think that you're little? Do you think that you're big? Okay, what about me? Am I little or am I big? Big. What do you think? Do you think I'm big? Now what about compared to that guy? Pretty big statue, right? If you look at him, then you look at me, I... Wait a second, maybe I'm little. What about a blade of grass?

[01:04]

Have you ever seen a blade of grass? I think that's a pretty little thing, right? But if you're an ant, that blade of grass must be like a giant skyscraper. There's a little ant standing on there, there's a blade of grass waving up high. But if you're a big person like you, or if you're a giant bear, and you walk by and see a blade of grass. It's just a tiny, tiny blade of grass. Can you think of some other example of something that's sometimes big and sometimes little? Do any of you have little brothers or little sisters? Yeah? So maybe when you're next to your mom, you think, geez, I'm pretty little. And then it's nice to go be next to your little sister and you can feel like, wow, I'm pretty big. So there's big and little. Sometimes it's hard to say.

[02:06]

It's hard to say who's big and who's little. And it keeps changing. One minute I'm little, the next minute I'm big. You're big. But you are big, yeah. Little. And little. That's the whole picture. Thank you. So sometimes we're big and sometimes we're little. And sometimes the blade of grass that we're meeting outside, sometimes it's little and sometimes it's gigantic. So when you go out this morning and play at Green Gulture to appreciate, appreciate you, appreciate yourself and appreciate the grass and the sky and appreciate that you're Your relationship to the sky and your relationship to the grass changes what the sky is and changes what the grass is.

[03:10]

So I hope you little big friends have fun today at Green Gulch. And it seems like you'd maybe like to go outside and play a little bit. Would that be more fun than being here? In this tiny room? This seems like a pretty big room, doesn't it? When you go outside, that's an even bigger room. Then suddenly this room seems really small. The room is really small if you're outside. But if you've ever been to some of these rooms where some of these Zen students live in here... then this room suddenly seems very, very, very big. So everything that we're relating to, everything that we're playing with is constantly changing. Sometimes it's big and sometimes it's little.

[04:12]

And I encourage you to play with it and notice becoming giant and notice becoming tiny. And have fun today at Green Gulch. So if you want to go ahead and join Amy, leading the children's program, Thank you, little friends, for coming. You're welcome. So now it's just we large people.

[05:20]

I want to ask, how big are you in this moment? Without recourse to whatever image of large and small, just immediately in this moment. Is this big? Is this small? What size are we right here, right now? So this is what I want to talk about today with you. How do we see little things and big things? And how do we limit ourselves moment after moment by forgetting that this big and this little aren't fixed? These kind of tentative descriptions of reality that really say more about where we're standing than about what it is we think that we're describing. And I want to suggest that if we see that, if we really appreciate that all of our ideas and descriptions of things are completely tenuous and completely relative, completely a matter of perspective, if we see that, then we can open up, actually, to connecting with our lives on a deeper, more immediate level.

[06:36]

letting go a little bit of our various descriptions, seeing that they're tentative, releasing them, and naturally coming into our body, into the room in the present moment. So, some of you know me, and some of you don't, and some of you know me a little, and some of you know me a lot. My name is Ji Ryu. Some people also call me Mark on occasion. And I live here at Green Gulch. I'm currently the head of maintenance, and I'm married to Sarah, who's the farm manager. I think they're going to be selling vegetables outside later today, but I don't think she'll be there. So I live here now, and I've lived here for a while. In fact, I was noting that pretty much exactly 10 years ago, almost to the day, in this very meditation hall, I received the precepts. I lay ordination with my preceptor, Sado Lee de Barros, who's sitting up here.

[07:43]

So rich life for me here at Green Village with gratitude to Sado. Any merit in my teaching is his, and all of the many faults, of course, I've managed to interject quite on my own. So if you've been around some Zen teachers and Zen teachings, you've maybe noticed this tendency to turn things upside down, to make some point and then undermine it, to slip away as soon as you reach for them. So an example, there's millions of examples like this. The Zen teacher says something like, all beings have Buddha nature. Great. All beings have Buddha nature. So then someone asks, well, does a dog have Buddha nature? And then teacher says, no. No, a dog doesn't have Buddha nature.

