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. It's great to see you. So I came in with my robes and Ellen and she suggested that I could go change in room 10 and I took the elevator up and got out of the elevator and walked into room 10 and standing in the doorway of room 10 I burst into tears. Tommy, all the books that put on the altar.

[01:01]

It was great. Because I used to, I stored my robes in there for years. So I have this deeply ingrained embodied memory of walking in the door to change into my robes in room 10. So it was some kind of palpable relief or something really sweet. So that's not really what I want to talk about, although it's related, right? So there's two cases in the middle of the Blue Cliff record, 49 and 50. They're right in the middle, and it hadn't occurred to me until recently that maybe they're in the middle for a reason. But they both have to do with... essentially with big ideas and rice.

[02:02]

So, the first one is, 49, is, Sancheng asks, Shui Feng, he says, hey, so, when the golden fish escapes the net, what does he eat? And, um, Treyfung says, you know, I'll tell you when you're out, just when you're out of the net, I'll tell you when you get out. And Sangsheng says, what? You have 1,500 students and you don't, you can't even, you don't even get the point enough to, you know, tell me an answer? And Treyfung says, I'm an old guy and it's really a lot of work running a monastery, basically. So that's one, right? And, you know, if we're talking about We're talking about big ideas. The big idea there is somehow that it's useful to imagine yourself as a fish who's caught in a net, right?

[03:14]

And that there's some direction you can swim or trick you can do to escape the net, right? Mm-hmm. You know, if there was ever a dualistic Buddhist idea, that's one, right? But anyway, so the next one is even more explicit. So a monk asks, young man, what is every, well, in Clary it's translated, every atom samadhi, right? Adam, I'll talk about this a little bit later, but Adam might not be exactly right, and the character says something slightly different. But in any case, Yun Min says, rice in the bowl, water in the bucket.

[04:15]

And here again, there's a guy who's done enough reading. and probably needed to be reading to get the notion that there's this mental state called every atom samadhi which I'll describe a bit later as well but which is pretty phantasmagorical basically and he's asking about it and he's asking you know probably one of the most famous Zen masters ever, and a guy who's constantly getting asked questions like this. And in all the koans, he answers them in this really brief, poetic, kind of minimalist way, like, you know, rice in the bowl, water in the bucket. But interestingly, in the commentaries, they have a bunch of rants by Yunmen

[05:26]

where he'll say things like, what the hell do you mean? And he just goes off, right? He doesn't necessarily say that about this particular question, but there's a whole bunch of other sort of standard way out there, big idea questions that he responds to by saying, does knowing the answer to this question do you any good when you're, he says stuff like, buying meat at the local butcher and using the roadside latrine, basically. So anyway, but in this case, he decides to do the minimalist answer, right? Okay, so in order to continue this talk, I need to make a about the fundamentals of Buddhism, right? And in order to say that, you have to have a preamble of some sorts.

[06:35]

And the preamble kind of goes like this, right? Basically, the history of Buddhism and the history of the ideas in Buddhism is just the more you study it, the more murky it is, basically, right? Yeah. The claim that we know anything that the Buddha actually said is based on an assumption that's so wildly impossible that hardly any modern day scholars take it seriously, right? There are some people who sort of backfill and say, well, you know, it was an oral tradition, right? Yeah, of course it was an oral tradition and that's a marvelous thing and we all know that all through the era when Buddhism was developing and also when the other sort of South Asian spiritual traditions were developing, oral traditions were really a big deal. And you get things like the Odyssey, right?

[07:36]

And so on, where people memorized... memorized extremely long pieces of text and, well, not even text. I guess you can call them texts in the sort of postmodern sense, right? But you memorized these extremely long things and recited them regularly and so on. But we know that, and that's true. But we also know by observing those processes automatically all over the world exactly what happens with them. People make stuff up. They make new stuff up. They change subtly or grossly the text of the thing that they're memorizing because of cultural, economic, or political factors and so on. And so over the course of the hundreds of years that that Buddhism developed until we actually got some stuff that's been written down that we can read, right?

[08:47]

Which started happening around the turn of the common era, right? Has everybody heard about this? In ancient Gandhara, the Buddhist community was constantly hitting up the incredibly rich people that were benefiting from Silk Road trade and so on and so forth and saying, you know, you'll do better in your next life if you donate a whole bunch of money to build a stupa and pay a Buddhist scribe to transcribe some text to put it in the stupa, right? And so they did this and they wrote them on birch bark They'd write them on these pretty big pieces of birch bark because you can unroll off a pretty big piece of birch bark, right? And then they'd roll up the piece of birch bark and usually, not always, but usually the jar that they were putting them in in the stupa was too small.

