This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everyone. Very nice. We got a little bit of dampness today, wasn't it? So... I think I've seen a lot of you at the practice period tea today. How many people here are taking the practice period that started yesterday? And yeah, and how many people are here for the first time? Welcome to the first timers. The theme of the

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practice period is Zen is our everyday life. And this came from a commentary, Suzuki Roshi, who was the founder of this temple, did on the Genjo Koan, which is a very famous essay that Dogen Zenji wrote, Dogen Zenji being the founder of Soto Zen in Japan and the founder of our Zen lineage. And because that essay is such a beautiful essay, we are chanting it every day at noon for the practice period. And tonight I'm going to talk about a few sentences from that essay. And the sentences I chose are a very famous section from that four-page essay. And I'll read it to you now so you can be pondering it. To study the Buddha way is to study the self.

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First sentence. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study Zen is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. How many people are familiar with that? Yeah, very, very famous paragraph. So, for those who aren't so familiar, I might say it. few words about Dogen, not a lot. I think Dogen has recently at least become quite a unique place in world religions.

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He's being studied not only by Zen people but by just general philosophers and getting a lot of rich commentary on his thinking. And he's unusual from a Zen point of view too. Typical, when you think of Zen teachers, famous Zen masters, and certainly that was the case when I was a new student, there were these stories of basically all these practices and efforts to get enlightened, to have an enlightenment experience. When I was young, that was the whole point. We went off to Tashara to get enlightened. And what's interesting about Dogen is... That idea of having an enlightenment experience is really never mentioned in his work, not in the way we normally think of it, of going and sitting long, long sashims and striving to have some really deep experience that changes our life forever.

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What he focuses on mostly is honoring... the depth and poignancy of ordinary human life, our ordinary daily human life, and the depth and poignancy of it in every moment. And what kind of practice will bring you in touch with that depth? And this essay the Genjo Koan, is an essay that sort of features that idea the most clearly of all of his essays. It's probably the best-known chapter of Dogen's collection of essays, which is called the Shogo Genzo, Treasury of the True Dharma High.

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I went fast through that, Treasury of the True Dharma I, what a beautiful title. And it is considered, at least by several commentators on the Genja Kohan, to be the best text to use in beginning a study of Dogen's teaching. And its understanding is essential to developing an understanding of zazen and our daily activities as a bodhisattva. And some editions of the Shobo Genzo, the Genjo Kohen is the first chapter and maybe Dogen's key text that signals his whole approach. Even though it is one of Dogen's most widely read writings and is a foundational text, it is nevertheless difficult to understand. But it's beautifully poetic. And until recent, there have been many, many commentaries on this essay in Japan and in Japanese, but it's only recently that they've been translated into America.

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And now, of course, there's tons and tons of translations of the Genjo Koan. And I just went on the internet and I just typed Genjo Koan and I got 10 different translations of the essay. And I thought I would just read some of the different titles. So the translation of Genjo Koan by the people that do the chant that we do in the afternoons is actualizing the fundamental point. The Genjo Koan means actualizing the fundamental point. Then there's another translation by Norman Waddell that said Genjo Koan means manifesting suchness. another translation of Genjo Koan, realizing the law of the universe, manifesting absolute reality, the issue at hand, the actualization of enlightenment.

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You can see that this little two Genjo Koan has a lot of different ways it can be looked at just by the different ways it's translated. The translation or the sort of deconstruction of Genjo Kohen that's in Realizing the Genjo Kohen, which I'm going to read some things from in a beautiful book on this four-page essay, he says, Genjo Kohen means to answer the question from true reality through the practice of our everyday activity. Genjo Kohen is to answer the question from true reality through the practice of our everyday activity. I like that one. It's almost explanatory. Of course, every moment there is something going on, and there's a question that's happening from what's going on, and we have to answer it with our practice, with our everyday activity.

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Another translation is the koan of the present moment. Koan of the present moment. Genjo koan, the koan of the present moment. Does everybody know what a koan is? Hasn't it become part of modern common language? Maybe not. What is a koan? We have a lot of these famous stories that are koans. I lecture on them quite frequently here on Saturdays. I think last Saturday, three weeks ago, I lectured on the famous koan, Dengshan's No Heat and Cold. A monk asked Dengshan, when heat and cold come, how can we avoid them? Dengshan said, why don't you go to the place where there is no heat or cold? A monk said, what is the place where there is no heat or cold? And Dengshan said, when it is hot, the heat kills you. When it is cold, the cold kills you. That was the colon I lectured on three weeks ago.

