This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I have been talking about face-to-face transmission and saying that face-to-face transmission is... the pivotal activity of all Buddhas that face-to-face transmission is zazen and one way to talk about this pivotal activity this face-to-face transmission is that it is both coherent and incoherent.

[01:03]

And it is the coherence and incoherence turning on each other. Coherent events have an incoherent background. And the coherent foreground and the incoherent background pivot on each other. it could be a coherence.

[02:15]

And other, if you make it into a version of the self, that's a coherence too. But the actual other is not just the opposite of yourself or another person, another coherent person. The other is everything. other than the self. Yes? Could someone give her a German word for coherence? Coher means for like to come together, to appear graspable, almost like substantial. So things appear substantial and they have an insubstantial background. No.

[03:25]

They appear substantial and they're insubstantial and the reason they're insubstantial is because they're supported by things other than themselves. Everything is powered by others. Everything is dependent on others. Nothing is dependent on itself. But things appear almost like they depend on themselves. And that's coherent. That appearance that something depends on the way it appears. But actually, it depends on everything other than itself. and that total, that absolute other, is inconceivable and incoherent. It's not like the practice, the pivotal activity of Buddhas is trying to get us to be incoherent or coherent.

[04:35]

It is the way coherence and incoherence pivoting on each other. It's a pivotal activity which is the activity of reality. And I've been telling stories and some of the stories I've told might have been somewhat coherent. And I think that it might be okay to offer coherent stories to help people through the story open to the incoherent support of the story and thus realize the way the story is pivoting with other than the story.

[05:37]

So the Zen stories, some of them you could say, and so now I'm telling a coherent, maybe somewhat coherent story, that Zen stories are to help us open to pivotal activity of that story and not that story, or that story and other than the story. They're stories about people realizing the pivotal activity and they're maybe told and retold help people enter that pivotal activity we seem to have a deep need conscious and unconscious to have coherent to have coherence and causal stories are often good coherent stories And so if we hear a story and it's not coherent for us, we often want to know more about the causes in the story.

[07:03]

That helps us have a feeling of coherence. Yesterday I told the story of reality coming to visit Judy in the night. And then you could make that a little bit more coherent by saying a nun named reality comes to visit a monk.

[08:04]

named judy in the night then there's a story about a monk here coming and saying why did reality go visit judy in the night and me saying i don't know And nobody does. However, people may want a coherent story about why Judy was visited by reality in the night. Later in the day, a thought came into my mind which was,

[09:08]

what was Judy doing in his hut on the mountainside? And I thought, maybe Judy was praying for reality to come and visit. And if I say that, then there's an opportunity here for a coherent story, a causal story, which is, Judy was praying for... Reality, and because Judy was praying, reality came. And that's why reality came. So now we've got a coherent story of why reality came. But there's other possible stories. For example... Reality came to visit Judy, but actually reality was intending to visit another monk and just mistakenly went to visit Judy.

[10:15]

So the reason that reality came to Judy was because reality was mistaken. It came to the wrong hut. Reality actually wanted to go to another hut where there was a better looking monk. who wasn't so, I don't know what, hesitant. But she missed that hut and wound up with Judy. That's another story. Is that one coherent? Here's another story. Well, actually, reality visits people on a random basis and just happened to visit Judy.

[11:16]

There's no pattern there. These are possible explanations, and in order to... fully enter into the pivotal activity, we need to open to all these possibilities. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes this seshin, the rohasu seshin, is called Buddha's attainment seshin.

[14:27]

Buddha's attainment of the way seshin. And we keep that expression, we keep it in our family language. But we also have in Zen and wider in Buddhism the teaching that the way is just no attainment and not knowing. I have a problem with attainment, that word, but I'm not trying to get rid of the word attainment. I looked the word up one time.

[15:37]

This is the English word. And I was pleased to find an etymology which is... in Latin, a-tingere, a-tingere. A-geri. A-tangere. Tangere as in tangible. A-tangible. Tangible does I don't think tangible means graspable really it means touchable so the root of the word attain is to touch to touch I think that is helpful so yeah I do Buddha Buddha's touching of the way Buddha

[16:46]

touching the way. But when you touch the way, the way touches you. As Lao Tzu says, the way that is truly the way is not the way. Or another way to say it, he uses the word Chinese character for the way and he says the way that can be weighed is not the way. And weighed means the way that can be spoken. The Chinese character for way conveniently also means to speak. So he uses the character for way and he says the way that can be spoken is not the true way. very close to Mahayana Buddhism but even closer would be the way that's the way is not the way so when Buddha touches the way the way touches Buddha and so Buddha did touch the way and was touched by the way in that

