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, everyone. I'm just going to take a look around and see all your wonderful faces, those of you that I can see. So nice to have you online with us. I do look forward to the time when we can sit in the Buddha Hall together and have a talk, but this is nice that we can do this together. So it's wonderful to take a look at your faces. So I particularly appreciate those who are in the practice period. It's wonderful that Paul Haller and Christina Lindner are leading a practice period on taking and creating refuge.

[01:02]

You know, life is difficult and it's particularly difficult at these times. And I think having a place in our own practice and in our life where we can have refuge and a place where we can create refuge for others is such a wonderful thing to bring to the world. So it's wonderful we're having this practice period. I want to thank Nancy Petram for inviting me to talk. I appreciate her guidance of the temple. So when my wife and I were visiting Kyoto in May of 2018, through some friends, we were invited to meet the abbot of Nanzenji, a famous Rinzai temple. At one point, as we were touring the beautiful grounds, he asked me, where is my true home? And I said, my black cushion. I asked him, what do most people say? He said, they say Nanzenji.

[02:04]

And certainly Nanzenji, a beautiful, inspiring temple. You can see why that practice place would be a true home for many people, just as the Zen Center is a true home for many people. And I look forward to the time when you all can come into the building again. True home is really another word for refuge, a place of refuge. And I was emphasizing zazen or practice as my place of refuge. So this morning, I'm going to talk about Zen practice and particularly Dogen's style of Zen practice. In January of this year, Shundo David Hay and I gave a four-week class on the newly discovered lectures of Suzuki Roshi. They were from the first year when Suzuki Roshi's talks were recorded. Suzuki Roshi, at that time, this is 1965, was meeting with a small group of students in Marian Derby's home in Los Altos.

[03:08]

She had a good reel-to-reel tape recorder, and she asked if she could record his talks. Amazingly, he'd been here since 1959, and this is the first time his talks had been recorded. Those talks eventually became Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And I remember listening again to the talk that is the prologue to Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which had been lost for 50 years. It was so wonderful to hear his voice again and feel his warmth. And near the end of the talk, he said to the group, which must have been maybe 15 or 20 Americans, I was very impressed by your practice this morning. Although your posture was not perfect, And then he laughed and they laughed. But the feeling you have here is wonderful. There is no comparison to it. At the same time, we should make our effort to keep this feeling forever in your practice. This is a very important point.

[04:10]

So obviously, Suzuki Roshi had practiced. He was trained at AAG. He was a monk since he was 13 years old. He was raised in a temple. He knows what good... posture is and that our zazen was not perfect is far from the point. But he appreciated our effort, our effort, the feeling in our practice. And that's what he always emphasized. That was so what was so encouraging about the way he practiced with us. So in this, then in the last lecture that Chendo and I covered, it was titled Study Yourself. And in that lecture, Suzuki said, The purpose of studying Buddhism is to study ourselves and to forget ourselves. When we forget ourselves, we actually are the true activity of big existence, a reality itself. So I'll repeat that sentence again. The purpose of studying Buddhism is to study ourselves and to forget ourselves.

[05:15]

When we forget ourselves, we actually are the true activity of big existence or reality itself. So this is, of course, a very famous line from the Gendro Cohen, but I'm going to talk a little bit about that later. So first of all, what he's saying is, of course, to study Buddhism and there's zillions of texts on Buddhism and all kinds of forms. uh ceremonies that we have to learn and we do learn them but his emphasis is it's to study yourself this to study you that's the practice of buddhism and then this other side to forget ourselves so there's a kind of interesting thing there which we're going to explore more And when we forget ourselves, we actually are the true activity of big existence or reality itself. What would it mean to be the true activity of big existence?

[06:21]

Not just our little life that we imagine we're living, but the true activity of reality, of big existence flowing through us. I remember I read this kind of a comment in a book, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism by Dale Wright, where he was talking about Wang Bo, a very famous Zen teacher in the ninth century China. And he said, Wang Bo pictures enlightened ancestors in real life situations of facing themselves so that the true contour of the situation is comes to disclosure in them. Kind of an interesting sentence. Facing themselves, so the true contour of the situation comes to disclosure in them. It's sort of, on the one hand, I like the general sense, just the basic idea that the true contour of whatever situation we're in comes to disclosure in ourselves.