[08:45]

Why should I do that? What is this tendency? Is it just a kind of intentional effort to make no sense or to be annoying? Are you just trying to bug me? Or trying to show that you're kind of clever and a step ahead of me? or just trying to be obscure from the cloudy peak. So it could be, in any given situation, it could be any or all of those things. But I did find maybe a deeper clue in the actual Zen tradition about why teachers have this slippery, upside-down turning quality. It turns out it's actually their job description. There's a kind of bylaw hidden in the Platform Sutra that says teachers of Zen are required to do this. So you maybe thought that these teachers are kind of iconoclasts doing their own thing, but they're really following these very clear directions laid out in the Platform Sutra.

[09:55]

You basically have to not make sense in this way. Whatever you say, you then are required to say the opposite. So there must be something to it. So I've been exploring that. So to move into the Platform Sutra a little bit, I wanted to give you some background on what that sutra is. It's the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Huynang. And mostly sutra, it just refers to a teaching that the actual Buddha gave. But Huynang is such a key ancestor for us in Zen, really an ancestor that all the schools and all the branches of Zen trace themselves back to. So his writings, his teachings, are called the Sutra, Platform Sutra.

[11:02]

And so he lived in about seventh century in China. And in the Platform Sutra, it lays out what will become as Zen develops. Hi, welcome back. It was too little out there, huh? You need to come in here for some space. So the basic premise or basic push of the Platform Sutra is to outline this perspective called the sudden or the southern school. So the sudden enlightenment and sudden practice. The basic idea of that sudden enlightenment, sudden practice teaching is that practice and enlightenment don't depend on a kind of gradual process of formal or ritual. or even moral cultivation. So it's not a question of gradual cultivation of anybody's kind of self-improvement project at the end of which lies Buddhahood.

[12:12]

But in fact, no matter how shoddy or incomplete your self-improvement cultivation project is, you can actually leap. You can leap in a moment, suddenly, even with all of your unfinished business, you can suddenly see how things are. and realize enlightenment, realize Buddhahood, actually, in that very place. So a lot of the stories in the Platform Sutra are probably familiar to a lot of you. The first section is Hway Nung's autobiography, the story of this illiterate woodcutter who hears a phrase of the Diamond Sutra and sees into his own nature. and goes on a kind of quest seeking out the fifth ancestor of Zen. There's that famous poetry competition where the head student writes this beautiful poem and then the ignorant woodcutter who's been pounding rice in the back for several months sneaks in and writes a far superior poem.

[13:16]

Or this wonderful magical story of the robe and the bowl of the sixth ancestor that places on a rock for this accomplished general to just take from him, and it's too heavy. The general can't pick it up and just goes onto his knees honoring the Dharma. Among all of these rich and wonderful stories in the Platform Sutra, the one that really caught my eye is at the end of the sutra, as Huyneng is dying. So there's this very... an intimate moment at the end of the sutra where he knows that he's dying and his disciples know that he's dying. And he calls together his closest top disciples, 10 core group. And again, all of Zen will really blossom from this sixth ancestor.

[14:21]

So represented in this room, is really all of the ancestors, all of the teachers who are going to disseminate Zen, you know, Gringold's Farm and Korea and Japan. So their overriding concern in this moment is that their teacher is about to die and they want more than anything to be able to know that this teaching, this practice and enlightenment of Zen is going to survive into the future, is going to survive the demise of their wonderful Awaken a teacher. So he gives them a teaching that he says, this is how you can keep Zen alive. This is what you need to keep Zen alive. He says, in all teaching, stray not from the essence of mind. Whenever someone puts a question to you, answer in antonyms. so that a pair of opposites will be formed, such as coming and going.

