Thank you for braving the storm, those who came from afar. It's a good day to talk about... stillness in the midst of storm. I'm curious, how many people here have what they would consider a regular meditation practice, like, and say, let's say regular, once a week at least, like sitting meditation at least once a week? Yeah, so maybe

[01:00]

maybe half so I intend to bring up some teachings and clarification about sitting meditation today so if you have a regular practice this is a chance to to look more deeply into clarifying what this practice is. And if you don't, maybe this could be encouraging to take up such a practice. The Buddha spoke of meditation practice commonly as having these two aspects. In Zen we often don't speak of meditation in this way because we're not into breaking things into two aspects so much.

[02:13]

But I think it's a helpful model, and I think that you'll find both aspects in Zen, and just not spoken of quite in this way. And so these two sides are shamatha, is the Sanskrit word, meaning calm, abiding, settling, or it could be translated as stopping, discursive thinking and the chattering mind, putting it to rest, and then vipassana, which is insight or understanding. And these two sides work together, and you might have So you might have heard these terms like vipassana before. There's insight meditation. And then there's this other side of the calm abiding.

[03:19]

And they work together inseparably. And so the Buddha spoke about these in the early teachings and then in the later Mahayana teachings also there was A lot of teaching about stopping, we could translate it, and another word for vipassana or insight is seeing. So we could say stopping and seeing, two sides of meditation practice. The Buddha said in the sutra, unraveling the mysteries. Bodhisattva Maitreya asked the Buddha, abiding in what and depending on what do bodhisattvas in the great vehicle in the Mahayana practice this stopping and seeing? And the Buddha says, abiding in and depending upon the unwavering resolution to teach Dharma for the benefit of all beings.

[04:34]

and to realize complete perfect awakening bodhisattvas practice stopping and seeing in the great vehicle so this is the foundation this is the the root this is the reason for practicing stopping and seeing in the great vehicle is to teach the Dharma for the benefit of beings And so this is the compassion side. Bodhisattvas, without this practice, it may be impossible to completely express the necessary teachings for liberation. And the reason also that they have this unwavering resolution to realize complete perfect awakening could also be seen to be compassion.

[05:37]

In order to fully help beings in all possible ways, they need all possible tools to do so, and as complete an understanding as possible. So they need to realize complete awakening, and this is done through these two aspects of stopping and seeing. Some people would say that all Buddhist practices can be included within stopping and seeing. So calm abiding and insight, stopping and seeing. Another way to speak of it would be resting. Resting in... present resting in now-ness in the quality of all the qualities of the present moment could say is now-ness but really resting in now-ness in a concentrated undistracted way

[07:00]

which, if you're not used to meditation, sounds very simple and easy, maybe, but if you are, you know how, although we are actually in the present, it's very difficult to just rest there, here, because the mind very much tends to past and future The mind tends to thought, which is virtually always past and future, which in itself I think is kind of amazing. We might not think that all thinking is virtually all thinking is past and future, but when you start examining thoughts, notice if they're involved in past and future, and virtually always, almost always.

[08:13]

So resting in the present, gently letting go of the past and future thinking mind is very challenging, but very rewarding and restful. and it's actually experiencing our present life. So it's really a gift to ourselves to rest in the present, to rest in now-ness. And in the Mahayana, in the great vehicle, generally this stopping, shamatha, calm abiding, resting, is generally, particularly in Zen, this type of meditation is encouraged to be practiced with the sense gates open.

[09:17]

So we leave our eyes open a little and our ears open hearing sound and the nose open and bodily sensation open. We are not shutting down the senses. There are such meditations, but the great vehicle meditations generally are not shutting down these aspects of experience, but fully experiencing them in the present moment. And in fact, we could say they're even an aid to resting in the present moment because sense experience is always in the present moment. So if this calm abiding side we could call resting, the inside side we could call opening.

[10:25]

Resting and opening. Opening to the way things are or opening to the true nature of things, particularly our own true nature, opening to that while resting. Generally, meditation is taught that first is the calm abiding side and then from that concentration and stability and focus then one shifts the mind's focus to insight. But if we say it's resting and opening, one might be able to see how that shift is very subtle and doesn't have to be a jarring shift.

