This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. It's raining. It's raining lights. Can you see it? So our Zazen is an endeavor to illuminate the self. To illuminate ourselves and all those places within us which don't already recognize how they are illuminated. So we sit in Zazen to shine a light in all the dark corners of our being.

[01:05]

the fears, the resentments, the guilt, the arrogance, the feelings of not enough. And we also, in our zazen, illuminate all the joy, all the happiness, all that is content. Everything gets to be illuminated in our zazam. So we bring them all into the light of awareness, and in doing so, we liberate them. The liberating light of awareness. So this morning I wanted us to start off by chanting the hymn to the perfection wisdom because I want to continue on the theme of Prajnaparamita, which I had spoken on about on Saturday.

[02:19]

And on Saturday I spoke about Prajnaparamita from the perspective of emptiness. And today I want to speak on it from the perspective of, if you will, light, seeing, insight, luminosity. And for those of you who weren't at the talk on Saturday, I'll just briefly say that, actually for those who weren't here for the whole practice period, we've been studying the six perfections, the six paramitas. And prajna, paramita, is the sixth, of the six perfections. And the word prajna is a Sanskrit word. And it most often is translated as wisdom. Although it's also said to be a little bit closer in meaning to insight or discriminative knowledge or intuitive apprehension or spontaneous knowing.

[03:32]

The word paramita in Sanskrit means crossing over or to go beyond. So prajna paramita means the perfection of wisdom or wisdom beyond wisdom. The perfection of wisdom has many manifestations or personifications, both male and female. including, as many of you might know, Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri, Kuan Yin, Kanzeon. The Tara statue here to the right of the altar is another manifestation of Prajnaparamita, as is the statue upstairs on the second floor in what's fondly known as Holy Hall, where you wait for a dokusan, practice discussion, and the mini hand red statue. is also another expression, particularly of Prajnaparamita, with many hands and many instruments in each hand.

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And you could say that the perfection of wisdom is beyond gender, because gender becomes for it merely a way to manifest skillful means. So, Prajnaparamita is not limited to the concept or the expression of gender. So each morning we pay homage to the perfection of wisdom in our service, acknowledging and celebrating her unique capacities. We chant that the perfection of wisdom gives light. She is unstained. She is a source of light. And from everyone in the triple world, she removes darkness. Most excellent are her works. She brings lights that all fear and distress may be forsaken, may be let go of. And she disperses the gloom and darkness of delusion.

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She herself is an organ, a vision. So with her luminous and keen vision, the perfection of wisdom is able to see beyond mere appearances, beyond dualistic perceptions, to see things as it is, to see emptiness, to see that all beings and all phenomenon lack any own being or inherent existence. Unstained, say she's unstained means that no mental constructs obscure her vision no thoughts or ideas or concepts color or taint her clear insight her vision or seeing is direct unmediated pure hers is just seeing pure knowing

[07:00]

pure awareness, luminosity. Because she sees the true nature of all beings, she therefore has compassion. She has compassion for the myriad ways in which we do not see our true nature. And in our not seeing and being blind to our true nature, we suffer. So she alleviates the suffering of beings by offering them light. The light of seeing into their true nature. So it's understood in Mahayana Buddhism that wisdom and compassion are inseparable. As Red mentioned in his Dharma talk a couple Saturdays ago, Compassion isn't generally emphasized in Mahayana Buddhism because it's already understood as an essential or foundational aspect of the Dharma in practice.

[08:13]

And he also spoke about how wisdom in the form of Avalokiteshvara hears the cries of the world and responds with a loving embrace and recognition. And her response, her mercy, can take many forms, all considered skillful means, or upaya, or appropriate response. In Japanese Buddhism, kanzayan is another personification of the perfection of wisdom, like the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara and Kuan Yin. It is said that kanzayan embodies wisdom and love as a single virtue. They're not two different things. Wisdom and love as a single virtue. Her personal process of realization is at the same time the process of world realization.