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These are famous old stories, interchanges between teachers and students that have a kind of paradoxical twist that pushes you into some kind of thinking about the subject or feeling about the subject that's different than you would mostly come up with. So... I just was curious to see if the dictionary had a definition of koan because it's become such an American concept. A koan is a riddle in the form of a paradox used in Zen Buddhism as an aid to meditation and a means of gaining intuitive knowledge. So, a koan is a question and it connotates a question about the truth of something. So the genjo koan would be the koan of the present moment.

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What is the truth or question in the present moment? This is basically a human dilemma. What do I do in this present moment? What is the question that this present moment presents me? So the Genjo koan basically is saying you don't need to go back and find a Chinese story to come up with a koan. You can just look at your life and every moment your life is presenting you with a question that can become a question that is a turning question about life. And the... Going back to what I said originally, which was... Dogen's focus is entirely on honoring the depth and poignancy of our ordinary human life.

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So... I mean, this is basically what every book these days is talking about. The present moment, if we can pay attention enough and be in the present moment, there is enormous depth and suffering and complexity. There's a whole world in every present moment. The point is not that we're practicing to achieve some special state somewhere, but that at every moment we're in, we're looking at what is the depth, what is the meaning, what is the question asked in our life by that moment. We don't notice how marvelous it is to be alive most of the time. We forget. We go through our life because we're so busy.

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doing many things that are important, most of them very important, and then at some point we wake up and say, oh, wow, this life I'm living is pretty interesting, quite a lot going on here. And then we fall back into our busyness and we forget, again, what it's like to be alive. And this koan is pushing us into the thing, What kind of practice it would take for us to remember that we're alive and that this moment itself requires our attention? And it doesn't matter. I mean, normally we feel okay about that if we're sitting on a beautiful mountain ridge watching a supermoon rising or a sunset happening. But what if we're in some thorny relationship that's blowing up? What if our aging body and mind is bothering us?

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What if we have a troubled heart, some strange longing for something we don't have? Are those moments that we can say, oh, this moment, this moment has everything for me. I need nothing other than this moment. Naturally, we don't say that. we have certain tragedies where you say, well, certainly this tragedy can't be a moment that is a moment of awakening, a moment of depth and importance. But that's what the Genjo Koan is saying. Every moment is a moment of depth and importance. So anyway, I have a couple of paragraphs from Suzuki Roshi, comments on the theme of the Genjo Koan. I'm going to read them to you. The secret of all the teachings of Buddhism is how to live on each moment.

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The secret of all the teachings of Buddhism is how to live on each moment. How to obtain absolute freedom moment after moment. This is the theme of the Genjo Koan. Moment after moment we exist in interdependency with past and future and all existence. What an interesting sentence. Moment after moment we exist in interdependency with the past and future and all existence. Interdependency, interconnectedness, interdepending on the past, the future, and all existence. In short, if you practice zazen, concentrating on your breathing moment after moment, you will be keeping the precepts, helping yourself and helping others to attain liberation. We do not aim for or emphasize some particular state of mind or some particular teaching.

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We do not aim for or emphasize some particular state of mind or some particular teaching. Rather, we emphasize how we understand and how we bring the truth into practice. this practice does not mean some particular practice only. When we say Zen, Zen includes all the activity of our life. So when he says this practice does not mean some particular practice only, meaning this practice doesn't mean sitting zazen only, chanting only, going to ceremonies only, any particular way of practice that we can think of, it doesn't just mean that, it means all the activity of our life is Zen. Zen includes all the activity of our life. How to apply Zen in everyday life is not difficult. If we live in each moment, that is Zen. Whether you are sitting or working, living in each moment is Zen.

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Zen is our everyday life. this before, living in each moment is Zen. So I'm going to return to the paragraph I first opened with. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. How do we study the self? I'm posing that as a question for you to ponder for a second or two. It seems like, first of all, there's the obvious aspect of this sentence that's interesting. To study the Buddha way is to study the self.

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You might say to study mathematics would be to open a book on topology and study it or open a book on... geometry and study it or open a book on measure theory and study it. So it's saying, well, no, don't go read a whole bunch of textbooks on Buddhism, although there's tons of textbooks and it's wonderful to read them. It says to study the Buddha way, to study Zen is to study the self. Of course, that's pretty handy because the self is always with you. You're always there. Are you studying yourself? Or what way would you study yourself? Would you stand outside yourself and observe yourself a lot? Noticing all the things that you're doing? Well, mostly you get kind of lost in your thinking. I don't think that's exactly what they mean by studying the self. There's a...

