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 tonight. talk with you. There's something that I've been turning for a while and it kind of struck me tonight in a certain way and I thought, oh, I want to talk with people about this. So you get to hear this. I'm right now in the middle of a Zen and Yoga retreat with Patricia Sullivan, co-leading, and the retreat.

[01:03]

The participants are very harmonious, and we've been working very well together, and the yoga and the Zen illuminate one another in a very harmonious way as well. I've been talking about the Lotus Sutra and Skill and Means. As always happens in yoga class, we are exposed to parts of our body and ways of moving that have been long forgotten. And even the names for things that we didn't know there were names for. Like, for example, the muscle that connects the shoulder blades to the vertebrae. Do you know the name of that muscle?

[02:06]

It's rhomboids. The rhomboids. And when we were, we thought that the rhomboids sounded sort of like a rock group. The rhomboids. And then another posture that we did was called Trembling Horse. And we thought the Trembling Horse group, rock group, would open for the rhomboids. And then there was another group, Hips of Fire. That was another one. They came on later. Also, today we practiced. I didn't go to the afternoon class where many shoulder stand variations were worked on, but earlier this morning we did a kind of preparation for headstand. Some people did headstand, but everyone pretty much went upside down in a very supported way with no injury to head or neck.

[03:13]

Going upside down is... to actually turn ourselves upside down physically and also in our ways of thinking, our ways of acting, our ways of speaking to turn ourselves around from our habitual stuck ways that we fall into and continue with year after year. Same kinds of karmic consciousness, same kinds of habitual, routinized ways of thinking and speaking. So it's wonderful to be upside down. And it's a very skillful way to shake things up a little bit. So in thinking about it, in yoga, our stuck ways of holding ourselves, our stuck posture, which is

[04:20]

attitude of body and mind. When we unstick our posture and move in different ways, we actually think and feel in different ways, of course, or maybe not, of course, but body, mind, working together. And this reminded me of two koans. working with being stuck, stuck in our ways, stuck with rigid ideas and understanding and strong beliefs and then acting from those stuck places. So how do we go upside down? How do we find a way to bring aliveness and freshness to our life? So the koan that I wanted to bring up is called Yuranji Knocks the Body Down.

[05:32]

Do you know that koan? It's in a collection of transmission of the lamp, and it's also in this new collection of koans, Zen stories, with women commentators called The Hidden Lamp, and it's in there. So the story is about two practitioners, their brother and sister. The sister's name is Yuranji, and her brother was Yuranjue, brother and sister, both practitioners, both disciples of the sixth ancestor. It was a very famous Zen teacher. Many, many disciples flowed from the sixth ancestor in all the different schools of Zen, and they practiced with him. Yiranji, the sister, also lived in a cave for many years, and she wrote a book called, is it The Song?

[06:32]

Record? No, let's see. Well, I'll find it. She wrote a book, which I've never heard of before. Anyway, her brother was also a teacher on Mount Wu Wei. And right about the time he was older, it was getting close for him, to die, and he asked his monks, his disciples, has anyone died sitting down or lying down or standing? And they said, yes, many people have died lying down and sitting and also standing. So then Yuran Joy said, has anybody ever died upside down? And they said, no, we've never heard of that. Never heard of that. So he then went into a headstand and died like that. And it says in the koan that his robes remained in a dignified manner.

[07:34]

You can picture that. They all just stayed right there. And there he was, standing on his head and died. Wow, this was kind of an amazing event. and he was up there for a while, and then finally it was kind of time to take him down and inter him, marry him, and cremate him, as one does, and they couldn't move him. It was like a pillar of stone. They couldn't move him. Oh, isn't this amazing? We can't even move him. People came from far and wide to see this, as you might have traveled to see this upside-down Zen teacher. dead. So they couldn't move him, and he was there for a while. And finally, his little sister, it was his younger sister, Iranji, she came by one day and said, older brother, you are always flouting the Dharma laws.

[08:43]

when you're alive, and here you go, making a nuisance of yourself and bothering everybody. This is just too much. And she, boom, pushed him, and he went crashing down. That's one of the stories. So for me, this upside down, yes, freshness upside down, but also Mr. Monk, Yuran-ji, Master Yuran-jui, was pretty interested in having something really special for, you know, the talk of the town, you know, hard to forget that one, and kind of wondering what it might be, and seeking a little bit for something incredible, you know, to be remembered by as he went out. And this can happen sometimes where we want to be really special. We want to be the one that's lauded and remembered and talked about.

