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. So I'm out of the topic of this night's talk. And before I even get to the topic of this night's talk, let me tell you about my journey here. So a while ago, my employer was bought by Google, and so now on the way home, I ride the Google bus. And I want to say that I volunteered to be stoned on the sidewalk outside at the end of the tunnel. If you have any stones to throw, I'll be just waiting in that room.

[01:05]

But so, you know, I leave my place of employment in Palpatine. I stand out in the street. Actually, I sat at the tables in front of the office and talked with a marvelous person. Had a lovely conversation. And then I got on the bus and then we crawled all the way to San Francisco. And the combination of anticipation and concern and delight and distress in which I've been soaking for the last hour and a half or something like that. It's just really kind of remarkable. Which brings me to the

[02:05]

So you would get pumped. So Master Mahler was sick. And the director went to him and said, So, how are you feeling? And he goes, Sun-faced Buddha, Moon-faced Buddha. And that's all there is to the kawan. The thing that's incredibly great about the classical Chinese kawan literature is that it's based on this ancient, vast literary tradition that's steeped in

[03:08]

poetry and metaphor. It turns out, in some ways surprisingly, there's a whole series of papers in the literature of mathematical physics that are that are focused on the notion of the unreasonable efficacy of mathematics and physics. And ask the question, why is it so easy and useful, not easy, but useful to describe the physical world in mathematical terms, right? Well, similarly, And no one's really answered the question as far as I know. But similarly, you could ask the question, why is it that metaphorical language is so marvelous at expressing the inexpressible?

[04:16]

Getting to the heart of this matter. If I could have a guess, it's something like this. So the word metaphor means something really interesting. It essentially means a delivery vehicle. In fact, if you go to Greece, there's a whole class of delivery vehicles that, as I understand it, are called metaphors, like these little tiny trucks that you use to move stuff around. The word metaphor literally means like transport, something that carries something from here to there. In the case of poetic metaphor, what it's carrying is it's carrying some setup that happens in this body and in this mind, and it's carrying it over to your body and your mind, or somebody else's body and somebody else's mind, in a way that's

[05:28]

That somehow, because of the way we're built, manages to get over the threshold and make something happen before you even realize it. How did we even figure that out? But that's how it worked. So the metaphor, sudden phase 2. Every one of us has sent Facebook. We have a life that lasts from the beginning of time to the end of time and covers the whole universe. We are a being that can meet the world in a way that's not completely unmediated.

[06:31]

we're physical beings, but that's remarkably free and untrimmed. That's like walking across the red sky at sunset. And not only that, but you don't have to take some Buddhist word for it, right? The literature of the world is full of stories about being sun-faced Buddha. There's a marvelous thing in the New York Times about two weeks ago where Barbara Ehrenreich, who everybody identifies as kind of a rationalist, atheist, hard-nosed, data-driven, steadier of the world or something like that fesses up that she's had mystical experiences since she was a teenager, right?

[07:43]

And that she has this marvelous story about she was on a kind of a poorly planned, sleep-deprived ski trip in her teens and she was in Lone Pine, California. She steps out of some restaurant and and looks at Mount Whitney, and she's just overcome. It's like the world is full of fire. Everything is full of this light that comes out of, comes out of nowhere and goes to nowhere. Comes out of everything and goes to everything. And her body is well. And she was like, wow, okay. never tell anybody about this ever. And she never told anybody about it until, you know, she wrote a book about it. So now it's out in the open and she gets to write articles in the New York Times about it.

[08:50]

Or this famous architect, Chris Alexander, who wrote a bunch of really marvelous books about architecture, also wrote a book about beauty, right? where he tries to get at the things that make something beautiful. And he says, here's how everyone experiences it. When you look at an object that's built in this way that makes it beautiful, you see light. You see it as it brings its own light with it. It causes light to happen. Yeah, that's true. Look at Rothko or Rembrandt. And it can happen in your body, too. So to sit, to let the...

