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 morning. My name is Susan O'Connell. I'm a priest here at San Francisco Zen Center. I'm in my 20th year of residency. I came for two months. And right now I'm currently serving as the president of San Francisco Zen Center. Welcome. How many of you, this is your first time at Beginner's Mind Temple? Oh, oh, oh, oh. It'd be interesting to find out how you heard and what brought you, but that's another talk. Maybe not, though.

[01:01]

We'll see. So this morning I'm going to try to walk a tightrope, maybe talk a tightrope between matters we consider to be in the realm of the relative and bifurcated reality and what we call the world of non-dual ultimate reality. I'm going to talk about enlightenment and the internet. What's important to us is we want the real thing. But are we like Don Draper? That's a joke. Those of you who saw the last episode of Mad Men. For him, the real thing was a Coca-Cola advertisement. It's the real thing, right?

[02:02]

But I hope we're not like Don Draper, and we want the real, real thing, but how will we know if it's real? And how do we share what's real in an authentic way? Here at San Francisco Zen Center, we've been stumbling about in the realm of comparisons. around the subject of offering teachings on the internet. The question is, are the teachings and the relationship as it's offered online, are they real or not? Is it warm hand to warm hand? We can look at this question in the realm of the relative and in the realm of the absolute. In the relative world, we get stuck by putting reality into good and bad, authentic and ersatz.

[03:10]

In the realm of the absolute, we say, words do not touch it. We say to open the mind to what is already in front of us and embody the mystery. And we like to think that that is authentic. So I'm gonna pull something very relative out my watch. This will tell me how we're doing in relative reality. So is this authenticity that we cherish, support, train in, talk about, promote maybe? Is this based on the methodology of what the offering is? Is the mystery hampered by the delivery method?

[04:17]

Is it in complete alignment? Does it need to be? Isn't the relative included in the absolute? Isn't the absolute included in the relative? And how much of this question is related to the clinging to our ideas and the pathways of change? And how do you relate to this? This is an issue we're talking about here at Zen Center, but what's your relationship? Maybe you care about online teachings and internet, and maybe you care a lot about that. But maybe you're in the process of change yourself. Maybe you're considering what is authentic.

[05:25]

What's of value to you? What's the essence of your way? And what is habit and comfort and ego and fear? Just a little aside. There's a book that's been recommended to me by several people over time, but a lot recently, called Reinventing Organizations. It's about kind of enlightened governance. I see some of you smiling. been exposed to these ideas, and I've just started to read it. For me, reading books about this kind of thing is not my way. I'm a very intuitive person, and the person who was president of Zen Center before me read lots of books on management and change and shared them with me, and I read one. I read one chapter of one.

[06:27]

And I liked what it said, and that was enough, and so then moving right along. But I thought, well, maybe, you know, now that I'm in this room, maybe I should read more books about this situation. So I read a little bit. But what I did is I actually didn't read the book. I went to the index, and I checked out to see what it said about change management. So what's an enlightened way to be working with change management? And I expected, you know, a couple chapters on it, there was one listing. It was like a paragraph in the middle of a page. And the author of this book about enlightened organizations says, enlightened organizations do not need to manage change from above. And this is because living systems have an innate capacity to sense the changes in their environment and to adapt. from within. One could say that Buddhism is a living system.

[07:40]

I think it is. I think it's why it's here after 25, 2600 years. And this living system has adopted, adapted in each country and culture and era. I've long thought that there are three important changes that have occurred as Zen, in particular, which is what I'm the most familiar with, has come to the West, has come to the West and started blossoming in the West. And those things are, one of them is integration of men and women in parity, in terms of both training and authorization to teach. This is, personally, I have benefited totally from this shift that happened.

[08:45]

And I think San Francisco Zen Center is one of the leaders in this shift, in this parity of men and women, in training everyone the same. It didn't happen at first. It happened as it hit the ground here. in the 60s and 70s and 80s. And as a living organism, didn't resist that. It could have. There could have been resistance, and there was some. And it comes up occasionally because it's in our karmic conditions, our cultural karmic conditions, right? But there was flexibility. It moved. And that's a shift that's happened. I think the use of the vocabulary of Western psychology to help us to relate to the ancient philosophical teachings.

[09:45]

So to make a bridge, to draw a line from here to there. They're not exactly the same, but it's a very inviting doorway into the teachings. We had a talk last night by... David Bradshaw, who really knows this, so I am not going to try to go there on my own. Zen and therapy and the relationship between psychotherapy and practice and et cetera. So there's a lot to read about this, a lot of very wonderful teachings on what is and isn't the role of therapeutic relationship within Zen practice. but it's a doorway and it's an adaptation and it's a taking of a language that's helped people come to the ancient psychological teachings of how the mind functions and what the ego is and what the self is.

