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. Wow. My favorite people. A couple of weeks ago, Is that better? More better. A couple of weeks ago, some of us were invited to Green Gulch to attend a seminar led by Robert Schraff, who is the Berkeley professor of religion and specializing in Buddhism, Zen Buddhism in particular, but early Buddhism as well, and

[01:01]

all other forms. And one of the things that he said during that workshop really hit home to me, and he didn't say this directly, I inferred this conclusion, and that is, American Buddhism, convert Buddhism, convert Zen, in moving to the United States and to the West has developed a tendency or a characteristic of being very, very similar to charismatic Protestantism. Now, now that I've rolled that grenade out into the room, Let me try to explain myself and get out of this hole that I just put myself into.

[02:05]

First of all, we all know that Buddhism as a way of expressing itself when it crosses borders and ingratiates itself into new cultures, picks up all kinds of stuff from the existent culture that it's moving into. We've seen if you look at Buddhism historically we've seen when it moves into Tibet it co-ops the Ban religion. When it moves into China it co-ops Lao Tzu. So this is nothing really new in a historical context. And the way that Zen in particular, and perhaps some of the other Buddhist sects that came to the West, was brought in.

[03:09]

It was brought in by teachers from Japan, for the most part, and Korea for some part, and one particularly prominent, one from Vietnam. But it was brought in by teachers who taught, in a way, that it was a very experiential religion, a very experiential way of accepting Buddhism into their society, into their consciousness. From the very beginning, from Nyogen Senzaki, all the way through D.T. Suzuki, Suzuki Roshi and Sasaki Roshi, they've all taught in a way that excluded them from teaching Buddhism in a literary or historical context.

[04:17]

They've been teaching us how to sit and teaching us how to interpret the experiences that we get from sitting. rather than create a very, very, very strong foundation in academic Buddhism and then work from there. So it's experiential in the sense that, as I mentioned earlier, charismatic Protestantism, the experience of talking in tongues, or experiencing God in a profound way, even the North Carolina snake handlers. It's very, very profound. And our way of experiencing Buddhism is beyond the canon itself.

[05:19]

We were taught to experience it by sitting, and that was the essence of our teachings. And I think this is a really good way to introduce Buddhism into the West. But I think we fall short a little bit in having a real academic background in our teachers. We haven't spent a long period of time, a lot of money, put a lot of effort into translations. Translations especially. I think that we're really lacking in some of those translations. Or I'm going to hypothesize that. I don't know whether I want to endorse this theory or not, but I'm going to roll that grenade out there.

[06:22]

I'll give you an example. Yao Xin had a dialogue with his teacher at one point, and the dialogue is most often translated as something like, what are you doing? I'm doing nothing. If you're doing nothing, then what does it mean? And then Yao Xin explains in some way. And Karl Bielefeld, I think that's the way you say it, from Stanford, translates the same dialogue by saying, the master asked Yashin what he was doing. Yashin said, thinking non-thinking. The master said, how do you think not thinking? And Yashin said, non-thinking.

[07:28]

If any of y'all have done your reading of Dogen's instructions of how to sit zazen, this is identical to the way Dogen teaches zazen. He says, think not thinking. We can talk about, let's put that aside for a second. We can talk about that in a second. But what I'm endorsing and what I'm, the point I'm trying to get to is that if we had better translations, uniform translations, better canon to work from. There wouldn't be such a mystery about some of the koans, some of the writings in Zen. Shobo Genzo, for example, is seen by some academics as being entirely a commentary on koans. And

[08:32]

None of the translations that we have in the West of Dogen's Shobogenzo give us any idea that that's what that piece of literature is about. So let's get back to, for a second, come back to Think Not Thinking. In Yashin's dialogue, and Dogen's instructions on how to sit zazen. This is one of the most important instructions that you can ever get for your zazen practice. Thinking, not thinking. It's really hard to explain, and I've given zazen instruction for many years. And about two years ago, I was listening to Radiolab, and I'm sure everybody's listening to Radiolab, and I've probably said this before, but they brought a child psychologist on the show, and he said, a baby does not think.

