This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Since I always forget to do this, invariably, I feel compelled now that I'm thinking of it to... remind myself and you that my name is Zachary, so pleased to meet you. Yeah, absolutely. I think the Buddhist robe hardware and the microphone cable hardware are not super compatible. Can you hear me okay? Excellent. Excellent. So this is the Zen school.

[01:02]

That's what this temple is a part of. It's a school that has a millennial history. And it has a couple of distinguishing characteristics, and probably some of you are familiar with them, but for those who aren't, or just in order to throw my own spin on them, here's what I'd say. The first one obviously is seated meditation or Zazen. It's the Zen school for a reason. It's the seated meditation school. Seated concentration and absorption. Seated study, intimate study of the arising of the self and the world. So that's part one. And part two is something like this. Transmission of the Dharma outside of the scriptures and scriptural reference.

[02:11]

And I'm not really a historian, but my take is that when Buddhism was introduced to China from... India and elsewhere in South Asia. It came in the form of texts, and there was this marvelous effort to bring the great Buddhist texts over. The traditional stories, they came over in baskets on the backs of donkeys, or maybe on boats. Maybe they put the donkey on the boat. But anyway, there was a tremendous effort and... continuously refined effort to provide good translations, and many of the translations that they provided were excellent of the ancient Buddhist texts, the Mahayana texts, and the earlier sort of original Buddhist texts as well.

[03:15]

And then, not surprisingly, somebody decided that maybe that wasn't the way, right? And so there was this notion that where the real stuff happens is not in the body of a text. It's in relationship, right? So it's either in the relationships between people or the relationships between people and things or maybe in this case in the relationship between people the person in the text, right? There's some lively thing that happens in relationship that isn't captured by, isn't directly captured by, you know, a thousand page document that relates the life and history of the Buddha, right? Those documents are not, you know... unhelpful, useless, or problematic.

[04:20]

They're great, right? But the school started to focus on, again, the teaching and bringing up of the truth in a way that didn't depend on scriptural reference. Dogen, the founder of this school in Japan, said something like, seize practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words, and following after speech. That's what he said. And then he said, learn to take the backward step and turn your light inward. That's what he said. So... Probably worth asking, right? Okay, so here we have a school, you know, starting in the Tang Dynasty, thousands of monks went to Zen monasteries and studied the practice diligently, some more diligently, some less diligently, we can assume, but in any case, diligently on average, and taught each other to wake up.

[05:42]

to wake up in the middle of their lives and to live in a way that was, live with our condition in a way that's comfortable, skillful, and alive, right? And they, you know, and they did it in the light, in the context of this injunction. So it's not about the scriptures. The words aren't in the meaning, right? Sorry, good job. The meaning isn't in the words, right? And so it's a totally reasonable question. What does that look like? How does that even work, right? So does everyone just get together and sit on their butts staring at a wall all the live long day and then go to bed and wake up in the morning? Yeah, maybe, right? But somewhere in the middle there, there probably ought to be some teaching. Because here's what happens when you do that, right? Let's say... hypothetically, any one of us decided, as some of us in some ways already have, to charge off to a remote mountain monastery and spend the next five years sitting, staring at a wall, eating some rice, taking a bath every once in a while, and going to sleep.

[07:02]

It's a great life. But the question... arises. How does the teaching take place? How do you, in particular, how do you, typically when you sit, you get ideas about how it all works. And some of those ideas are okay, and some of them are maybe not so okay. And how do you reflect those ideas? How do you get feedback? How does the teaching either between peers or between teachers and students or students and teachers actually happen? And the answer to that is that the Zen School has come up with is this sort of voluminous literature that's about interactions mostly between teachers and students, not all, but mostly. And they're called koans. And I think of all the things that are famous about Buddhism in the West, koans are one of the most famous.