[09:48]

I remember it's just occurred to me that a priest at Green Gulch, Galen Godwin, was also a runner. She used to run in the hills at Green Gulch, and there had been a sighting of a mountain lion at Green Gulch, which has been, see, there are mountain lions in the hills there, and she said to her teacher, Rev. Anderson, what if when I'm out running I get killed by a mountain lion? And he said, you will be the most famous Zen priest in America. I just remembered that. Anyway, so here's this guy upside down and kind of stuck in wanting to be special, but also he had understanding, he was a teacher, but this little extra... holding to something. And his younger sister, in a kind of everyday manner, sort of seeing through these qualities, was able, when nobody else could move him, I think everyone else was in awe.

[11:04]

But this is her brother, right? And she knows his tricks and she was able to cut through. And we can do that for one another. That's why it's very good to have friends, peers, who can say, would you knock it off? Doesn't matter what color robe you've got or what letters after your name, a good friend will say, drop it. Or they can speak truth to you because they know you well enough and they our friends can sometimes see through our attachments. So having good friends and peers is important in a practice life, in life. Find a friend and be friends with them.

[12:06]

So this koan resonated with another koan that I've been turning and wanted to bring up as well. This comes from another collection of Zen stories called The Gateless Gate, the Muman Khan. And this story is called Manjushri and the Young Woman in Samadhi. Do some of you know that story, that Zen? So Manjushri is the bodhisattva who's on the altar in the Zendo, the bodhisattva of wisdom. carrying, if you look at the altar, carrying the sword that cuts through delusion. And Manjushri, as wisdom, is the teacher of all the Buddhas. Wisdom is the teacher. So in this koan, Manjushri arrives at this place where he thinks there's going to be a kind of meeting. In this story, there's many Buddhas. All the Buddhas have left, except for Shakyamuni Buddha,

[13:08]

And sitting next to Shakyamuni Buddha is a young woman who is deep in deep zazen, deep meditation and concentration, samadhi, the term samadhi, deep attentive stillness. And she can't be moved also. It resonates with the first koan. And she's sitting there very near to the Buddha. And Manjushri comes and says, how come she can sit so near to you? And she's like sitting in a seat. Usually, sometimes there's Shakyamuni with Manjushri on one side and another Bodhisattva on the other, right next, you know, right close. And here's this person. I don't think we have to get caught on the gender. It's this person who's kind of a newer student, right in... kind of in Manjushri's seat, kind of really near the Buddha.

[14:12]

And he says, how come she gets to sit so near the Buddha and I can't? And the Buddha said, why don't you wake her up and ask her? So Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, walks around her. He snaps his fingers in front of her face three times. Then he, with his miraculous powers in this legendary story, he scoops her up and takes her to the heavens and brings her back. She doesn't come out of it. She's stuck. He can't move her. This is Manjushri. This is the Bodhisattva of infinite wisdom, you know, you can't move her. Then the Buddha said, we need another Bodhisattva to come who lives under the earth, deep down, 1,200 lands deep down in the earth, as many lands, 1,200 lands and more, as many sands as there are in the Ganges River.

[15:30]

And the name of this Bodhisattva is Deceptive Wisdom. We need him. And the Buddha kind of calls. And Deceptive Wisdom, who's a kind of baby Bodhisattva, comes out of the earth, and he stands in front of this young woman who's stuck, and he snaps his fingers. It didn't sound very snappy. Snaps his fingers, and she wakes up. And that's the end of that koan. So in both these koans, there's this quality of being stuck, being stuck in whether it's our ideas of arrogance and pride and specialness, uniqueness about who we are, and wanting everybody to know stuck in that, or stuck in emptiness, which we talked about today in class, in our Dharma talk with the Yoga Zen, the teaching of our conventional life together, and when we study very carefully each and everything, our own lives and everything we do,

[16:55]

encounter, we see that each and everything is ungraspable, flowing, empty of separate self, and filled with interconnected mutual assistance, imperceptible mutual assistance, and inconceivable flowing life. So there is the situation of having a glimpse of this ungraspability of our life and getting kind of stuck in that in a way that's leaning, leaning away from our life into such thoughts as nothing matters, we're all going to die anyway, There's nothing I can hold on to.

