This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. Is there anyone here for the first time who's willing to... Show us. Welcome to you. Someone over here. Welcome, welcome. So you've arrived on a, well, not so unusual. We do one of these every month, but this is the Saturday that we do a one-day sitting. So a large number of the people that are sitting in this room have been sitting since 5.30 this morning and will continue sitting together. mostly for the rest of the day till six o'clock, intrepid fellows and women.

[01:05]

It's also the first week of our practice period. We have a 10-week practice period where we intensify our practice and we usually kick it off with a one-day sitting and end it with a seven-day sitting. So a lot of the people are participating in that too. The theme of the practice period is the harmony of difference and equality. In Japanese, that's the sando kai. It was composed by a famous Chinese monk, Shudo, who lived from 700 to 790. So it's 8th century China. And san means multiplicity or relative or things, you know, the stuff of the world. And dou means means oneness or the absolute or the sameness of everything. Everything is one. We're familiar with that idea. And Kai is the merging or the harmonizing of these two concepts.

[02:15]

The concept of everything being interconnected and one and everything being completely different. Suzuki Yoshi put 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... I think on Wednesday when I was talking to the group at the beginning of the practice period, I mentioned the body. On the one hand, the body is one whole being. That's a new concept in health care last 50 or 60 years. And yet every little part of the body is independent and does its own thing to some extent. And how are those harmonized together? So that's a quick overview of the title, Sandokai, which sort of is an aspect that flows through the entire poem.

[03:25]

And today I'm going to talk about four lines from that poem. But just to give you some context, I'll read the first four lines to get to the second four lines that I'm going to talk about. So the first four lines of the poems go, The mind of the great sage of India is intimately transmitted from west to east. So this was written by a Chinese Zen teacher in the 8th century, and the mind of the great sage of India is Shakyamuni Buddha, who was born 500 BC, so this is 1,300 years after he was born, or 1,200 years. And this teacher is saying his mind, the mind of that great sage, has been transmitted to China. And I think we can infer the same concept intimately transmitted to America, so the mind of Buddha is here in America with us. One could do a whole lecture on that, and I think I probably have done parts of one, but I'm just going to leave it there.

[04:33]

Something to kind of ponder a little bit, what is this mind of Buddha that is with us here? And then the third and fourth line are, while human faculties are sharp or dull, the way has no northern or southern ancestors. There was a lot of controversy in what is the right way to practice Buddhism in China at that time. After all, Buddhism had only been in China for about 400 years or 500 or 600. So they were still trying to figure out how to integrate it into their culture because it, after all, had come from a foreign place. And at that time, China was the middle kingdom and was suspect of these foreign things. Anyway, there was a lot of controversy about whether the northern school was the right way or the southern school. And Sherdo in his two lines is basically saying, well, that really doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter whether you're sharp or dull. The way, the true way of practice, is fine for everyone.

[05:35]

In fact, each individual human being has their own way. The way is adapted beautifully. In fact, the only way the way is expressed is through your individual way of practice. So now we get to the part I'm going to discuss. And it goes, the spiritual source shines clear in the light. The branching streams flow on in the dark. Grasping at things is surely delusion. is still not enlightenment. Good time for a water break. The spiritual source shines clear in the light.

[06:37]

The branching streams flow on in the dark. It's kind of a metaphysical thing. philosophic statement, so we're going to unpack it a little bit. There's two metaphors here. One is light and dark, and the other is a stream, a branching stream, and the source of that stream, the beginning of where streams start. So darkness, in this case, in this poem, stands for Do, the part of Sandokai, which is unity, oneness. Nothingness. And that's because in the dark everything is equal. When the lights are turned off, you can't discriminate between what's the chair and what's the desk and the different facial expressions on people. It's all just sort of one experience in the darkness. And also darkness has that implication that it's beyond anything we can understand. You can't really understand what's going on in the dark.