[08:03]

And people have heard the one-hand clapping thing, except wait, that was two. And so on. But certainly, let's say you were to pick up a collection of koans, the books are usually... have a tremendous thud factor, right? Because they're this collection of little stories, and then with the stories come poems, and then with the poems come commentary, and people write little introductory sections, and by the time you're done, a hundred little stories takes up hundreds, maybe thousands of pages, right? In any case, lots of hundreds. And it's not at all clear what... these things are about when you first look at one of these texts. They're kind of hard to get a handle on. So I'm going to talk about one today, and I thought we might want to try something out just as an experiment.

[09:05]

So I'm going to recite this little story. It's quite short, and I'll probably say it a couple times. And then I'll tell you what to do afterwards. But what I'd like you to do while I'm reciting it is just settle down your body and bring your entire body and mind here, and then just watch what happens. Watch what comes up in your mind. See what the flavor of it is, what the emotional texture of it is. Does it feel? And you could feel... baffled and angry. There's one example of what I could feel. But in any case, something will happen, right? So just do that. And then we'll talk about more later. Okay, so try this. Everyone breathe all the way out. Try and bring some attention to your

[10:15]

your hara, or what they call in martial arts, your dantian, this kind of place down underneath your navel in the middle of your body. That's kind of the bottom of your diaphragm. Breathe all the way out into there. Pause. And then let the breath come in just totally of its own accord without forcing it, without pulling it. Just let it come in. Do that a couple more times. Yun Quan was sitting in his study with his attendant, and he turns to his attendant and says, hey, give me that rhinoceros horn fan. He's probably hot, like me. And his attendant says, I'm sorry, the rhinoceros horn fan is broken.

[11:23]

And Yan Kuan says, okay, then bring me the rhinoceros. I'll say it again. So Yan Kuan said, bring me my rhinoceros horn fan. And his attendant said, but the fan is broken. And Yan Kuan says, okay, then bring me back the rhinoceros. Got that? So, here's what I'd like to do. Reach back into the memory of the experience of listening to those two koans and try and get a flavor of what happened and then come up with a word or very short phrase that sums it up, right? So, you know, baffled, goofy.

[12:28]

boring it's you know anything okay just just come up with come up with your single word and when i give the signal i want everyone to to just speak it out don't yell it just say it don't wait don't bother to make sure that you're not talking at the same time as everybody else and if it takes you a little while longer to come up with one then fine say it afterwards right and we'll wait a bit and then when everyone's done we'll uh kind of move on Go. Beautiful. Anyone else? Even more beautiful. From the standpoint of physics, we're kind of all plummeting through space, right? Yeah. Falling is just moving unobstructed in the absence of any countervailing factors through the curvature of space-time.

[13:42]

It looks pretty obvious when you see something falling off a building or something like that, but in fact, that's our natural state. We're all doing this all the time. We're falling through space, just moving, taking the path of least resistance. All of our quanta are taking the path of least resistance through space-time. Amazing. And at the same time, we're on fire. Not in a kind of chemical sense, although this is a broader sense of the same thing, but in this kind of thermodynamic sense. So... We're born, or we're conceived, I guess, and some order is established, and that order elaborates over time, and we become these kind of large-ish, multi-limbed, kind of complicated beings, and quite orderly in a lot of ways, and in some ways, not so orderly.

[14:43]

And our bodies, moment by moment, day by day, are... or essentially fighting a rearguard action against disorder until the day we fall into the grave. And then that doesn't mean the disorder stops happening. It just means we've stopped fighting it, right? Sorry. Okay. So we're falling through space and we're burning. there's a famous expression in Zen, grasping after life, I'm adding the afterlife, grasping and turning away are both wrong because it is a massive fire, right? Yeah. The world is a massive fire, right? We're all plummeting through space and, you know,

[15:46]

disorder is coming up and sometimes we create order and then it just dissolves, right? The rhinoceros was murdered and its horn taken away and then somebody went and they carved this beautiful artifact out of it and then it wore out. And Yen Kwan can't use it anymore. Since we're talking about fire, I want to say something about the Soberanis fire, right? So here we are. It's how it is, right? There are people here in this room whose lives have been disrupted and turned upside down by this... vast, disordering event that was started by an act of, as I understand it, an act of simple carelessness and foolishness.