[17:58]

It's all ungraspable. So what's the purpose? That's a kind of stuckness or stuckness in some seeing the nature of things, let's say, and thinking cause and effect don't matter. I can ignore cause and effect because it's all... just flowing like that. This is stuckness and not only is it detrimental to oneself and off-kilter, not middle way, not in balance, which one needs for the health of one's body-mind to be in balance, but it can be destructive. It can be hurtful to others and be a nuisance, like she said to her brother. You're just being a nuisance to everybody. They want to bury you.

[19:00]

Knock it off. She did knock him off. So in this other scenario, this question, how come Manjushri wisdom couldn't bring her out of this stuck place? And I've been turning this for a while. And somehow with this other koan of... the upside-down Zen master, I thought, oh, and Ranji, the young practitioner, nun, I thought deceptive wisdom, this baby bodhisattva deceptive wisdom with beginner's mind, with not a lot of awe at all. She's in this deep samadhi, ooh, and she's next to the Buddha. He just... with his fresh, kind of everyday mind, just, oh, wake up.

[20:03]

He wasn't stuck either. Maybe Manjushri, believe it or not, was a little bit stuck, like, why is she so close to the Buddha? That's my seat. I'm supposed to be near the Buddha. And, or playing that role for our sake, anyway. So both of these stories helped me to look at where am I caught, where am I stuck, where am I grasping to old ideas, old ways, and how much damage that can do to myself and others. Having old understandings and thoughts about people. holding on, grudges, chips on our shoulders, carrying around a chip. If you carry a chip on your shoulder, what happens to your posture?

[21:06]

So carrying a chip, turning thoughts of greed, hate and delusion and without studying the thoughts, but actually going along with it as if there was no consequence to that. So both of these, Yuranji and the deceptive wisdom bodhisattva, who came out of the earth, I feel were practicing skill and means, meaning responding to a situation fresh, not too many ideas, but bringing their whole, open, beginner's mind to a situation and not being fooled, not being caught themselves. So in thinking about the damage that can be done by our holding to rigid ideas, being stuck in our ways, I was reminded of

[22:20]

something that affected me very strongly as a child when I was 10. And it came up again this summer because this summer is Freedom Summer, the anniversary of 50 years of the Mississippi Freedom Rides and people going down to Mississippi to register African American people to vote. But even before that, 50 years ago, in 1957, and this is a kind of image that was seared into my psyche, I think, and I'm sure many of you have seen the same image, which was the Little Rock High School, the Little Rock Nine, the nine high school students who were... really, to integrate Little Rock High School. And this was in 1957.

[23:23]

And that group of nine were very carefully chosen. They were vetted very thoroughly to knowing what they were going to face, knowing the abuse and danger to them. Were they emotionally stable enough and strong enough and open enough to meet that. And these nine people, one of them's name was Elizabeth Eckford. And Elizabeth Eckford, the day that Little Rock High School was integrated, she didn't have a phone. Her family didn't have a phone. So they weren't able to contact her that morning, but the other eight all made arrangements to carpool and arrive together to the high school.

[24:27]

But Elizabeth never heard of those plans, and she got to the high school, not sure how, and was by herself. She was by herself. And I'm sure many of you have seen the picture of her. September is probably pretty warm in Little Rock. She's wearing a summer blouse tucked into a skirt with a belt and she's carrying her notebook. Do you know this picture? And she's walking and behind her is a crowd of rabid white people with faces contorted in hate and and she's kind of surrounded, and she's got her eyes down. She's carrying her notebook, and she's walking to... I remember when I say it was seared into my mind as a 10-year-old, I remember seeing the photo and thinking, how could she do it?

[25:42]

How could she stand it? Isn't she frightened? How could she... And during that walk, she was by herself. She was, they swore at her and called her names, the worst names, and spat on her. And the Alabama, the state guard was there to keep probably the worst from happening. And that one photo had this, a 17-year-old young person with this face, just in anger and disgust. And that's the photo. Anyway, those faces, this is the face. These are the faces of being stuck in our ideas, our

[26:45]

prejudgments, our prejudices, our biases, our belief that we know, and also hatred. There it is. It's the distortion of the human face, really, in contrast to whatever it was she was doing to be able to stay upright. I'm sure she was frightened, but to stay with it. And I'm not sure if it was Elizabeth Eckford or another one of the Little Rock Nine, but I read somewhere where the reason this person could go to school, continue, was her mother told her about these other young people and adults who were screaming at her, that they were, you know, that you have to be taught to think in that way.

