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. Morning, everybody. Nice to see you all. I recognize many of you. Thank you, Kodo, and thank you to Nancy for inviting me to speak today. The title of my talk for today is, What is the Body? What is the Body? Did you ever think, you know, what is the body?

[01:01]

One doesn't think, you know, of this. I'm with my, these days, with my seven-year-old granddaughter. She's very lively. She has a flexible, energetic body. I don't think she thinks, what is the body? She's too busy doing things, as are most of us. when we get a little older i think we start wondering what is this body when we notice that it doesn't work automatically that it doesn't do what it used to do that it needs more attention and and that we can't entirely rely on it and we're beginning to to realize that So what is the body is a good question. And it makes me think of the case in the Blue Cliff Record where two monastics are attending a wake and one raps on the coffin and says, alive or dead, what is this body that formerly we call the person?

[02:24]

And now, what is it? And the other monastic, his teacher, says, I won't say, I won't say. And then there's the story in the Hidden Lamp collection of the seven women in the charnel ground. The seven women, it's springtime, and the seven women... want to go and view the spring flowers, and one of them says, no, let's go to the charnel ground. And the others say, why would we go there? And she says, good things can be seen there. And they go to the charnel ground and they see a corpse. And immediately they say, what is it? What is this body? And on raising that question with full hearts, they all become awakened.

[03:24]

So good question, what is the body? Notice that in these Zen stories, no answer is proposed as to what the body is, and yet raising the question fully with body and heart and mind is a really good thing. We, a couple weeks ago, finished a session at one of our everyday Zen communities, the Red Cedar Zen community in Bellingham, Washington. We always have a session in mid-June there. We have a lovely place to have this session, a beautiful island. You can see islands all around and there's egrets flying overhead and some eagles.

[04:27]

It's a beautiful place. This year all we could do is remember what a beautiful place it is because we were on Zoom. Everybody was at home doing the session. But we practiced as we usually do, returning awareness over and over and over again for seven full days. To the body, what is the body? To the breathing, the breathing is the body, the breathing throughout the body. The sounds, sensations, thoughts coming and going. Isn't all of it the body? What thought is there going to be without the body? What body is there going to be without the breath?

[05:31]

And in a seven-day session, you really experience how it comes, how it goes, how it comes, how it goes, how none of it is really graspable. And you can appreciate with the support of Sashen, with the support as a practice, in the pervasive atmosphere of Dharma. You can appreciate coming and going, and you can find it delightful, peaceful. Every day we chant the Heart Sutra. All dharmas are empty. All dharmas are characterized by emptiness. They don't appear or disappear. They don't come or go. They're not pure or impure. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. All dharmas are insubstantial, fleeting.

[06:40]

We're here, we say, to one another. We believe we're here, but in a certain way, we're not here. We're certainly not here in the way we think we're here. And as I say, you appreciate this more and more the older you get. And if you think about the quickly end of your body's time to be conscious and to be held together in this form you wonder what is the body what is the journey of the body what is the path of the body what is the fate of the body

[07:45]

And it's not just the body. Because the body is not somehow walled off by its skin from all of physical reality. It's the whole of physical reality. How strange and how marvelous an opportunity to be so briefly, so wonderfully... so sensually alive. I really think that it's sad we spend most of our lives simply enwrapped in a host of assumptions, unexamined assumptions that if we examine them we would be amazed at the marvel of this life. In that session, I mentioned a moment ago, Bob Rose, who's one of our stalwart members of the Sangha up there in the Red Cedar Sangha.

[09:05]

I must have been talking about the body in one of my Dharma talks there. I don't remember exactly, but he said, oh, do you remember the poem of Robert Creeley, The Plan is the Body? And I said, no, I don't remember that poem. It's such a great poem. Send it to me. I had forgotten. So he sent me the poem, and I'll read it for you now. It's a marvelous poem. Robert Creeley is one of the great American poets of the 20th century, one of my absolute favorite poets. Every time I read a Robert Creeley poem, I'm amazed all over again, and I want to write a poem just as good, and I never have. Here's his poem. The plan is the body. The plan is the body. There is each moment a pattern. There is each time something for everyone.