[07:31]

That is, we become... the true contour of the situation. At face means, you know, to make oneself insignificant or inconspicuous or erased. And, you know, you think of like the wallflower or something, but of course, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about giving up our self-concern, you know, our busy small life to open up to the whole world and let the whole world become us, become one with the whole world. And in that position, we actually know how to act. So this is sort of another way of saying the same thing. When we forget ourselves, when we forget our self-concern, we actually become the activity of reality itself. So this was Suzuki Roshi's...

[08:32]

of translation in the early days of this famous paragraph from the genja koan to study the buddha way is to study the self to study the self is to forget the self to forget the self is to be awakened by myriad things or 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. A wonderfully beautiful paragraph from the Genjo Koan. So I'm going to give a little history here, because I was sort of curious when we were doing this archive project with Shindo. What was Suzuki Roshi lecturing in the early days on? And... He lectured on the Blue Cliff record, and people took notes. And it was sort of interesting that he didn't, the Blue Cliff records are pretty complex koans, but that's what he did for the first number of years that he was teaching here.

[09:48]

And Kaz Tanahashi, who was a good friend of Zen Center and a Japanese artist, when he first came to Mitsuzukurashi in 1964, he said, what kind of text do you teach? And Reverend Suzuki said, the Blue Cliff Record. And Kaz said, why not Dogen? And Suzuki Roshi said, Dogen is too difficult for American students. Then Kaz said, don't you think you should present your best when you teach foreign students? I think Dogen is your best. I believe Dogen is not only an important Zen master and an imaginative poet, but the greatest thinker Japan has ever produced. He is fantastic. It doesn't matter if your students don't understand him. Teach Dogen. I think it was so wonderful that Ka's young 25-year-old student was letting Suzuki Roshi what to know, what to teach. And of course, it turned out in 1965, Suzuki Roshi began teaching Dogen. And this lecture that I quoted was one of the very first lectures he did on Dogen.

[10:52]

And he chose Genjo Koan as the first text to teach. And this paragraph was the first one he presented. It's kind of, in some sense, the essence of the Genjo Koan. And the Genjo Koan is the most studied fascicle of Dogen's Shobo Genzo, his collection of 95 fascicles. So maybe it's natural that Suzuki Rishi would have chosen that. Suzuki Rishi ended up giving 15 talks specifically mentioning the Genjo Koan. over his time in America, three of them in 65, eight of them in 66, and three of them in 67, basically during the Sashin, which was the first 90-day practice period in America that summer of 1967. So really, Suzuki Roshi and Kaz said this about Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was basically pure Dogen. And Suzuki Roshi had trained under the best

[11:54]

teachers of Dogen in Japan at that time, when there had been a kind of reawakening of interest in Dogen in the Zen Soto sect. I remember when I met Suzuki Hiroshi in the summer of 1970, I was... fascinated by him. He was so present, so connected, responding to the situation so appropriately. I had been searching for a wise teacher and I realized what he was doing, that was true wisdom. You know, I had been a mathematician in college and I had gotten distracted by the counterculture and I'd been studying Nietzsche and all kinds of philosophical stuff. But I realized that I needed to find somebody who I thought was wise.

[13:00]

And I took this trip to Tassar in the summer of 1970 and met him. And when I saw the way he could relate in each moment, I realized there's something here. And that's something that's there, I think, is really expressed in these phrases of Dogen. So I'm going to talk a little bit more in depth about this thing. The study of the Buddha way 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 body of mind and minds of others, drop away. No trace of realization remains. This no trace continues endlessly. It's kind of a step-by-step progress. You study yourself, then you forget yourself, then you're awakened by all things. When awakened by all things, you drop off your body and mind and the body and minds of others.

[14:04]

And when you're finished, no trace remains. So, of course, why go through all that trouble if no trace remains at the end? But maybe we'll talk about that as we move along. But it is true that each sentence is kind of a stage, but it's also, they're all the same way of just talking about the same thing. Each sentence is just a different way of talking about how to live fully in this moment. So to reemphasize, Buddhism is not an external thing. It's a way. All of the forms we have, all the rituals, all the ceremonies, the oryoki way we practice eating food is a way of focusing our... attention on what we're doing in each moment. So we say, well, of course, that's what we do all the time. We're always paying attention to ourselves. But to study the self is to really observe our lives honestly. Be willing to admit, this is how I actually feel.

[15:07]

This is what I'm thinking about. This is how my body feels. This is what I'm doing. So that requires a certain kind of honest integrity about it. This is how I'm interacting with the world. And you do this without prejudice. You begin this study without a bunch of, oh, that's not good, that's good, that's bad. You have to be able to observe it without so much prejudice. And when I had mentioned I was a mathematician and a scientist when I was young, so when I thought about And when I first heard about Zazen, I thought, oh, this is kind of a microscope allowing me to see my mind. And it is true. Zazen is a good way to study yourself because you can sit without the distractions of moving or interacting with people. You can actually watch your mind, your thoughts arrive, your emotions, your body and your sensations more carefully.