[15:23]

Another way he says it a little later is, whenever a question is put to you, answer it in the negative, if it is an affirmative one, and vice versa. If you are asked about an ordinary person, tell the inquirer something about a sage, and vice versa. So some of you who have met with Zen teachers maybe suddenly see now why They've been acting in this way. They perhaps actually believe that in doing this, they're keeping up the lineage of Zen. How could that be? When I first came across this in a kind of informal study group that some of us residents and non-residents together have been doing here occasionally at Green Gulch, this seemed a little silly. You know, there's a lot of really magnificent... teachings in Zen and to reduce it to this kind of game of just always do the opposite of whatever they think seemed a little flat or a little silly how could this be the essential teaching of Zen it reminded me actually of a game that my brother and I used to play where I forget how you were empowered to do this but you could suddenly declare that it was opposite day

[16:46]

Are people familiar with opposite day? So then when it's opposite day, suddenly everything that you say is the opposite. And this can also be refined into opposite minute or opposite second. So I don't want to wash the dishes in opposite second, and then I just inadvertently affirm that I want to wash the dishes by the power of opposite day. So this was kind of a fun game. kind of annoying too, depending if you were able to trap the person or you yourself were trapped. But it never occurred to me that I was, in playing this game, maintaining the ancestral lineage of the Buddha way. So the study group talked about this a little bit and, you know, discussed some of the kind of philosophical implications of it, but basically moved on. But it lingered a little bit, and I decided to try it out, kind of as a game or a joke, just kind of to be fully annoying as a Zen person.

[17:53]

So we were getting up, it was time to leave, and somebody picked up her purse, which is full of various translations of the Platform Sutra, and commented, wow, that's a heavy purse. And so this new commitment to being annoying and oppositional, I said, It's light. It's a light purse. Again, kind of as a joke, trying on this practice. But actually, I was quite surprised in saying that, that I actually, in the moment of saying that, had a fairly strong appreciation of what it is that this teaching is getting to. So I noticed that until I said light, until I just offered up the opposite, I actually was pretty much behind that the purse was really heavy. I didn't think, like, wow, that really is a heavy purse, you know, a self-existing, that this kind of fundamental truth called heaviness has applied itself to this fundamental truth called purse or something.

[19:01]

I don't think I would have said all that, but that was operating on some subtle level in me. It's kind of like, yeah, it's a heavy purse, you know, and I'm having an okay day, and, you know, here, I'm... this kind of very casual and subtle kind of secret assumption that I didn't even know that I was making about the reality, say, of the heaviness of the purse. Well, as soon as I said light, I realized, well, yeah, it's actually, the purse isn't heavy, because in a different situation, the purse would be light. So... There is, of course, a place for heavy purses and light purses, especially if you're going to be walking to the beach or something. It's good to be able to discriminate. This is a heavy purse. This is a light purse. But in the midst of that, to not confuse or not, say, believe that heaviness is really an attribute of the purse.

[20:08]

By bringing up the opposite, I see that actually heaviness says more about lightness. Heavy and light are kind of doing this thing over to the side, and here's the purse, you know, in a whole different position than this, you know, heavy and light are trying to orient themselves, get some angle on the purse. And even, you know, even purse and not purse is another kind of thing that's going on. I say purse, then if there's a Zen teacher around, they might hopefully say, that's not a purse. And then I say, oh, This idea of purse and this idea of not purse are just kind of, they're just kind of talking about each other. And the actual experience of the purse is missed. So that's really the point, is how am I using these assumptions, or how do these assumptions function to block me, block me from actually taking the time or...

[21:09]

putting in the energy to really see and really meet the purse as it is. Oh yeah, that's heavy. I'm done. I'm done with the purse. But if then it's light, then suddenly the purse is back to life. I don't know what the purse is. And I can meet it. And in doing so, I find that I kind of come into the room. have my ideas about what's going on. And then if suddenly I call them into question or I see, well, that's just this tentative perspective that I'm taking up at this moment. When I see that, then naturally I settle into something deeper, something deeper than the ways that I'm describing the reality that's in front of me. So I... I imagine this morning that a number of us will be eating muffins later on.