[10:46]

And then this collaboration with science to kind of quiet the minds who are a bit maybe frightened by the mystical realities that arise in spiritual practice. It's a balance. What did he say last night? He said something, David Brasher said something about Buddhism has become more scientific, but not because Buddhism has changed. It's because science has changed. Science now is actually looking at some of the things that Buddhism has been trying to describe. centuries. So this allowing of a kind of a mind into practice that's coming from a show it, prove it to me, I want facts, show me the facts, ma'am, has not been resisted. And in fact, is encouraged.

[11:49]

It's an encouragement. It's another doorway. where this adaptation, this living, breathing understanding of the way life is, has allowed these, I don't know, mutations, shape changing. And maybe some of you in this room are here because of one of those three things. You've felt encouraged as a woman. You see women teachers sitting here. with robes just the same size as the guys. Mine's a little shorter. Or you've been sort of in your therapeutic journey, reached a point where you see maybe where it can help and where it can't help. What are the limitations? And then it's an easy bridge over to taking that next step into investigating the maybe more esoteric and spiritual realm of your questions about who am I in this life?

[13:02]

What is this life? Or maybe you probably aren't a scientist because most of them are at the San Francisco State University conference today which is going on which is about mindfulness and compassion and a lot of people are giving papers and talking about ways of approaching what we know as practice and what they see in a lot of different ways. But maybe some of you are scientists and maybe you feel comforted that there's a meeting of the rational and the mystical. Maybe there's a part of your mind that feels the need for the balance of this way of being scientific. So in the midst of these three benefits or three shifts that I've mentioned, and there are others that might be important to you, I now wonder if the fourth change...

[14:10]

might be the relationship of Buddhism with electronic communications. The internet. Which is, I will say today, none other than our attempt to replicate how life actually is. It may be kind of a stumbling attempt. I think it's rather elegant, but... Of course, the way life actually is is almost infinitely subtle. We can't quite get our minds around it. But we can talk about it in terms of everything is connected, right? We all are creating each other all the time. That's the positivist way of talking about emptiness. Emptiness being there is no separate, stand-alone self. The other way of talking about it is everything is connected.

[15:17]

And what is the internet? Excuse me? Something like that. Something going in that direction. Something manifesting. It's like maybe it's when a child first does a finger painting of his house. Maybe it's just that. It's a finger painting of the way we are actually functioning with each other all the time. Maybe it's more elegant. Maybe it's a Van Gogh. I don't know. I don't know. Some of you will be alive to see it shift in many, many, many ways. Ways we can't think now. We couldn't think this before it happened. But this is the way we think. That's the Internet. It's the way things happen, which is altogether completely connected. Now, there are things that aren't connected to the Internet, and it's not a perfect metaphor, but I just wonder, here it is, arising as a manifestation out of, you know, perhaps the great benefits of being a Western culture that has, for some people, some of the basic needs met, so that the kind of thinking that can go on is out of the realm of survival,

[16:37]

And then it allows to sort of explore these realms that are more optional, in a way. But here it is arising as Buddhism is arising in the West. Hmm. Interesting, don't you think? And... I propose we want what is real. We want our hunger to be satisfied. Now I'm going to do something that's not so easy to do in a Dharma talk. I'm going to bring in Dogen. Dogen Zenji, who is an amazingly energetic bright, poetic Zen teacher, philosopher, writer, poet, who lived 750, 800 years ago in Japan, and is seen as the founder of the Soto School of Zen.

[17:52]

He's written many, many things, and one of the fascicles in a book called Shobogenzo is called Gabbio, or Painted Rice Cake. I'm going to talk about this for a few minutes. One of the things about Dogen is that, which I love, is that wherever you stand, wherever you try to put your feet, he pulls the rug out. The rug is constantly, for me, as I study and I try to work with the flow of what he's showing us, I'll settle and I'll think that, oh, that's it. And then the next thing he says is upside down. So that's what you're going to hear a little bit of. So in this fascicle, Dogen basically challenged the notion that there are two separate realities, absolute and relative.

[19:03]

And he does this... he takes a phrase which at the time when he was writing was really well known, and it reflected a certain understanding. And that phrase was, a painting of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger. So that statement was usually used as a caution, that the teachings should not be taken for the reality to which they point. It's the same spirit of saying, you know, don't take the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself. But Dogen, in his understanding, any apparent gap between a painted rice cake and our idea of a real rice cake needs to be closed.