[09:21]

So her realization, her waking up, is the world waking up simultaneously. As the Buddha said, I awaken, all beings awaken simultaneously with me. So she is not separate from my own body or yours. And she lives a life of offering. In fact, she offers her body up as an organ of vision to all beings. She is the one who perceives the unfettered self. the one who is free and sees the source of freedom. She knows and sees about the causes for suffering and is herself liberated from these causes of suffering. The word kanzeon means one who perceives

[10:31]

or sees the sounds of the world. So the word khanzayan is a form of a synesthesia. It's a new word I learned. Synesthesia is a figure of speech in which one sense, in this case hearing, is described using terms for another, seeing. Khanzayan doesn't just hear, the cries of the world, she sees them and with great compassion holds and responds to the cries by offering mercy. She has sight into the cries and their causes. She has insight into these cries. and into what may liberate the cries of all beings.

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There is a well-known and often referenced Kaan about the perfection of wisdom in the form of the Bodhisattva of great compassion. And here is case 89 from the Blue Cliff Record. Yunnan asked Dawu, how does the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion use so many hands and eyes? Dawu said, it's just like a person in the middle of the night reaching in search of a pillow. Yunnan said, I understand. Dawu said, how do you understand it? Yunnan said, all over the body are hands and eyes. Dawu said, what you said is all right. Sometimes it's translated, what you said is 80%. Yunyan said, I'm like this elder brother, this is my understanding. How do you understand it? And Dao said, throughout the body, hands and eyes.

[12:52]

Throughout the body, hands and eyes. So the main point of this koan is that the Bodhisattva of great compassion with her profound seeing and insight that is beyond our normal, limited human way of seeing things. As well as with her manifold hands, able to execute any skillful means using her various tools in her paya, is able to spontaneously and intuitively respond. spontaneously and intuitively respond to any form of human distress and in doing so alleviate it. So her response is one that begins before thought. It begins before she even thinks about it. It's intuitive.

[13:53]

It just comes naturally before, beyond thinking. So the tension in this particular koan pivots around the question of whether there is a difference, and to what degree, between a type of seeing and responsiveness that comes from having hands and eyes all over the body, on the surface if you will, and one that comes from having hands and eyes throughout the body, permeating the body. What's the difference? From where does true insight come? Recently, I read an article claiming that some new extensive scientific evidence shows that our bodies are covered in photoreceptors.

[14:55]

And photoreceptors are specialized light-detecting molecules that are actually outside of our eyes. They're on our skin, mostly, from what I understand, but also within our central nervous system and even in the lining of some of our internal organs. So in other words, the cells throughout our bodies essentially have eyes of their own. Pretty trippy, huh? However, these eyes within don't necessarily connect to our conscious minds, at least not directly, but they still have an effect because they apparently regulate our level of alertness. They also help to regulate our body temperature and even our moods. So you could say we literally have the proverbial third eye

[16:03]

and fourth eyes, and fifth eyes, all over our bodies, affecting our intuition in all sorts of unexplored and mysterious ways. So in other words, your whole body, like the perfection of wisdom, is literally an organ of vision. I remember being at Tassajara where it's, when there are no lights and all the kerosene went out, this is the days when there was kerosene before there was too much electricity, right? Going at night from the Zen no to one's room and then trying to navigate in the dark of one's room, you learn to cultivate another sense of seeing. You no longer see with your eyes because it's too dark. So I began to be able to move through the darkness with my whole body in some way.

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Just feeling from this internal place of knowing how to make it to the bathroom, how to pick up various objects, try to get through my room without stumbling or anything. Even at times when it was pitched back and there was no... no moon, to walk through Tassajara in the darkness. And I never fell. I never hurt myself. And even now I still, at night, close my eyes sometimes or walk through my apartments, trying to continue cultivating this capacity to see in the darkness, not to be fooled by my vision. In the pointer in the introduction to case 89, Yuan Wu wrote a commentary and he asked the question, now leaving aside whole body for the moment, if suddenly you had no eyes, how would you see?