[18:25]

face-to-face transmission between Buddha and the Way, we celebrate that pivotal activity of Buddha and the Way, that face-to-face transmission, that zazen. Someone told me, I came to the monastery, I came here... to touch the temple and I said oh yeah that's like to attain the temple so you come here and you attain the temple you come here and you touch the temple but when you touch the temple the temple touches you we could say I came here to be touched by the temple I came here to touch and be touched not to grasp and be grasped to touch and be touched and in that touching and being touched all beings are liberated and sometimes

[19:58]

this temple it there's a coherent story that the people here that there's people here and that the people are touching the temple and in touching the temple the temple comes alive and is well cared for and in the temple coming alive the temple touches the people In that process, sometimes there's no possessiveness on the part of the people for the temple they're touching. And there's no possessiveness in the temple for the people that it's touching. And in this way, the temple is a temple of Buddha's activity. If we try to care for the temple,

[21:05]

by grasping and controlling it, we interfere with, in a way, not interfere, but it feels sometimes like we're interfering with the process. And of course the temple includes the people in the temple if we try to grasp and control the temple, people, including trying to grasp and control ourself. But to touch ourselves, and to touch ourselves and to be touched and to use ourselves to touch without trying to control. Here's an opportunity to realize the pivotal activity of face-to-face transmission. And I told the story to some of you in the Chosan that I was visiting a noted Zen teacher named Mumuonyamada at the temple where he was an abbot in Kobe.

[22:32]

It's a temple that used to be Bangkei Zenji's temple. It's called, I think, Tofukuji, I think. a beautiful temple. It's a men's temple. And I went there and visited him on his birthday. And afterwards, we went to visit a women's monastery just down the hill. we went into the entryway of the temple and the guests coming in are standing on one level and then there's a landing up higher and then there's another landing up higher which is the level at which the main hall was at. So there were steps up indoors and so we were standing there and the resident

[23:39]

monks, female monks, came to meet us with their, seemed like their happy faces, their radiant faces, emanating warmth and generosity, welcoming us into the entryway. Yeah, it was very nice to see them. And behind them, I looked past them, into their main hall, and I was impressed by their human warmth, but back behind them in the main hall was an altar. And on the altar, there was also a great warmth. The altar was not on fire, but almost. And I could see that there were all these offerings that were put on the altar, which I guess... You can tell a story. They put those offerings on there.

[24:42]

And they just sort of look like they were put on there really skillfully and really artistically. You could see a tremendous amount of human effort emanating from this physical... There was a physical sort of inanimate objects, but I felt like they're up there by human effort. That's my story. Anyway, I felt this great energy coming off the altar, much more than any of the altars I saw up in the men's temple. Even though the men's temple was very radiant also, but I didn't see their altars with that same intensity. And we didn't actually go in, we just said hi and then we departed. So there was a coherent thing there for me to touch.

[25:54]

And that coherent thing touched me. And I was like really inspired. I was touched and then I was inspired because I thought these people had something to do with that. These people have tremendous devotion to put their life energy into creating such a touching physical reality. They touched things so those things touched me. They used those things to touch me. And they were successful. I was impressed. I didn't go, actually. I wasn't aware that I was going to that temple to be touched or to touch the temple. I was kind of like sightseeing. But I got sight touched.

[26:59]

And I got a feeling of, you know, a very memorable experience. And I went back to visit To Fukuji after Mumon Roshi died. I went back to visit his successor, Taitsu Konoroshi, and had a nice visit there with him. And then he put us up... in a dormitory near the monastery, us being Ananda Dahlenberg and Catherine Thanis, who I was taking on a little pilgrimage to Japan. And so the three of us stayed in this dormitory, down the hill, from the beautiful Tofukuji. In the morning we woke up, and put away our bed stuff, and I saw this little alcove near where we were sleeping, and this little light went off, and I thought... I looked at the alcove, and then I looked to the left, and I saw an entryway.