[19:58]

The Japanese term for study here actually means to be intimate with. So to study yourself is to be intimate with yourself. And certainly if you're going to be studying yourself, you're going to have to study yourself without prejudice. You know, be able to look at yourself without all that judging because all that judging gets in the way of studying yourself. And even more importantly, when you start to pay attention to yourself, you notice that an enormous amount of what's going on in you is self-concern. In fact, to some extent, your entire world revolves around your self-concern. Did somebody criticize me? Did somebody not pay attention to me? Did this happen? Did this happen? In fact, I think we basically organize our entire life around the background theme of self-concern.

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It's a pretty frightening thing when we look at it carefully, studying ourselves and we notice that, wow, mostly what I'm concerned about is how I'm doing. Anyway, I wanted to, so to study the self is a big issue in Zen and you would think, well, that sounds like a good project to do. But I show up at Zen Center and all they do is spend a lot of time telling me how to enter the Zen Do, how to bow to my cushion, how to turn right instead of left, how to do all these complicated things. What does that have to do with studying the self? And... Well, to some extent, it's just a very courteous way to go into the zendo, which is where we really study ourself by sitting on a pillow and watching all of that self-concern coming up. But also, it turns out that all these little forms are ways of taking us out of our thinking mind and getting us back in a larger picture of the self.

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Studying the self is not just studying the thinking mind, studying the self is also studying the body, the feelings, the emotions, the entire story. If you look at the characters for study in the Chinese characters, there's an upper part that means wings and there's a lower part that means self. So one interpretation is to study is like when a baby bird watches its parent birds to learn how to fly. They're studying, but they're studying sort of, and then they jump off the branch at some point in time. I teach a small group over in Mill Valley in an art center, and one time one of the displays in the art center was this person who had watched a hummingbird

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pair raised some baby hummingbirds in a nest and took a bunch of photographs. And apparently he caught the moment when the hummingbird baby, you know, stepped off the branch and started to fly. And he described it so vividly to me that I imagined that I saw it myself. Or maybe I went to a... I probably went to the internet and pulled up a video on baby hummingbirds jumping off and flying. But it's pretty... scary for them at first you know i mean they've been observing and then they they jump off that that's a kind of studying and i think we we studied like that too at some point in time when we first got up and walked that was a kind of studying ourself and what is this walking about huh you know and then as we got older we got better we did we figured out how to ride a bicycle or go skiing or go scuba diving or various other dangerous sports that we took up So studying, in this sense, is a total engagement of your being in a process of figuring out who you are.

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It's not standing back and just observing yourself. So you might study in an awkward social circumstance. Maybe you're a shy person and you go to a party and you say, well, I wonder what it would be like if I became very gregarious and talked to everybody. And you would study through the action of doing that. That's what we mean by studying. That is, intimately engaging with who you are is a way of studying. So, study's end. To study Zen is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. It's kind of this two-stage thing. So what does it mean to forget the self?

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What would you be doing if you were... Well, I've kind of set this up for you. To forget the self is to be with the self without all the self-concerns. Forget the self-concern aspect of the self. I mean, really observe yourself and let go of all that self-concern, all that self-worries about the self, concerns about the self, issues with other people about how you're... And if you sit there long enough and observe your mind... After a while you notice, well, there's a lot of that self-concerning, that's okay, but I can just start letting go of it. That's the letting go of the self. To forget the self is to see your own lunacy, and I'm using that term properly, your own lunacy and not take it so personally.

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talking with a person recently who was like going on on how she just she just knows where this lunacy is coming from but someone talks to them about something and something happens and they just they get in this this mind warp it can go on for minutes can go on for a lot how not to take that lunacy seriously or personally just to have enough capacity to step back from it and say, this is just an old story that's rerunning its tape in my head. I'm just not going to take it seriously. I'm not going to let it run my life. So, of course, what this leads to is the source of all our suffering is this clinging to this self. This clinging to this self is what's causing all this suffering in us.

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And it can be such a relief to put it down. Just drop it. I mean, you're going to pick it up soon, so don't worry too much. But just set down all those concerns about yourself for a while. So to study Zen is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. And what can happen when you let it down is that you can appreciate the world you're living in in a whole new way. You actually can feel the depth and quality of the world that you're living in no matter what's going on. That's the beautiful sentence. To study ourselves is to... I'm having a little problem because I mixed three different translations of this paragraph and this thing, and I want to find the one I first used.

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To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. So to forget the self is to all of a sudden... be open and have the myriad things or everything out there. Have that mix in with you and make you to be actualized by many things. So I was mentioning there was another translation here, and this is a translation that was the one that Suzuki Gershi did his commentary on, which was an early translation made in Hawaii by... Robert Aiken and Kaz Tanahashi in like 1967. It was one of the first translations, probably was the first translation of the Genja Koan. And it's very close. It goes, to study Buddhism is to study ourselves, to study ourselves is to go beyond ourselves. That's kind of different than to forget the self, to go beyond ourselves, to go to some place which isn't so much ourselves.