[10:09]

The plan is the body. The mind is in the head. It's a moment in time an instant, second. The rhythm of one and one and one and one. The two, the three, the plan is in the body. Hold it an instant in the mind. Hold it. What was said, you said. The two, the three times in the body. Hands, feet, you remember. I, I remember.

[11:14]

I speak it. Speak it. The plan is in the body. Times you didn't want to. Times you can't think you want to. You. Me. Me, remember me here. Me wants to. Me am thinking of you. The plan is the body. The plan is the body. The sky is the sky. The mother, father. The plan is the body. Who can read it? Plan is the body. The mind is the plan.

[12:15]

I, speaking, the memory gathers like memory. Plan. I thought to remember, thinking again, thinking, the mind is the plan of the body. The plan is [...] the body Kodo kindly mentioned my just out book when you greet me I bow

[13:19]

You know, as you know, Zen priests are really not supposed to write books. It's frowned on. It's a little embarrassing to write as many books as I write. But I guess I can't help it. Anyway, one of the essays in that book is The Plan... is the body, or rather, what is the body? Not that the plant is the body. What is the body is one of the essays in the book. And I'm going to share some words from that essay with you this morning. But first, I'll just explain a little bit about how this book came to be. I write a lot of essays for the Buddhist magazines, mostly for the former Shambhala Sun, now the Lion's Roar. And it's because Melvin McLeod, who's the editor of that magazine always asked me to write stuff he says you know we're doing an issue on this could you write about that and i said i probably have something i could think of to write about that so i published a lot of essays in that and other buddhist magazines and other magazines that are not particularly buddhist magazines and one time uh i i remember recently that it was in the men's room we were at some kind of buddhist conference there was a time when there was a lot of buddhist conferences

[14:47]

think there maybe are less now but anyway we're at some buddhist conference in the men's room and melvin said you know you should collect all your buddhist essays you've got so many of them you should collect them in the volume and i said yeah that'd be a good idea someday and i and i forgot about it and many many years went by and uh it occurred to me to to take up that suggestion but the effort to collect all these essays wherever they were. They were all over the place, you know, and I wasn't sure exactly where they were or what I had published. It seemed like a big job, and it was just discouraging to do all that. And then one of our sangha members, Cynthia Schrager, who's a brilliant reader of texts. She's got her doctorate in English and really is a great reader, knows how to read and see what's in the text, you know, more than the author, I think. so she said I would really enjoy doing that so she became the editor of this volume and she found all the stuff that I had published including stuff that was not available on the internet had been written long before there was an internet she found it all put it all together and selected about half the essays as being worth republishing and then she

[16:14]

figured out that there were themes that put the essays into different thematic baskets. And I had never kind of thought about that. But she said, no, here are the things that you've been thinking about for the last 40 years. As I read your essays, here are the things you've been thinking about. So that... The book is organized into four categories that Cynthia figured out. And here, I didn't know what I'd been thinking about, so here's what she figured out I've been thinking about for 40 years or more. First of all, the first category is relationship. I didn't begin practicing Zen thinking about relationship, but as i practiced for a long time you know i realized that zen practice is together practice we practice together more than the other buddhisms i think zen really is together practice and the emphasis in zen when you analyze the zen stories and what they're about the emphasis is in a way you know less on awakening per se than it is on communication of and sharing of awakening

[17:42]

So really, at its root, Zen actually proposes that awakening itself is relationship. A moment arises, and in that moment, it doesn't exist without relationship. So, in all of its different forms, I write about relationship. That's the first section. The second section is emptiness. The emptiness teachings that I referred to a moment ago have always been really, really important to me. And they are the foundation of all Mahayana Buddhism and of Zen. So I've done a lot of writing about emptiness teachings, which really are the underlying foundation of relationship. Because relationship means not only two in relation, it also means... There is no one to be in relation with the second.

