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. Thank you, everyone, for being here in person and in person on Zoom. I'd like to thank... Anna Atanta for inviting me to speak and for my teacher, Paul Howard. Thank you very much for the guidance and support. Recently, a student was here in this room for Zazen Kai and asked a question of Paul Haller that had to do with directed attention and receptive attention.

[01:07]

And the question was about what is the relationship between those two things? You know, when does one weigh more heavily than the other and how should that matter for us in our practice? And Paul's response was... well, this is the yoga of inquiry. And I'd never heard that before. He's been my teacher for a long time, and I never quite heard that. And so I became really interested in that conversation, and it inspired something in me. And so I've been sitting with what it means that we have questions. specifically, and what is the relationship of inquiry to our practice. And so I've been kind of reflecting on my own practice as a student of Soto Zen, and in line with this inquiry of the yoga of inquiry, and the question that was asked,

[02:25]

I'm holding in my heart as I ask this question a phrase from the Jewel Mir Samadhi subtly included within the true inquiry and response come up together and investigating what that has meant for me. Um... I'm going to pass around a photograph of my son and myself. He's four. I'm about 25. And when he was very young and learning how to speak, there were a few words that he would kind of invent and that would stick around for a while. And so he would see, for example, a helicopter and get very excited. say, Haka Doctor. And I knew what Haka Doctor was, and he knew what Haka Doctor was.

[03:29]

And other adults would say, oh, that's so adorable. He's learning how to speak. Not quite there. He can't quite get it yet. But there's another way of thinking about it, which is that he's He is somewhere before language has fully taken up his mind. And so somewhere between experience and the word, in his mind, it's something like haka-daka, haka-daka, haka-daka, haka-daka. And it has nothing to do with the Latin word helix for spiral, which is... where adults came up with the word. Yeah, so it's not a word yet because it's not separate from the thing in the way that words are.

[04:36]

And so the photograph that I'm passing around is if he's four. And you can't see it, but we're standing in front of a giant red fire engine. And the hand that my son is holding is the fireman. And the fireman has just taken my son on a tour of the firehouse with all of the boots and the pole and the ladders and... Fire engine to a little boy is like this gigantic machine that you walk inside of. It was really quite something. And the camera zoomed in on his face. So that's why you can't see the fire truck is because there's this, you know, there was something going on there that was intriguing to say the least. He's not simply smiling for the camera.

[05:39]

What I see in his face is a very quiet, delighted inquiry. And I'm looking at him very intently. I know this feeling that he has and I'm all over it. I just can't get enough of this Buddha child. And it's as though in my own intensity there, very soft and quiet. I'm asking the question, what is it that does come? In appreciation of it and the feeling for it, it is a question, a very alive question, that connects me to my son in that moment. In a moment like this, there's the question, and that's all there is. It's enough. And this is a... a great mystery, if not the great mystery of life.

[06:41]

What inquiry is and where it leads us matters greatly. Because of our habitual behavior to see that the world yields to our inquiry and is a resource for us, I learned upon getting out of Tassajara for seven years that we're now living in the Anthropocene. that hadn't really quite taken hold the way that it has now. And I think we're feeling it in that every inch of the globe is surveyed. The natural forces of extreme weather are basically doing us in. And just like the Ice Age, the Anthropocene will end to leave us all a mass of undifferentiated geological strata. This mind that can only see a world for itself is in dramatic contrast to what I see in this photograph.

[07:46]

There's a subtle spirit of inquiry that expands us. It's as the entire world, complete with no need for explanation or use. Nothing is gained. All alienation is ended. In the inquiring spirit of that kind of great mystery, the entire world is one with expanding mind and is profoundly felt as the entire support and vitality of our life. I found a poem in this very dear few weeks of asking these questions. by Wallace Stevens, called The Question and the Remark. And I found it because others and teachers have referred to it. Robert Aitken and Tygen Layton I know of, and because they did, I'm sure many others have, as I am now.

[08:49]

So, Wallace Stevens, The Question and the Remark. In the weed of summer comes this green sprout, why? The sun aches and ails and then returns, hello, upon the horizon amid adult infantilage. It means childishness. Its fire fails to pierce the vision that beholds it, fails to destroy the antique acceptances, except that the grandson sees it as it is. Peter, the voyant prophet. or seer, who says, Mother, what is that? The object that rises with so much rhetoric, but not for him. His question is complete. It is the question of what he is capable. It is the extreme, the expert at being about age two.

