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, everyone. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. Do we have anybody here for the first time today? Wonderful. Special welcome to you. So for the last period of time, especially last fall, I've been talking about an essay by Dogen, who was the founder of the Soto Zen lineage in Japan, 13th century teacher. And the essay is called the Genjo Koan, which translates into the koan of the present moment or the koan of everyday life. which emphasizes being in the present moment.

[01:03]

How do you be in the present moment and does the present moment ask something of you, ask a question of how to be in the present moment? So Zen practice is a matter of being in this present with our lives and acting in that present moment in a skillful way. Recognizing in this moment the depth and poignancy of our ordinary daily life. Suzuki Roshi used to say, how to apply Zen in everyday life is not difficult. If we live in each moment, that is Zen. Whether you are sitting or working, living in each moment is Zen. Zen is our everyday life. So I think there's something interesting in that sentence that's useful. He's not putting some More emphasis on sitting zazen than in our ordinary daily living of working and relating to people.

[02:04]

All you have to do is live in each moment. Be yourself in each moment. So that sounds like pretty simple. I mean, what else are we doing than being ourselves in each moment? And I thought I would sort of talk about that concept. I'm going to skip about three pages here because I was going to summarize the Genjo Cohen for you, but I just realized I'm not going to have enough time to do that. So the question is, are we actually living in each moment? Are we actually alive and awake in each moment? Are we lost in our dream world? Are we so caught up in our escaping reality by fantasizing and dreaming or Are we so caught up in our problems that all we can see is the problem in front of us and we're not seeing anything else that's going on? So this is the question.

[03:05]

The question is, to what extent can we be more awake, more alive, and more connected to the life that we're living and the people around us? So I'm going to, Suzuki Roshi goes on to say, even in zazen you will lose yourself. When you become sleepy or when your mind starts to wander about, you lose yourself. When your legs become painful, you go, why are my legs so painful? You lose yourself. So it's easy for us to lose ourself, and the question is what to do about that. So I'm going to bring forward a very well-known case on this subject. This is case 12 of the Gateless Barrier. Ri Yan, Calls Master, that's the title of the gate. So Riyan was a student of Yanto and a very well-known Zen master in his time, and this was his practice.

[04:11]

The priest Riyan called out Master to himself every day and answered himself, yes. So that would be like I would call out and go, Ed, yes? Yes? Ed, yes. Then he would say, be aware. And then he would reply, yes. Or, are you awake? Yes. And then he'd say, don't be deceived by anyone. Or, don't be fooled by anything. And he would say, no, I won't. That was his practice. So let's... first try this out. I want everybody to shout out to themselves their name and go, yes. Ready? Here we go. Ed. Yes. Are you awake?

[05:11]

Yes. Don't be fooled by anything. Don't be fooled by anything. No, I won't. How are you feeling? You feel pretty good? You've just practiced the famous Zen practice from the 9th century Tang dynasty, Zweigin's practice of waking up to himself. I'm going to just read a little bit of that. Now, as you know, all these wonderful... These are koan stories, which in some sense contain the essence of Zen teaching. So in some sense... in this little dialogue that we've just done is an essence of what Zen teaching is. Are you awake? Yes. Very good. Don't be fooled by anything. Okay, I think we've got the idea. So I'll read you a little bit of the commentary on this topic.

[06:19]

Old Ruyan buys himself and sells himself. He brings forth lots of angel faces and demon masks and plays with them. Why? Look! One kind calls, one kind answers, one kind is aware, one kind will not be deceived by others. If you still cling to understanding, you're in trouble. Or if you take these different appearances as really existing, you are altogether mistaken. If you try to imitate Ruyan, your discernment is altogether that of a fox. So we'll discuss that further on in the talk. And then Wumann made also a verse on this. Those who search for the way do not realize truth. They only know their own old discriminating consciousness. Those who search for the way do not realize truth. They only know their own old discriminating consciousness. This is the cause of the endless cycle of birth and death, yet stupid people take it for the original self.