[09:50]

Why does a baby not think? Because a baby has not begun to think use language and is experiencing phenomena in its purest form before it's labeled and before the baby can continue on to the next progression in the mind of saying vroom, that's a car, I am hearing a car. But to the baby, not thinking, it's merely Vroom. Vroom. Vroom. So if we can practice our Zazen practice, I don't know how I got off on this so quickly, but if we can practice our Zazen practice, experiencing phenomena in its pure form before we label it with language,

[10:58]

before we understand that we have heard the language itself and have identified it as such and therefore bringing self up when it's just before it's the car, then the identification of I am hearing the car. So we're making self and then we're immediately creating a duality. As long as it's just a vroom it's still singular. It's still just one thing. And this is practice. And this is the experience of Zazen, or my experience of Zazen. It's time and time again reflecting the empty mirror. going back to the debates between the sixth ancestor and Jingsha in his poems, the poems that were written.

[12:12]

Maybe y'all don't know the story, but the sixth ancestor came to the monastery of the fifth ancestor and was a young kid. He had never done... really much meditating, and was sent immediately off into husking rice. That was the job he was assigned. They wouldn't even let him go to the zendo. And his, the number one student of the fifth ancestor was Jingsha, that's his Japanese name, and he was the shusō. If his ancestor got to the end of his life, and he decided that he needed an heir, and so he had a contest. People put up poems, and whoever had the best poem would be his Dharma heir.

[13:19]

And nobody wanted to compete because they thought that Jingsha would... be the automatic winner. He was the Shusou, he knew more than anybody. He was also the favorite of the master, the fifth ancestor. So, Jingshou was the only one that put a poem up. And his poem, many different translations, again we have translation problems, but essentially he said, the mind is a bright mirror keep the mirror free from dust. And the sixth ancestor, Wang Nan, heard this poem. He didn't even read or write, and he dictated a poem to another student there at the monastery. And his poem basically said, from the beginning, there is no mirror.

[14:23]

And according to the Zen legends, one of the sixth ancestors won the bowl and the robe and went fourth. But I want to talk about Jinxia for a second. Jinxia started what is called the northern school of Zen. And sometimes when we chant here in the morning, we will say that in the Zen schools, there are no... northern or southern ancestors. Jinxia started, went up to the northern part of China and started the northern school, became really ingratiated with the emperor and the emperor's family, became the national teacher of China. But his school died out after the Yangsheng revolution in the late 800s or so. But Jinxha speaks to me today, going back to Yao Shin's poem, going back to the way that we practice Zazen.

[15:39]

Thinking, not thinking, keeping the mirror bright, free from dust. I don't want to eliminate that from the beginning there is no mirror. But I think that through the period of Zen literature and tradition, Jingsha's teachings have been ignored. So I want to emphasize to you that when you're studying that combat, that Dharma battle, that you look carefully at Jingsha's poem and you realize that that in itself is a big help to your practice, to your zazen practice. Keep the bright mirror free from dust. So I'm already all over the place.

[16:49]

And before I go on, maybe we can ask, somebody could ask me some questions or I'll just proceed into the next thing on my mind. Yes, ma'am. I have a question, Jamie. You say that there's something to learn from keeping the bright mirror free from dust, but if there's no mirror at all, what is the point in doing that? Well, there's both a mirror and there's not a mirror. It's not an absolute either way, at least from my point of view. did it really? I mean, if we look at the history of it, it seems like the seventh, eighth, and ninth ancestors and the Platform Sutra itself seem to be people that are endorsing that point of view only and eliminating and cutting the other point of view down.

[18:07]

In some ways, Kim, I think it's... The division is very similar to what we hear is the division between Rinzai and Soto today. The Rinzai people will say that the Soto is a gradual awakening style, and they're the only ones that are really adept at the sudden awakening style. Truth of the matter is that both are sudden and both are gradual. In my training with sort of a disgraced Zen master who was a Rinzai teacher who I first started sitting with, I have to admit that he was great at overcoming my resistance to subject-object duality.

[19:17]

And he did it in a lot quicker manner. And that's the benefit of the sudden style, or the Rinzai style. But the gradual style is often like Suzuki Roshi talking about us walking in the mist and then all of a sudden finding ourselves drenching wet. Yes. Yes. Yes. No. Charismatics. Yeah. Yes. a good question. I wasn't trying to be analogous in that way.