[09:53]

He will never ride the red horse she describes. His question is complete because it contains his utmost statement. It is his own array, his own pageant and procession and display. As far as nothingness permits, hear him. He does not say, mother, my mother, who are you? The way the drowsy infant old men do. What this poem evokes for me is that there are different ways of questioning, different ways of relating to inquiry. There's the question that is complete in its thusness. His question is complete because it contains his utmost statement.

[10:55]

It is his own array, his own pageant and procession and display. As far as nothingness permits, hear him. And there's also a mode of inquiry that is led by conventional thought. And I'm interested in both of these. What I see in the photograph of a child... is that reaching beyond the limits of conventional thought, the question, what, is the illumination of the entire world? There's a profound trust, both in the support and the joyful authority of one's own being as something beyond the self. And so, inspired by Paul's simple mentioning of a yoga of inquiry, I've been reflecting on this. Usually in Zen we think of questions and what will come up is koan practice.

[12:02]

But as one 17th century Japanese teacher Bankai describes it, he strived to realize Buddha mind in koan study and found it was more helpful for him to ask our own questions in our own ordinary everyday language rather than in borrowed words. He also felt that it's unfortunate that in Koran practice one might be encouraged to think that unless they raise a great ball of doubt and break through it, there can't be any progress in Zen. The feeling here is that people can get tangled up in doubt, be saddled with doubt, in Bankai's words, and that this can actually stand in the way of Buddha nature. I haven't myself practiced with koans, but I can say that within our tradition, as I've experienced it, there is a role for inquiry and that it can be helpful, helpful to investigate this thoroughly.

[13:05]

I'm smiling because those are Dogen's words and he says it a lot. And it's actually surprising how much he says it. We can count things now so easily with computers. So I did. And it shows up 136 times in the show Dogenzo. Sazen shows up 120. So this interests me. And sometimes when you hear the words don't know mind, it might be easy to associate it with passivity. But in Dogen's guidance, there is agency. And so a good question might be this, for the purposes of this Dharma talk. Given that there is the teaching of no self, where does all this agency come from and what is the power of inquiry within it? As people were wanting to introduce Zen to the secular modern world of the 20th century, they saw that

[14:17]

questions were really important. And so as a way of introducing this new old religion, the role of the question comes up. Keijo Nishitani wrote, true seekers do not ask why religion, as though religion is something that could provide for them in some way. but ask instead, what is the meaning of my life? When we have become a question to ourselves, the religious quest awakens within us. And Tygen Leighton, there is no faith without questioning. Faith that is allergic to questioning is just fundamental blind dogma. He also further explains that faith... To doubt or question means being willing to be a question ourselves and that we aim to be the question we are. There's a whole lot of ways we are actually practicing with questions in the course of the ordinary day in our life.

[15:30]

But there's a formal event that I find to be really fascinating, and that's the Shosan ceremony that we hold during practice periods. It's a formal event. And for that formal event, students are given maybe a few hours only to come up with a question that they will ask during the ceremony. So this is the form. And one by one, the students all come. to ask a question of the teacher who has been leading the practice period. What happens often enough is that there'll be one or two people who had a really difficult time and wound up feeling that they just didn't have a question. So what does it mean to not have a question? What's going on? when you don't have a question.

[16:33]

And I've experienced something close to that in preparing for these ceremonies, and I did a lot of them over my time at Tassar. I would, in those few hours, be close to a question, and then by the time I'd settled on the question, it seemed as though I'd... come up with the answer at the same time. It's like the performance of, you know, making up a question was coming up with its own answers. And it was a delightful process. I mean, you know, I had so many wonderful insights and, you know, it was very consuming. And on days like that, I might come to the Shosan ceremony with something. I discarded questions. You know, that's not a good one. That's not a good one. I already know the answer. And so then I would come with a kind of open question, you know, something that at least was satisfying as an open question and was real in my inquiry at the moment.

[17:45]

But there was a desire in me to have like a real question, you know, like what is a real question and why are these ones being discarded? So there's a way in which I was seeing through my own behavior. I was observing something. And here's how someone else describes this kind of question. The main point of this kind of question is to achieve a concentration of a particular array of presuppositions, assumptions, into one big pleasantry. And that was true. These were pleasantries. And so I spend the little time I have disposing of questions that turn out to be not questions at all and finally setting on a question that feels open enough as an open question. But the question is so loaded with my own understanding that really I still have a hidden answer.

[18:51]

And so it's more of a query than a question. And in asking that question, I'm asking for a response to my question that sheds light on my query. And the response from the teacher is likely to challenge my own answer because they know this game. It may not be so hidden in the question that I'm asking. This is the sense of query as in to put to question. It's a fascinating and revealing process, this act of questioning. In classical philosophy, there's something called Menos Paradox. And it goes something like this. A. If you know what you're looking for, inquiry is unnecessary. B. If you don't know what you're looking for, inquiry is impossible.