[07:28]

This is how the ancients make a very simple practice quite complicated. But we'll deconstruct it later on and see what we're talking about. So we're always talking to ourselves and... Sometimes our conversation with ourselves is not quite as refreshing as the conversation we just had. Usually we're saying, Ed, don't forget your keys. Or, you know, oh gee, I wish Bob hadn't treated me so badly the other day. The various things that go on in our... So we're talking to ourselves and this is a way he's talking to himself to kind of get beyond that. It's a way of returning... yourself with a kind of freshness and inquiry and openness, recognizing that there's something more than the torrent of karmic habitual activity that's flowing through your life, something else, something bigger, some kind of eternal moment here that we can be awakened to.

[08:45]

something indescribable in our life that's going on. I think probably the... I'll just give the entire message of what I'm talking about today. We forget we're alive. We think our problems, they become bigger now. They become our whole life, in a sense. We build a little prison around ourselves with the problems we have, these little daily tasks we have to take on, and we forget what a miracle our life is. I mean, we basically just forget and carry on through the day living in some kind of distracted way. So the question is, is there some way we can remember the vastness, the scale, the actual truth of the fact that we're a living human being more often in our life than we do.

[09:56]

So, just to enter into some more of the complexity of this, you call out, Ed, yes, well, who's talking to who here? I mean, who is this person that's calling out and who's responding? Who is the self that we're calling out to? In the actual story, Rujan was the Zen master, so he would call out master. And that sets up a kind of idea that there's a master and he's the master of a temple. And so we've got, he's a subject of an activity called being temple master. But... Shibayama in his commentary on it says when you're calling out, when he's calling out to himself, he's not calling out to himself as an object. He's calling out to himself as the absolute subjectivity. Can you call out to your self in the most intimate connected way? You know, so like who are you?

[11:05]

Are you your thinking mind? Are you your body? Are you your definition of yourself, your storyline? I was born in such and such a place to so and so parents, went to such and such a college, went to such and such a trade school, went off and worked here and there, had relationships with these and those people. That's a whole life story. Is that who you are? In this moment? Is there something else going on for you? I mean, of course, you're all those things. I mean, we are the subject of all the people that have loved us. We're formed by the people that have loved us. Our parents and any other people that have loved us. But that's not all we are. We're something more than all of that.

[12:07]

In any given moment, we are something bigger than anything you can describe yourself as being, or feel yourself as being, or think yourself as being. And that you is the one that is being called out to, to wake up. That's the you that... You have those experiences, obviously. You'll have a kind of... moment where you're watching a sunset and you'll go, wow, I'm really here. This sunset is so stupendous out over the Pacific Ocean. You'll be hiking in the Sierra Mountains and you'll be standing at the base of some beautiful granite cliff and you'll go, I'm really alive. I'm alive and I'm here. And that place becomes a sacred place for you and wakes you up to something bigger then. But this practice is the practice of recognizing that This is true of you at every moment of your life. This is true of you when you're taking out the trash, washing the dishes.

[13:14]

So at any given moment when we call out to ourselves, we're both this ordinary person with a karmic history, a life description, and we're something bigger than that. And we're a part of everything. We're part of a great vast, unnameable livingness. And we forget this. We forget this a million times a day. So it's just a matter of kind of remembering that. It's not so difficult, this Zen practice. It's just a matter of remembering who we are and where we are. course, if you remember to call yourself back to the present moment, there's no problem, because you've remembered to do that.

[14:23]

But how do you remember to do that? See, there's a little trick here, right? You're lost in your dream world. While you're lost, you sometimes sort of wake up, and then when you wake up, you could say, oh, I'm going to really remind myself that this is real. I'm really here, and this is a bigger thing. So... In Zen monasteries, to use an example, and this is a Zen temple, there's all kinds of activities that we set up. Daily actions, I call them, that we try to help remind us that we're here, that we're awake. These daily actions are viewed as spiritual practices. And we use the power of our imagination to lift these small actions into something like the cosmic realm. I say cosmic realm in the sense of we are living in a cosmic realm. We have galaxies upon galaxies. We're this amazing thing that somehow evolved out of a reptile that crawled out of the ocean years ago and started crawling around in the land.

[15:28]

I mean, you know, this is a pretty cosmic event and every moment of our life is an example of that. So we have these techniques in Zen to wake us up. And I thought I would share some of these very practical things that you can use in your life. So one of the first things I was taught when I showed up at Tassajara when I was a young man was when you enter the zendo, which had wide double doors at that time, if you enter on the left side of the doorway, you enter with your left foot, and if you enter on the right side, you enter with your right foot. And a part of me thought, well... I'm here to understand deep philosophic Zen. What's this entering with left and right feet business? So, but, you know, I am a good boy scout, and I learned to step through with my left foot, and I stepped with my right foot, and one day I was working in the shop, and I was busy trying to figure out why the carburetor wasn't working, and I entered the Zendo with my right foot when I was on the left side, that is, the wrong foot, and I noticed, oh, I entered with the wrong foot.