[20:04]

He ventures the idea that all things are painted. So just let that sit with your body and mind for a second. All things are painted. It feels a little uncomfortable, doesn't it? Don't you want something to be real? Don't you have a hunger for something that isn't painted? All things are painted, he says. And therefore, and this is a line from a scholar, Heejin Kim, a Dogen scholar. Heejin Kim says what Dogen is saying. All beings and all things as painted pictures are equal in spiritual status. Relative in the absolute of all things is equal. There's one other talk on the internet on the painted rice cake that I found, and a teacher named Dennis Keegan, who has recently passed away, talks about this, and he says something I think very interesting.

[21:22]

He says, the so-called absolute is privileged over the so-called relative. And the teaching of two truths, so I'm not going to go into this, but the two truths are there's Relative reality, where we're separate and unique and individual, and there's absolute reality, where there are no distinctions. That's very simplistic, excuse me for doing that. But, so therefore, he says, because the absolute is sometimes privileged over the relative, the teaching of two truths becomes a teaching of one truth and one falsehood. Right? Right? And this is precisely the kind of thinking that Dogen attempts to correct by helping us see how we paint both elements in each of those dualities, pairs of dualities.

[22:22]

He goes on to say, the ultimate does not hide behind or below the conventional. It's not some real rice cake devoid of any painting. So this kind of a teaching, I'm going to also say, if you hold to what I just said as true, that's not what I recommend. Dogen's instructions to me are always meditation instructions. He heads me towards meditation. a wall. And then he pulls the wall away. So where we are deluded, we will find where we are deluded when we're challenged by teachings like this.

[23:26]

What are we holding on to? What do we see with this teaching that we're holding on to? Dogen goes on to say, canning of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger. This statement, some say this statement means that studying the sutras and the commentaries does not nourish true wisdom, or to study the sutras is not the way of complete enlightenment, or to meet with a teacher online is not authentic. He didn't say that. However, To think that this statement means that expedient teachings are useless is a great mistake, says Zen Master Dogen. Expedient means. Is the internet an expedient mean? Is the Dharma harmed or obstructed by the vehicle of its delivery?

[24:33]

Is it changed? Duggan goes on to say in the fascicle, a painted rice cake includes herb rice cakes, milk rice cakes, toasted rice cakes, millet rice cakes. I would add it also includes paint and water and hands and eyes. A painting is all-inclusive. A rice cake. is all inclusive. All things include all things. Does not satisfy hunger, according to Dogen, means that even if you were to eat a painted rice cake, it would never put an end to this hunger.

[25:42]

Rice cakes are not separate from hunger. Rice cakes are not separate from rice cakes. And I ask you again, as I asked in the beginning, what is this hunger? This hunger for something real? Is it a hunger for something to hold on to? Is it a specific something you think is going to help you? What is this hunger? What brought you here today? What are you hungry for? Besides cookies and really nice vegetarian lunch. When we talk about teachings, Zen teachings being transmitted

[26:44]

warm hand to warm hand. And when we have a clear idea about what this is, we think there's a preferred way to do it. But what is warm? Warm is just a word. is warm? How important is limbic resonance with the being? How important is it that we are in this room and those people, hello, who are watching, who are in this room, how is this for you? Are you missing something? What are you missing? Let's find out. Let's not assume. This is a moment for exploration, for creativity.

[27:50]

What is it? Maybe you could, those of you who are listening to this, either live or later, write me. Let me know if something's missing. Really interested to know. So, I am not saying that I have a preference for warm hand, but I am not also saying that I do not have a preference for warm hand to warm hand. I am presenting this as a way of thinking about this. I'm trying to work with my own, I'm not saying I don't have a preference, of course I have a preference, but I'm working with what it would be like to not have a preference. And I'm suggesting this talk for that. purpose for all of us. Because I suspect that once we really, really look at this deep down, we go to the bottom as far as we can go, what happens for me is when there are opposites, when there are two different ideas, I'm going to tell you about a process, and it won't seem like it fits, but it really, really does.

[29:12]

I sometimes get in conversations with people where we have different ideas, strongly held different ideas, and we get stuck. So several times recently I've tried this experiment, and one time the other person was actually agreed to do it with me, and the other time, another person didn't agree to do it, but I tried it anyway. So the experiment is, when someone has a different idea, to actually take that idea into your body and mind to such an extent that your own idea is dissolved. Totally accept the other idea. Not like, well, yeah, but it could be a little bit better if it were more like the way I think. Really let it into your body and mind. And what happens is your mind changes. Your idea is, for a moment or longer, erased.