[09:55]

the body breathe and take the posture, the meditation posture completely, is to find yourself in the state where every cell of the body is like a secret star. It shines with its own light. Every part of the body is full of this boundless energy that can sit forever. Dogen says, even the tiles and pebbles and other commentators say even, you know, rat turds and the whiskers of ants shine with this light. And we're in the middle. We are, we participate in it moment by moment, whether we realize it or not. When we sit down and

[11:03]

Dovan says when we make the Buddha mudra even for one instant that it spreads out and covers the whole universe when you read Dovan saying things like that it can be useful to remind yourself that he meant that it was literally treated not metaphorically or you know not some sort of analogy or something like that that's how we are we are it's on Facebook where we set every single line. I think as a culture, maybe as humans, we kind of like it that way, right? It's great, you get out, you walk out of a cheap breakfast joint and you have an experience of having a full body, full mind encounter with this other mode of being.

[12:17]

What could possibly be wrong with that? And why would we not want more of that? Why would we not want that to keep on going forever? one of the things that brings up way-seeking mind. When the beginning of the Mumon Khan says, when you get here, when you break through the barrier, it's like you're walking with Joshi. It's like you see with the eyes of... all the Buddhism ancestors. And he says, who wouldn't want to be like that? Yeah, well, nobody, of course. Why not? But there's kind of a problem.

[13:21]

The problem is ideas like Sun Fu's Buddha, The problem is that the way we're built, the way we live in the world, the way we are designed to be, and the way that we have to be in order to be alive and be human, makes it impossible. the sun-faced Buddha all the time. We have to live in the world of causes and conditions. We have to be this self that we've constructed for ourselves over the course of a lifetime. We have to make accommodations with its peculiar form of goal-seeking and agenda.

[14:39]

And there's a sense in which we don't like that. At least as I teach, it's always an instruction a fair amount, right? And people come in and ask, what do I do? How do I do it? I want to quiet the mind. I want to have a mind that's more like my idea of how it should be. That's why I started sitting too, right? I looked at the way my mind worked and I thought, God, what a train wreck, right? So full of desire for anything other than what's happening right now and right here.

[15:57]

Even though I know from what was starting to feel like a long lifetime of experience, no. Nothing compared to what it feels like now, but it just turned 60 two weeks ago. So busy wrangling with itself over that stuff that I couldn't sit down for a minute. Everything was instantly unsatisfactory the minute it happened. Even the stuff that was inherently marvelous and satisfactory. Even the stuff that went beyond the everyday, moment after moment, astonishing miracle of just living, even the stuff that went beyond that was still unsatisfactory and fraught.

[17:00]

And I thought, This is a stupid way to think. I want to think in some other way that's better. And so I'm going to fix it by becoming a Zen student. So that's where we meet in Facebook. If you want to meet moon-faced Buddha, do something impossible. Or try to do something impossible. Try like Siddhi Zazna, for example. There's an impossible thing. Try that. Try quieting the mind. Quieting the mind, it's like saying,

[18:03]

I want to quiet the whole world. There's no inherent separation beyond these little tiny insignificant categories that we draw around ourselves as a result of our need to be an actor in the world that knows where it is. And a speaker in the world that knows what it's saying, knows who it's talking to. There's no inherent boundary between the mind and the world. How can you quiet the mind? The world comes in like everything from a gentle breeze to a raging hurricane, and it lights up the contents of the body and the mind, and they go up like a glass of fire. All of them. How can we quiet that by thinking that we're going to do it?

[19:10]

We can't. It's impossible. How can we take that train and snatch it off the tracks and wrestle it to the ground? It's not going to work. It's a try. or try this, try going to be yoga class and for each posture coming up against the natural limits of the body and instead of acting on ideas I should be able to do this. I should... I remember once I was doing a yoga class, and I was pretty warmed up because it was in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[20:16]

It was a really hot evening, and I was all sweaty. And we were doing these sort of shoulder stand things, and I thought, I am. I'm going to put my legs in full host. And so having... Having conceived that idea, I was like, yeah, all right. And I went, and I put my legs in. It was like butter. And then about 10 seconds later, there was this audible pop. I could even hear it echo off the back wall. And my knee just tugging like that. It took ages to fix itself. rather than being that way of it, which in our kind of obsession with being, some of us do way too much, just to instead to meet the natural limitations in the body in this way that's kind of compassionate,