[16:34]

I mean, my body... noticed that. And at the same time that my body noticed that, I noticed that I was working on the carburetor instead of noticing that I was entering the meditation hall, that I was entering a new space where I could quit working on the carburetor and practice zazen. I could set down that work. It's an interesting thing, isn't it? Just this simple thing. And you could take that practice up. You could say, any time I move into a new space, Anytime I enter a new room, I'm going to realize I'm leaving an old world and coming into a new world. And I will wake up to the new world that I'm in. I was in business for 20 years after I left Zen Center and I had to go into many meetings. And it's very useful as you're walking down the hallway and you're going to go into a meeting with some people as you enter that room to realize, oh, I know I was talking on the phone to Bill about such and so back there.

[17:36]

but now I'm going to be in a meeting with these people and I want to be present with these people in this meeting. And stepping through a doorway can remind you, wake up to the new world you're entering into. Wake up to a possibility of something absolutely new happening here if I just look around the room and see who I'm with. And in Japan, I visited Japan this summer, and there's all these temples. You go through temple gates, you know, an entrance of a temple. You go through a gate. They're trying to say, wake up. You're moving into a sacred space. In fact, there's this one place where they have torii gates, where you walk for miles through gate after gate after gate. It's a beautiful thing, this entrance. Like you're in a trance. You're in a trance. You've entered into a new space. Every space you enter in is a sacred space, a new space, not just as endos or Buddha halls.

[18:41]

We, of course, have, that's just one technique we have. If we go to the bathhouse, we chant this bath gatha. As I bathe this body and mind, I vow with all sentient beings to wash from body and mind all dust and confusion and feel healthy and clean within and without. Beautiful. You say that in an effort to raise your activity of taking a bath to something bigger than that, something spiritual. Wash my body and mind all dust and confusion. You elevate that activity to something sacred. Which, well, what's sacred about bathing? You're alive. Everything you do is sacred. Everything you do can be elevated to that level. When we have a meal, we say, for the sake of enlightenment, we now receive this food.

[19:47]

We don't just receive this food to nourish our body. We receive this food for the sake of an awakened mind, to end all evil, to cultivate all good, to free all beings. That's what we chant before we eat a meal. elevate the ordinary activity of eating a meal to remember the sacred activity of being a human being. Another practice that I always, well, I say I love, but at Tassara and in the mornings here while we're in silence, when we pass somebody in the hallway, we do a bow to them. So we actually stop and we're standing facing each other. We just bow and then move on. I've had a tendency in my youth and in my middle age and in my old age to rush a lot because I have a lot to do.

[20:49]

I used to stop and bow. I'm trying to get to the shop to fix this thing. I'm trying to get this meeting to solve these problems. But if you actually stop and bow for a moment you recognize that other human being. A human being sharing this space with you. Sharing something. Just think if you were alone instead of having other people to share this with. A chance to actually meet for even a second someone. You don't say anything. Almost better that you don't have to say anything. One of my friends, when I was at Tassar, she said, when I passed so-and-so this morning, I felt very angry because he was mad at him when he bowed. How was that, Sikurashi? Sikurashi said, perfect. It's fine. You're angry with somebody, but you bow to them. You meet them. You recognize them. You share space with them.

[21:53]

Phone calls are another place. Email. I'm giving you some examples that you can use even if you're not in a monastery or a temple. When I make phone calls, when I was in the working world, and I do it now too, I try to imagine the person I'm calling and where they may be. If I've been in their office, and so if they actually answer the phone, rare occurrence, I'm more connected to them then, if I was otherwise. Because I've... taken the time to kind of be aware of myself at that moment. When I was thinking of this example this morning, preparing this talk, I was reminded of my father, who died over 20 years ago. In our home, he always used to answer the phone. He'd say, Jim here. His name was Jim. Jim here. And I realized he was practicing Rion's practice.