[28:24]

And the thought arose, could this be the temple that I visited before? And I went over and stood in the entryway and looked up at the little alcove and I thought, yeah, that was the altar. So I realized that this was, that was the altar that was full of light and warmth and human... human warmth and now it was like it was just an empty room clean but just empty and then I found out that the teacher of that group of nuns had died and then they dispersed to other temples so when the human touching came out of the room

[29:31]

The room stopped touching me. And another example of this is... What is it? Cabin 6, which I've been talking about quite a bit this practice period. It's a cabin that... was used by our founder and also by other people, other abbots after him. It was used by Suzuki Roshi and then it was used by Baker Roshi for quite a while and then used by other abbots. And oftentimes if you go into that room you maybe feel some light people come in there and they say, this is a beautiful room.

[30:35]

And I think, I say, yeah, it is. And over the years, over the 46 years since Zizigarashi died, and over the 34 years since Richard Baker left, and over the years of all the very Zen Center Abbotts, Sometimes in the summertime, because of, I don't know exactly, maybe financial need, cabin six is used as a guest room. And then I've come down to Tassar in the summer when it's being used as a guest room, and I go in there, and the room is dead. The light's gone. It's a dorm room. It's clean. The cabin crew cleans it. But the cabin crew doesn't go in there and sit zazen and doesn't do services and doesn't have an anjo.

[31:50]

So the room goes dead in a few minutes or maybe a few hours or a few weeks, but it loses its life. And you go in there and it's like, whoa, what happened here? And at Sokoji Temple, when I went there, when Suzuki Roshi and his partner, Mitsu Suzuki Sensei, were living there, when you go into that zendo, it was, again, radiant. And it was radiant. to the eyes and it was radiant to the nose to the ears it was not so radiant because it was on bush street the world famous san francisco bush street it's a noisy street so the the sound effects were kind of quiet and then kind of quiet but the the visual and the and the olfactory were radiant because

[33:02]

Suzuki Oksan and Suzuki Roshi and Katagiri Roshi and the students made that room a temple. And then Suzuki Roshi left Sokoji and went to 300 Page Street and Oksan went with him and then they made Zen Center into a temple. They made a residence club for Jewish girls into a temple and it still is. Without grasping... Oh, and then I went back to visit after they left, and I went into the zendo, and it was dead. It wasn't cared for. It lost its life. There was a priest who succeeded Tsukiroshi, but he didn't give that... He didn't touch it. He didn't touch it the way they touched it. And so... no life because no human effort no human diligence no human generosity no human carefulness no human courage no human patience no human calm i shouldn't say no but very little the room was not used for the way and it becomes then dead of course the way is all pervading and there's no place it doesn't reach but if we don't practice it

[34:35]

it looks like it's dead here or it's dead there. We have to practice. Now, if we went there and practiced, it would become alive for us. So anyway, this is a little talk about attaining the way, touching the way. And one additional point again is that we touch the temple, We touch the room. We touch the rocks. We touch the earth. We touch and we're touched. And in the process of touching to make the temple, we have to be careful that we don't slip into grasping. Because if we slip into grasping, I predict, we will stop touching. In the grasping, we lose the touching. in the grasping, we will stop taking care of things.

[35:41]

We will have burnout. Like when you take somebody's pulse, you touch, but if you grasp too much, you lose the pulse. I just found my pulse. It just came to me. I wasn't looking for it. It just came. Hello. Amazing. Life. When you touch, you find life. If you grasp you can lose it. So, I do say, and I have said, told people, what do you call it? I've told people all around how well you monks are taking care of this place. But I didn't tell them, which they know, I didn't tell them that you're at risk of grasping this place.

[36:42]

So thank you for taking care of it and thank you for not grasping it. And strangling it by grasping. Touch. And again, when you touch, you can realize, oh, I'm touched. When you grasp, you maybe lose that you're being touched. What you do get when you're grasped is you get grasped back. But when you're grasping, you don't even, it's hard to notice maybe you're being grasped back. But when you touch, you can feel, ooh. Like I just thought of, when I watched Suzuki Roshi offer incense, it's like he touched the incense and put it in the incense bowl. And sometimes I felt like he was getting surprised by the incense. Like he was touching it, and then it's like the incense went, hello, and he went, ooh. I didn't know you were alive. I mean, I shouldn't know by now, but anyway.

[37:46]

Wow. When you really touch softly, you realize the incense is alive too. You're not the only one alive around here. If you touch, you get touched back. Like, it's not just this finger touching this table, it's not just life on one side. Now, one more kind of thing is that maybe, well, not maybe, I propose not maybe I propose that Judy was sitting in the hut praying for reality to come and touch him.