[16:57]

So difficult. And in addition to the people here whose lives have been turned upside down, there have been... there are countless others in the area whose lives have been turned upside down in ways that range from merely inconvenient to deadly, right? This is the arising of disorder and the natural functioning of the world, right? When you... There's this great thing about the incense we use in the temple here. It's a highly ordered collection of little pieces of matter that when you burn them, they make a particular scent and they're calibrated and designed to make that scent constantly and in a constant manner for a very specifically prescribed portion of time.

[18:06]

And at the end, of the, say, half hour or something like that, they burn down into a little tub of ash that the incense is sitting in, and they make this little tiny alarm. It's this little tiny whiff of the incense going out, and it kind of smells like longing. It's really, it's the final collapse into disorder of this orderly object. And people use that scent as a very subtle alarm clock. Okay, time's up. Pretty great. So what can or what do we do about this? This kind of fundamental activity of the universe of which we are an inextricable and unmistakable part of. Well, from a simple point of view, there's nothing we can do about it, right?

[19:13]

Nothing. It's just the reality of the world and of living in the world, right? From a more conventional perspective, what we actually do about it is we, so humans are tremendously gifted strategists. We're probably, we don't know this, but we're probably the best strategists on the planet, right? We're really good at it. We can get together, make a strategy, get a bunch of people together to help with it and produce marvelous things or horrible things. We're pretty good strategists and because we're beings who attach symbols and names to things, we think we understand them, right? And so between those, our capacity to symbolicate the universe and pretend that we understand it, and our capacity to make pretty decent strategies and plans, we take those two things and we actually misapply them to the task of living in the universe.

[20:23]

It's not bad to be good at being a strategist, and it's clearly not bad to be good at at naming and symbolication. Those are all great, but they have their place, they have a number of areas, countless areas where they're useful, but they're not as useful as in dealing with this problem that we all have that we're tumbling through space, burning up. And so we make up strategies. There's this movie called Blade Runner that was made in the early 80s, which is absolutely the best movie, or perhaps the best document about this whole thing ever made. It's really, really good. And it's based on a short science fiction novel or short story that's equally good. And the two things that come to the fore in this movie, one,

[21:24]

everything is falling apart. In the book, he references, the author, I think it's Philip K. Dick, references directly this Japanese notion of gomi, which is just the stuff that collects in corners, right? It's like the detritus, discarded detritus of life, right? if you don't keep after it, it will all drown in it, right? And so the interesting thing about it, he shows the director, Ridley Scott, I think, shows an image of L.A. that's in the process of drowning in its own gomi. It's quite, you know, kind of both shocking and kind of beautiful, right? And in the midst of it, there are these artificial humans who are, the slogan of the company that makes them is that they're more human than humans. and they're tremendously gifted, and they feel things really deeply, and because they're played by A-list actors, they're really beautiful. And the only problem with them is that in order to keep them from taking over the world, the company gave them a five-year lifespan.

[22:36]

And so in sort of one of the... the kind of pivotal scenes that one of these, the most gifted and talented of these beings, they're called replicants, meets the CEO of the company that designed him, and actually also was the guy who actually figured out how to build things like this. And they have a big argument about why he can't live longer, and he finally just says, I want more life, father. At least that's what it says in the script. In the movie, he decided to say something nastier, which I won't repeat, but... We're all sort of like that. We want more, right? We want more life. We want safety from this dissolution. We want not to know that we're tumbling through space out of control and that disorder is arising all the time in our bodies and minds and all around us, right?

[23:37]

I got sick at the beginning of this year My God, I got cancer. And it was the thing that's amazing about modern technology is you can kind of take a look at your insides and see the inside of your body with this thing, right? It's like, there it is. Disorder has taken root, right? And in some ways, it's irreparable, right? You can... You can bring all the technology, medical technology that you want to bear on it, but something about the internalization of that disorder is irreparable. It never goes away. Amazing. So we don't like it. We want more life. We want less of that sort of thing. We develop strategies whereby...

