Good morning, all. I want to thank Mio Yi for inviting me here, and Linda Ruth Katz, the leader of this practice period, for asking me to speak this morning. How's the audio? Huh? A little loud, yeah, it seems like it's a... How's that? A little better? So, my name is Ed Sattazan. I am the Abiding Abbot at Zen Center's city center in San Francisco.

[01:04]

It's always a pleasure to come out to Green Gulch on a surprisingly foggy morning. Usually by this time in the fall, isn't it sunny all the time? No. Just my fantasy of the times I was here. In the summertime, it's foggy. So the theme of the practice period in the city is the harmony of difference and equality, or sandokai in Japanese, was composed by Shurdo, a very, very famous Zen teacher who lived from 700 to 790 in China. He was in the lineage of the sixth ancestor and three generations after him, Dungshan, who was the founder of Soto Zen in China, wrote the Hokkyo Zamae and the Five Ranks, both of which developed ideas from this Andokai.

[02:05]

So this is a very foundational text in our tradition. It's chanted at the memorial service for our founder, Suzuki Roshi, and I think in Japan for the memorial services of the founders of all temples, which is done monthly and chanted weekly in this temple and in city center. quite important. It sets out the major themes of Zen practice as understood at that time, which was the classical period of Zen, the Tang Dynasty. So a really golden age of Zen, and two of the great of the five schools of Zen flowed from Shurdu. So to the title, San means multiplicity, relative things, and Do means sameness, oneness, absolute, and kai is the merging or harmonizing.

[03:07]

Hence the harmony of a difference and equality. What a beautiful title, the harmony of difference and equality. Suzuki Roshi phrased it this way, many and one are different ways of describing one whole being. Kai is the relationship between one great whole being and the many facets of that one whole being. Kai means to shake hands. You have a feeling of friendship. The one whole being and the many things are good friends or more than good friends since they are originally one. So, you know, to make this very simple, you know, your hand is made up of many different fingers. Each one of the fingers has its own capacity and can do individual things, and yet the hand as a whole acts as one thing, and you can't really grab things with just one finger. And it's the same with our body.

[04:08]

Our body consists of many different parts, and yet theoretically acts as one unified thing. And it's the same with this beautiful group of people. We are all completely individual in many particular ways. There's no one exactly like you in the whole universe. And yet as we sit here in this room, there's a sense that we are all part of one activity. And that's also true of the Sangha as a whole and even in wider ways. So, of course, this is how one harmonizes the individual activity of a person the wider society or a person in the Sangha is an interesting question and not always easy to figure out. So this poem, which consists of 22 couplets or 44 lines, uses dichotomies to lay out this particular phenomenon.

[05:11]

So dichotomies of light and dark, enlightenment and delusion, front and back. interacting and not interacting, and through exposing the artificial nature of these differences, we find the harmonizing middle way. So that's the basic structure of the poem, and I thought what I would do is just take maybe the first eight lines of the poem and talk about them and see where we go. So the poem begins with, well, I think I'll read the whole eight lines first so you get a sense of the flow. The mind of the great sage of India is intimately transmitted from west to east. While human faculties are sharp or dull, the way has no northern or southern ancestors. The spiritual source shines clear in the light. The branching streams flow on in the dark. Grasping at things is surely delusion.

[06:15]

According with sameness is still not enlightenment. That's quite beautiful and on the one hand somewhat clear and on the other hand not completely clear. Which is the wonderful thing about Zen poems. So we'll take them two lines at a time. The mind of the great sage of India is intimately transmitted from west to east. The great sage of India is Buddha, and as is well known, or commonly known, or at least in our tradition, we say when Buddha attained enlightenment under the bow tree, he said, it is wonderful to see Buddha nature in everything and in each individual. So... When Buddha was enlightened, he didn't say, I'm enlightened and I'm sorry for all of you out there. He said, oh, wow, we're all enlightened.

[07:19]

We're all awakened beings. And that understanding has been intimately transmitted from India through China and Japan to here, from west to east. And it means each of us has an awakened mind. This is very important. Suzuki Roshi often said, the most important thing is to believe that you have Buddha nature. Buddha nature is another way of saying that you are Buddha. And of course, we have many koans in the Zen tradition that emphasize this. Matsu's answer to a monk's question, what is Buddha, was this very mind is Buddha. This very mind is Buddha. Your very mind is Buddha. Or Nanshuang's Or when Zhaozhou, Nanxuan's student, asked him, what is the way? What is the way of practice? What is the way of Zen? Zhaozhou answered, ordinary mind is the way. Your mind at every given moment, this very moment, that is the way.