[20:23]

I'm no expert in the theology of the charismatics. I'm close friends with a number of ministers. I grew up in West Texas and a lot of my peers are members of charismatic churches, and we're still in touch. And I have a great deal of empathy, if not admiration, for their ability to actually feel the hand of God. But that's more of a sudden enlightenment and more of the... of the other poem than this one. My point in bringing up the evangelical situation is that they're very experiential.

[21:31]

And they use canon to justify their experiences rather than canon to teach them about their experiences. What I'm hoping for is for the comprehensive and diligent attempts to make the Buddhist canon available to all of us. There are some things that I don't understand and I've only been told and I'll... I'll say that this is something I've been told, I was told this by Robert Schraff, so considering the source, the head of the philosophy department in Eastern Religious Studies at Berkeley, he said to me that a number of academic scholars of Buddhism and Pali and Sanskrit and Japanese especially have gotten together and done a very new translation of the Shobo Ginzo

[22:46]

It was commissioned by Sotoshu. So Sotoshu owns this translation and it is finished. What I was told by Robert was that Sotoshu was thinking of not releasing that except to their own libraries in Japan. It's completely footnoted with all the... connections back to the koans that he's commenting on. Not that we don't have a wonderful translation that was originated here at San Francisco Zen Center, but it would be really great to see what this one's like. And not only would I like to see Soto Shu share that with us, but I would also like to see us put some more effort into getting translations of canon myself. If you see me squirming, I have to apologize.

[23:47]

It's been two years since that I've been fighting this back problem and I've been facing the karma now of it getting worse. And just recently, since I agreed to do this Dharma talk tonight, I have decided and am scheduled for a back operation. And so I'm not sitting quite as well and easily as I... I have been. I am kind of squirming and I apologize. No, chairs. This is better, actually. There is no position. Yes, sir. 19th century. Well, that's a really good point.

[25:41]

When I said that, especially the Zen teachers, which I'm much more familiar with than some of the other versions of Buddhism, Tibetan or Vipassana, or some of the others that are around, that I'm sure are great. I don't know that much about them in the history. But in terms of Zen, it's been... coming to the United States, in particular in the West in general, since the late 19th century. Soen Shaku was the teacher of both D.T. Suzuki and Njogen Senzaki. And Soen Shaku, as an anecdote, I'll tell you my favorite Soen Shaku story. He was invited to the Congress of World Religions at the Chicago World's Fair in 1898.

[26:42]

And he debated William Jennings Bryan on whether or not he was going to go to hell because he didn't accept Jesus Christ as his savior. Soen Shaku. S-O-Y-E-N-S-H-A-K-U. Zen priest. A well-known Zen priest in Japan at the time. And Soen Shaku is reportedly to have said at the end of the debate, when William Jennings Bryan threw up his hands and said, well, you're going to go to hell. Soen Shaku said, well, that's where they need me. And that was the end of the debate. But Soen Shaku was a really interesting character. He was one of the first people that saw the West as a place where he could be for wanting of the other side of Protestant, non-mainstream Protestantism, evangelical with his Zen because he thought the Zen tradition in Japan had gone stale.

[27:56]

And he deliberately trained D.T. Suzuki and Nyogen Senzaki to learn English and to be ready to go over to the United States and teach. Njogin Senzaki was a priest and he came, I'm going to say in 1920. I'm not exactly sure when Senzaki came, but he came on one of Sohen Shaku's subsequent visits to the United States and he was Sohen Shaku's attendant. And one day they came to San Francisco and in Golden Gate Park in the 20s. he turned to Njogin Senzaki and said, well, I think I'm going to leave you here. The city's either going to eat you up or you're going to eat the city up. You stay here and teach. I'm going back to Japan. And Njogin Senzaki was not only famous for the iron flute or the 101 Zen stories, which preceded Paul Repp's in the first koan collection,

[29:08]

It was written in the United States, and he had a floating zindo here in San Francisco in the 30s and in Los Angeles in the 40s. He was interned during the war with the rest of the Japanese Americans. But he was also famous for, as Suzuki Roshi was, for being a kindergarten teacher. So there must be something there for... two of the greatest exponents of Zen practice in America to have come and to have spent a major part of their time in their beginning phases as teaching kindergarten. It must be something that my daughter is teaching kindergarten and I'm still learning from her. So I think it's really a good thing to be doing. So you said earlier that you thought that emphasizing the experiential nature of Zen practice was a good way to introduce this to the West.