[07:40]

So that's kind of interesting because a lot of times we think of oneness, you know, it's all one as kind of light, illumination or something. But in this case, oneness, that interconnectedness of everything is the mystery. It's the darkness. And the light is everything that we can see. Like I can see whatever 80 or 90 of you here and each one of you has a slightly different complexion and a different hairdo. different clothes. My discriminating mind can make all kinds of judgments about that or not. But there's a lot going on. And in the relative world of light, there's a lot we can say. I mean, merely turn on your computer and type in Google and you'll find out how much can be said about what we know of the relative world, which is a lot. So, and what's source? Source is, well, the character for source in this poem is the origin of a stream.

[08:48]

So normally in mountains, the origin of a stream is usually up high in the mountain, normally, sort of maybe hard to get to. Maybe the origin of the stream is deep in the mountain and sort of comes out of some crack, so it's hidden, it's dark. Again, the origin of the stream is some hidden place. Source also is the emptiness out of which everything comes. You can't see it, so it's the mystery. Where does everything come from? It's unknowable. And, of course, the stream we can see. So the stream is the visible part of this source stream metaphor. So I was thinking about source. So the source of a stream is, of course, deep in the mountain somewhere. But maybe the source of the stream isn't really deep in the mountain because maybe the mountain had to create the rain, which caused the water in the mountain to happen.

[09:58]

So the source is maybe the clouds, which is maybe the oceans. And so a couple of weeks ago, I picked up this book by Neil deGrasse Tyson called Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Just the right kind of book for me. Somehow I thought in my older years I would be sitting quietly at the bottom of a mountain observing the clouds and casually reading long tomes on various subjects, but that has not become the case for me yet. So I needed astrophysics summarized in a two-hour read, which he did beautifully. And you all know this because the Big Bang Theory is pretty popular, but he goes on at great length how from something infinitesimally small, and he went into 10 to the minus, 12th, 20th, some very small thing exploded into everything that we see around us.

[10:59]

Now, does that even seem possible? I mean, that has got to be the most fantastic story you've ever heard. But anyway, that is the current story. one of the current theories of where all this came from 13 billion years ago. But then I got interested in this. So that would be the real source, right? And that is definitely something we don't know anything about, where the source of that came from. So the source is the unknown, the unknowable, the mystery of the whole thing. That's one part of the source. But the other thing I read along in this book is that it turns out that most of the matter that we see is only 15% of the matter that's out there. Because apparently there's more matter out there somewhere that we can't see. We can't see it because it doesn't give off light or electromagnetic vibrations at all. But we know it's there because it has a gravitational pull on the other 15%. They call that dark matter. So we only see 15% of what all the matter is out there.

[12:04]

But that isn't the interesting part. The matter that's out there... 15% of which we can see, the other 85% we can't see, is only 30% of the energy in the universe. And they discovered this about two decades ago when they realized that the universe was expanding. And it couldn't be expanding with that much mass around because the gravity would pull it back unless there was some other energy pushing it out. And they determined that energy is about 70% of the energy in the universe, and that's called the dark energy. To summarize it all, 5% is all we see. The other 95% of the mass energy in the world is invisible to us in any form at all at this point in time. Which is just, you know, physics way of saying we really don't see very much of what's going on around here, right? Which I always find. So this is what, I just got into riff on dark there, so. Since it was part of this line here.

[13:08]

Darkness. So darkness is the mystery. So Suzuki Roshi's comment on the source, going back to that metaphor of the stream of the source, 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 or wrong. This is important. Whatever your mind can conceive is not the source itself. So your mind can't conceive of what the source is. And he goes on. Often we feel that 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 Sukurashi is talking about what's the source of our being.