[08:24]

That is the way of Zen. And you can give, and I have, give entire lectures on each one of those koans, but I'm just sort of... waving my hand at them this morning. So that's the first two lines. You have an awakened mind. You are Buddha. I think that's a nice way to start a poem, kind of encouraging. And then the next two lines. While human faculties are sharp or dull, the way has no northern or southern ancestors. So there's a lot of history involved in that line. There were two schools of Zen that became dominant from the descendants of the fifth ancestor, the northern school, founded by Shenzhou, and the southern school, founded by Weining. He was often referred to as the sixth ancestor. The northern school was known as the gradual way of attaining awakening or building character or practicing, and the southern school was known as the sudden way.

[09:28]

And there was great controversy during those times, as there always is among political institutions, of which was the better way. Was the northern school better, the southern school better? And I'm not going into any, and there's wonderful history to read in that, but I'm basically, this poem, Sherdo is saying, the way is not involved in such sectarian discussions. The way has no northern or southern ancestors. It's both gradual and sudden. And you know this from your own experience. I mean, obviously, practicing Zen is a moment-by-moment, daily paying attention to your life. Mindfulness, when you're out doing all the activities of your life, and when you're sitting zazen, paying attention to each breath. It's moment-by-moment. So one would say that's a gradual. And on the other hand, you've had moments in your life when there's been a kind of turning.

[10:31]

Something happened when you could feel a certain dramatic sense that your life had turned. So it is both sudden and gradual. Suzuki Hiroshi gave 12 wonderful lectures on the Sandokai in the summer of 1970, which got published in the book, Branching Streams, Flow in the Darkness. Suzuki Hiroshi died in 71, so it was really wonderful that he took the time in the summer of 72X, give these talks on the Sandokai. And so his comment on the line, while human faculties are sharp or dull, he went, the clever ones do not always have an advantage in studying or accepting Buddhism. It is not always the dull person who has difficulty. A dull person is good because he is dull. A sharp person is good because he is sharp. Even though you compare, you cannot say which is best. Suzuki Roshi goes on to say, he was his teacher's last disciple, but he became the first because he wasn't smart enough to leave like the other students did.

[11:44]

So it's so common for us to say, well, I'm really not smart enough to do Zen, or, oh, that person... sits Zazen so well, he's so beautiful, he must be an excellent student, or that person follows the schedule perfectly, or my mind is so confused I could never study Zen. Sherdo's being very clear here that those kinds of comparisons don't have anything to do with your practice. And there's a wonderful section from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, the title of the essays, The Maros, where Suzuki Rishi goes on and talks about the four kinds of horses. I don't know how many of you heard this. Of course, excellent ones, good ones, poor ones, and bad ones. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver's will, before it sees the shadow of the whip. The second best will run as well as the first one does, but just before the whip reaches the skin. The third one will run when it feels pain on its body, and the fourth will run after the pain penetrates

[12:50]

to the marrow of the bones. You can imagine how hard it is for the fourth one to learn how to run. And Suzuki Roshi goes on to say, well, when we hear this story, almost all of us want to be the best horse. If it's impossible to be the best, at least we want to be the second best. This, I think, is the usual understanding of the story and of Zen. You may think that when you sit zazen, you will find out whether you're one of the best horses or one of the worst ones. Here, however, there is a misunderstanding of Zen. If you think the aim of Zen practice is to train you to become one of the best horses, you will have a big problem. If you practice Zen in the right way, it does not matter whether you are the best horse or the worst horse. When you are determined to practice zazen with the great mind of Buddha, you will find the worst horse is the most valuable one.

[13:53]

In your very imperfections, you will find the basis for your firm, way-seeking mind. So I think sometimes the best horse may be the worst horse, and the worst horse can be the best horse. So, I think the message of the second two lines follows the message of the first line, you are Buddha. The message of the second line is, whether dull or sharp, whether fast or slow, all of you have the way. These kind of comparisons have nothing to do with the way of Zen. Of course, if you enter this temple, you will follow all the guidelines of the temple to practice here, sort of the wind of the temple. But within that, you find your own path, which is available to everyone.