[22:16]

And you maybe will bite into this thing that you insist is a muffin. And you may have the thought, this is a delicious, delicious muffin. Or you may have the thought, not delicious muffin. Whatever thought you have, the... opportunity here, the possibility, if you want to try this game out for yourself, is if you say delicious muffin, then immediately say, well, not delicious muffin, and see if that helps you actually taste the muffin. What I find is, you know, taste a little sweet, say it's delicious, and then I'm actually tasting my idea of delicious. I've left the muffin, the muffin is gone, and now I'm just eating deliciousness. Um... Uh... So to see, by undermining or calling into question, even in this kind of flippant way, by calling into question our hold on reality, our descriptions of how things are, not just to confuse people or to confuse ourselves, but to actually connect in some deeper way with what it is that's in front of us.

[23:23]

All the time, all the time we're creating these divisions, these judgments, but each of those judgments are not describing what we think they're describing. they're just relating, they're just situating something in a network of other things. So, you know, heavy is completely dependent on light. And light is completely dependent on heavy. They have no meaning without each other. So there are these two things that only mean anything in terms of the other one. So it's this kind of there's a tension or there's a relationship but there's nothing really there to hold each other up so why why is this important you know we can we can appreciate maybe some little some little merit in in seeing a purse or eating a muffin without without being trapped by some idea about what that muffin really is about what that experience really is but

[24:35]

What's the point of that, really? Who cares, you know? How can we see the extent or the depth of a practice like this? How does it help us to notice that our life is taking place on a much deeper ground than our ideas, than our comparisons? So what would it be? We can use a purse, we can use a muffin to ask ourselves or to open ourselves to what it would be to ground our life, to really live our life from the immediate, directly felt experience of being alive, rather than on the ground of our various ideas and perspectives about being alive. I think that we actually really long for this, all of us, that we notice, especially when we wake up a little bit, And all of us arriving in this room have some inkling, some sense that my vision is so clouded.

[25:42]

I'm living at this level of views and opinions that's not reliable. And I can intuit, I can imagine that there's a deeper ground that I could live my life from. or maybe you experience it as separation and just really letting yourself feel the pain of that constant feeling of separation from me and you. Walking around, not living totally with confidence in our life as it is, but living at this level of, I'm over here and you made me mad and this is this and this is this. To the extent we're doing that, we're creating, and sometimes we can be aware, at least a little bit aware, that we're creating this kind of division, this kind of separation, and we most deeply don't want to be living that way. So this, this is, you know, all of violence comes from here, all of war, war and violence is coming from this confusion of our idea with how things actually are.

[26:59]

I say all that just to indicate that something's actually at stake in this practice. The sixth ancestor doesn't just want people to have kind of fun with language, but to really touch our life, which is our connection with each other. So this is the path of the end of suffering, actually, for ourselves, and it's the path of realizing compassion for others. And one way in, one gate... is that when we have a thought, realize that we could just as easily have the other thought. We could just as easily, from some different angle, we could think the opposite. So elsewhere in the Platform Sutra, the sixth ancestor is really committed to helping us find this way. He says, at this moment, and this is a famous koan that maybe many of you know, at this moment, thinking neither of good or evil, what is your real nature?

[28:05]

Who are you? So I feel like he knew, well, if I just asked who you are, who are you, you'd go straight to good and evil. Well, I'm good, or you'd tell me how you are, but I don't want to know how you are. I want to know who you are. So, at this moment, not thinking about good or evil, not thinking getting involved in anything that can have an opposite, without thinking about something that can then just have an opposite. What's your original face? What is your real nature? Who are you in this moment without recourse to your ideas about yourself? Are you willing to look beyond your ideas? willing to look beyond how you're doing, how good you are, how evil you are, and actually see who you are. So...