[14:13]

I mean, I wandered into the source of the universe, but really what's of more interest to us is what's the source of our being in this moment. How does this all work? And he's saying there's a truth in this. There's some source to our existence, to our living, to our beingness that has truth in it. So we're sitting a one-day sitting, and part of what you do in a one-day sitting is you quiet down enough to maybe see the source of your experiences. You can quiet down enough to actually notice a thought comes up, and with that thought is a whole series of emotional feelings and a smell comes in your mind. You sense things. You start to get a source, some sense of where all this stuff is coming from. more about that later.

[15:17]

So now to that first sentence. The spiritual source shines clear in the light. Well, that seems like a complete contradiction to what I just described, right? The spiritual source is the dark, deep part of the mountain, and what's it doing shining clear in the light? should be in the dark. That's where it is. And of course he starts off saying the spiritual source shines clear in the light. So this is the first place where he sets up this idea that there's no difference between the absolute and the relative. There's no difference between the things that you see in the world, the multiple things in the light, and the deep connected oneness of our life. They're together. And the second sentence emphasizes that same thing again.

[16:23]

The branching streams, we just had talked about the branching streams flowing out in the light in the meadows and wherever we can see them, flow on in the dark. So now we've got the streams, which were supposed to be visible in light, flowing in the darkness. So again, this is that idea that he's putting forth that the deep hidden truth of this darkness is here in plain sight. And all the things we hear and see and taste, all our thoughts, every breath, every person we meet is part of the deep hidden truth. of the source of all things. Tsukiroshi goes on to say, the stream is pure source, and pure source is a stream. The pure source is flowing all over, even though you don't know it.

[17:27]

This don't know is what we call dark, and it is very important. It's kind of a nice idea that this stream metaphor has the feeling of movement, and the movement is in the dark, That is, the truth of your life is moving through you every moment. In the dark, you can't see it, you can't know it, but it's there. You're busy with your relative speculations and discriminations and decision-making, and yet the source of your life, the truth of your life, is flowing like a stream through it. Everything is gently and constantly going beyond itself, to the heart of things, beyond your sort of immediate perception of things. It's moving to the heart of things. Everything is teaching us and guiding us to wisdom. We just get too stuck to feel that movement.

[18:32]

But maybe if you sit still all day, you'll get some sense of that source of your life. Anyway, I wanted to bring forward a marvelous poem of the same time frame from China that I think brings us forth a little bit. So this is a Tang Dynasty Chinese poet, Wang Wei. So he was born just one year before Shurdo was born, same time frame. And this is his poem. In the middle years, I became fond of the way. I make my home on 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.

[19:36]

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. Nice poem, huh? In my middle years I became fond of the way. I love that. It's kind of like, you know, in my middle years I became fond of the path of Buddhism. Not like in my youth where I was crazily, desperately chasing after the way. No, the middle years, warmly fond of the way. Not exhausted by it, but pretty interested, pretty fond of the way. And what did I do? I made my home on the foothills of South Mountain. It's a nice place to be on the foothills of a mountain.

[20:39]

I mean, I've lived most of my life I was raised in a community at 7,000 feet on the foot of a 10,000-foot mountain. I went to college with a 10,000-foot mountain in my backyard. I went to Tassar with a big mountain. I've been around mountains my whole life. I love them. They're great. They're so stable and yet so alive, mountains are. So naturally, if you had become fond of the way in your middle years, you might go and find yourself by a mountain. when the spirit moves me, I go off by myself to see things that I alone must see. What are the things that you alone must see? Your life is really your own to see and

[21:41]

shape, make. When I was young and I had some free time, which I don't anymore, I spent a couple of three-month periods just hiking by myself in the mountains. And I used to like to, first I used to climb to the top of mountains, but then I was cold up there and windy. kind of lonely. So after I'd come down from one of those mountain tops and was sitting in a beautiful meadow at 10,000 feet with a little stream running by me and flowers around me and butterflies and everything, and I, well, this is like, if I'm going to walk in mountains, maybe I ought to hang out in this area. So I kind of got into looking for the source of streams. I sort of thought, well, it's interesting where these streams are. What's the source of these streams? These meadows, these crevices and rock, granite walls where the stream would come out, the bottom of snow packs where the stream would come out.