[18:15]

Without ears, how would you hear? Without a mouth, how would you speak? Without a mind, how would you perceive? In other words, how would... We know the world without our sense organs. Is there a form of seeing and knowing beyond our senses? If so, what is it? If suddenly you had no eyes, how would you see? This is something that I've considered often because I think of the five senses, The one I cherish the most is my sense of sight, and I would be most grief-stricken to lose that capacity. I remember how my own father was partially blind. He was blinded around the age of 30 in a construction accident in which he was hammering a rusty nail, and it broke off and went into his eye, his right eye, and blinded him.

[19:21]

I remember looking into his eye and seeing how the black of the pupil kind of bled into the iris like a broken egg yolk. And he said he could see some light and maybe some vague figures now and then, but basically he couldn't really see much from that eye. And over the years, my father's partial blindness became a metaphor for how his... limited ability to see me and to see his children and to see his wives and those around him, to see us with love, to see us for who we truly were, and rather than his limited perspective. And, of course, in the years of practice, I myself have come to awareness of my own limited seeing, the ways in which I am partially blind. how do I see the world from a limited, compromised, myopic point of view?

[20:26]

And so there are two eyes maybe that I use. There is my Dharma eye, you know, which is maybe more clear, direct, vibrant, and inclusive. And then my other eye, the eye of small self, which, alas, still plagues me. And through that eye, I see a world of shadows and murky movements and black and white contrasts. And I think all of us and the whole world would benefit from understanding the ways in which we are blind, the ways in which we don't see or don't want to see each other and what is true in our lives. And while our blindness may be conditioned by many things, society, culture, our parents, our own particular karmic proclivities, we can find another way to see, to meet and inhabit our lives with a vision that is clearer, inclusive, compassionate, and direct.

[21:39]

A number of years ago, I read a book by the title, And There Was Light. And this is the autobiography of a man named Jacques Luceran. And Luceran was a French underground resistance leader during the Second World War who had lost his eyes in an accident when he was seven years old. And at the age of 16, he formed a resistance group with his school friends in Nazi-occupied France. And He was a leader, and what was special about it is that he was able, when he interviewed people who wanted to join the resistance movement, to be able, with his kind of special, unique inner seeing, be able to perceive whether or not these people were authentic and genuine, or whether or not they were lying or spies in some way. And he was very, very successful at this. He had interviewed thousands, perhaps,

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And was able to discern. Except for one time. One time. He made a mistake. And he and his comrades were then captured. And betrayed to the Germans. And spent 15 months incarcerated in Buchenwald concentration camp. And so he was one of initially 2,000 people had entered the camp. And at the end, when he was finally liberated, he was only one of 30 remaining from that initial group of 2,000. Does anyone know this book? One person? It's a fascinating book. And I particularly like it because it has a lot of strong Zen elements to it, particularly in the way he describes, after the loss of his vision, how it is that he came to see again. and what that was like.

[23:46]

And so I want to share a few passages from his autobiography, and there was lights, as well as from a collection of essays called Against the Pollution of the Eye. And Luceron became blind, as I said, when he was seven. He was at school, and there had been a rush to go outside, And he got pushed and jostled, and he fell, and he was wearing spectacles. And one of the arms of the spectacle went right into his eye, his right eye. And so the eye had to be surgically removed. And his other eye had what was called sympathetic ophthalmalia, which is basically sympathetic trauma, and therefore couldn't see. So he lost both his vision. Both eyes became totally blind. And this is afterwards what he discovered. It was a great surprise to me to find myself blind, and being blind was not at all as I had imagined it, nor was it as the people around me seemed to think it.

[24:55]

They told me that to be blind meant not to see, yet how was I to believe them when I saw? Not at once, I admit, not in the days immediately after the operation. For at that time, I still wanted to use my eyes. I followed their usual path. I looked in the direction where I was in the habit of seeing before the accident. And there was anguish, a lack, something like a void which filled me with what grown-ups called despair. Finally, one day, and it was not long in coming, I realized I was looking in the wrong way. And it was as simple as that. I was making something very like the mistake people make who change their glasses without adjusting themselves. I was looking too far off and too much on the surface of things.