[11:25]

It's in the midst of resting, deeply resting in the present, in now-ness, opening naturally may arise. Resting in nowness, opening to the nature of things, begins to manifest. would say that this is one reason why Zen teachings often don't mention these two sides of calm abiding and insight because in deep resting opening naturally manifests but it's not necessarily so so I feel it's important to bring up these two sides in other words we might be resting in the present very focused on the the

[12:28]

presently arising experience, but actually not opening to the truer, deeper nature of the experience, which tentatively I would call the ungraspability of experience. And I think this is an important point, I feel, because Sometimes we hear these teachings or meditation instructions like just rest in now-ness with all your senses open, completely experiencing the present moment, letting go of discursive thinking and just like this is it. And sometimes it sounds like this is the complete Zen meditation. And it sounds pretty good, and it is pretty good, but it may be missing the full import and benefit and wonder of the complete dharma.

[13:54]

And what it might be missing is this opening to the ungraspable nature of the experience. So if we say that the first calm abiding is like this is it. Just sitting, completely experience your life, present moment, this is it. You could say this other side is, this is not it. We need both these sides. Completely, this is it. And then opening to this quite subtle realm of actually, this is actually not it. This is not it. Anything we think or even experience, even our experience is not it. what we think it is, and even our experience that we're conscious of doesn't completely touch the nature of the complete ungraspability of reality.

[15:21]

We could even say that this is it, resting in the present, is another way to talk about that would be not grasping. So in order to rest in the present, we have to kind of temporarily, anyway, release a grasping hold. And I use the word grasping to mean in the mind, really, but it's that image of tightly holding. And tightly could be not even very tightly, but to some extent we're holding to a certain way of seeing things or idea about something. particularly thoughts, grasping thoughts.

[16:34]

Or we could say holding or grasping thoughts as real or as really the way things are. Or that a thought about something really is the way that thing is. This is our normal mode of experience. And so this resting will be temporarily just giving that grasping a rest, give it a break, almost as an experiment. That's why we could say temporarily. It's not completely ending grasping mind forever. That's too much. But just during this period of meditation, for example, to just... be open to the possibility of releasing that grasp on the thinking mind, which is a little tricky because it's kind of easy to grasp that idea, the idea of not grasping, and make that into something.

[17:50]

So it's subtle. But any kind of grasping, to just let it all go. So not grasping... And that sounds like the seeing inside side, the realization of not grasping. Isn't that like the end of the path? And in a way we could say that, but another way to look at this other side would be if the resting side is not grasping, the other side of seeing would be like the realization of the ungraspability of anything. Could you see that difference? Not grasping thoughts, the mind calms and settles and rests in the present moment. And that, almost like that is, could be said in a way to be the end of the path.

[18:57]

if that were to just, if there was a moment of non-grasping, and then that continued endlessly, then nothing else would be needed. But in fact, it's a kind of a temporary meditation state, you could say. Maybe just one moment of just non-grasping restful peace but then there's this other side that actually is the understanding that actually the way that experience of not grasping in that one moment is is actually the way that everything always is the way that thoughts were not grasped in this one moment of just resting which is not so impossible a thing for one moment to just let go for a moment.

[20:03]

But then to see that actually that way that thoughts were not grasped in that moment is actually the nature of things that thoughts can't be grasped. So that's actually that moment of kind of intentionally resting is a kind of description of the way things always are. And to see that actually nothing can ever be grasped, even when we're so-called grasping, that people might say, well, I'm grasping thoughts. I really am grasping thoughts, but the seeing is like, Actually, when it seems like you're grasping thoughts, that's illusory. Thoughts cannot be grasped.

[21:04]

Mind cannot be grasped. Cannot be gotten a hold of. No thought can ever be gotten a hold of. Obviously, it's not something physically graspable. We know that, but we feel like we can... We can hold a thought, but actually we can't really hold a thought for even a moment. And to see how the thoughts are completely elusive and illusory and ungraspable and gone already. Every mind moment. There's really nothing there. So seeing that, then coming out of the meditation, there can be some freedom even in the midst of activating the mind again.

[22:17]

And this could be said to be the point. If we had to sit in meditation all the time to be free, that would be ridiculous. It has to apply to everything, especially complicated, dynamic activity. And that's the point of the seeing side, so that seeing that the stopping is actually the way things are, then when we're no longer stopped, it's okay. So I think of it as the wind is howling and so on and the kind of a storm or, you know, how a hurricane has an eye in the center of the hurricane is the As I understand it, it's this area, maybe like of a few miles, where it's actually quite clear and sunny, even.

[23:29]

And the wind is calm, and then all around it is this wild hurricane. And I've even heard that it's like in a cyclone or a hurricane, it's rotating around the eye, and the part that's called, I think, the wall of the eye, kind of at the edge of the eye, where the rest of the wild hurricane begins, is the strongest part of hurricane, where the winds are the strongest. And really, that's what destroys buildings and things like that, is when the wall of the eye hits things. So, the eye itself is very peaceful. So we can think of what I call post-meditation practice. like this, is that arising from the settled mind of sitting meditation back into the hurricane of daily life, that there can be this settled, calm, abiding I in the center that's where there's stillness in the midst of a lot of activity.