[09:49]

And so they would take this roll of birch bark and they'd fold it in half and stuff it into the jar, right? And not surprisingly, the things completely fell apart and And when people started digging him up, and this had been happening for the last, I don't know, 60 or 70 years or something like that, and looked at them, they were like, we can't make head or tail of this. But people started to try, and they would spend ages, you know, like sort of steaming and unrolling and steaming and unrolling the pieces that were still rolled up. And then they'd go through this huge pile of little tiny chips and go, well, this one might go here. And what about this one here? And they managed to put together these documents, and they've put together a fair number of them now, right? And they are literally the first...

[10:55]

actual long-form Buddhist documents that we have. And not surprisingly, there are documents in there that are like things in the Sanskrit canon and like things in the Pali canon and so on and so forth. But when you look at them and you read all the other stuff as well, you get this idea that that regardless of the murkiness, that Buddhists, at least at that point in history and ever since, have agreed on some fundamentals. And the fundamentals are that human suffering and folly arises out of essentially how we're built as humans. And, you know, like in the Four Noble Truths, it says grasping, right?

[11:55]

But if you dig down in the rest of the canon, it becomes clear that that grasping has a mechanism and that mechanism is built into being human. It's not, we can't, we humans can't be human without it. And interestingly, the assumption in the, in the, In some of the documents, there's a great text in the Gandharan Birchbark Sutra collection where this guy is walking down the street, this Brahmin is walking down the street, and he sees somebody sitting under a tree, and he looks really good. In fact, he kind of looks extra good. And the guy walks right up to the other guy and says, wait, are you a god? And the guy goes, no, I'm not a god. He says, well, are you some sort of, you know, like spirit being of some other sort?

[12:58]

And the guy goes, no. He says, are you human? He goes, no, I'm not human. And the guy says, what are you? And he says, well, I'm a Buddha, of course, right? So the notion was then that Buddhas were post-human, right? They weren't human anymore, interestingly enough, right? But in any case, the fundamental idea was that it was possible to transcend, not even transcend, work with the freedom from the suffering and folly that was caused by our humanity, right? was tractable and could be addressed through practices that were easily describable and involved both outward behavior and inner cultivation.

[14:00]

So, you know, obey the precepts, practice a kind of self-study. I'm now dressing this up a little bit, but practice a kind of self-study that allows the human self to soften up and leave more space and so on, and then live and enjoy the result, basically. That was the sort of fundamental prescription. There were a lot of problems and complications around that, even at that point, right? the question was, well, who can do this? Well, if you look at the earliest Buddhist documents we've got, it's pretty clear that it's only guys, and maybe even by implication, only guys from particular social classes or families, and that, and interestingly, it's only guys that are willing to

[15:13]

drop out of society and not even have any friends. There's all this stuff like, oh my God, you shouldn't be having any friends. They'll just make your life complicated. So there's a whole sutra about that too, that you're supposed to be completely and utterly solitary. So only guys, maybe only people you know, Brahmins, right? Um, and, and only people who are willing to live this extremely renunciate life, right? Um, and, and, you know, even when, even when women were added in as practitioners, and the, you know, the, the Lord only knows how that happened. There's a story in it, in the poly, about it, in the poly canon, but, um, The overarching assumption that's written all over that set of documents is that even though women can practice and be enlightened, they can't...

[16:31]

be totally free from suffering and experience pari nirvana and be erased from the round of suffering and rebirth and so on. They have to be reborn as men. So that whole scheme was kicking around in the period before Buddhism sort of jumped into China. And the interesting thing is that it changed a lot when that happened, right? I think the Chinese Buddhists were, none of that stuff about that, like extreme renunciate life looks particularly good. It's not how we want to live here. And the idea of... purifying your karma to the point where you're completely erased from the universe is not particularly appealing as well.

[17:41]

And so we don't want to think about it that way. And they had a number of pre-existing philosophical and sort of spiritual fields of practice that suggested a way that they could kind of you know, modify or tint Buddhism so that it was, it was more of a practice that was possible in China, right? So, I mean, for an example, we can look at the whole notion of samadhi, right? And so remember the first, the first koan Well, actually, no, the second one, the monk has to end man. So what's every Adam Samadhi, right? The notion of Samadhi goes way back in the South Asian spiritual traditions.

[18:43]

So it's in the Upanishads, not in the Vedas, but in the Upanishads. It's in the Yoga Sutra. It's in the Jainist and Sikhs. and it's in both Mahayana and Theravadan Buddhism, right? Interestingly, in the Pali canon, it doesn't really appear very too many places. It's mainly inside the scheme of levels of practice that are called the jhanas in the Pali canon. And it's mentioned in the... First jhana as a sort of mental state that the primary mark of which is enjoyment, right? So you can kind of enjoy it, right? It's not in the other jhanas, right? The enjoyment kind of goes away, but...