[29:13]

So there's a lot to say more about Huy Nang's kind of philosophy here. I'll just say briefly, read again his statement. So whenever someone asks about something, a thing, well, we speak in terms of pairs and hold up the opposite. Since each element of this set of pairs depends on the other for its existence or its non-existence, both of them are eventually eliminated and there is nowhere left to turn. So there's this very rich, kind of philosophically, you know, about emptiness realized in the relatedness of everything and about whether there is actually such a thing as unconditioned reality or whether unconditioned is really just that everything is conditioned. You know, there's something in there about language and how language and the mind creates reality and creates our experience. But I feel like what he's really pointing to is here in this nowhere left to turn.

[30:32]

So when you do this, when you're aware of the opposite, you suddenly have nowhere left to turn, which is our favorite place to be as Zen students. We love to be cornered, or at least we value being cornered, a sense that there's nowhere left to turn. Maybe you've heard the... The phrase, Pema Chodron's phrase, the wisdom of no escape. There's nowhere left to turn. Well, I thought the purse was heavy. Well, maybe it's light. Where do I go? Where do I go? How do I interact with... If I can't just go into my opposites, if I can't just go into how I am, how can I answer? How can I meet what's in front of me? We think that if we let go, if we actually let all of these... ideas fall away and we'll be in this nowhere left to turn, we'll be adrift, we'll be without any of these ideas and views that we've been relying on.

[31:35]

But actually, when we do let go of some ideas, when we do see that we could just as easily have the opposite idea, or even when they're taken from us, when our idea that we cherished is suddenly taken away, suddenly see, wow, that's not how things were at all. We notice in that moment that this nowhere left to turn can actually be a very alive, very alive, very immediate place. In my own life I found this very directly when I was living in a Japanese Zen monastery. And I was very absorbed in this kind of certain view about what Buddhist practice was and what it would lead to. Buddhist practice being meditating very diligently and narrow-mindedly under this particular charismatic teacher for the sake of becoming enlightened and saving all beings.

[32:49]

through our individual heroic effort. So I was very much in this view in a way that I didn't even know that I was. You know, there was this end teacher around, but he wasn't able to say, he didn't so much bring the opposite. He didn't so much say, what we're doing is just a waste of time and there's no merit in it at all. Mostly we all agreed what we're doing is really, really valuable and there's a lot of merit. I was really, without even knowing it, and that's You know, if we can find some opposite that gets to something that we're holding that we don't even know we're holding, or if the Zen teacher can bring up some opposite to show us that we're holding something that we don't even know we're holding, until it goes away. So my life in this particular monastery, some inner and outer crises have followed that really called my whole perspective into question. it seemed like everything that I had made up about the way I was practicing, about what Buddhism would lead to, all of that was kind of shattered, and I was left actually with no place left to turn.

[34:06]

I couldn't turn to Buddhism for answers. I couldn't turn to the teacher. I couldn't even turn to myself, because how was that reliable? I had just gotten myself in this whole mess. There was really nowhere to turn, and my feeling in that in this real, I'd say, kind of a pit of lack of no faith, of no faith in anything. There's nothing left I can turn to. So all I have is this moment that's in front of me, which now from a distance seems kind of like what the whole point of the practice had been, is to actually appreciate that all we have is this moment in front of us. And I thought to do that I needed to hold on to everything. It's actually when everything's taken away, then we realize, we really notice, wow, all I can rely on, all I can put my faith in, is this direct, present life.

[35:07]

Anything else is too unreliable. Somebody can just bring up the opposite. Somebody can just take it away. What is it? What is it that can't be taken away? What is it that's not an idea? It's just this exact moment of present being. I felt a similar thing on September 11th for me. I really noticed, wow, I didn't even realize the extent to which I was relying on this world being a certain way. And now maybe it's not that way. What's left? I actually felt a real kind of presence. real peace in the sense of, well, this is it. Where else can I turn? There's nowhere else to turn except this present moment. So I...

