This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. I'm very happy to be here leading a co-leading Zen and Yoga Retreat with Patricia Sullivan and I often find her teaching and our Zen practice, she should be up here and I shouldn't be where she is, obviously, but it really looks like one thing, just seen from a different angle. Patricia's been bringing up, as she did the last workshop, moving...

[01:02]

from the marrow, from the marrow of the bones, and being in touch with the marrow, the deepest part, and, you know, the marrow of our practice and the marrow of the bones, both in the marrow of the bones there's blood cells that are being produced. It's a life-flowing and giving life activity deep, deep in the bones. And we talk about doing something to the marrow, to the deepest, the most important. And there's a fascicle, there's an essay called Bowing to the Marrow and Retaining the Marrow, which There's a lot in that, but for me, one of the most important parts is to attain the marrow of any activity, one needs to have utmost sincerity and a trustful heart.

[02:17]

So a trusting, which means an open, allowing heart and utmost sincerity in what we do. And that's how one attains the marrow, or the deepest. Touch, attain comes, another way of saying attain is to touch. You might say, well, how can we touch the marrow? But, you know, the marrow and the bones and the flesh and the skin, how can you not touch it? Another thing Patricia's been bringing up and practices that we're doing with getting in touch with the life force energy or qi and doing qigong, doing some exercises or movements that bring us into a subtle relationship, or subtle or not so subtle, with this energy flow that's within and without

[03:26]

And recently I did some calligraphy on, actually on Todd's Raksu, and I was reading about calligraphy and brushwork, and this teacher, Harada Roshi, talks... I was looking at his book of calligraphy, and he talks about the most important thing in calligraphy, and I would say probably all the arts, is not the technical skill and expertise of the technique, but the body-mind unified expression, and the composed and peaceful mind and heart, and sincere mind and heart. And with that mind and heart, you make your stroke and press and lift. And one thing very interesting that I read in this book is that the chi, this energy, this mind-body energy that's expressed through the calligraphy, you can see it, you know, you can see it in the strokes.

[04:46]

And microscopically... Microscopically, you can see the way the particles of ink are lined up in the stroke shows the gene, which I found, you know, at once, you know, like this marvelous thing, and on the other side, well, of course, you know, to the marrow, it lines up. To the marrow, it's one stroke. So utmost sincerity and a trustful heart, how do we live that way? How do we find a way to live in that way in the face of all the difficulties that we have to face, all the losses, all the illness, all the disasters of this human life and suffering all over the world?

[05:50]

this terrible famine that's going on and still the tsunami in Japan, the aftermath and all these things. How do we open our hearts? How do we live with utmost sincerity? So this has been a time for many people, many people in this community and in other communities and individually known and unknown, a time of great bereavement and loss. And I wanted to tell a Zen story which speaks to, for me, it speaks to how do we live with utmost sincerity and a trustful and open heart when we're facing and living through these difficulties. And the koan is case number 18 in the Blue Cliff Record, the national teacher's seamless monument.

[06:57]

And the national teacher was kind of an interesting Chinese teacher, a very good teacher, but he had very few disciples, like maybe one. So he's not very well known. If you look on the lineage chart, it stops after his one disciple doesn't go on. There's stories about his life and his disciples' life in relation to him, but not teachers that flowed from this. But he was a very great teacher, and he lived for 100 years, 675 to 775, the golden age of the Tang Dynasty. And he practiced for like 40 years assiduously, also was ordained young as a monk. when he was a little boy and practiced many, many years, and then was invited by the emperor of China to be the national teacher of China, and often goes by just the name national teacher. He worked with three emperors, father, son, and maybe another son, as the Dharma teacher of the court, of the emperor.

[08:09]

So his name was Nanyang Huizhong, and he was a disciple of the sixth ancestor, his very important ancestor, had many disciples, many enlightened disciples in schools that flowed. And this, he was a disciple of Huizhong also, but we don't, you know, he didn't have succession. So this is a story of right before the national teacher died. He was getting old and ready to die, and he went to the emperor to take his leave. And the emperor said, in very polite Chinese, he said something like, after a hundred years, what will you need? Which, in the translations, the meaning of that is, after you have passed on, what kind of monument do you want, or memorial? And Nanyang, the national teacher, said, please build me a seamless monument.

[09:16]

Please build me a seamless monument. And the emperor said, national teacher, please tell me what that would look like. And the national teacher was silent for a long time. And then he said to the emperor, do you understand? And the emperor said, no. And then the national teacher said, well, I have a disciple, Don Juan. His name is actually Don Juan. Don Juan, Chinese. I have a disciple, Don Juan, who knows about this matter. Why don't you can summon him and ask him? So the national teacher died, and after that, The emperor called for this disciple and told him this story that he had asked what kind of monument, how can I memorialize you, national teacher?