[18:48]

There's just the one in relation to itself. So it's empty of any separation. So I did a lot of writing about the emptiness teachings in different ways. The third category is culture. So I've been, you know, really as someone who started practicing Zen in the very, very beginning, of zen practice in the west i've really been aware of us trying to understand and inevitably misunderstanding a teaching that comes to us from another culture from another language very different from our own and so the the phenomenon of cultural borrowing and cultural exchange and the culture of zen has been something that i've been writing about so the third category is culture and the fourth is engagement That's why when I retired from the Zen Center in 2000, I wanted to call my new organization the Everyday Zen Foundation because our practice really in the West is not about really for us, for most of us, you know, we're not terribly concerned about, some of us are, but most of us are not terribly concerned about

[20:12]

preserving the zen tradition per se we're really concerned about our lives and how to make the tradition be of service not only to our lives individually but to our collective life in the world so engagement in various guises has been one of my subjects it seems and i've written surprisingly about a whole bunch of stuff like i wrote an essay about trying to understand what was the religious motivation of the 9-11 terrorists. I wrote a lot about Israel-Palestine, which unfortunately you could write about, you could have been writing about for the last 50 years, and you'll write about for the next 50 years, probably. And many other things, feminism, racism, and other issues. So those are the four topics that I've been writing about before. categories into which the book is divided relationship emptiness culture and engagement and and then cynthia had a great idea which i resisted at first until she explained it to me and made it sound better she said well why don't you write so that there'll be some new writing in this book why don't you write um reflections notes you know on these essays in each batch

[21:39]

You wrote them a long time ago. Maybe you don't agree with yourself anymore, or maybe you have something further to say. So you could write notes about each of the sections, and that would bring some new writing into the book. And I said, oh, well, if I don't have to write a serious polished essay, but I can just write notes, informal notes, that would be easy. So I did that. I wrote informal notes to each section. And that was kind of interesting, because... I mean, this is one of the problems with writing and publishing is that you said something 35 years ago and now you're supposed to defend what you said 35 years ago. Well, you were a different person, you know, and the world was different. Context was different. And yet there it is, you know, in print and you have to answer for it. So I was able to write notes reflecting on how different actually the context is in 2020, 2021. When I wrote these notes from... when I wrote the original pieces as far back as the early 90s.

[22:44]

Anyway, the essay, What is Your Body, appears under the section on emptiness. And I'm going to read for you, not the whole thing, but a little bit from that essay. And it was published in 2013. What is your body? We think about our body all the time. How does it look? What's its state of health? Is it aging? Is it strong, attractive, impressive enough? And these questions that are always at the back of our minds churn out an almost endless stream of thinking, feeling, and spending.

[23:50]

Consider all the clothing, beauty products, food products, accessories, books, equipment, therapists, health products, body work, body workers, and so on that make up a serious part of our economy. Thank God we're obsessed with our bodies. The economy would collapse if not. And, you know, it is really true, isn't it? Everything, absolutely everything depends on the body. Without the body, you know, what are we? We're nothing. And when you think of these wonderful, noble, inspiring, transcendent concepts like consciousness, higher self, soul, goodness, enlightenment, Buddha nature. What are these things? Are they just made up fantasies? Are they expressions of our hopes?

[24:55]

Do they exist at all? And if they do, they also depend on the body, don't they? So the body really is important, and yet we don't know what the body is. What is the body? We take it for granted, just like we take the sky and the earth for granted. Yet just like the sky and the earth, the body is much more than we know, much more subtle and connected. What we think of as our body, what we feel, imagine, and dream about, what we unthinkingly assume the body to be, is not what the body is. And then, you know, there's you and me, you know, ourselves, which, it would appear, are not the body.

[26:06]

Because we say, my body, well, who is that person who possesses that body? Where is that person? How could that person be outside the body? And yet we feel that it's my body. I am not the body. It's my body. Who says my body? Couldn't say it without a tongue, without a brain. And so from what perspective are we viewing our body? are we viewing it from inside peering out from the body's eyes or from the outside as if looking in the mirror it's like seeing a portrait in a portrait gallery but the body couldn't be external to itself the body must be contained in the experiences of looking and thinking So what in the world are we referring to when we say, my body, as if it were a thing, not us?