[14:58]

The only way the truth appears is as your practice. The Dharma does not exist in any other place but your practice. individual, totally unique practice. So that's the message of the third and fourth lines. Line five and six. The spiritual source shines clear in the light. The branching streams flow on in the dark. Beautiful. what it means. The spiritual source shines clear in the light. So he's got two metaphors going on here. He's got a metaphor of light and dark. Light is the opposite of dark. And he's got a metaphor of a stream. The stream with its source and then the many branching elements of the stream. So in Zen and in this poem, darkness stands for Do of the Sandokai.

[16:06]

That is unity, oneness, emptiness. A lot of times we think of oneness as being light, but in this case, darkness is oneness. In the dark, everything is equally dark. There's no discrimination. So when it's dark, you can't discriminate between the different things. You need the light to be able to make all those distinctions. So darkness means something that is beyond our understanding. So you need the light to make all those discriminating things. The light is the relative, the world of our senses and discriminating mind. Everything we can know or think about. A lot lives in the light. Well, we know this because we can turn on our computer and hit Google and see the many things of the world, the many discriminations that go on. So in the light we can see things, but in the dark is the unity of everything.

[17:09]

beyond what we can see or understand. So the other metaphor of source and branching streams, source also means union, emptiness, out of which everything comes. You cannot see the source. If you think of a source of a stream, it's usually deep in the mountains, so you don't know where the source of that water comes from. It just sort of comes out somewhere. But you can clearly see all the branching streams of the stream. So source is hidden and our branching streams are exposed. You can see them. Darkness is emptiness or oneness, and light is everything you can see, the relative. I was thinking about this recently when I had a brief moment in my busy schedule and I saw this book by Neil deGrasse and Tyson called Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

[18:16]

You might think as Abbot of Zen Center I'm not a person in a hurry, but I thought by this time in my life I would have plenty of time to be reading astrophysics, but unfortunately I need a condensed version. So anyway, just remind ourselves, which I, every time I read it, I find it phenomenal. He goes on to say, of course, that the beginning of everything that we know, the known universe, was in something smaller than one twentieth of a thousandth of the size of a dot on a page. A big bang happened, and all of the known universes, the 20 billion, 200 billion galaxies, each galaxy having billions of stars, all of that came from something That's small. Smaller than that small. Seems amazing, doesn't it? It just defies ordinary logic, that's all I've got to say. Anyway, he then goes on through a series of interesting experiments they've done by noticing the way these clusters of galaxies move, that there has to be more mass in the clusters of galaxies than we can see or identify with any of our instruments.

[19:33]

He calls that dark matter. And then there's also the fact that the known universe is accelerating. And that can only happen if there's more energy in the universe than we can see. So it turns out, after some calculation, that everything that we see is only 5% of the mass energy available. That's called dark mass energy. Much exists in the darkness. And it's true of your life, too, which exists in the darkness, out of which everything seems to come. Siddhika Rishi calls about the source or the darkness. The source is something wonderful, something beyond description, beyond our words. What Buddha talked about is the source of the teaching beyond discrimination of right and wrong. Whatever your mind can conceive is not the source itself.

[20:37]

Often we feel the truth is something we should be able to see or figure out. But in Buddhism, that is not the truth. The truth is something beyond our ability to describe, beyond our thinking. Truth can also mean the wonderful source, wonderful beyond our description. This is the source of all being. So here's the interesting twist in this. The sentence is, the source shines clearly in the light. We just said the source was hidden, impossible to know. And we just told you that the light is everything you can see, the relative. And so the line goes, the source shines clearly in the light.

[21:37]

He's already set up this distinction between the source and the branching streams and the dark and the light, and then he mixes them together. which is another central theme in Zen practice. Emptiness or the source or the truth is shining clearly in the relative that you can see, in the life you are living right now. It's not off in some place that we don't know about. The deep truth and meaning of our life is right here, right now, right in the middle of it. the light of the relative world, all of your problems and difficulties, discriminations. And it's the same thing with the second line. The branching streams flow on in the dark. The darkness, the emptiness, is, again, right there in the relative. This dream is such a wonderful metaphor.

[22:52]

It has a sense of a flow, the flow of our life, gently and constantly going beyond our small self to the heart of the matter, to, as Suzuki would say, the big self. Everything is teaching us and guiding us to wisdom. just so stuck we can't feel that movement. So how does all this apply to Zazen, our fundamental practice here? So I thought of this beautiful Tang Dynasty poem that was written at the exact same time as the poem by Shudo. So it isn't confusing enough that I start with a poem, but I'm going to give you another poem. But this one maybe will be more understandable. So here's the poem. In my middle years, I became fond of the way.