[22:44]

But sometimes it's hard to follow the stream to the source of the stream because sometimes streams go through crevices and there's rock walls you can't climb up or they're filled with a lot of bushes you can't whack your way through so you have to make detours around the streams. I'm going to get back to that. But anyway, you're sitting there in those mountain meadows, or he's sitting in maybe a little forested area on the side of a meadow, and he's watching the clouds crop up. You can recall times when you've done that, right? The only thing that's concerning you at that moment is how the way the clouds form or form magically out of nothing or move across your mind. And at the same time, you've got thoughts, right? Thoughts are going on while the clouds are cropping up, but they seem kind of all relaxing thoughts while the clouds are going by, right?

[23:51]

But then somebody comes along for some reason and says, hi, what's up? How are the clouds today? And you laugh and talk and get home late. And if you were a young kid lying out on the local park with your friends and you got home late, your mother or father would chastise you for having missed dinner while you were. You couldn't explain to them about the clouds. You just let it go. So what does this have to do with our zazen? My idea of this poem is, of course, since we're fond of the way, We're going to make our seat in the foothills of South Mountain down in the Zendo down there. And when the spirit moves us, we're going to go by ourselves to see what we must see alone. And we're going to follow the stream to the source.

[24:59]

We're going to follow the stream of our experiences, of our sensations, of our thoughts, to the source of those thoughts. And just like climbing a forest to the source of a stream might be difficult, there may be things that come up that you have to get around. Could be little things like a little bit of daydreaming. I mean, who doesn't want to daydream a little bit, you know? How things could be or should be or would be, maybe. You can be the star of your own movie for 10 minutes? Why not? After all, my knee hurts a little bit, so I think I'll star in some movie that I've just produced. But then you think, well, no, it's time to keep looking for the source. Time to find where my life experiences are coming from or what's going on there. So I'll pay attention to my breathing again.

[26:01]

I'll pay attention to my posture. And I'll try not to avoid my suffering. Because to some extent, you might actually get to some place where you're sitting quietly down there. No clouds are coming up at all. It's just calm. You know, that quiet place that happens in us. We do have that quiet place in us. And then the thoughts crop up. The clouds crop up. And that's okay. Because the clouds cropping up is our participation in the life of sentient beings. Our participation in the life of suffering. Because we can see how those thoughts create suffering. How those thoughts are about suffering. Maybe you're remembering a friend who's ill or something.

[27:01]

And you're willing to be there with that suffering because... You don't need to be in the calm, quiet all the time. You're willing to be a bodhisattva and live in the suffering of the world. So that's my little poem about sitting zazen today. Hope you have a moment of quiet and when you have a moment of suffering, you accept it as just as good as the moment of quiet. So that's line one and line two. Now we go to the psychology of this thing.

[28:07]

We were in the metaphysical realm. Now we get to get into psychology. Grasping at things is surely delusion. According with sameness is still not enlightenment. So we live in an enormous universe of being beyond anything we possibly can understand, and yet we make it small. We shrink our experience of life up into something very small. And how do we do that? We do it by grasping. That's what the poem says. Grasping at things is surely delusion. This is a tricky area in Buddhism, so I'm just going to explicate it a little bit. It's not that wanting things or desiring things is the problem. If you're hungry, you want to eat some food.

[29:09]

That's humanness. That's our human body speaking. If you've been out maybe hiking in the mountains for five days, you might feel lonely and want to meet another human being. That's a natural thing. That's a desire. That's wanting something. The problem is not so much the wanting or the desiring. The problem is the grasping at it. Holding tight to what you want. So maybe you get something you want and then you want to make sure you keep it. And you actually usually crush it through your wanting to keep it. or when it goes away, which it almost certainly does, then you really feel bad because you've lost it. And the other thing that is involved in grasping is, it's also when you've got something you don't like and you're avoiding it, you're pushing it away, that's a kind of grasping at some other kind of experience than what you have right now.