[16:10]

When you do that, what a world of activity. Life is so big, so complicated and painful. And we begin to notice how much pain is self-inflicted. Of course, the other advantage of studying yourself while you're sitting zazen is sitting in this noble, upright posture and feeling your body and your breath Eventually, the thinking mind recedes into the background and the feeling of just being alive comes forward. What a relief just to sit and be alive. So I would recommend, if you're going to begin the process, the study of Zen, sitting zazen. And this, of course, this was Suzuki Roshi's number one practice he brought to America. And it's been the practice for 2,500 years in Buddhism.

[17:12]

So a good way to practice studying yourself. Might just comment a little bit about the narrative that's going on in our mind when we're sitting zazen. It's quite often we'll notice that we're, you know, criticizing ourselves, for instance, or we're angry at someone else because they've mistreated us. And we build a whole story around it. And pretty soon we are either ashamed of ourselves or angry at someone. And then all of a sudden we notice that our... body slumps a little bit, and we're having this bad feeling, and we've lost the sort of buoyancy we had when we first sat down.

[18:16]

And this requires a certain amount of patience or tolerance, you know, the beautiful value of the third paramita, endurance, just to be able to hold ourselves up in the midst of our confusion and anger and It ennobles us to sit with all of that. And sometimes, of course, we'll notice that we actually need to apologize to somebody because that's what's come up in our zazen, and that reminds us to live our daily life with more excellent or more appropriate conduct, and we can go apologize to people. This effort to work with our craziness is good, but it also can become too self-involved. We need to start appreciating our stupidity with some humor.

[19:21]

I remember when I first went to Tashara and I met Suzuki Roshi in his first talk, he was giving a long talk about how Dogen had gone to China. He was trying to explain... In our dedication, we dedicate the merit to Dogen and other people. And he was telling a little bit about Dogen. During those times, the dedication was done in Japanese. So we just chanted it. We didn't really know what it meant. Listened to it. We didn't know what it meant. So he was explaining it to us. And I was sort of like, gosh, I, you know, I've been studying Nietzsche. I came all the way to, wandered into the Zen temple and I'm listening to little, you know, seem like a Christian storytelling, you know. I was looking for depth. I was looking for meaning. And this is just a little story about somebody traveling to China. And he was laughing and just having the greatest time. And I just, you know, and I was trying to be serious. And I was kind of actually a little bit down and depressed.

[20:26]

And I remember years later when I was actually practicing at Tassara. I had been a little bit depressed, and I remember his laughing and his joy and his lightness. And it all came back to me, you know, yeah. It wasn't the story about Dogen traveling to China, although actually when I reread the lecture was actually very interesting. It was that joy in his life, that lightness. So we do have to remember that. We may be studying ourselves and noticing, boy, I am really... a mess, and I've got a lot of work to do, and I've got to improve the way I treat people, and I've got to take better care of myself. That is all true, but at the same time, maybe we should just, you know, laugh at ourselves a little bit, maybe drop our self-concern and help someone across the street. Maybe that's a good way to approach this. You know, another idea of studying yourself, the translation of study and from the Japanese characters is to become intimate with.

[21:35]

And the Chinese characters have two components. One meaning is wings of a bird and the other being self. So to study self means to study the way a baby bird studies his parents to fly. And I was thinking about that. So I actually so wonderfully in that Jumped on the Internet and watched a video of seabirds jumping off the cliff when they first learned to fly. The cliff is 300 meters, you know, like 300 meters above the ocean. And the baby seabird is born and he lives right on that little ledge for 20 days. And then the time comes when he has to fly. He has to jump off that cliff and he's got to make it all the way to the ocean. landing too short on the beach, got to make it all the way to the ocean, 300 meters below. It's amazing to watch. He just has been, of course, there's no practice flying.