[27:18]

Maybe the body is the flow of its sensory experiences, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, tactile sensation. But when you analyze that, it also becomes strange, because where do these things go? Does taste occur on the tongue? Does it occur in the thing tasted? Is it just a mental experience in the brain? And then there's this other thing that we call, if it's a thing, probably isn't, that we call awareness. What's that? that insubstantial, apparently non-physical procedure through which anything we experience comes to us. So where would the awareness be?

[28:22]

Is it like floating around the body? Is it in the air around us? Is it in space? It's inside the body, is it? If it's inside the body, then we could never say my body. And there wouldn't be anyone outside the body to say mine. So then awareness is outside the body, but that seems completely impossible. In other words, it's very strange and we can't really say. And the more we look, the more elusive it gets. And yet, awareness... is foundational to experiencing oneself as a person at all. No awareness, no smelling, no tasting, no thinking, no you.

[29:23]

There could be a lump of flesh in the shape of a human body, but if there's no awareness there, There's no one who has a body. In the Buddhist analysis of consciousness called Abhidharma, they thought about these things very carefully. And although they did not have what we call objective science and instruments of measurement and so forth, they had a very powerful... subject of science and they could examine human experience from the inside and they discovered that there is no body per se only a variety of momentary mental events that they undertook to categorize into its various baskets some of them

[30:40]

we would think of as physical but they were not considered to be physical by the abhidhamis they were considered to be also consciousness and think about it you know if in that red cedar session i'm sitting there and i have a pain in my back i say there's something wrong with my back my back hurts maybe i need to adjust my posture maybe it's just my you know my various discs that are herniated, causing my back trouble. But the truth is, it's not my back. Pain in your back is a mental sensation. It's an event occurring within awareness, possibly triggered by a basis in what we would call physical reality. But what's important about that pain and why it's a pain is because it is a mental and an emotional event.

[31:44]

All perceptions are either stimulated by what we call a physical basis or a non-physical basis. But the physical basis is just another form of consciousness, a much more slow form of consciousness. So the Buddhist analysis is that there is no body as we would understand it, and that partly our suffering comes from our misconception of self and body and how they relate. But, let's be honest, the idea that we have a body is really strong. and not to be overcome by some intellectual sleight of hand, right?

[32:51]

Beyond my misinterpretation of my personal experiences, the idea of the body is reinforced by the social discourse we have all grown up with, We all agree that we all have bodies and there's no doubt about it, so every conversation, every interaction with another person reinforces this idea. Our whole system of language is based on the metaphor of the body, which really is a metaphor. Most of our feelings and commonplace ideas about our lives are based on the metaphor of the body. The metaphor of the body is a thought so foundational to us that we can't even begin to know how to question it. So now we zoom back a few thousand years and now it's the night of the Buddha's enlightenment. Mara, the evil one, did not want the Buddha to awaken because Mara's

[34:07]

tricksterism depends on the illusion of the body and all the kind of human delusions and illusions. He didn't want anybody clearing this up. So what did Mara do to try to dissuade the Buddha from awakening? Mara realized that the most persuasive thing would be to attack the Buddha on the basis of the body. the first thing mara did was to tempt the buddha with various positive pleasant aspects of the body so you know beautiful women and you know food and all kinds of sensual delights why get awakened buddha just enjoy yourself you have the capacity to enjoy yourself don't don't bother with awakening when that didn't work Mara then used the opposite tact.

[35:09]

Let's threaten the body. Let's scare the Buddha out of awakening. So then all the demons and arrow shooters and club wielders appeared to threaten the Buddha. But again, the Buddha was not dissuaded from awakening. And Mara said, look at all this and all these minions behind me. The tempters. And the destroyers, these are my forces countervailing against your awakening. What are your forces? And the Buddha then, in one of the most famous moments in his story, touches the earth. And we see many beautiful Buddha statues with the Buddha touching the earth with one hand. And Buddha says, those are your minions, and here is my support.

[36:09]

I don't think he just meant the goddess who protects the earth. He was saying, the earth is my body. My body expresses earth, is produced and supported by earth, is made entirely of earth elements, and so nothing on earth, no matter how frightening, can threaten this indestructible earth body, even if it is broken up into a million pieces, it will remain, going home to its mother, who gave birth to it, who embraces it now and will always embrace it so there is nothing to fear ever. And with that, really, the rest was easy. and the Buddha awakened, and we remain grateful for that moment to the present day.