[19:44]

In other South Asian traditions, it's tremendously complicated. There are multiple stages of stages of, you know, kind of, well, anyway, they go from sitting around enjoying things to experiencing the entire universe of, from one side to the other through the eye of God, right? So, and in, you know, the whole, every Adam Samadhi, if you look around for every Adam Samadhi in the Buddhist literature, almost all the references are actually, to this case is translated by Thomas Clary, right? And if you look elsewhere, You don't really find it, but it's pretty clear it's from the Avatamsaka Sutra.

[20:49]

And the passages in the Avatamsaka Sutra that are talking about every atom or every particle, samadhi, say that the mind of a Buddha can penetrate... every particle of dust and find in that particle of dust the countless worlds that exist in that particle of dust and find the dust notes that are in those worlds and so on and so forth. So it's a pretty phantasmagorical and sort of infinity-inducing concept, right? And interestingly... If you look at the Chinese form for what Thomas Clary translates as every atom samadhi, the actual character is the character for dirt or dust.

[21:52]

So basically, it's like dirt samadhi. But you're really getting way into the dirt with it. And you know. It's good to recognize that that's... that probably doesn't happen to people, right? You know, where physics determines for the most part what we can perceive and even if you decide that there's some metaphysical enhancement to your perception, your brain's just made of meat, right? So how many particles of dust can it see? I don't know, you know, not that many, right? But... it's an inspiring idea, right? And that's kind of in some ways the point, like there are these two forces pulling on, I was talking about this a little bit before too, but pulling on the sort of Buddhist philosophical and conceptual framework, right? And one of them wants to make things more grand and fantastical, and the other one wants to make them simple, right?

[23:03]

And By the time you get to Dogen, who learned his stuff in Song Dynasty China, right? When he talks about Samadhi, it's actually, you know, it's Jiju Zanmai. He actually talks about other Samadhis as well. But the one he holds up in his, like, primary discourse, where he's essentially saying... This is how everybody should be practicing, is Jijuizamai, which is usually translated as self-receiving and employing samadhi. But again, the characters for self-receiving and employing, the receiving and employing part is a compound in Chinese, and it really means enjoying. So it's essentially self-enjoying samadhi. That's sort of how it's come down to us today through the Zen school.

[24:19]

There's this set of practices that allow us to enjoy and reap the benefits of our humanity. That's really what it says. and that allow us to live with our humanity in a way that's skillful and comfortable and doesn't require, you know, eons of playing the karmic lottery and so on. And that's pretty straightforward, right? And that's what the two teachers and the koans are saying, too. You know, like, what is... When Sanxiang says, what is the net escapee eat, what do you think the answer is? They're going to eat rice because they're monks.

[25:23]

They're just going to get up every morning and they're going to have rice gruel and they're going to have some rice for lunch and then they'll have some rice maybe with some other stuff mixed in it for dinner, basically. That's what they're going to have for the rest of their natural life. And the activity that Shreyfung is talking about, he says, you know, my life is an app. It keeps me really busy. That activity is the activity of escaping the net to the extent that there's a net that you can escape, right? And similarly with young men, right? The monk asks about every Adam Samadhi. The young man sort of tries to pull him down by saying, hey, you're floating around up there. Come down here. It's eating the rice and hauling the water to cook it, basically. That's it.

[26:25]

And so that points to the kind of... Well, that points mostly to monastic practice, right? But the interesting thing about that is that by the time Dogen is writing the Bendo Wah, somebody says, well, okay. I mean, you know, as I was saying back in the day, the assumption was only monks can do this, right? Then somebody asked him explicitly, who can do this, and he says everybody can do it. Everyone can benefit from it in the same way. It's just, and he has a fascicle about this as well, it's just easier if you're in a monastery, basically. And, you know, why not, right? So, since everyone can do this, right,

[27:35]

So then what are we doing exactly? Becoming aware of our behavior and how it causes difficulty for us and for others, right? Practicing in such a way as to bring forth self-enjoying, self-benefiting samadhi, right? reaping the benefits of our human experience, right? And let that guide your engagement. If your life is telling you that something's wrong, believe it and pay attention to it just like it's pain in your knee or the sound of a fly flying around the Zendo.

[28:40]

It's just a thing to pay attention to and to register as wholeheartedly as you can. And then live and enjoy the result, basically. So I think I don't close this until we've had questions, is that right? Right. Excellent. So, does anybody, oh, one more thing. I wrote a poem for this, so I'll read it. A day like today, when this room is too small to contain anything, When the sky lies low over the horizon like the eye of a startled sleeper, when everyone's wearing their wooden mask or their golden mask, a day like today calls for staying within a yard or two of the ground.

[29:46]

It will not abide grand plans or destinations, not even so much as a pinch of salt could hold together today. 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 and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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