[25:56]

This was much more than a simple discovery. It was a revelation. I can still see myself in the Champs-de-Mars where my father had taken me for a walk a few days after the accident. Of course, I knew the garden well, its ponds, its railings, its iron chairs. I even knew some of the trees in person, and naturally, I wanted to see them again. But I couldn't. I threw myself forward into the substance, which was space, but which I did not recognize. because it no longer held anything familiar to me. At this point, some instinct, I was almost about to say a hand laid on me, made me change course. I began to look more closely, not at things, but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place to one further within.

[27:00]

instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the world outside. Immediately, the substance of the universe drew together, redefined, and peopled itself anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me as within. But radiance was there. or to put it more precisely, light. It was a fact, for light was there. I felt indescribable relief and happiness so great it almost made me laugh. Confidence and gratitude came as if a prayer had been answered. I found light and joy at the same moment. And I can say without hesitation that from that time on, light and joy had never been separated in my experience. I have had them, or lost them, together.

[28:05]

I saw light and went on seeing it, though I was blind. Still, there were times when the light faded, almost to the point of disappearing. It happened every time I was afraid. If instead of letting myself be carried along by confidence and throwing myself into things, I hesitated, calculated, thought about the wall, the half-open door, the key in the lock. If I said to myself that all these things were hostile or about to strike or scratch, then without exception, I hit or wounded myself. The only easy way to move around the house the garden, or the beach, was by not thinking about it at all or thinking as little as possible. Then I moved between obstacles the way they say bats do.

[29:10]

What the loss of my eyes had not accomplished was brought about by fear. It made me blind. Anger and impatience had the same effect. throwing everything into confusion. The minute before I knew just where everything in the room was. But if I got angry, things got angrier than I. They went and hid in the most unlikely corners, mixed themselves up, turned turtle, muttered like crazy men and looked wild. As for me, I no longer knew where to put hand or foot. Everything hurt me. This mechanism worked so well that I became cautious. When I was playing with my small companions, if I suddenly grew anxious to win, to be first at all cost, then all at once I could see nothing. Literally, I went into fog or smoke.

[30:13]

I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly. Because as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. All at once, a black hole opened, and I was helpless inside of it. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light. So is it surprising that I loved friendship and harmony, when I was very young. I found this last part pretty amazing, how literally he would go blind by losing his inner composure, losing contact with the light inside, by allowing his emotions

[31:16]

and unwholesome mental formations to get the best of him in some way. And that only by choosing to return to connection to the light, choosing to be happy, choosing to come from a place of kind regard, could he once again see clearly and move through the world with this inner seeing. he actually learned to see in other ways. So it wasn't just about sight, it was about how he moved in his body. So that word I mentioned earlier, synesthesia. And this is from the foreword in the collection of his essays. Luceon also began to understand that there was a world beyond the ordinary auditory sense, where everything had its own sound,

[32:21]

These sounds were neither inside nor outside, but were passing through him. Similarly with touch, a new world of infinitely differentiated pressure opened up to him. To find one's way around the world, all it took was a certain training in attention. Reality was a complex field of interacting pressures. By the time I was 10 years old, Lusserrand writes, I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else, ready to take its place if it should fall by the way. The crux of Lusserrand's insight was that attention, the thread that leads us from the labyrinth, is not only attention, It is the way we turn toward that ray of light so that it can come toward and touch us.

[33:24]

It is the part of our relationship to God or reality that depends on us. It is what connects us to reality. Another word for it could be presence. Being present. Wakeful, active receptivity. Anything that disturbs this presence must be avoided. One must strive for what the ancient monks called apathia, detachment, and what the German mystics called gelesonheit, letting go. We must become blind again and again. Then the one who is seeing, what Lusron calls the essential power, are linked with the principle with God, we could say Buddha-nature, can be present. In addition to the mystic and activist, there is in Liseron the phenomenologist of the senses.

[34:31]

In a few sentences, he sketches a revolutionary, non-dualistic anthropology. The human being as a whole is a sense organ, a non-material perceiving being. All our senses are one, he says, the successive stages of a single perception, and that perception is always one of touch. We can understand what Luceon means by touch when we realize that what he means is contact and that the psychological form of primal contact is attention. We move from being subjects for objects. to becoming a space, a field within, which color, sound, smell, neither inside nor outside, come to meet attention. Here, in this field of vibration, or force field, each object is and carries its own meaning.