[37:15]

In the Mahayana Sutras, they talk about three bodies of the Buddha. The Dharmakaya body, truth body, is beyond measure, It's all-encompassing. It's perfect. It's beyond perception and concept. The sambhogakaya, the enjoyment body, the purified, perceivable body of perfect meditation and teaching, this is the body that's depicted in all the statues we see of Buddha. And finally, the nirmanakaya, the transient historical body that appears in our world for the purpose of teaching worldly beings like us, a regular person Buddha.

[38:22]

In Zen teaching, it's axiomatic that the ordinary human body that can be accessed in meditation practice when we breathe, when we feel its sensations, when we're sitting silently, that ordinary body is itself beyond the ordinary, corruptible human body. Dogen says, the true body is far beyond the world's dusts. And Hakuin, in his... famous song of Zazen, says this very body is the body of Buddha. And now we have some 300 or more years of science studying the human body and discovering that truly it is an amazing phenomenon.

[39:26]

How much we know now which points to us how much we don't know. I mean, the brain, for instance. How could the brain, you know, regulate this complex organism so perfectly? If anything goes wrong, the brain will adjust to all sorts of contingencies, produces thoughts, the brain does, literary works, skyscrapers, giant cities, social systems, the heart, the lungs, the cells, the DNA, the enormous knowledge and complex communication and movement that seem to occur effortlessly within every human body. My seven-year-old granddaughter walks, runs, jumps, shouts, sings.

[40:33]

Plays the piano. 25,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body, which if you stretched them out end to end would go around the globe. Every minute, blood flowing through these vessels, nurturing the body, renewing the body, letting go of everything extra in the body. The human body is a marvelous thing. And nobody figured it out. It was not created by artificial intelligence on a computer. There are no patents for it. Nobody owns the intellectual property of the body. Isn't that marvelous? It's totally free, this body. Nobody knows how it got here. Nobody knows where it's going. And then...

[41:36]

Never mind the body, but the consciousness associated with this body, we have no clue. No clue. But in our practice, especially in Soto Zen, which is such a simple-minded practice, there's nothing fancy about our practice. We just sit there and breathe, you know, and be there with our life. It's very physical practice, you know, even down to, as you all know from going to zazen instructions, here's how you walk in the room. Here's how you hold your hands. You don't just plop yourself down on your cushion as if it were nothing. You bow to the cushion. You pay attention to your body the minute you enter the zendo, through sitting and afterward. And when you're given zazen instruction, you're really mostly told about your spine and your mudra and your breath.

[42:45]

There's very little doctrine or spiritual ideas to be incorporated into the practice. Dogen's entire spiritual, so to speak, instructions for zazen is something like think, not thinking. Pretty much that's all he says. to sit so i'll finish with the last paragraph of the essay i've been skipping around and not exactly reading but sort of reading the essay here's the last paragraph one of the deepest themes in western philosophy beginning with plato probably before plato is that the world of appearance is not real. How could this world in which everything is falling apart be fundamentally real?

[43:54]

That's what they thought. There must be something else that is fundamentally real. And that's the job of the intellect, which is associated with the spirit. to carry us beyond this passing physical world to a perfected world of non-material form, purely mental or spiritual. And that's what Plato thought philosophy would do. And that was the task of philosophy and of religion. The kingdom of God, you know, is beyond this corrupt world. And this was the content, this was the theory behind all of Western thought in various ways, all the way up until the 20th century, when phenomenology, perhaps in part under the influence of Buddhism, which never did have a mind-body split like we've always had in the West, began to break it down.

[45:06]

And that was in the middle of the 20th century. So in our Earth-threatened time, when we must think and care about the future well-being of the planet, it is fitting that we begin to learn and enact the truth that has always been engraved on our very skins. That body, mind, spirit, and Earth are one expression, one concern, and one delight. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org.

[46:12]

And click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[46:17]

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