[23:01]

Even before I was a Zen student, my father, a Zen practitioner, who knew? But such joyful energy in his voice. I could never figure out why he was so excited about answering a phone. But it was his way. His way was to greet whoever was calling him with energy and joy. And I'm ready. I'm here. I'm here to see what this event of having a phone conversation is about. Anyway, I could go on and on, and you can come up with your own examples of actions that you do daily, whether it's washing dishes. GiaoGio, one of the most famous Zen teachers in the old time, when a student came and said, you know, I'm a new student here, please tell me about Zen. GiaoGio said,

[24:02]

have you had your breakfast? And he said, I have. And he said, well, then go wash your dishes. That's Zen. You know, just do the next thing. Do the ordinary activities of your life, but do them with a kind of awareness. And God, washing dishes is so great. Washing dishes used to be, for me, kind of like a chore. But if you get into washing dishes, it's one of the most wonderful things in the world to do. The soapy water or whatever... a beautiful dishwasher if you have one of those. Whatever it is. Everything that you think of as a chore can be turned into a moment of practice. This reminding ourselves is really necessary. It's a training of your body and mind and spirit that can transform your life, can lift up your life to a level of dignity and reality that we need.

[25:19]

If we don't do this in our life, we don't find times to lift ourselves up to the dignity of being a human being, we start getting... down. We start losing energy in our life. So, I recommend this practice. So, now on to the commentary. Old Ruyan buys himself and sells himself. He brings forth lots of angel faces and demon masks and plays with them. Why? Look! One kind calls, one kind answers, one kind is aware, one kind will not be deceived by others. If you take these different appearances as really existing, you are altogether mistaken. If you try to imitate Ruyang, your discernment is altogether that of a fox. A lot of different commentary on this particular paragraph.

[26:23]

Old Ruyang buys himself and sells himself. I don't know, for some reason this reminded me, I was reading a book on evolutionary psychology in which their contention is, we think we're running our life, right? But there's all these studies that show that actual fact is all our actions are flowing from the unconscious in us and our conscious mind is merely our PR agency. That's how they put it. Convincing us that what we're doing is good and convincing the world that what we're doing is good. Or if we have that particular twist of mind punishing ourselves for what we're doing and criticizing the outside world for what they're doing. That all of our action actually comes from somewhere else. So we're buying and selling ourselves to ourselves. That's one way of looking at it. And of course, we're bringing forth all kinds of angel faces, good ideas about who we are, and all kinds of demon faces, bad ways we are, and we play them out in our mind

[27:28]

left and right. Why? Look, look at it. And one kind calls, one kind answers, one kind is aware, one kind will not be deceived by others. So, like one, you know, Robert Aiken sort of says this and says, well, this is just, you know, really just playing with themselves and just sort of enjoying the great, great variety of of the ways he can be, which is part of what we do when we notice ourselves. We think, oh, wow. If we really look carefully, we've never exactly been this way before. This moment, I'm a completely new thing. But it's also a little bit of a warning when it says, if you take these different appearances as really existing, you are altogether mistaken. So part of what happens, of course, is as we are doing all these practices I've described, is we get kind of attached to, oh, I'm really alert.

[28:31]

Alertness is the way, you know. Not being fooled by things is the way. And we get sort of, we cling to or get caught up in certain ways we experience the world and we think, well, that's practice. That's practice. And when I'm not that way, of course, I criticize myself. I say, well, that's not practice. This is a big mistake. And what they're pointing out is if we take this, we can get involved in our formal practice too much, and we can get too engaged with it, and we can start making judgments about what good practice and bad practice is, what the right way to experience life is. You know, I remember when I first started reading about Zen guys, Zen guys always, you know, you don't even know, you're in your room, you walk into a room, you don't know why you're there. You know, I'm a Zen guy, when I walk in a room, I know where I am. Oh, I see. Of course, I met Suzuki Roshi, who was the most alive, most awake, most present human being I'd ever met. And then you read all the stories in David Chadwick's book, biography, about how Suzuki Roshi would be riding on a train and completely forget to get off at his stop and end up an hour down the road on the train.

[29:42]

His son would say that after Suzuki Roshi would go into town to do various things, town members would bring back stuff he'd left in various places, you know, around the... That's not the kind of clarity we're talking about. We're talking about something different. And the thing we're talking about that's different is we're talking about accepting who you are as you're experiencing yourself in each moment. When you are you, Zen is Zen. You will know how to act. You will know what way to behave and treat the world when you're standing in your own life. when you're standing in your own body and standing in your own mind and standing in this place, then you're open. When you're not so concerned with your self-concern, you'll be open to experiencing the world around you. And when you experience the world around you, you will have some way of being one with it and knowing how to act.