[24:42]

stillness of mind, even when the mind is having to think of the next thing and the mind is totally busy, there's some, in the very center, there's a still resting. And this is just a metaphor, but you may have some feeling for that type of calm, unmoving center in busy experience. And the way to train at opening to that eye would be through the actual practice of calm abiding while sitting to get in touch with it. So the abbot has recently been bringing up mindfulness practice and the four foundations of mindfulness.

[25:52]

And just to mention that briefly so that it's not confusing to the residents who've been hearing about this in terms of these two different models. It might sound like two different models of the four foundations of mindfulness and then this calm abiding and insight. Not really. They're just two different ways of talking about something similar we could say that mindfulness is a would fall into the insight side actually because it's it's paying attention in a way it's not just just a narrow focus on one thing it's it's paying attention to what's happening but um oh i guess i would The way I see it is that the first foundations of mindfulness, mindfulness of the body and feelings and aspects of mind, are more like the calm-abiding side.

[27:05]

They're just simple, direct awareness of these very straightforward aspects of the world and our experience, the body, the basic feelings and mental states, and just settling on those. In the body, there's just the body. In the feeling, there's just the feeling. It's very much like calm abiding, resting the mind and the experience. Whereas the fourth foundation of mindfulness, which is of mind objects or dharmas, and particularly includes various dharma teachings like the Four Noble Truths and so on, that seems to move over into the area of insight. And now it's applying the mind to this more dynamic kind of teachings about objects of experience and particularly different analyses of the way things are.

[28:10]

That's kind of a footnote for people who've been listening to the talks on mindfulness. Now, in Zen, they don't talk about so much, as I mentioned, these two aspects of stopping and seeing, or also another similar pair of terms. shamatha and vipassana another pair is samadhi and prajna which is like samadhi is one pointedness of mind sometimes we say concentration one pointedness is very similar to this calm resting in the moment and prajna means wisdom very much like insight so almost synonymous I would say this pair And these terms are brought up sometimes in Zen teachings, and particularly the sixth ancestor of Zen tried to clarify these terms.

[29:17]

And you could say that the sixth ancestor in China in the seventh century was, in a way, the beginning of the Zen in school. he was the first to really write a lot about Zen teaching and meditation and kind of define the style of Zen. And he did kind of define the style of meditation in his writing and became a kind of Zen way of expression. And what he said was that talking about samadhi and prajna, one point in concentration and wisdom, He said, good friends, you should see that this one-pointed concentration and wisdom are not two. They're not two practices. They're not separate. Because they were often taught as two different things. And he said that one-pointedness is the substance of wisdom, and wisdom is the function of one-pointedness.

[30:27]

They're like a candle flame and it's light. So the flame is like the substance of the light and the light is like the function of the candle. And the way I see this is similar to saying that the stopping is like not grasping and the seeing is like realizing ungraspability. realizing that nothing can be grasped. One is like enacting it, temporarily enacting non-grasping, and one is like realizing that that's the way it is. Nothing can be grasped. Similarly, samadhi being the substance, one-pointedness being substance, is like actually the experience of one-pointedness. And the function of wisdom is to realize that this one-pointedness, samadhi, one-pointedness is, again, the way things actually are.

[31:38]

The nature of reality is one-pointed. One-pointedness refers to the one-pointedness of the mind and its object. So in meditation, One-pointedness would be when the mind and the meditation object, for example, the breath or the presently arising experience, become one-pointed, so there's no separation between the observer and the observed. And that's samadhi, but what the sixth ancestor seems to be saying is that the wisdom, which is the function of this one-pointedness, is... what sees that this one pointedness is actually the nature of the universe. That actually mind and its object are not separate. Mind and object are not two.

[32:44]

Seeing that is wisdom. That's the function of this substance. For those who don't have a meditation practice, this might be getting overwhelming and sound kind of complicated. But I think it's just a way of talking about it. It's actually not such a complicated matter, really. It's about resting. It's about resting the discursive, figuring mind. It's trying to figure out what this is about. It's giving that a rest. Just, you know, if you're having that experience now of wondering what is he talking about, just listen to the sound of the words coming into your ears without getting involved in the content.

[34:03]

rest in the nowness of the experience of this sound. And you might find there's some calmness in that compared to trying to grasp the meaning. And the fact that the meaning of what I'm saying actually can't be grasped is the meaning of what I'm saying. There's a story about this, a Zen story about this. There is a teacher named Du Shan, Virtue Mountain in old China, sometime after the sixth ancestor. And he was not a Zen person.