[35:38]

Luceron apologizes. Language can take him no further yet it takes him very far and often in the simplest, most obvious direction. In his last paper, Against the Pollution of the Eye, which is in this collection of essays, and he died on the way to actually deliver the paper in this. This was in 1971 that he died, the same year Suzuki Roshi died. In this paper, the eye that he speaks of is but... Another name for the mysterious, fragile, sensual vitality. The light, life, and love that we are when we attend and open the possibility of a true inner life. He sees this I, this inner light or vitality under attack from every side. He would have us wake up. to not let the inner eye, that awake, vital, luminous quality that's always present, be obscured by our conditioning, by the distraction of the world, by the distractions of our thinking.

[37:14]

Not to pollute that eye, not to obscure it, not to abstain it in any way, but do our best to allow it to be luminous and continuous. to abide as attention, to abide as presence, to abide as wakeful, active receptivity. That is asen. That is asen. And it requires a detachment or renunciation, a letting go into what is, trusting it, not trusting appearances in the world, not trusting our thoughts and ideas, but trusting that which in us already knows, allowing that one to come forward in some way. To stay in continuous contact, as Dogen says, to be in continuous attention.

[38:26]

This is our practice. moving in the world in such a way that the subject-object dichotomy begins to fall away because we feel no separation with the world around us. We feel the world in us, as us. We know the world because it's not separate from us. The knowing in objects and the light in objects is the same knowing and light within us. So it's just light seeing light. as we move through the world. This vibrational field of vitality comes forward and meets us. We don't need to go forward to meet it. If we try to go forward to meet it, if we try to grab onto it, we stumble, we fall, we hurt ourselves from this grasping behavior. But if we just rest as awareness and allow the world to come forward, it informs us.

[39:29]

It guides us. It directs us. Lissaran says, touching things fully is seeing them as fully as eyes can see. But it is more than seeing them. It is tuning in on them and allowing the current they hold to connect with one's own, like electricity. To put it differently, this means an end of living in front of things and a beginning of living with them. Never mind if the word sounds shocking, for this is love. There is only one way to the inner light, love. For this inner light, which is life, is love. We suggest that this inner light is exactly the perfection of wisdom, which is love.

[40:37]

The way in which this inner light, this perfection alleviates suffering by fully presencing our lives. Being fully awake and receptive to what is. Unconditionally. Numinously. And Our challenge, of course, is not only to do this for others, to be available and receptive to others, but particularly, at least initially, to do it for ourselves. How difficult that is to allow ourselves to be illuminated by ourselves. So when Dogen says the Buddha way is to study the self, what we're studying is anything that obstructs the light within. in a way in that it gets in the way, it throws shadows or blackens out our inner knowing, our inner luminosity.

[41:41]

The ways in which we get blinded by our karmic formations, by our emotions, by our ideas and thoughts. Our inner light is always present. It never leaves us. We leave it. So we endeavor to attend, attend, attend. Give attention to such a degree that there is no longer subject or object, self or other. There's just this one field of luminous presence, what is called love. So everything that you see, I want to suggest, all objects, all phenomenon, all experience, is nothing more than a modulation of awareness, of this luminous knowing.

[42:53]

Nothing more than a manifestation of light. the ton, the mat. This one, that one. It's just a field of light. Taking shapes. Dancing. It's all light dancing. Can you see the dancing of light? Can you see it in the rain? Can you see it in each other? Can you celebrate the dancing of light in yourself and others? A whole being wants to be seen, wants to be recognized, wants to be received, realized, and illuminated by the light of pure knowing.

[44:03]

So there are no dark corners. There are no shatters. There is nothing left out. Light illuminating light. So once again, let's run. There is only one way to the inner light, love. For this inner light, which is life, is love. So let's go back to the zendo. and sit. Sit and look inward at this light. Sit and allow this light to illuminate us. Sit and allow our own light to illuminate all experience. So when we get off the cushion again, we'll continue to be able to recognize the light in all things and in each other. So thank you for your attention.

[45:15]

Thank you for your luminosity. Thank you for your love. 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 sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

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