[21:31]

exploratory and just to say, this is where I am right now. This is Moonface Buddha. This is the Buddha that's... I was talking about this the other day with a friend and she said humble and meet the conditioned ephemeral nature of moment to moment existence completely and wholeheartedly without adding anything in like I put my legs in My favorite instance of this in my life is take on an engineering problem where the thing you're making is so complicated that you can't possibly hold it in your

[22:56]

in your head, and then try and do it by yourself. Such a, you know, day-to-day, moment-to-moment encounter with your own kind of incapacity, and the excuses I make for my incapacity, my... all the... tricks I used to escape it, to deny it. And also something about the sense of kind of spacious comfort that arises when you say to yourself, This is how things are.

[23:58]

It doesn't have to be one way or another. It can be just this way. And also the ephemeral and transient nature of each of those states, right? So to be engaged in a long-term enterprise like that is to notice that sometimes it goes well, sometimes it goes badly. Sometimes ideas flow like water. Sometimes you couldn't have an idea of your life. Some people interpret this koan as meaning Master Ma is saying, not so great.

[25:02]

Sometimes it's okay, sometimes not okay. That's not what it's about. It's more like this is the essential nature of human practice. It's Sun-Faced Buddha living in the same body and mind as Moon-Faced Buddha and learning how to learning how to be together, learning how to live skillfully and comfortably with that condition, with the human condition. And in the service of that, neither sun-faced Buddha nor moon-faced Buddha is the one. They're both the Buddha. And each one of us is equally sun-faced Buddha and white-faced Buddha.

[26:12]

Right what we say. So here's a question. Before we go on, does anybody have any questions? Go ahead. So when I... Will you repeat the question? Sure. Yeah, of course. So the question was... Is moon-faced Buddha the embodiment of feeling bad? Is moon-faced Buddha reflecting the light and the heat, but not the heat, and so on?

[27:21]

Yeah, it's an interesting question as a metaphor. I think if you really dig into it, it's not the part about feeling bad. Moon-faced Buddha is... Think about the moon as a metaphorical object. Back in the day, nobody knew that the moon was reflecting the light of the sun. Back in the day, what the moon was was this beautiful, powerful object that vaulted into the sky different showing a different face every night. Amazing. And unlike the sun, it shines forth and brings light to everything. The moon kind of, you know, even when it's full, it gives a kind of shy, mysterious light.

[28:29]

And when it's dark, it doesn't give any light at all. It's the It's the body that's about the ephemeral nature of life and of this moment and the next moment. It's the body that casts a light that is subtle and beautiful and... So something like that. If the sun represents the eternal, the moon represents the ephemeral, and if you read the commentary on the koan, someone points out that there was this notion that the sun-faced Buddha and the moon-faced Buddha, where the sun-faced Buddha lasted forever and the moon-faced Buddha, and so on.

[29:39]

It's about It's something about that, about the condition, the ephemeral, and the light of the moon is almost always seen as intimate, and it's kind of the light of romance and so on. So it's something like that, right? Yeah. It's, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. and Chinese culture where there's the end and the end. Yeah, I think that's right. I think when Master Ma says sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha, that definitely arises out of those ideas from Taoism as much as it arises out of any ideas from Taoism.

[30:48]

So how to practice with that? How to live with sun-faced Buddha and learn-faced Buddha? I mean, the problem is that it's easy to It's easy to get attached. That's how we are. That's what essentially what Suzuki Roshi says at the beginning of Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. The problem is not so much practice itself or any particular aspect of practice. It's more like how our attachments to ideas that, you know, Sun-faced Buddha, right?

[31:50]

Or to the experience like sitting and every cell of the body is a secret star. If that happens, why would you want reality to ever be any different from that, right? You wouldn't. And so it sets up this structure It sets up the desire, even in the heart of practice, and even in the heart of rather deep practice, to have things be other than they actually are right now. And all of the literature and Zen talks and... and so on in the world in some ways they make things easier and in some ways they just feed that they just feed this they bring up the they bring into your mind that the commentary on sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha the first line of it is something like one word, one phrase it's also you can find a point of entry but

[33:18]

Even this is like gouging a wound in living flesh. It can become a nest or a den. To bring into the mind the notion I want to quiet my mind is to gouge a wound in healthy flesh. It's to make a space that can become a den for wild foxes. That can become a place to settle down and stop paying attention to what's going on here and now. So that's the difficulty.