[22:39]

He's just watching his parents fly around and then he flies. So maybe that's kind of some way of studying. We have to dive into life. We have to plunge into our own life. There's a famous case from the gateless barrier about jumping off a hundred foot pole. It says, you who sit on top of a hundred foot pole, although you've entered the way, it is not genuine. Take a step from the top of the pole and worlds of the 10 directions are your total body. Of course, that's a story about someone who had some insight and thought he'd... He knew everything there was to know about Zen and he was encouraged. No, you've just begun, you know. Take a risk. Step into your life. Fully step into your life. And the world of the 10 directions will become your total body. I like that idea about we learn about ourselves by actually entering our lives as deeply and

[23:52]

completely as we can so i've kind of presented this as a kind of dramatic thing which sometimes it is but it also is as another famous zen teacher is you settle yourself onto yourself as you're sitting zazen you just slowly settle into who you are to find out what it is that you're feeling And I'm also reminded of Suzuki Hiroshi. This studying ourselves is tricky business because he says, if you try to understand who you are, it is an endless task and you will never see yourself. It is very difficult to try to think about yourself. To reach a conclusion is almost impossible. And if you continue trying, you become crazy and you won't know what to do with yourself. That's true. Oh, I'm going to really figure out who I am and I'll become crazy and I won't know what to do with himself. He quoted Dengshan, the founder of Chinese Soto Zen.

[24:57]

Don't try to see yourself objectively. Don't seek for information about yourself. That is information. The real you is not that kind of thing. And then Suzuki Rishi told this story. He says, when you see someone practicing sincerely. you see yourself. If you're impressed by someone's practice, you may say, oh, she is doing very well. That she is neither she nor you. When you're struck by someone's practice, you see yourself. That is the real you. That you is the pure experience of practice. When you're struck by someone else's practice, that you is the pure experience. That is you that is created out of connection. That connection is what practice is.

[25:59]

That connection is what you are. To experience life without the subject operation separation. It's not I seeing you out there, but me feeling the connection. Another way to put it in. And in the direct experience, she says there is no subjectivity or objectivity. So to study ourselves is to study everything. Well, I better get to the next sentence. To study the self is to forget the self. Forget the self is to see your own craziness and not take it so personally. Be with your experience in a non-prejudicial way. And you may notice how much of your experience is around yourself, your self-concern. Did I do okay?

[27:00]

Will they accept me? Why did they disrespect me, etc.? How much of your view of the world is shaped by your self-concern and your conditioning and your attitude? At some way, we might say... Self-concern is the organizing principle of our thoughts and feelings. You'll certainly notice this when you're sitting zazen, how much of your thinking is centered on yourself. The source of our suffering is this clinging to ourselves, this attachment to our own self. So to forget yourself is a matter of dropping this self-concern, which, of course, is impossible. It's built into our very structure. But we can soften it a little bit. We can notice how often we've structured our relationship to the world in terms of me and the outside world.

[28:05]

And we can put it down for a little bit. What a relief to just put it down for a while. Zazen is one of those places where we can do this. When you let yourself go, which is the next sentence, to forget yourself is to be actualized by myriad things. When you're no longer the center of your life, then... the whole world, the myriad things, work through you. You begin to connect with them. You can appreciate the world, even the tragic parts, no longer dividing it into the things that are good for me and the things that are bad for me. This...

[29:12]

openness to the world this willingness to meet yourself all the aspects of yourself this willingness to meet other people this openness to life itself this is the real practice of zen this is actually the definition of generosity the definition of love and this is ultimately the practice of buddhism and zen the next sentence when actualized by myriad things your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away uh There's famous stories about Dogen being enlightened when his teacher walked by and hit somebody on the shoulder and said, drop your body and mind.

[30:22]

But what dropping body and mind really means is our self-description, you know, our body and our mind. We wear clothing and the clothing says something about us. We have titles, what our role and our job is. what our role in our life is. We're a husband, we're a daughter, a son, a grandfather, a grandmother, a boss, a student, all these different things, all these descriptions of who we are. And it's kind of impressive, actually, when you observe it, how much of our life depends on this story that defines us. our self-image. I've had many times in my life when I've changed careers and I realized, wow, when I gave that career up and started a new one, so much of who I was was defined by that previous career and I had a hard time adjusting to the fact that I was no longer that.

[31:28]

So this dropping body and mind kind of from a really simple way is just to start to recognize how much of our life is defined by these things our social status our education our occupation and let go of them and let go of viewing others in this way too and start to just see ourselves for um maybe something more fundamental you know we have views of ourselves oh i'm capable i'm incapable i'm honest i'm dishonest all these views are wonderful and they create a self-image but As someone says, if we open the hand of thought and let these concepts drop off, and the body and mind are released from these karmic bindings that were really built up from our early childhood, it's a chance of moving from building a big ego structure, which of course we need to function in the world, to letting go of a big ego structure and seeing something about what our life is.