[36:16]

to point out a danger of this kind of practice, or just to be clear, that I'm not saying that we walk around constantly undermining whatever we happen to be experiencing. I'm not mad. [...] Everything is empty. I'm not feeling this. Everything is empty. I'm not feeling this. Or, you know, I just think that's evil. I just think that's evil. Maybe it's good. Maybe it's good. This This is not what I'm pointing to. This is not what the sixth ancestor is pointing to. We completely honor our perspective and we completely appreciate that the way our ideas about how we're seeing things are really creating our experience. We're not trying to push aside our actual experience. What we're trying to do, in fact, is really meet the experience that we're actually having. So it's not about denying emotion or denying the intellect.

[37:22]

It's about honoring it so much that we actually want to know what it is. So rather than say or think I know what I'm feeling, to actually ask myself what I'm feeling, be open to what this feeling actually is, rather than say, rather than be feeling my idea about what it is that I'm feeling. So there's a way that we can let go, we can put aside at least a little bit our ideas without, I think sometimes there's this fear or maybe a real danger of putting down, letting go of something that's vital to who we are. But what's vital to who we are will stay. If it's who we are, it'll stay. So to feel that we can really wholeheartedly let go of our ideas in order to find our life. And This is totally alive in the midst of the sorrows and the joys of our life. It's not trying to be anywhere else or trying to make them anything else.

[38:25]

It's just trying to connect with what is that? What is that sorrow actually? What is this experience? And I might still say, yeah, it's still sorrow. It really is sorrow. But in that process of opening up that question... there's the possibility, the invitation to connecting to what that experience actually is. Another way to say this, you know, if the opposite approach seems too mental or too technical, There's another tradition where we just say, what is it? What is it? This is what Shui Feng said in Case 51 of the Blue Cliff Record. Some monks came to visit this old Zen master, and he pops his head out and says, what is it?

[39:32]

And then one of the monks says, what is it? And then he closes the door. And... later somebody says, well, he should have said, this is it. But you say this is it, just this is it, after we've gone through this kind of fire of what is it. So I find when I'm walking around in some state, this kind of shell of whatever, grumpiness or agitation or self-centeredness, to actually ask if I can bear If I can bear to crack the window a little bit, just enough to ask, well, okay, what is this? What is this? Well, actually, it kind of just feels like walking and some wind on my face. Okay. This kind of opening, this question, what is this? Yeah. So often when we say that or when I say that to myself, what is this?

[40:46]

I find myself coming back into my body and I feel my breath. I notice that, well, it's kind of more like breathing than like she did that and he did that and they did this. It's more like breathing and walking. So another way that we get to this place in Zen practice is to use our breath, is to be aware of our breath. So if we untangle ourselves from our ideas, we maybe notice that we find our breath. And the opposite is also true. If we can stand to just come back to our breath, we notice that naturally our ideas kind of untangle. And if we do that for a little while, we might notice that actually we've set up an idea about breath. So now here I am meditating on breath. And so then it's good if a Zen teacher will come by and say, there's no breath. So then you can see, oh, wow, okay, what is this?

[41:52]

Here I've been thinking it's breath. You know, I've worked with people on breath meditation and I have this feeling like a lot of us meditate on our idea of what breath is rather than the actual experience of breath. So if we're calling it breath, it's good if somebody comes by and say, well, What is it really? What is this breath? Right now for you, what is this breathing? Is it an in-breath? Is it an out-breath? What if that's also just something you're adding? What if it's not actually an in-breath or an out-breath? What if you imagine that the in-breath is actually an out-breath and the out-breath is actually an in-breath? Does that help you find what the breath actually is in your body? apart from your views of it. So this is our practice of just sitting, of just being completely present and wholehearted, exactly in our life as it is.

[43:01]

Really vowing, moment after moment, to live from the real ground of our life. and to honor and appreciate the stories, the ideas that we spin out of that. But to never be fooled, to always realize that whatever we're thinking is just a perspective, is just a comparison to something else, and doesn't actually touch our true mind, our true heart. So thank you for listening this morning and sharing these few minutes together. May our presence and practice here of meeting our real life really extend far out of this valley and bring benefit and joy and ease to all of the confused beings inside and outside. Thank you for your practice.

[43:58]

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