[38:51]

I don't propose that he knew that he was doing that. I'm open to that he might have actually thought I'm sitting here praying for reality to come visit me. He might have I'm saying even if he didn't know he was praying, even if he didn't think, even if he didn't perceive himself praying for reality to come, he was praying for reality to come. I propose that. I propose that we're sitting here and we are praying for reality to come and visit us in the night and in the daytime. When we pray in the night, we may not know we're praying. When we pray in the day, we may know we're praying. But I propose we are praying for reality to come and realize together with us.

[39:54]

We are praying for the way to come and touch us so that we can touch the way reciprocally. And I would say we are always doing that, but we are not. The way we're always doing that is not a coherent, it's not a coherence. It's incoherent. It's incoherent how we're always doing that. And sometimes it's coherent. Like sometimes you go, reality, please, you say in English, reality, please come to visit me. That's coherent. Sometimes you might do that. Like the other night, Dhanin said, O Bodhisattva, Mahasattvas, please come and touch me. She coherently said that. But they incoherently came and touched her.

[41:00]

But did they coherently come and touch you? No. They incoherently... She was incoherently touched. So she got a coherent call and got an incoherent response from her point of view. Also from mine. I watched her coherently call for the bodhisattvas to come and touch her. But I couldn't see them. Sometimes people do coherently call bodhisattvas. They say, please come, bodhisattvas, and witness my practice and support my practice. And then they see a coherent bodhisattva and they go, great. It happens that way sometimes. Other times, they're sitting and they don't know they're asking for bodhisattvas to come. They're sitting, you know, and then somebody comes in the room with their hat on that they didn't think they invited. their invitation was incoherent, but they have a coherent visitor.

[42:09]

And they're surprised that now reality is sitting there, reality is standing there with her hat on, and that now reality is walking around me three times. I didn't invite this visitation of reality, and yet... I can coherently see that reality is coherently walking around with me with her hat on, but I don't feel I coherently invited it. Maybe. Or maybe he thought, I was coherently inviting reality to came, and I just cannot believe that reality did coherently come. So I'm proposing to you that we... incoherently, imperceptibly, are calling for reality to come and meet us and realize with us.

[43:13]

We're incoherently doing it all day long. And reality, all day long, is incoherently asking us to open to it, embrace it, and sustain it. Incoherently. That's going on all the time. And there's no way for me to prove it because it's incoherent. Then sometimes we coherently ask, like the example of Deneen in the precept ceremony. And then again, sometimes we don't coherently ask, but we coherently see a visitor coming. And sometimes we coherently ask and coherently we see a visitor. response and here's the hard part is that it's not like this is the hard part in a way it's not like you or I coherently call or invite a request and that is the cause

[44:28]

for the response to come it's not like that it's that when you call the response comes up with it they come up together it's right there the inquiry and the response come up together it's not like the inquiry causes the response that's a coherent causal story. And we've got those. Go sit in a hut on a mountain and bodhisattvas will come and visit you because you set up the cause for them to come. When you sit on the mountain, that sitting there is already calling the bodhisattvas and in your sitting there, they're already responding to you.

[45:32]

in your sitting. That's not a causal story. And so it also doesn't satisfy our wish to have a coherent thing that we can grasp. For the last year or so, I think that cabin six has not been used as a guest room.

[46:39]

Is that right? A year? Or so. Way so. Way so. When has it ever been used as a guest room? Yeah, it was, yeah. It was used as a guest room, yeah. Well, there's also a nice little folder in there which says... cabin six, laminated folder, cabin six, it says guest information. It's been quite a few years since we even used it for anything other than habit or senior drama teacher. Occasionally, in my memory, we used it for other visiting teacher, but not for a long time. Anyway, it has come back to life. Because it's not being used, I don't know what, I don't know why, but it's come to life again. It's a beautiful room, which is also a beautiful memorial to the founder.

[47:44]

in one of our friend's book, which is called, I think it's called China's Zen Heritage. Is that what it's called? The translator and editor is Andy Ferguson. And the way he arranged the... teachers that are in the book is that one section there's a female teacher and then a male teacher and a female teacher they're right next there a little triad there the female teacher is Moshan Liao Ran who you know somewhat then comes Judy Judy and reality Then comes Tianmo Liu, or Liu Tianmo, Iron Grinder Liu.

[49:45]

So Judy's sandwiched in between the two female teachers in the book. So I told the story of Mo Shan Liao Ran, story of Judy and reality, and the celestial dragon, And tomorrow I'll tell the story of Iron Grinder Liu and Guishan. True dragons abound. Are you ready? 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, visit SSCC.org and click Giving.

[50:45]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_94.67