[34:23]

And that's where that's where the moon-faced Buddha really shines. To meet that, even that, are the thing that makes delusions inexhaustible right that's when the bodhisattva vow says delusions are inexhaustible it's this sort of thing you're talking about right even at um you know three in the afternoon on the fifth day of the best sishin of your life um delusions are not only um plausible but Arising right now All of the world So when When faced with Ending Inexhaustible delusion That's the Shining moment for Moonface

[35:48]

Just as though you were doing yoga and trying to avoid putting your knees into full lotus. To meet even that desire arising out of way-seeking mind or out of deep experience with practice or out of a desire to be useful and service in the world. Any of those things can become a mess. To meet them in this way that acknowledges our limited capacity. We're so incapable of understanding even the complications that happen in this little space right here that's got just a bunch of empty spaces and air molecules in it.

[37:01]

We can't grasp even that. And the question of how can I quieten the mind or how can I be of service and help people is so beyond our comprehension and ability to control that the notion that we control it is just this dream that we have, that we live in the midst of the dream of control. So to meet that dream of control, our tendency to make a nest out of almost anything that comes into the mind in a way that's compassionate and comprehensive and self-comforting, right, is the activity of Moonface. To meet it over and over again and to meet whatever comes up as a result.

[38:09]

to let it speak its own piece, right? To let it speak with its own voice and to really listen to that. To give it space so that we can have space to turn around and so that the world doesn't look like just being dragged around by our incentive agenda-seeking, nest-building, goal-executing, and so on, but something else, something more dynamic, more skillful, comfortable, and alive. In the end, what it makes is it makes a kind of... It makes every encounter a lot to live that way.

[39:26]

Even the ones where we don't get to see Mount Whitney on fire. Even the ones that are kind of icky and difficult, like sitting on the Google bus wondering whether I'm going to be 45 minutes late. for a talk at San Francisco. Before we call, does anyone have any more questions? I just felt like I should say that if I, well, maybe I am an Adena Fox, if I had an intensive version, when you said that I might count the seventh.

[40:27]

And I feel like there's all this jabbering around, and being with that was very nice. But not to go down that path or to entertain those so much, but I'm curious about, What then is the role of discipline? What then is the role of concentration? What then is settling the mind? Yeah, that's a great question. You know all these things, because they're talked about and I care about. Yeah, totally. And I didn't say that the mind couldn't be settled. I said, I can't settle down my mind by grasping after a settled mind. But it's a really, really good point. So what's the role of discipline? There's nothing harder than to bring the body and mind right to this point of limitation and stay there in spite of the difficulty.

[41:34]

That's very hard and requires tremendous result and discipline. And it's something that you don't train yourself to do overnight. It's something that it takes, it's the work of a lifetime to stay close like that, to stay close to what's actually happening right now and right now. And to take it all in in a way that neither throws anything away or has anything extraneous in, it's the work of a lifetime. And it's a lot of work. So that's what I said. Absolutely. Does the mind settle down? Yes, the mind settles down. Does the body bring us to a place where sitting is like walking across the red-skyed sunset? Absolutely. Yes, completely.

[42:34]

And it's marvelous. It's just that the things that we... that we bring to it from the way we're built as humans are the things that both stand in the way and that we have to meet and become skilled with in order for that to happen on its own, because that's how it happens. But thank you for your question. It's a great question. Specific practice that can target doing that piece of post breath, beginning with that? Yeah, so the, yeah, I would say specific practice. On the out breath, breathe, let go. On the end, breathe.

[43:44]

Trust everything. Trust everything. Just do that. Ten thousand. More. Plus. Yeah. We'll wish you coming. Thank you so much for coming. It was real. 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 sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[44:32]

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