[32:37]

can be when we're more open, more vulnerable, and more able to connect to other people. And this, of course, the best place to practice this, which is both safe and solid, is when we said zazen. It's a place where we can no longer have to be the person we have to be maybe in the outside world. We can just be... a human being sitting there. And the separation between self and others falls away. And we can experience the total reality of our connection to everything. I just said something like, when we let go of thought, we settle our whole being into interpenetrating reality.

[33:48]

I want to be careful about that. Sounds like I've described something in Zazen where we are not thinking anymore. And sometimes there is no thinking, or certainly many times when there's more space between our thoughts. But it's not that thinking doesn't go on. is that you don't stick to your thinking. You don't follow it up with the whole storyline. The thinking becomes just a kind of background sound, like birds singing and cars driving by on the street, things like that. People talking in the background. We can let thinking no longer control our life. We can... Start to pay attention to our breathing in our body and become present with just the fact that we're alive. Now, I want to say just a little something about no trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly.

[35:00]

Shohaka Okamura's translation of the line, no trace of realization remains and no trace continues endlessly is. There is a trace of realization that cannot be grasped. I like that. Sometimes we have a moment of present awareness. We just wake up to being alive, being connected to everything. We want to hold on to it. We want to grasp it. But what we're left with as soon as we grasp it... It might be a poem we wrote about it or something like that, but it's not that moment anymore. That moment is gone. So Kiroshi would say, when you do something, you should burn yourself completely like a good bonfire, leaving no trace. If you attach to the idea of what you've done, you're involved in selfish ideas. You will leave a trace or a shadow in your mind that will limit your actual experience.

[36:02]

they talk about this trace of realization of like the trace of birds flying or fish swimming. You know, I actually, I've been meaning to research this, but I haven't done it. Apparently birds, when they fly along, can somehow tell that other birds have flown along before them. Maybe there's something left in the air and fish can do the same thing as they're swimming along. So maybe as we're following our path, our awakened path, we have, some sense of the direction we're going in some sense left over from some realization some uh awakening to the path that leads us along there's a uh famous case where Dengshan presented offerings at the altar.

[37:11]

And as he was presenting these offerings at the altar, he told the story about his teacher, Yunnan. And the monk came forward and said, when Yunnan and Myungnan was famous for saying just this is it, that was his parting comment to Dengshan when Dengshan asked him, you know, what's the... What's your teaching and how should I refer to it in the future? And Yang Yang said, just this is it. So the monk came forward and asked Yang Yang, when Yang Yang said, just this is it, what did he mean? So Dengshan said, at that time, I nearly misunderstood my late teacher's meaning. The monk said, did Yang Yang himself know it is it or not? Dengshan said, if he didn't know it is, If he didn't know it is, how could he be able to say this? How could he say just this is it if he didn't know it? But if he did know it, if he did know it, I am so sorry.

[38:16]

I have to reread this again. The monk said, did Yunnan himself know it is or not? Yunnan said, if he didn't know it is, how could he be able to say this? If he didn't know it is, how could he be able to say this? So if he didn't know it, how could he be able to say it? And if he did know it, how could he be willing to say this? So this is a very long and complex way of saying, how can you talk about just this is it? How can you actually talk about what your life is at this moment? Who you are at this moment? you've experienced that may or may not be deeply moving. And the fact is the most important things about life cannot be known or understood in the ordinary way. And trying to hold on to some idea or experience of it is not helpful unless it encourages us to practice.

[39:22]

That's what they mean by no trace of realization can be grasped. Of course, we have experiences that encourage our practice, but holding on to them, trying to recreate them, trying to understand them is not going to benefit your practice. So I'm going to finish with this. quote from Suzuki Rishi, how to apply Zen in everyday life is not difficult. If we live in each moment, that is Zen. Whether you're sitting or working, living in each moment is Zen. Zen is your everyday life. So I comment, look and see what's going on in this moment of your living.

[40:27]

Each moment is gone and in a flash. It is a death. Whatever our problem, a difficult relationship, a grieving heart, an aging body and mind, some mysterious longing, this is your life. This is our life. And we get lost in life's problems. We don't notice how marvelous it is to be alive because we are so busy. We are so consumed by our problems. We don't know how wonderful it is to be alive and to share our life with other people. And how great it is that we are all in it together. We forget. We forget to be grateful to live a human life. We forget how brief life is.

[41:32]

It's natural. It's part of being human to forget. And if we practice, and if we practice more, it will be more difficult to forget and we'll remember our human life. 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. 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.

[42:20]

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