[24:38]

We're really good at this. We imagine a life in which we would feel free from this bind, and then we go after creating that life in a way that's quite single-minded and often can be quite destructive, although sometimes it's not. So these are the strategies that people have been using to dig themselves out of the bind they're in, as far as we can tell from looking at the literatures of the world, forever. At least since there were mythological texts that were turned into paper texts that we can get our hands on. It's like that. People are... have been struggling with this forever. We struggle with it. We struggle with our mortality, our frailty, our lack of control, our lack of knowing, and so on.

[25:44]

Man, I'm using up a lot of time. Sorry. I haven't even gotten to the good part yet. So what Zen and... particular in Buddhism in general, suggests and requests is a different set of strategies. In fact, it requests a kind of non-strategy, a kind of anti-strategy. And Dogen, the guy I mentioned earlier that brought this school to Japan in the 13th century, said something like this. I'll paraphrase, right? But he says, to study this way, this strategy or non-strategy, is to study the self, to turn in and look at the self. And he means self in a very complicated way.

[26:49]

He doesn't just mean, although he does mean this, he means watch what happens when you're... preoccupations are on display, but you have the opportunity to study them as opposed to flying through life a million miles an hour and not really looking at it at all. So he says, watch that. But he means something deeper than that, too. If you dig in to self and if you turn your light inward, if you take the backward step out of that... that kind of maelstrom or river of activity that we're usually in, if you step back out of it and pay attention, then the boundary between self and the world begins to lose its distinct character. It's not very distinct. In fact, there's no boundary, right?

[27:50]

So the way he says this is he says, to study the self is to forget the self. Just the activity of self-construction that we all engage in all the live long day tends to settle itself down when you do that because we're bringing a kind of counterweight to it that has to deal with bringing a kind of bare and un... uncomplicated awareness to the activity of the self and the world, right? And in the light of that counterweight, the activity of self-construction, the emotionally driven habit-forming thoughts that we engage in, ever since we're old enough to engage in thoughts, I've probably told everyone in this room this story, but It's one of my favorite stories. So my daughter, who is now 27, and I was just FaceTiming with her.

[28:57]

She's in Croatia studying conceptual artists of the mid-20th century, which is pretty great. But when she was two-ish, we were talking on the phone, and she goes, maybe less than two, she says, you know, I just figured out today that I can talk to myself without talking out loud. Right? Right? So there you have it. That's when it happens, right? And after that, you're totally screwed. But yeah, we use this capacity we have to think about the world as a defense, as a bulwark, as an illusory... but not an useful form of knowing and so on. And when that dissolves, some other kind of awareness and activity comes to the fore, right?

[30:02]

And in that context, the human condition becomes less of a, less problematic. It's possible to live with it in a way that feels comfortable and skillful. And it's possible to be in it and feel alive and feel awake. And to bring that aliveness and awakeness to relationships, which is what, again, it's all about. So back to the koan. Yen Kwan says, bring me the rhinoceros. He doesn't mean... He doesn't mean you should go out and get a rhinoceros. I mean, it seems like at least in principle that was possible back then, but that's not what he's talking about. In the context of this exchange, they're exactly talking about the kind of direction of karmic life and about the way in which skillful action and this kind of poetic surprise, right?

[31:12]

I mean, so Yen Kwan was... you know, kind of a natural poet, right? When you say, bring me the rhinoceros, that kind of sounds like surrealist poetry, sort of mid-20th century surrealist poetry. And it has the same effect. It's got this kind of surprise. It breaks you out of your everyday frame of mind, and all of a sudden, there's a rhinoceros in the room, right? Sadly, that doesn't do the original rhinoceros a lot of good, but still, it... produces this kind of awake and alive experience and both parties leave the encounter feeling like the world is full of possibilities, right? That's how it works. A little bit more on that. We explore this activity, this studying the self and forgetting the self in zazen.