[10:20]

And he had said, please build for me a seamless monument. And Don Yaron was silent. And then he said, do you understand? And the emperor said, I don't understand. And then Dan Yuran gave a poem to illuminate. And the poem is South of Xiang and North of Tan. Okay, I have to look at my notes. This is my memory. Okay. South of Shan and north of Tan, in between there's gold enough for a nation. Under the shadowless tree, the community ferry boat, in the Crystal Palace, there's no one who knows.

[11:31]

So this was his poem. South of Shan and north of Tan, in between there's gold enough for a nation. under the shadowless tree, the communal ferry boat. In the crystal palace, there's no one who knows. So this particular story, this Zen story has been, as often Zen stories do, has been turning and I've been circling around it and it's been circling around me. What is a seamless monument. Build me a seamless monument. Build me a seamless monument. And, you know, when I think of, we have monuments, we have Suzuki Roshi's stupa or monument, his ashes site with this wonderful stone that he chose from the creek that was...

[12:38]

you know, over months was hauled up the hill slowly, slowly with a two-ton kamala and disciples pulling it and the whole place was created. He chose the site. He chose that stone. Build me a seamless monument. Is that a seamless monument? I would venture to say that Suzuki Roshi's monument, you know, is lives on in all the people who have come in contact with him, all the people who have ever read a lecture or Zen by beginner's mind, or come in contact with a student who came in contact with a student who came in contact with a student of Suzuki Roshi's. And like that, this monument to his utmost sincerity and trustful heart and attaining the marrow and how this is passed on in unseen ways and seen ways and lives within beings, uncountable beings.

[13:55]

So we have our monument up on the hill and we have, I think at the same time, our seamless monument, the seamless monument of the ungraspable way that we affect each other, benefit each other, support each other, help each other, is the way to memorialize someone. So when we lose someone, when we're bereaved, deprived of a loved one, we find, as someone said to me today, what used to be seem to be encased within this skin, flesh, bones, and marrow body that could come and go and arise and vanish, off, come away and come back.

[14:57]

And now there's no place that you don't find it. There's no place where you don't find a loved one and can feel them in this seamless life. way, the seamless monument. And we become the seamless monument for each other. We become transformed by each other and transform others. This is our life of pouring clear water from vessel to vessel, just clear water, utmost sincerity, trustful heart. So this South of Xi'an and North of Tan, just to comment on that poem, the kind of meaning of those two places in Chinese kind of idiom means kind of everywhere.

[16:04]

North of Tan, South of Xi'an, North of Tan is kind of like here and there, everywhere is the kind of meaning of that. And in between this everywhere, there's gold enough for a nation. And how I, you know, respond to that is there's nothing lacking. There's enough our own reality of our own life is filled, is brimming over with life force and the fullness of our practice life. We have everything we need. And under the shadowless tree, the community ferry boat. So here we have this boat. I was picturing this boat kind of like a small boat, you know, but everybody in it, you know, shoulder to shoulder kind of

[17:12]

bottom to bottom, all in there together, riding on the waves, riding on the river, riding, riding, never stopping, flowing. The community ferry boat, everybody in the boat together, nobody's left out. Everybody's of the same, of the same nature, faces the same kinds of things. And yet it's under this shadowless tree, this, which is an image, if you can picture, what might that be, a shadowless tree? This is one of those poetic images that is kind of ungraspable, a shadowless tree, but for me it denotes one single body, one single body and the myriad things, one single body and the ferry boat. not a single body only or just the ferry boat, but under the shadowless tree, there's the communal ferry boat with nobody left out.

[18:20]

This is actually how we exist, whether we realize it or not. Don Yuran's verse to the emperor in some ways was the silence, you know, the Buddha taught with noble silence and noble words, and sometimes noble silence and sometimes noble words. And in this story, when the emperor said, please tell me what this seamless monument will look like, there was noble silence from the national teacher. And this poem in some way is very compassionate, you know, because it's hard to understand noble silence sometimes. Not for everybody, but please tell me.

[19:25]

The emperor said, please. And whatever we say, whatever we say sometimes isn't it, you know. Whatever we say doesn't... hit the mark. We can't say it. And yet poetry will try, and Dandaran tried, you know, to say was unsayable. Now, a very interesting thing happened in this particular koan 18 of the Blue Cliff Record. In the commentary about this silence, there In the commentary was this story which appeared the last time I was here also in a kind of serendipitous way, the story of the four horses. There it was right in the commentary of this unpremeditated, unbidden, the four horses came again to speak to me.