[30:13]

So other words we use in Zen a lot, which you've all heard, is don't stick to things, don't get attached to things, clinging to things. So we know this is the cause of our pain and suffering. So what's the antidote to this? Since we have these desires, since we want these things, the antidote is letting go. If we get what we want, great. Let go of it. It'll go away soon enough. If we don't get what we want, let go of what you thought you wanted and see what you got. Because almost assuredly what you got, in most cases, is pretty interesting. And in any event, it's what you got. Right? Right? So this is standard Buddhism 101, right?

[31:21]

So we all know this, but the trouble is it's hard to do. It's hard to do, and of course the advantage of a one-day sitting is you get to spend time noticing how you grasp at, oh, that feeling, I want to hold that feeling longer. I want to get rid of that feeling. How do you move moment by moment and try to accept what's happening to you right then, right there. So that's grasping. Second line, according with sameness is still not enlightenment. Okay, so now Shudo's gone back to according to oneness or unity, or the darkness, is still not enlightenment. That sort of contradicts our general thinking about things.

[32:24]

I thought the whole idea is once we got rid of our grasping and searching after things, we would become one with everything, feel the interconnectedness of everything, be there, enlightenment. Great, right? But no... You know, that's just another thing to get attached to. Another, that sense, that feeling of oneness is just another place that we get attached to an idea, something. So, Sandokai, the merging of many and one, the merging of grasping and enlightenment. That's what this poem is talking about. We're going to merge grasping and enlightenment together. We're going to... I mean, he's talking about your actual experience, your moment-by-moment experience.

[33:25]

He's not advocating enlightenment. He's not advocating delusion. He's advocating sandokai, the merging of delusion and enlightenment. My goodness. I have this marvelous story that I gave an entire 40-minute lecture on that I thought I would be introducing here at the end about this merging of delusion and enlightenment. Maybe I'll just read the case and you can ponder it. This is just another version of that same idea Zhao Zhou, a very famous teacher, maybe a couple of generations past these two teachers, said, the great way is not difficult, just avoid picking and choosing. Just avoid all this preferential activity in your mind.

[34:25]

As soon as words are spoken, this is picking and choosing. This old monk does not abide or and or clarity. This old monk does not abide within clarity, so what should we do? Clarity is enlightenment. So he's saying... avoid picking and choosing and don't abide in enlightenment. He's in that same place. So his fellow monk says, well, since you don't abide in enlightenment, since you have decided to avoid picking and choosing and you're not going to enlightenment, what do you do? And Jiaojo said, in the eminently clear way these teachers do, I don't know either. Beats me. Big problem. I don't know how you mix these two things together, this delusion and enlightenment business. It's your life. You'll have to figure it out. And so then the monk went on, because these monks persist in these confrontations.

[35:34]

Since you don't know, teacher, why do you say you don't abide in enlightenment? Since you don't know, how do you know you're not abiding in enlightenment? And Zhao Zhao says, it's enough to ask the question, just bow and withdraw. So maybe it's just enough to pose that question. How do we merge delusion and enlightenment? How do we harmonize our crazy monkey mind and the Buddha mind that's sitting with us at the same time today? More to be said about all that. Well, I've developed this tradition, apparently. I call it a tradition since I've done it three times so far.

[36:36]

Of ending every talk I give on the Sandokai with the last four lines. Or at least just the last two lines. I respectfully urge you who study the mystery, do not pass your days and nights in vain. Schurdo's imploring us. First of all, very respectful. Urge you who study the mystery, you who are willing to study the mystery of your life, of the source of your life, of the activity of your life and the decisions you need to make. I respectfully urge you, do not pass your days and nights in vain. Thank you very much. Enjoy your day. 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.

[37:43]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:58]

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