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 evening. I couldn't get through this without such a loving and kind sangha. I'm sure I did everything out of order again. And thank you, Abbot San, for helping me with figuring out which my ear is the correct one. Some years ago, and I wasn't present for this, but I was told that that a Tibetan teacher came to Zen Center and stayed for a little while and said to one of the leaders of our practice period here or our practice time here upon leaving, I said, yeah, I see that you throw everyone out into emptiness without any preliminary practices.

[01:24]

How do you get away with that? And there was some answer that was given. I guess the Tibetan teacher was satisfied and our teacher was satisfied and we went on our way. But tonight I'd like to take a look at that again and see if we shouldn't maybe not have preliminary or practices before we started the zazen, but that we do, that we do become aware of some of the other important parts of Mahayana Buddhism and the practice of Mahayana Buddhism as well as our central practice, our heart practice of zazen recently some of the other Buddhist sects have had some difficulties and my heart and our heart goes out to all of them and I make my little offering tonight in hopes that

[02:56]

we can mitigate that happening to our sangha and help heal those sanghas that have been hurt in any way. May all beings be happy. I'm actually going to... do this out of order. This is a typical, I wad everything up and put it into my pocket instead of folding it neatly like a good Zen student should. I think that one of the most important preliminary practices that one can do when one is practicing Zazen or concurrently to your beginning your Zazen or At Beginner's Mind Temple, there is no preliminary. We continue to do these beginner's practices throughout the rest of our life.

[04:10]

And I think one of the ones that I would recommend that everyone do is to do full prostrations. The Tibetan sects or some of the Tibetan sects do as many as 10,000 before they move on to any next practice. Some of the Korean Zen groups do 108 every morning at morning service. Can you imagine doing 108 here before we do morning service? Has anybody done that? Anybody here? You have? Yeah, how is it? Hard. Hard. Do they do them together or do they just do them together?

[05:17]

Wake is a matter of birth and death. Permanence is all around us. Don't waste this life. And then eight more mouths and then you're sick. No chanting. Everybody goes to sleep. I'm sure of this. And everybody knows why they're sitting. I think it's really a good practice. undertook for a year to do 108 bows a day. I didn't do them all at once, I must admit, but I did do 108 bows every day without falter. Sometimes I would do nine at a time, but sometimes I would do all the 108 at once. But I got through the entire 108 every day. And I'm going to start that practice again. I'm going to start doing 108 bows a day.

[06:17]

One of the things I think that happens when you do a large number of prostations, it's kind of active. You're neither in duality or non-duality, or perhaps it's active non-duality. I don't want to get too technical, but... the opportunity to do them, you're not thinking about much except you're aching quadriceps or hamstrings. It's a devotional practice that you can offer to yourself, to your sangha, to the three treasures, to the Dharma, to Buddha and all his forms. And I think it also, at least according to one of Suzuki Roshi's teachers, so on, it eliminates some stubbornness that we have as humans.

[07:33]

So it does... It does have value in many different ways. And I would really recommend doing prostrations. And you can do them by yourself in your room. I know both of the last two Enos pretty well, and I know that they've both seen me not do kin him no matter what they have said. And I often sneak out and come up here and bow between the morning periods. You can do them with a friend. It's nice to do them with a friend or with a group. There's more power in doing them with other people, just like there's more power in sitting zazen as a sangha.

[08:37]

The next practice that I would recommend is taking refuge in the three treasures. You know, we do take refuge in the three treasures during the sashim. We take refuge in the three treasures a couple of times a day. But heartfelt... taking refuge, giving yourself up to the three treasures, to Buddha, Dharma, and this wonderful Sangha over and over again throughout the day, taking the time to stop and take refuge is a pretty powerful practice. The third practice that I would recommend is studying the sandokai, the merging of difference and unity.

[09:43]

I think we... So when you sit in the zendo, you sit in either shikintaza or you're counting, and hopefully you're sitting in a state where... unless you're dreaming, you're sitting in a state of non-duality. And even if you're dreaming, if you're falling asleep in the right way, it's pretty non-dual. Just listening to the cars going by tonight, you know, you can... In the mornings, we chant, Nin Nin a couple of times. If you've read any of Sekeda's books, the Nin's are essentially phenomena.

[10:51]

The first Nin is when you perceive the sound, the light, the feeling, the touch, the taste. But for the purposes of this little demonstration, I'll do this. will use sound. And the first Nen will be... And then the second Nen will be... That was a car. And the third Nen would be... I just heard a car. And what Sekeduk tries to recommend that you do in your... shikantaza or your zazen is to stay with that first nin where you're just experiencing or if it's pain in your little toe it's owie or not even owie it's the impulse of the nerves along the line because owie is the second nin so

[12:03]

Going back to the Sandokai, the difference is pretty obvious. We, in our Western culture, have the difference shown to us all the time. But the unity comes from our personal experience of these various nens, these various phenomenas. And when you study the Sandokai, it's a treat and it's eye-opening to study Suzuki Roshi's book, Branching Streams Slow in the Darkness. It's traditional among Zen teachers. or it's been told to me, I don't know if this is true, but it's traditional among Zen masters to teach the Sandokai as one of the last things that they do in their life.