[20:26]

And this time they had something else in their whinnying. And neighing, I heard some other, some more to the four horses. So for those of you who are not familiar with the four horses, there's a traditional teaching of four horses. The first horse, actually I just read a new translation, is startled, is startled by the shadow of the whip. And the second horse, runs right and left, and according to the intention of the driver, of the rider, when they feel the whip on their hair, actually, is another translation. And then the next one has to feel the whip on their flesh or skin. And the third horse has to feel to the marrow of their bones the whip in order to move, in order to run.

[21:28]

This is very old. This comes from the Agama, some of the Pali canon of the Buddha, the story of the four horses. And Dogen takes it up. Suzuki Roshi takes it up. And so I'm taking it up again because in this koan of 18, Seamless Monument, in the commentary, after the national teacher was silent, when the emperor said, please, what can I... How could I memorialize you? What could I do after you're gone? And he said, you know, please build me a seamless monument. What would it look like? Silence. So in the commentary, it harkened back to the story of the Buddha when it says a person from outside the way, so somebody who wasn't in the Buddhist order, came and said to the Buddha, I don't ask about... the unspoken, and I don't ask about the spoken. Please teach me."

[22:29]

And the Buddha was silent. And after a while, this person from outside the way said, Thank you very much. You have cleared my entire mind. My heart is free. I am so grateful. And he left. And Ananda, the Buddha's jisha, the Buddha's attendant for many, many years, said, what happened with this person from outside the way who came? What did he understand? Why did he thank you so much? You didn't say anything. And the Buddha said, he ran at the shadow of the whip, like a horse that runs at the shadow of the whip. Now, the new turning of this for me is that, because I always thought the whip was just the difficulty of our life, that we have to feel the difficulty of our life. We have to feel it to the marrow before we can turn our lives around. We have to be brought, or some, the fourth horse needs to be brought low, brought to their knees with suffering.

[23:35]

And others, they hear the teaching and they, and I think that's true, but more subtly or another way to look at this is that the whip The whip itself is impermanence. The whip is the evanescence of life. And some, and this is what it says in the Agamas, some upon hearing of some distant village having a flood or a tsunami or famine or some place you don't even know on the map where it is, but you hear about it and it turns your life around and you take up your practice. That's the horse that runs at the shadow of the wood. And the second horse hears about a village, their own village. They hear about their hometown, you know, New Orleans, flooded, you know, your own, you know, the stadium falling down at the state fair in, where was that, Oklahoma or someplace?

[24:44]

Your own home, you know. Or someone, you know, and you turn your life around. That's the second horse where you feel the whip of impermanence, the ungraspability, everything changes. You can't hold on to anything. You know, your own hometown. The third horse, they... when they hear of their own parents or family dying or sick. This is the third horse where you feel the whip on your flesh. And the fourth is your own death, your own loss of everything you hold dear, which you could say death is, but sickness. So that's the fourth horse. when it comes that close.

[25:47]

And of course, the fourth horse, just like in the marrow, the fourth, to hit the marrow, you've got to have the shadow and the skin and the flesh and the bone, all four come through. So all of us in the community ferry boat are being you know, we see the shadow of the whip, we feel the whip on our backs. You know, I recently saw the movie Buck, which is a documentary, maybe some of you have seen it, maybe a lot of you have seen it, it's a marvelous documentary about the man who, he's one of the men, there's more, there's a lineage actually of men who are called horse whisperers and they work with horses and train them and The Buddha from this story was called the excellent tamer. And when I heard that, the excellent tamer of horses, because he chose how to use these teachings.

[26:56]

When something was needed, you use this teaching. With this person, you need this teaching. And sometimes you need a whip, sometimes not. So he was an excellent tamer. That's one of the epithets for a Buddha. excellent tamer, which reminded me of this movie, Buck, which is a very poignant story, because it talks about his background, Buck's background, and I don't think it will ruin the story for you. As a young boy, he was in a family where he was abused terribly by his alcoholic father, and he was actually whipped mercilessly, and his mother died when he was very young, and they were at the mercy of this man. And he was a very sensitive child. And so you hear about it, he talks about this, and when it was finally found out, because he was playing sports, I guess, and he didn't want to shower with the other boys, and his coach said, you know, you have to shower.

[28:09]

took off his shirt, he had these marks on his back, and the coach realized the situation he was in and did something about it, removed him and his brother from the family and put them in this foster home of these wonderful people who had a ranch and had horses. And that first day, the foster mother was very loving and he warmed to her right away, but when the father came home, and drove up in this pickup truck. You know, he had a huge post-traumatic, you know, he was terrified, terrified of this male, you know, big male. And the foster father gave him some tools and some wire and said, come on with me. And they went to work, and they fixed fences like all day, all afternoon, and they worked together, and he learned. to take care of horses, and he realized he understood how the horse felt, how terrified the horses were when they were being broken and treated.