[35:08]

He was a scholastic teacher. And he studied the Diamond Sutra. And he had studied many commentaries on the Diamond Sutra and had written many commentaries on the Diamond Sutra. And he heard about this new movement down in the south of China called Zen, where it was said that one directly points to the human mind, sees true nature and becomes Buddha. That was his phrase from the founder of Zen. And he didn't like that, Darshan. When he heard about this style of practice, He thought, well, Buddhism teaches there's countless eons needed of devoted, diligent practice of stopping and seeing an unwavering resolution to realize complete, perfect awakening, and then countless eons to realize it.

[36:23]

And people are just pointing directly to the human mind, the human heart, seeing true nature and becoming Buddha. He's like, Those rascals, I must stop them. I have to do something about this. And maybe I can stop them by showing them how wrong they are. And I'll come armed with my Diamond Sutra commentaries and find them and rouse them out and expose their delusion. stop this Zen thing from happening. So he did that. He packed up all his Diamond Sutra commentaries. And the Diamond Sutra was an important sutra for the sixth ancestor, for example, and for the Zen school teaching on graspability.

[37:24]

But he got overly involved in the extensive commentaries and grasping the meaning to such an extent that he forgot that they were ungraspable. So he had this backpack full of commentaries and he went on the road because he heard about this Zen teacher in the area and went looking for him and on the way he was getting tired and stopped on the road because there was a little snack stand with an old woman selling snacks. These types of old women often show up in these Zen stories to awaken great teachers who are grasping something.

[38:25]

So... She was selling dim sum. Does anyone know what dim sum is? It's like Chinese refreshments, like dumplings. You see small dumplings, lots of different kinds. And literally the word dim sum means to refresh the mind. Dim sum is a Chinese pronunciation of refresh the mind. So they're like refreshments. And so he stopped to refresh his mind on the road to meet this Zen teacher to debate him and refute him. And he said, I'd like to buy some mind refreshments, some dim sum. And this old woman said, well, what's in your big backpack?

[39:32]

He said, oh, it's, you know, it's commentaries. And she said, commentaries on what? He said, oh, the Diamond Sutra. Like thinking as if she would know what that is. And she said, oh, I'd like to ask you a question. And if you can answer this question, I will offer you some of these dim sum refreshments. You don't even have to pay. But if you can't answer, you just have to leave. So, he's like, fine. So she said, I've heard in the Diamond Sutra that it says that past mind cannot be grasped. Past mind is ungraspable. Future mind is ungraspable.

[40:32]

Present mind is ungraspable. Which of these minds would you like to refresh? With this mind refreshment dim sum. And Virtue Mountain was speechless. And he couldn't answer. It seems that he couldn't answer because he was grasping for an answer, grasping in his back of his mind, quickly flipping through all the pages of commentary, looking for the answer, but it wasn't there. And so he just stood there in a daze and she shook out her sleeves and left.

[41:35]

Left him standing, a bit dim sum stand. And so then he, he quite humbled at this point, at least somewhat humbled, still headed down the road to meet the Zen teacher, but I think he, at this point, was already having some doubt about being able to overcome him with his commentaries. And he did eventually make it to Dragon Swamp's place. That's the name of the Zen Master, Dragon Swamp. And he came there and he met him and maybe he'd been staying a little while and meeting him and trying to practice with him some actually to see we don't know if he if he tried to refute him right away maybe he actually by the time he got there he'd given up actually and was just practicing with him we don't know the details about that but um one day he was um but he was still stuck in his grasping mind trying to get to the bottom of something and uh one day he um

[43:05]

He was talking late at night with Dragon Swamp, and Dragon Swamp said, well, it's getting late. You should go. And so Virtue Mountain started walking out the door and said, oh, it's dark out here. And so I kind of turned back into the to the teacher, and the teacher says, oh, well, here, let me give you this. And he lit a kind of a paper lantern to give him. And just as Dushan was reaching out to take the paper lantern, Dragon Swamp blew out the flame. And at that moment, as you can imagine, Dushan let go of all grasping it. of the last time and in the complete darkness entered ungraspability of everything.

[44:12]

And then we have this phrase, painted rice cakes cannot satisfy hunger. So graspable versions of things. Written scriptures, for example, cannot satisfy hunger. We have to actually enter their teaching. Painted rice cakes cannot satisfy hunger. What Dogen Zenji, great Zen founder in Japan, said at the commenting on this story of Doshan and the old woman, at the end he said, the ungraspable mind... Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Please help us continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support.

[45:56]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[46:04]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.51