[13:08]

And certainly, Suzuki Roshi's teaching and the way that book was presented, Branching Streams, Flow in the Darkness, is the zenith of much of his teaching is to be savored and enjoyed. And I recommend it strongly. And the fourth is studying Ginjo Koan, because, you know, Ginjo Koan right away mixes up the difference of, the merging of difference and unity. the difference of self and others of Buddhas and sentient beings. And there's a lot of good classes here and great books that are written from Okamorasan to the book that Mel and Michael, and I'm not sure who else,

[14:27]

was the editors of, do you know Blanche? It just came out recently. There's more than one book on the Genjo Koan that you will find explains it in a way that you will enjoy it and understand. And then the fifth is studying the precepts. And when you study the precepts, important for you not to study the precepts only as um from the subjective side of do not take what is not given but also from the objective side of you can't be given anything you can't take anything it's already given to you um

[15:29]

So again, there's another opportunity to look at the merging of difference and unity right there. In my original thoughts for this talk, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Fox Koan and more than about the Fox Koan, how Dogen wrote about the fox co-on and changed his mind or perhaps mitigated his first fascicle because he wrote two fascicles on the fox, the fox co-on. My wife is here and I know that I have driven her nuts for 40 or 50 years reading Paul Reps and worse in bed and trying to get her to react to Zen bones, Zen flesh.

[16:33]

or whatever I was reading. I think I was reading something to her today that she just rolled her eyes and walked off into the other room, which is probably the appropriate response. But the Foxconn goes something like this. Every time that Pai Chang spoke to his monks, there was an old man at the back of the room, and he would leave at the end with the rest of the monks. And then one day he finally stayed, and he said to Pai Chang, he said, Many kalpas ago, during the period of Kasyapa Buddha, I was the priest on this mountain, and I was asked whether... a man of great understanding was mitigated or fell into cause and effect or not.

[17:42]

And I answered that he did not fall into cause and effect. And because I gave the wrong answer, sometimes it's translated as wrong. Sometimes it's translated as incorrect. Sometimes it's translated as something that, would be a synonym for just not quite right. Because I gave the wrong answer, I was condemned to 500 lives as a fox. And if you will now say the turning word, I will be... from this fox body and won't have to suffer anymore as a fox. So, Pai Chang of the present said, a man of great practice is not mitigated, is not obscured by cause and effect.

[19:00]

not let cause and effect obscure one. There's many translations and I don't really like any of them. A man of great cause and effect, a man of great practice does not really make the mistake of ignoring cause and effect. I think that's the translation that is used in Hawaii. It really doesn't matter because most of the commentaries, including the commentary in the Mamankin, are written from a point of view of the absolute, from the point of view of... of emptiness. Dogen wrote two fascicles, one in 1244, he wrote great practice or daishin go.

[20:06]

And in that he kind of agreed with the crowd that, yeah, this was just two sides of the same coin falling and not falling into error here was pretty much the same. But then at the end of his life, he went to Kamakura probably to seek a cure for whatever was ailing him. And at that time, the descendants of Isai, who had been Dogen's original teacher, were teaching in Kamakura and were teaching the samurai who were facing imminent danger from an invasion of the Mongol hordes. I think it was Kublai Khan that was after Japan at that point, but it may have been one of his successors. And they were giving everyone a crash course on Zen Buddhism and emptiness, and the crash course was emptiness.

[21:17]

And of course the samurai were running around misbehaving as they would anyway, and probably getting into fights and justifying it by saying, well, it's all just emptiness anyway. And so Dogen went back to Eheiji and wrote Jin Shin Inga or Shin Jin Inga, depending on the collection of Shobo Genzo that you have. And in that fascicle, he condemns the use of the Fox Koan to justify bad behavior that's continued through Japanese nationalism, the samurai period, a lot of the Renzi bad behavior, the World War II stuff, social discrimination, other trends.

[22:38]

I think I would even add misogyny to this. Some scholars would argue that with traditional interpretations of the Fox Koan, these things are just two sides of the same koan, not koan, but koan, excuse me. And by being just two sides of the same koan, they can be again, act out their bad behavior. And I think the antidote to that bad behavior was those practices we talked about in the beginning. Prostrations, taking refuge, studying the Sandokai, studying the Ginjo Koan. Dogen himself saw the

[23:49]

of falling too much into emptiness and too much into non-duality and what it would cause. And I think we need to recognize that again and fight against it. I don't really have much else to say this evening. But I'm happy to entertain as many questions as y'all have. Please, bring me your questions. Yes, sir. Well, I do. First of all, thank you. You're welcome. It seems to be coming out quite often for me. I think that's the third or fourth time of the conversation. And then you can answer one of those other things. That is with the, the Towsam, to go find a dead box at the bottom of a cliff and to prepare a funeral for a teacher, a priest, and then they go, okay, explain that part to you.

[25:07]

Dogen takes for a great issue with that in both of the fascicles. He thinks that that was a mistake that you would provide a full priestly Buddhist funeral for a non-ordained priest or non-ordained entity. So, I don't know if that's what you're looking for. If you're looking for, if he just found a... He just used his stick, which is a lot of the pictures to show him pushing his rock over and coming up with a fox underneath, a dead fox underneath the rock. But Dogen also talks about a fox being unable to remember that he's actually living 500 lives. I think...

[26:12]

it's looked at more mythologically than it is as an actual description of fact. And I think another thing to remember is that the fox itself is a trickster animal in Asia, much like the coyote is in the Indian culture here in the Western United States. Do you have a question? He said the folks wouldn't remember his lifetimes. How does the priest remember his lifetimes? Good question. Perhaps this priest was merely speculating.

[27:12]

No, I do one on my tombstone. Shinkichi Takahashi is a great poet. He died a few years ago and he has one great poem that I like and I'm going to put it in my trust that everybody gets nothing unless I get this on my tombstone and that is Just say he's out back in five billion years. I don't know if that answers your question or not, but I like saying it. You had a question? What do you, how do you understand taking refuge in Islam since you recommended it? To say wholeheartedly would not be enough.

[28:16]

It would understate it. Completely. Almost like giving myself up to the Buddha Sangha and Dharma and erasing my personality. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[29:08]

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