[32:22]

And it's tremendously useful to study it in zazen because it has this quality where it's pretty clear what you're supposed to be doing. There's a whole bunch of other, particularly if you sit here in a temple or a tasahara, there's a whole bunch of people sitting around doing the same thing. And they all kind of want you to stay there and you kind of want them to stay there, right? So we're all supposed to stay there. And there's nothing else to do but to be in the middle of that and start to explore it with a kind of intimacy and thoroughgoing diligence that, in the end, trains our minds to meet the world in a different way. Sometimes that... Supposed training happens really fast. People like the guy in the koan, when Yin Kuan said, bring me the rhinoceros, he probably was like, whoa, and then, you know, was happy for the result, right?

[33:27]

Sometimes it happens really slow over the course of decades just to bring the body and mind to this practice, to be... to enact the following kind of trinity of activities that are in some ways related to these bodhisattva figures we see here. So to bring a kind of mindfulness and unjudgmental awareness to the activity of the moment, to what's happening now, to the crow calling in the trees, cars running up and down the street, to bring forth compassion, first of all, first of all for the self and the experience of being here.

[34:34]

Sometimes being here is difficult. It can be quite difficult if you're in an emotional state that's difficult or if your physical state is difficult or painful and so on, right? It can be all you can do just to stay with it, right? So to bring a kind of gentleness and compassion and kind of a self-comforting to that. And then to take action. If we take action... and we're sitting on the cushion, all you're doing is you're fully inhabiting sitting on the cushion. You move your entire body and mind into this moment of sitting on the cushion and not throwing anything away, not adding anything in, just to be here, right? And to let that encounter guide what happens next, right? But we can do exactly the same thing in the world, driving a car, working, getting sick, getting well, all of that.

[35:50]

The request is the same and the activity is the same. It's just a little bit more complicated if what you're doing is having a meeting with the most exasperating person in your life or something like that. Same deal, right? Just to be completely alive and to let that liveness inform the next step and the next step, right? So, the end of Blade Runner... The main, the most gifted replicant, this guy, Roy Batty, says a little poem, and it goes like this. It's pretty great. He's realized that there's nothing he can do about it. He can't get more life, and various other things have happened, which involved a lot of running around and jumping up and down and shooting people with guns and so on, which you can leave aside.

[36:54]

But... He says this great thing. He's sitting on the rooftop in the rain. He says, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. I saw attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched sea beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. And then he dies. Because it's a movie. So I thought that was pretty good, but I thought I'd try and do what went better. So I wrote something in the last hour or so, and here it is. So this is my answer to Roy Batty and the human condition. It goes like this. What did you expect? The howl of rubber on asphalt and the aerial ballet of elephantine machinery.

[38:04]

The fire that takes everything with it. And the bitter tang of medicine. And then what? Spring rain and wild irises beside the creek. A mountain of poppies 2,000 feet high. There. in the grass, a huge dark shadow on the glimpse of that horn, with each step sinking more deeply into the earth, with each breath taking in and letting out the sky. After all, what did you expect? Whatever it was, forget it. We can be sure that it has already forgotten itself. I can. What did you expect?

[39:06]

The howl of rubber on asphalt and the aerial ballet of elephantine machinery. The fire that takes everything with it. And the bitter tang of medicine. And then what? Spring rain. and wild irises beside the creek, a mountain of poppies 2,000 feet high. There, in the high grass, a huge dark shadow and a glimpse of that horn, with each step sinking more deeply into the earth, with each breath taking in and letting go of the whole sky. After all, what did you expect? Whatever it was, forget it. We can be sure it has already forgotten itself. Is that okay? Awesome.

[40:12]

Yeah, see? One minute. Well, thank you so much for coming and listening. It was really, really great. I really appreciate it. And I... If you want to come... ask questions afterwards, we can talk about it. I always prefer talks where you can just ask questions in the middle, but that's a little impractical in this setting. So let's go over there and talk about it, shall we? 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.

[41:08]

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