[23:54]

I make my home in the foothills of South Mountain. When the spirit moves me, I go off by myself to see things that I alone must see. I follow the stream to the source. I sit there and watch for the moment when the clouds crop up. Or I may meet a woodsman and we laugh and talk. and forget about going home. Maybe I should read that again. I didn't read it so well the first time. In my middle years, I became fond of the way. Isn't that wonderful kind of way he put it? I became fond of the way. Very relaxed approach to the way. Unlike in my youth, I became crazed and had to rush off to Tassar as fast as I could and spent four years there because I was going to get enlightened with such great... No, he became fond of the way. He says, I make my home on the foothills of South Mountain.

[24:59]

When the spirit moves me, I go off by myself to see things that I alone must see. I follow the stream to the source. I sit there and watch for the moment when the clouds crop up, or I may meet a woodsman and we laugh and talk and forget about going home. It's a nice feeling, make my home in the foothills of South Mountain. I've lived, fortunately, my entire life near mountains. I was raised in New Mexico, Los Alamos, outside of Santa Fe, in the foothills of a 10,000-foot mountain, and I lived at Tasajar for many years. And I have a home in Mill Valley, so I feel very comfortable being by mountains. They're so stable, so strong, and yet so alive. And when I was young and had time for such things, I used to hike in the mountains a lot. And at various times, I used to climb to the top of mountains.

[26:00]

Then I found it much more interesting, because the top of mountains are very cold and windy, to go down into the valleys. with all the beautiful flowers and butterflies and I'd get interested in all the streams and where the source of the stream happened. Maybe it happened out of a crevasse on the side of the granite cliff or happened under a snowfall or icefall of some sort. The source of the stream was interesting and sometimes it's hard to follow a stream to its source because there's many bushes growing around the stream and so you have to kind of figure out how to get around maybe up a cliff face or something to Find the source of the stream. So, of course, we have a metaphor here going on. When you're sitting there and watching for the moment when the clouds come up, the clouds coming up is what comes up in your mind when you're sitting zazen.

[27:00]

What comes up in your mind? The clouds come up. You remember when you were young, or maybe it still happens sometimes, you're lying on the ground looking at the clouds going by, and it wasn't like you, a thought would come up about the clouds, but you sort of let them go away, and then other thoughts come up, and there was a sort of relaxed way of watching the clouds go by. So, making your home in the foothills of the South Mountain is finding your way to your zazen place in the zendo and watching the clouds come up. Follow the stream to the sources. Where are the source of these ideas that come in your head? They come in? Where do they come from? What is that space before the ideas first come in? What's the quiet place in the midst of your sitting? How do we find our way to that?

[28:04]

settling down and retiring to the foothills. To be present at that moment is to witness both the inevitability of thought and its illusory nature. And this is also the birth of compassion, because it is in that place where we feel our connection to everything. And with that connection to everything comes our sense of compassion. So when we get up from zazen and meet the woodsman, we laugh and talk and forget about things. I particularly like that last line of the poem. Or I may meet a woodsman and laugh and talk and forget about things. The feeling of the poem at the beginning is that we go by ourself, alone, deep into the mountains in search of the truth, the source.

[29:13]

And we observe our mind's activity and see the quietness of it and find our connection to everything. But then a woodsman shows up and we immediately enter, begin. We don't say, oh, go away, I'm meditating here. We say, hi. How are you? What stories do you have to tell today? Let's walk together. And that is our way here in Zen Center. Our way in the temple is we practice with people. Suzuki Roshi said, group practice is a shortcut to the imperturbable mind which is beyond concepts of personal and impersonal. Group practice is the shortcut to that imperturbable mind. Now, you may not always feel that, those of you who are residents at Green Gulch. Sometimes you think, how did I get sat next to this person?

[30:14]

They move all the time. They're so noisy. I can't sit zazen right next to this person. Or you may be working with them and say, why don't they work? They don't work at the same speed I do. They're just not, you know, it's easy for us, but it is the truth. Group practice is the shortcut. That's when you actually learn what practice is about. So when we sit together, the first thing we do is when the bell rings, we don't continue sitting, we get up. Here you go to service in this room at the city center, we get up and go up to the Buddha hall and we chant together. And while we're chanting, we say we chant with our ears because we're listening to everybody else. At the same time, we're chanting with our own voice and strongly. This chanting together, this practicing together is a harmonizing of our individual unique voice and the voice of everybody else.