[30:26]

Can you elaborate on that one? Well, there was no canon. Unless you want to go back to somebody like Dwight Goddard. or the iron flute itself, Paul Rebs. There was really no canon. And fortunately, and I see this pattern repeated not only here in San Francisco, but also in Sao Paulo, where I just came from, Zen priests were sent over to serve the Soto community, the old Japanese that had lived... here that were one or two generations removed from Japan, but still had an affinity for the Soto church. But they saw Soto practice as bingo and funerals. And in both Sao Paulo with Monja Cohen and in San Francisco with Suzuki Roshi, sooner or later, they moved their practice over to

[31:38]

the Western students who really wanted the experiential kind of Buddhism that they really wanted to teach. I think they wanted to teach it because, as I mentioned earlier in my comments about Shomen Chaku, I think that they felt that Japanese Buddhism was really stale and was too engaged in just scholarship, bingo and funerals. So they came with a real mandate from their own spiritual practice, which was to sit zazen, and they wanted to bring that practice to the United States and to the Western students. When I'm endorsed, when I'm talking about scholarship, and I keep talking about this over and over, but when I talk about my desire for us to have more scholarship.

[32:41]

I really want us to put down more roots into the Buddhist tradition without giving up that very important experiential. I think we can do both. I think we can have both if we really, really want it. But I think it's most important. Doug. I really don't know how to say his last name right, but my favorite is Carl Bielefeld. But that doesn't mean that I'm not grateful for Cleary or Sekeda to Zen Classics. They did a wonderful job. Cleary especially was able to translate everything from the Avatama Saka Sutra, which I don't know if he translated from the Japanese or Chinese, and went back to the Pali, all the way to modern Japanese and stuff that he did.

[33:54]

So he's got to be commended. But keep in mind that there was three centuries or more of translation of sutras from the Pali and the Sanskrit into Chinese as it came over. I don't think this is going to happen in a day, but we certainly are moving faster than we were with computers and jet planes and trains that go vroom instead of choo-choo. It's a lot different. I remember my grandfather drove a truck and could barely keep it on the road. overcorrect all the time. Here I am doing the same thing with an iPod and having my grandchildren go, no, you don't have to, that's not the right way. So, iPad, not even an iPod, sorry. A Walkman. What do I know?

[34:54]

But, yeah, it can be done much, much faster than three centuries. But... I think we need to show that we're interested and put a little emphasis into it. I don't think we've really showed that. It's only in the academics that there seems to be really good translation stuff being done. Aside from the Shobo Genzo that was translated by Kaz and Takahashi and the people here at Zen Center, the senior teachers here, there doesn't seem to be anything really being done with all the potential canon that's out there, it's kind of sad to me. You know, I don't even know if that's a true story. That's what Robert Schraff told me. He said that there is some argument going on about that. I sometimes don't understand our relationship with Soto Shu.

[36:06]

Monja Cohen, who was the priest that was brought over to Bushenji in Sao Paulo, and then moved her Brazilian intelligentsia type students to a small temple, is unable to get her temple certified by Sotoshu, even though they sent her to Sao Paulo. Why? Because she doesn't own the grounds that the temple is on. Or Sotoshu doesn't own it. It's not controlled by either a teacher or Sotoshu. That seems to be a silly rule to me. I mean, it's an active, strong temple. And I don't even know if it's applied equally. I don't know if Sotoshu recognizes other rented properties as temples or not. I don't want to be too critical of Soto Shu because I don't know what goes on and I'm not that smart anyway.

[37:12]

Yes, sir? Yes. No. In fact, I don't know if the charismatics are quite as evangelical or as proselytizing as the evangelicals are. It's certainly not uniform. And although I have had delusions of grandeur about being the first Zen Buddhist teacher of the radio, Fran's Now's the time to look at the sutras.

[38:14]

I really don't think that that's going to go over well in Cochrane County, West Texas. And there's not a good radio station for me to get on here. Nobody suggested it to me yet, but I'm certainly up for it. Yes. Yes. Good point. But I'll take every crutch I can get to get there. You guys should be bored with me by now.

[39:20]

Thank you all very much. I am sorry to be so all over the place. I really appreciate you all having me and me being able to talk to you all. 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.

[39:57]

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