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To go beyond ourselves is to be enlightened by all things. And Suzuki Roshi's comment on that sentence is, he says that in the direct experience, there is no subjectivity or objectivity. In the direct experience, there is no subjectivity or objectivity. So to study yourself is to have a direct experience of yourself without a subject-object differentiation. You know what I'm talking about here? Like... I'm the subject and I'm viewing myself as an object. That's not a good way to study myself. If I'm just being myself, direct experience of myself, that's what studying the self is. I'm having this moment where I'm thinking subject-object, self and other,

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Here I am myself right here, and then there's the whole world out there. Gosh, that seems pretty dangerous. Because I'm just this tiny thing. The whole world out there is that big thing. Maybe I shouldn't make that subject-object differentiation. Maybe I should decide that I'm the whole world, too. That there's no difference between me and the whole world. And that's the second thing that... So to study ourselves is to study everything. That is, if we're not making a subject average differentiation, then everything we experience, whether it's something we see, something we hear, something we think, something we feel, that's all part of us. We're just having a direct experience of everything. So I'm I'm not making the kind of progress on this essay that I thought I would, but that's okay.

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We've only gotten through three sentences of a six-sentence paragraph, and I've only got five minutes left. What do I want to say in the last five minutes? Maybe for those of you who are starting the practice period, I'll make a few small comments about something that we do all the time, which is Siddhazen. Besides being this... magnificent philosopher who changed the whole idea of Zen practice from having enlightenment experiences to seeing the depth of every moment in your life.

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His primary recommendation for doing that was to practice Zazen. And the Zazen that Dogen talked about is not meditation in the normal way we think about meditation. The normal way we think about meditation is quite commonly thought about. in modern times is that you meditate on something to get something, to improve your state of mind, to change your state of mind, to get something. But the kind of meditation that Dogen is talking about is not that. It's not meditating for some particular purpose. It's sitting down and resuming your true human heritage. sitting down and resuming the dignity and depth of your life. Taking a step back and allowing yourself to resume your Buddha-ness.

[34:26]

If the Buddha in you exists anywhere, it exists here and now. So you sit just to feel the feeling of being alive. what it's like to be alive in this human form in this moment. Not to try to change it, but just to feel what it's like to be alive in this human form. Everything is included. Nothing is excluded. Not trying to push away your thoughts or concentrate on your mind. Just be here with our minds, not concentrate the mind. You know, that's a form of meditation where you concentrate the mind. Just be here with your mind. And the basic practice is to bring the attention to the body. So we sit in this nice posture if we can. If you can't, you sit in a chair and you try to keep your back straight.

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You try to have a little bit of lift here. Hold your head up. It's a very dignified human posture to sit like this. Allow the life force in us to lift us up. I mean, when we sit, gravity is, we sit on the ground, or we feel the chair sitting on the ground. We feel the force of gravity anchoring us to the ground. And then we feel an opposite force, which is the force of life, the energy of life lifting us up. and we feel breathing animating our life. So when we're sinning zazen, we keep our focus on the body and the breathing. We substitute our great attention of the theme of our self-concern in our brain and instead concentrate on our body and breathing.

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Our self-concern is the background of our consciousness. We put that aside and put our energy into our body and our breathing, and we just sit. Whatever comes, comes, and we let it go. Feelings, sounds, memories, discomfort, we let it come, and we let it go, and we remain present. And we've all heard that before, but I thought I'd just remind you that that is our practice, that is our style of zazen here. I think what I'm going to save, I'm going to save the rest of these three sentences for the Saturday talk. Body and mind drop off is a very, very famous saying from Dogen. So you can ponder for the next few days what body and mind dropping off is. And then the next sentence, which is also beautiful and famous, there is no trace of realization and that cannot be grasped.

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There is a trace of realization that cannot be grasped. So between now and Saturday, we'll be dropping our body and mind and our trace of realization won't be grasped. Isn't that nice? The trace of realization is like the metaphor of a bird flying through the sky and there's a trace of the bird left. So as you're moving through your life, maybe you had some realization, some moment where you actually were actually living your life completely and felt like you were in touch with everything and connected to everything and it was marvelous and immediately your mind said, wow, maybe I'm enlightened. That's that trace. So what we're going to do is we're going to develop that way of being that way without that trace hanging on there, tracking after you, commenting on every moment you're actually experiencing with your life so that we can start to differentiate between

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the life we're actually living and the story we're telling about it in our head, especially the story we're telling that's causing us lots of suffering by criticizing us. Well, thank you very much for your time this evening. Those of you who are returning to a home somewhere else, strive safely. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

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