[31:15]

The harmony of oneness and difference. So that was a sort of short detour into kind of a metaphysical speculation about the unity of absolute and relative. Now we get practical. Grasping at things is surely delusion, according with sameness, is still not enlightenment. Since I now have only six minutes left and I have five pages, I think I'll accelerate the pace of this talk. Grasping at things is surely delusion. Well, we know this, right? I could say a lot about that. We want to hold on to those things that we love and they slip away from us and we want to reject those things that we don't like.

[32:18]

That's grasping at delusion because everything is always changing. And this is, of course, laid out by Buddha early on in his comments about desire produces suffering. There's, of course, a lot of complexity in that because desire actually is the driving force of our life. And it's very important if you need to drink water and feel like thirsty that you go and drink some water. I think the clinging aspect, the grasping is the term that is the part that makes this so, causes such suffering. So of course, giving up grasping is easier to say than do, and I'll just leave it at that. But, so you think, well, once I get to that beautiful place where I'm no longer, I'm accepting everything just as it is, you know, in the old days when we were hippies, it's all one, it's all good.

[33:27]

I'm Buddha, I don't need to do anything. I'm enlightened, I'm awake, I'm done. Or at least you wish you'd get to that place and then you could just, like, be there. But of course, Sherdo is very clear about that. According with sameness is still not enlightenment. That's not the enlightenment that we talk about in Zen. That's not the enlightenment that Sherdo is talking about. That's just another one of those ideas that we have, that there's some perfect state of mind that we could be in where all our problems would be solved. There is no such thing. It's just another state of mind which eventually will disappear and then we'll be lusting after that quiet, calm, stable mind that we had at some point in time in our zazen. So according to sameness is still not true enlightenment. This is our everyday life.

[34:32]

Sometimes we act like Buddha and sometimes we are a foolish human being. And maybe we're a little bit of both at all times. A little enlightened and a little foolish, or probably a lot foolish and a lot enlightened. We just can't tell how it's all mixed together. And Dogen's expression for this is, practice enlightenment. Practice and enlightenment are the same thing. You are not practicing for enlightenment. Practice is enlightenment. Enlightenment is practice. Path and goal are simultaneously the same. So practice enlightenment is one word. We're not going for something other than the experience, the practice, the awakening, the foolishness we have in every moment of our life, no matter how ordinary, boring, or difficult it seems. So I think I'm just going to jump past 32 beautiful lines of dichotomy to the last four lines of this poem.

[35:46]

Progress is not a matter of far or near, but if you are confused, mountains and rivers block your way. Progress is not a matter of far or near. There is nowhere to get to. We have to trust that things that are going in the right direction. Whatever is presenting itself in your life in this moment is what you should deal with, what you need to deal with. Doesn't that make sense? Whatever is presenting itself to you is what you need to deal with. But if you are confused, mountains and rivers block your way. I led the winter practice period at Tassara January through March of this year, and I'm sure all of you who are up in Marin had the same record-setting amount of rain during that period of time that we had down at Tassara. And so the Tassara Creek, for those that have been to Tassara in the summertime, and you sort of hop across the stones down to the narrows, you know, little, quiet little creek, it was a rushing torrent.

[37:00]

I mean, there was no way you could cross that creek. And also because it was raining so much, it seemed like every crack in the mountains, water was coming out of it. There were mudslides and the road was blocked and there were slip outs. So you couldn't get out over the road much of the practice period. So mountains were blocking our way out and the torrents of the rivers were blocking where we, you know, powerful torrential streams and mountains blocking our way. Isn't that the way you feel sometimes in your life? Your problems are so difficult. You're so confused about how to move forward. It's just like... But he's saying here, of course, that if you stay with your practice, you will find a way across the rivers and through the mountains. I mean, of course, when we get confused and worried about how to deal with our problems, And we are humans, after all.

[38:02]

It seems like these mountains will block our way. But if you continue your practice, you will find a way through. I call this life is workable. Even the most difficult problems, we can find a way through. So I think there's some encouragement there. And then, of course, he ends the poem with this. last two lines I respectfully urge you who study the mystery don't pass your days and nights in vain I respectfully urge you who study the mystery that's us those of us who are brave enough to study the mystery of what life is about to ask the question who am I and what should I do knowing that we can't really understand anything about what's really going on.

[39:07]

It's too much for us. But still, we ask the question. We study the mystery of life and accept the responsibility of being a human being. So he respectfully urges you who take this on, don't pass your days and nights in vain. Or as Suzuki Roshi would say, don't goof off. So maybe I think that's a good place for me to end. Thank you very much for your attention this morning. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[40:13]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:17]

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