[19:53]

Therefore, inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible. And expressed another way, how can I ask about something if I have to know about it in order to ask, so I don't really need to ask at all? Or, I don't know about it, so how can I ask? Let me submit to you that this paradox, And the kind of artful questioning that I describe above is not what is meant by the words subtly included within the true inquiry and response come up together. That's not it. And that's something of what I felt when I say that I could see through myself when I was coming up with these questions that had answers. It were like summoning their own answers for me. I think that that's actually what's meant by a tethered cult and a trapped rat.

[20:58]

The ancient sages grieved for them. In Shosan ceremonies, I've never been unhappy with the answers I've received, but I have had to sort through an unhappiness with my own questions, which is interesting. This comes from the desire, as I said earlier, to ask the real question. Um... And it's familiar to me, this real question, in the way that seeing that expression on my face was familiar to me and captured an intensity from me. What is it that thus comes? So sometimes you may have been in a classroom or with a group of people and there's a conversation. someone is inspired to say with real gravity and seriousness in such a way that the room is captured by it. Now that's a real question.

[22:00]

Maybe you've been in such a place. It also comes in a kind of negative, you know, like now that's the real question in an almost snarky way, you know, as though if there were the answer to that, The farce would be undone. That's interesting, too, that the same phrase can hang together in these different ways. But even with real questions, some are more real than others. There's no response to a real question. When a question arises from the open presentness of inquiry, it has its own authority that is even beyond the one who is asking. There's no demand, really. My experience of real questions is that they are a palpable event for oneself and others, and I've only experienced them with others, in fact.

[23:09]

I've never experienced a real question by myself. A real question fills the body and thickens the air with an active power in a complete pause, in its suspension of thought, because all of the usual workings of the mind are being undone by it. You can't repeat a real question. In fact, I have not repeated any questions here because it's not the content but the functioning that matters. And the functioning of a real question is the most profound of all. And what is meant by a great ball of doubt? It is what is meant by a great ball of doubt. And to ask it is to be transformation and to be transformed by it on that very spot. Inspired by the yoga of inquiry, I've lately been drawn to a gentler, quieter, and unspoken practice with questions.

[24:26]

It's my experience that the who, what, where, when, how, and why of the questions that a journalist is required to ask in order to bring the news include some words that bring us closer to our Buddha nature. to suchness, thusness, and some that do not. As well as Stevens does in the palm above, I'm very attracted to the question, what? This is partially because of the newness of my job as plant manager. For example, I can't get to the how without the what. If I'm going to patch a hole in the ceiling, I have to explore what drywall is. And I may have to do this more than once in order to get to the hell of it. This makes what rather primary in simple, practical terms. But there's another primariness to what that I have been thoroughly enjoying.

[25:32]

No matter how long... We've been sitting as in for how many years, how many weeks, how many days. It's helpful to have those reminders that return us. That's a word that's frequently used, you know, to return. And so... Even in the first day of Zazan instruction, often focusing on the breath and returning to the breath as an encouragement and a practical guide is offered. And this has been really helpful for me as someone who reads a lot. And, you know, I like that. I like to make sense of my world. in my understanding and through the understanding of others, I've found epiphany in the expression of other people's understandings as my own.

[26:44]

That's a thing. And so returning to the breath has always been an important return to the body for me. And when I was first taught Zazen, the emphasis was that Zazen is a body practice, and it was a strategy, particularly for a culture that enjoys a kind of fluency of mind in educated thought. And people who are attracted to Zen are often such people. And so this was important for me to return to the body as a way of relieving myself from monkey mind. And so still today, of course, I return to my breath.

[27:54]

In recent days, I have, in the course of the day, in the same way that one returns to the breath and just that momentary reflex, been asking, what? At any given moment. I've found it a helpful way to extend zazen in my daily life. And I won't say what happens other than that there is a vividness. And that I think this gentle way is also what is meant by the phrase inquiry and response come up together. And so I'll close just with a section of the poem from Wallace Stevens. The child who says, Mother, what is that?

[28:58]

the object that rises with so much rhetoric, but not for them. Their question is complete. It is the question of what they are capable. It is the extreme, the expert of being about age two. Their question is complete because it contains their utmost statement. It is their own array, their own pageant and procession and display. As far as nothing permits, hear them. Thank you.

[29:59]

May we fully enjoy the Dorma.

[30:02]

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