[30:48]

So we have to be careful about overdoing all of our little practices and think that we have found some secret. The secret is simple. If you try to imitate Ruyan, your discernment is altogether that of a fox. In Chinese folklore, foxes are shapeshifters, tricksters. So if you try to imitate Ruyan, you'll get all confused, don't know what's going on. This is a very important teaching in Zen. There's a great story I'd love to read you, but I don't think I have time for it. I'll give you the quick summary. Yanto, who was Ruyan's teacher, very famous teacher, and he had a buddy, and they practiced together for 20 or 30 years, and they have many koan stories about them.

[32:06]

In fact, the 13th case, the one following the 12th one here that I'm talking about, is a story of them with their teacher Deshan. Anyway, they were traveling in the mountains and a snowstorm came up and they retreated into a hut on tortoise mountain and so it was snowing and Yantu would just sleep and hang out and do much and Shengfang would sit zazen all night long and so Yantu sort of like said well why are you sitting around like a crazy person you'll drive people nuts if the villagers see you like this and the other guy said well I still haven't solved all my problems and so Yantu says well you tell me about your problems and I'll help you and so he recites three or four really important interactions with the with great Zen teachers during that area that he'd had and how they'd all changed his life, but he still hadn't, didn't feel settled. And after, you know, the last one of these stories he told, Yantou said, haven't you heard it said that what comes in through the front gate isn't the family jewels?

[33:11]

Ying Fang said, then in the future, what should I do? Yantou said, in the future, If you want to expound a great teaching, then it must flow forth from your own breast. If you want to practice then, it has to flow through from your own breast. If you imitate someone else's practice, you're just imitating someone else's practice and you'll get confused. You can follow a person's practice, you can take hints from a person's practice, But you have to find your own practice. You're the one who is actually the master of your life, the boss of your life. You're the one that knows whether you're fooling yourself, whether you're awake or not. And you know yourself how to practice. So a very important teaching that seems to get thrown in quite often.

[34:16]

Just enough time to do a little bit about Wuman's verse. Those who search for the way do not realize truth. They only know their old, discriminating consciousness. This is the cause of endless cycle of birth and death. Yet stupid people take it for the original self. Well, this is our problem. It's basically our discriminating consciousness. That is our consciousness. Our discriminating mind. That's all we do. That's what it means to have a thinking mind. Words you use are discriminations in the world. Robert Akin mentioned on this that this verse here is a 200-year-old poem that Uman quoted and brought here. It's one of the most important cautionary poems in Zen literature, a succinct presentation of Ru Yan's purpose.

[35:30]

Chang Chang and Wuman are scolding us. We students of the Tao are only caught up in consciousness, the mind road that runs from the past to the present and is projected by conjecture into the future. We are preoccupied with the mind of certain certainties, bills, taxes, dental appointments, and all the other points of our respective timelines. We are not aware of true nature, which is not born, does not die, has nothing substantial to be called anything, yet is charged with infinite possibilities. We are busy with our discriminating minds, but we long for unity. We know in our hearts that we are in exile, lost in the endless round of birth and death, and we long to come home.

[36:40]

We can come home. If we work with our practice, we can be touched by oneness. If we can have a real sense of it, not only in our transcendent moments, but in our ordinary moments, too. The issue is not that we only know ordinary discriminating consciousness and we want to know something else. It's that we take that discriminating consciousness for all that we are, not recognizing that the original self both is that and much more than that. without any boundary at all. So once we appreciate this not as a thought, but as an actual felt reality, it will make a difference in our life.

[37:43]

Whatever our problem, our difficult relationships, a grieving heart, an aging body and mind. This is your life. We forget how marvelous it is to be alive because we are so busy. We don't notice how marvelous it is to be alive and share our life with other people and how brief this life is. We forget. We forget to be grateful for this human life. This is natural. This is the way it is. But maybe if we practice Ruyan's practice of coming back to himself, be awake. Don't be fooled by anything. Maybe we can forget less often. Thank you very much.

[38:47]

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.

[39:13]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.08