[29:19]

He doesn't break horses. He allows the horse to be safe and happy and composed and works with him in that way. And you see this in the footage. It's marvelous. But he knew, he knows, he knows about the horse because he knows from the inside out. He is, literally, he felt the whip to the marrow and faced, you know, the worst as a young child, the loss of his mother and was able to turn it into a seamless monument, you know, of teaching and touching people's lives and in such a deep way because the way they take care of horses is how they take care of their life, right? The way we take care of each and everything of our life, our calligraphy, our setting down our plates, removing plates from the dining room, cooking, composting, writing, all the arts, everything we do is an expression of our

[30:35]

our full body-mind of our trustful heart and our utmost sincerity, or lack thereof, or longing to fully enter with sincere heart. Nothing's hidden, you know. This is our seamless monument. It's not hidden. It's It's in each thing that we do. So when we think about this seamless monument, we might think, oh, this vast, big, universal, it's all too much. And in Suzuki Roshi's commentary on this 18th case, he says, you know, to have a stone, a memorial stone, it doesn't have to be a big, universal, giant thing. It can be a small stone. I like small stones, he says, ones you can carry, ones you can make gardens with, you know. So to have a stone that's movable and can be placed, it's good enough, you know, it's enough, which is like our own life.

[31:44]

We don't have to think about all the vast ways that we're going to change the world. We just can take care of that which is before us with utmost sincerity and a trustful heart. And that small stone, of course, if we stay study it and stay with it and relax with each thing, each stone and each posture, each asana. Patricia was saying, you know, you go into an asana that's unfamiliar and you're startled, you know, like the whip, and you draw back and you might run away or I can't do that or I'm afraid. And if you stay, You get something happens, there's a shift, and this is, I'm okay. This is all right. I'm okay. And you can relax into it. But if we don't stay long enough, we'll never be able to relax.

[32:48]

So each thing, each asana, each stone, each action can be not different than our seamless monument. really. So I know I'm supposed to be really careful about the time. Oh, it's almost time. So I think that's all I wanted to say. And we are coming to a close. And I wanted to Someone sent me something last week, actually another yoga teacher, Judith Lassiter, sent me this thing in the mail, in the email, an audio that she said she thought I would find amusing. And so I brought it to play tonight because I did find it amusing and I thought, you know, there's a kind of gravity maybe to the talk and looking at old age sickness and

[34:03]

death and whips. So I wanted to play this because our suffering and our joy are not mutually exclusive, actually. There is great joy within suffering and the shift from one to the other. They're not mutually exclusive. So this particular thing I'm going to play is called I think it was done in a comedy club or something. It's called the Zen Hokey Pokey. Do you know the Hokey Pokey? Does anybody not know the Hokey Pokey? Hal, do you not know the Hokey Pokey? What, what? Of course. Anybody not know the Hokey Pokey? Oh, good. Everybody knows the Hokey Pokey. So I was thinking of the Hokey Pokey kind of like... the universal admonitions for zazen, you know, like how you move your body and you do various things.

[35:07]

So this is someone's rendition of the Zen, Hokey Pokey, and also it includes all the stereotypes of Zen that you can imagine. And if you don't think it's funny, you know, that's okay. Okay. So let's see here. Set up. We have speakers. I hope, I hope this works. Dan, did you test it? Okay. You take your left arm and you don't whip it at all. You take your right. arm and you keep it really still. Sit in contemplation doing Zen meditation. Is that what it's all about?

[36:08]

You take your left foot and you leave it where it is. You take your right foot and you completely clear your mind. Practice non-attachment. Surrender everything. Now you're doing the Zen. meditation. You take your right leg, but was it really ever there? You may not exist at all. You take a vow of silence and give up worldly things. Now you're doing the Zen meditation. Not Doing anything should be your only aim. Now concentrate on that which cannot be named. When you clap along, you do it with one hand. Now you're doing the Zen meditation.

[37:11]

Is this song inside your mind? Or is this song outside your mind? Either way you answer, you'll probably be wrong. That's doing the Zen meditation. I mean, not doing the Zen meditation. I mean, doing it, but not not doing it. Now go practice this for 10 years. Thank you for listening to that. I thought that opening line about you take your right leg and you leave it alone. And then he says, is that what it's all about? I don't know if you heard that, but is that what it's all about?

[38:12]

Okay, well. Thank you all very much. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[38:42]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.0