[27:50]

You have to be taught, it has to be over and over and over again exposed to this until it permeates your consciousness. This is not a natural state, really. And her mother said, they weren't brought up right. They weren't taught right. And I think part of vetting these nine was that I think they had a kind of faith that they could draw upon to be able to go through what they went through. Even so, there was great trauma, really, post-traumatic. So just recently I heard that in that picture, that iconic picture, the young girl who was 17 who was making one of these screaming faces, She was known for that. That picture was all over. That was her face. And later, many, many, many years later, she tried to find Elizabeth Eckford to make amends, I think, and was able to contact her.

[29:00]

And they had, for a time, a kind of reconciliation, which I didn't know about, but that's a kind of further chapter in the story. And they did some speaking at high schools and together, the two of them. But it didn't really last. There was too much pain. So being stuck in our ideas, there is consequence to that. And the longer we practice, the more we develop the mind called niyushin, which is Japanese for a mind that's soft and flexible and supple and smooth and able to meet our situations and people, people we don't understand, people who maybe frighten us, but we're able to

[30:07]

roll with it and bring compassion and kindness to it. This is a fruit of our practice, this kind of soft and smooth mind, which is the opposite of that picture of that crowd of people. And Elizabeth's effort, what was her practice there? She wasn't trying to be She just wanted to go to school. She just wanted to go to a school where she could learn and be educated. She was just going to school on the first day of school. Nothing special, nothing particularly unique, and yet that very act still resonates and inspires and helps us to live our life

[31:10]

upright and with fearlessness. Fearlessness means even though there is fear, we find a way to meet a life. It's the fearless I understand. So she's become a bodhisattva for me, a great teacher actually. and it's 50, 60 years, yeah, it's many, she's an old lady now, right? She still inspires me. And all of us can be Bodhisattvas for one another, living our life, not, oh, look at me, how unique and special I am, I'm gonna die upside down, or do anything like that, but I'm just gonna live my life upright, balanced, and continue my practice, that can be inspirational.

[32:12]

Not that you're trying to be. You're not even thinking about that. We just try to live our life in an upright way. And in the Lotus Sutra, in Chapter 10, where it talks about Dharma teachers, it basically says anyone can be a Dharma teacher for you. It's do you see the dharma and the admonition for the dharma teachers, which might be, as I say, anyone maybe who doesn't even have that strong a yen for practice. But something that they pass on to you or show you can be a teaching for you and they can be a bodhisattva for you. Anyone can be a Dharma teacher and you too can be a Dharma teacher. And in chapter 10 it says to go into the room of the Buddha, wrap yourself in the robe of the Buddha and sit on the seat of the Buddha.

[33:28]

And then the commentary is stepping into the room of the Buddha is stepping into Compassion. The room of the Buddha is compassion. That's the abode. That's where we live, in compassion, surrounded. The room is compassion. Wrap yourself in the robe of the Buddha, and the robe is the robe of gentleness and patience. We wrap ourselves in gentleness and patience. And then we sit on the seat of the Buddha, and the seat of the Buddha is the emptiness of all things. Nothing to grasp, nothing to hold on to, flowing, impermanent. And yet, there we sit, wrapped in gentleness and patience, in the abode of compassion.

[34:34]

And that's where dharma teachers are. And this is not just, I'm not talking about priest or lay or men or women or old or young. There's no quality that you can point to that says that's a dharma teacher. What is a dharma teacher for you can be anything. It can be Elizabeth Eckford, it can be... The bats in the zendo this morning can be your own illness. It doesn't matter. But each of us as practitioners or being exposed to the teaching, whether we're a practitioner or not, can be a teacher for another person. So thank you very much for your attention tonight.

[35:45]

Thank you. Good night. And I want to thank all the Tassajara students for their great efforts in taking care of Tassajara this year. The work is... We're just in the middle, right? We still have half to go. So I know right about this time, it's like, whoa, we're right in the middle. Can I make it? But I really encourage you to take your days off. There's a saying in Italian, il dolce far niente. It's the sweet do-nothing. And there's a painting where it's got this woman, she's sort of lolling on a bare rug and just enjoying it. Her day off is what I think about her. So, yes, there's always going to be work. The garden calls.

[36:46]

There's things to do. The shop, it never ends. But please, take your personal day and rest so that you're ready to meet with a mind that's in balance because rest is a very important part of our practice. Otherwise, we'll be... grumpy. And then all these wonderful guests will say, gee, I don't know if I want to go down there. People are kind of grumpy. And thank you guests for coming once more to Tassajara in this drought year and may we be safe, may Tassajara be safe through this difficult time for the environment and for our our environment. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[37:49]

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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[38:05]

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