[30:14]

It's like a different shape is in there. A different shape is trying to get in and manifest itself in your body and mind. It's not your natural idea. It's some other idea. But there it is. And don't worry, because after a moment, your idea will come back, particularly if you've been in this very strongly held situation. It's going to come back. There are a lot of causes for that idea, right? It doesn't totally erase, but for a moment, it allows a different shape. in our mind. If the other person also does that, I've found, and even if they don't, because it's happened in both situations for me, you'll be sitting there, you'll take the other idea, oh, and it's like scary and you don't want to do it, but you do. And out of that situation, a brand new idea comes. Brand new. that has the shape, it has a new shape, it has a shape and a flavor and a respect for the other opinion, an embodiment.

[31:23]

You're not resisting it much because you've actually ingested it. It's been in your body. You've owned it. You've held it. You've nurtured it even for a moment. And out of that comes a new idea. So this kind of discussion about... internet and teachings and ultimate and relative, I would say the answer, the response, will most likely be some way of working with this that isn't even in the room right now. Some new, you know, a maturation of a new idea that will hold within it all of the wholesome elements of both of the ideas. So, going back to Dogen and his fascicle, he says, to paint a person, we use the five skandhas and the four great elements.

[32:28]

To paint a Buddha, we use a lump of earth and the 32 marks and a blade of grass and the cultivation of wisdom for eons. Isn't that beautiful? All Buddhas are painted Buddhas. All painted Buddhas are actual Buddhas. All persons are painted, and all persons are actual persons, which is form and which is mind. real, not real, two ideas live together and procreate a new way, a new way of seeing, a new way of talking, a new way of sharing.

[33:32]

Dogen then says, there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake. There is no understanding other than painted satisfaction. So where is your hunger when I say that? How does your hunger meet that? Those words, painted satisfaction. Is it uncomfortable? Is it relieving? Duggan says, when you understand this teaching with your body and mind, you will thoroughly experience the ability to turn things and be turned by things. If this is not done, the power of the study of the way is not yet realized.

[34:40]

to enact this ability, this ability to turn and be turned, complete flexibility, complete relatedness, then to enact this ability is to actualize the painting of enlightenment. We've been doing some experiments to develop an online community of practice. And we've been working with small groups and little websites and online sitting and just to see what is it that people want and how to meet that with authentic teaching. So we got an email, actually Mimi got this the other day, from someone taking an online class.

[35:44]

This person, I think this is a man, said, during my zazen this last week, I often find that my stream of thought turns to family. So he's doing zazen, he's doing this online with other people that he can see on a website if he looks, you know, if he opens... puts his eyes up, there are, you know, 15, 18, 20 people sitting with him at the same time all over the world. So he's paying attention. He's doing zazen. It occurred to me that though it just isn't possible to connect with everybody as often as I would like, I am indeed in unity with them at all times as part of absolute reality. It was one of those moments that felt real to me in the way Dogen talks about experiencing beyond intellectual understanding.

[36:48]

I felt happy that it was so. I think this guy woke up for a minute. What do you think? From seeing, from the kind of practice of seeing the arising of his thoughts and family and the kind of wandering around and thinking about, well, I miss them and maybe I should be with them more. We've all done, this is the way, you know, our meditation practice is. And then, I don't need to be concerned. I'm totally connected with them. And the kind of happiness of knowing that's so. What's better than that? Was there any limbic connection that this person had? Maybe. Maybe at some time in the past, maybe sometime in the future, he'll have that limbic presence where time is relative in this situation. That's another fascicle, which I'm not going to talk about. I was really happy to read this.

[37:52]

So... There's a little piece of a Suzuki Roshi talk in which he talks about painted rice cake. So I'll share that with you, and then I just have a few questions to end with. Suzuki Roshi, in a talk, sorry I didn't write down what year this was, but he said, Buddha true, real Buddha nature, should be something which is actually here. There. If you cannot see actually what Buddha nature doesn't mean anything, is it rice cake or painted rice cake? Means if you see what you just saw and say it's enlightenment, to see it is to paint it.

[39:00]

But to also, I would say, to think that you can't see it is to paint it. If you want to see the actual rice cake, this is Suzuki Roshi again, you should see it when it is there. So the purpose of our practice is to just be yourself. When you become yourself in that way, you have real, really, enlightenment is there. The enlightenment you have in your mind is not actual enlightenment. So are we, thank you Suzuki Roshi, are we holding the absolute, the mystical above the relative, the limbic above the electronic? What are the conditions for waking up? What's the role of body to body, face to face? Do we think there's only one way? Do the means of sharing the teachings affect the authenticity of the teachings?

[40:06]

How living is Zen? Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost 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 sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:42]

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