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. Good morning. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. So in Zen, the transmission of this light that we call the Bodhisattva vow is at the core of our identity as a tradition. And how... it is transmitted, is the core of our Zen training program, which you are all in.

[01:05]

And the core of our program, which as you know, is Zazen. And that's followed by more Zazen and even more Zazen. Occasionally there's chanting and ritual and classes and Dharma talks, which are an effort to aid you in returning to the Zendo for more Zazen. So as we continue in the training program by sitting and listening and studying, by becoming intimate with the teaching of the Buddha, I'm going to be bringing up some well-known stories from our Zen ancestors who have transmitted the Buddha's wisdom for over 90 generations to us. The Dharma transmission story begins with the names of the Buddhas that came before Shakyamuni as we chant each morning. And it continues through the enlightened masters through India to Bodhidharma who brought Zen to China.

[02:11]

Once in China, transmission passed from Bodhidharma through five generations to the sixth Chinese Zen ancestor, Hui Nong, author of the Platform Sutra. And from there to our Soto Zen founder, Dongshan, and on down to Tendon Yojo and his well-known Japanese disciple, Eihei Dobin, who is the founder of Soto Zen in Japan. And then there was that jet plane that brought Suzuki Roshi to California. So this morning I'm going to begin the Zen story, which... we hope will never be complete, with the arrival of great ancestor Bodhidharma, who came to China from the West and around the 5th century to teach Zen by his own example. This version of the Zen story is from a book called The Transmission of Light, which I've mentioned a few times, a collection of teachings by Japanese Zen master Keizan Jokin, who is the third generation from Dogenzenji.

[03:18]

So this text was stored away in the Aheji library and not made available to the public for 557 years. A monk by the name of Sene was the first to bring the transmission of light out from behind the monastic walls. And his reason for doing so was the same reason that Kezon had written this text in the first place, to give everyone, lay and priest and monk alike, access to the language of awakening. So it's this term awakening that has a number of essential meanings in Zen stories. So not only in the text, Transmission of Light, but throughout Buddhist literature, you'll see this term. And it refers to slightly different things. Which may be because Buddha never gave a clear teaching about his actual experience, the morning of his own awakening. His teaching, as with all teachings, are nothing more... than fingers of language pointing to the moon of an awakened mind.

[04:23]

And yet many things have been said about awakening by others since the Buddha had declined to do so. Some said it is the realization of the non-dual nature of reality, no separate self. Others say awakening is to see one's true nature or to see the true nature of mind. Using familiar Japanese Zen words like satori, or Kensho. The word light, too, referred to in the title of Kezon's book, is this very light of awakening. In whatever way, each of us understands just what that light might be. No one can tell you. So Thomas Cleary, the translator of the text, says that the transmission of light is in reality a book of instructions on Satori. seeing your own true nature as Buddha, in which the essential technique for realization is revealed to you through the transcendence of time, history, culture, race, gender, personality, and social class.

[05:32]

This realization is basically an awakening to the two truths, which I'm going to be talking about as this practice period continues rolling along. The ultimate truth awakens us to how the self and the world and suffering have all arisen together through the power of illusion, the stuff of which dreams are made. And the relative truth awakens us to the great power of those illusions by means of the stories that we have woven from them, stories that make what we call the world. Within that dual realization, is born the Bodhisattva's vow to become a Buddha by awakening from illusions and yet vowing to remain an inhabitant of the illusory world in order to do our best to make amends for our own mistakes and to support others as they realize and make amends for theirs. In Zen, the transmission of this light is at the core of our identity as a tradition.

[06:39]

And how this transmission is done is at the core of our Zen training program, which is, as we all know, and I said, zazen, zazen, zazen. In the course of our program, we may find ourselves escaping from the shell of illusory views and understandings when, as Dogen says, what had long been unclear suddenly becomes apparent. Tom Cleary goes on to say that this experience of escaping from the shell, of awakening from illusions, is not viewed as a destructive experience in Zen, even though the language of destruction is often evoked, such as shattering, smashing through, falling out, jumping off, and even the great death. This experience is in fact a constructive one in which the barriers of lust and hatred and fear and self-consciousness

[07:39]

have fallen away, leaving the newly awakened being access to a brighter and a more radiant way of life. And yet, seeing your own true nature is not the goal or the accomplishment of Zen, but in fact is the true beginning of a life of practice, the practice of the Bodhisattva vow. Kezan says at the beginning of the collection of his own stories, to understand our own enlightenment by thoroughly seeing each story and being able to explain it is letting the explanation flow from your own heart, not by borrowing the words of others. So for our purposes in this practice period, I'm going to respectfully skip over our Indian ancestors who followed after Shakyamuni Buddha. Mahakashapa, Ananda, Nagarjuna, and Vasubandhu, and pick up the story of Dharma transmission from the time that Prajnatara, the 28th Indian ancestor, tells his disciple, Bodhidharma, to leave India and go to China, taking the Buddha's teaching with him.

[08:49]

So here's the story of Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma was from a family of the warrior caste. as was Shakyamuni Buddha himself. His original name was Bodhitara, and he was the third son of a raja of southern India. His father was devoted to Buddhism and once gave a priceless jewel to the Buddhist master Prajnatara, who had come into town for a visit. In order to test the wisdom of the king's three sons, Prajnatara showed them the jewel that he'd been given by their father, asking, is there anything comparable to this jewel? The first and second princes said, Oh, this jewel is the finest of precious stones. There is certainly none better. Who but someone of your sanctity could receive such a jewel? And in this way, flattering both their father and his honored guest. But the third son, Bodhitara, said, This is a worldly jewel and cannot be considered of the highest order.

[09:52]

Among all jewels, the jewel of truth is supreme. This is a worldly luster and cannot be considered the finest. Among all lusters, the luster of wisdom is supreme. This is a worldly clarity and cannot be considered the best. Among all clarity, clarity of mind is supreme. The sparkle of this jewel cannot shine by itself. It needs light, the light of knowledge, to discern its sparkle. When you discern this, you know it's a jewel. And when you know this jewel, you know it's precious. When you understand that it's precious, the value is not value in itself. If you understand the jewel, the jewel is not a jewel in itself. And then the third prince says to Prajnatara, because your way is a treasure of knowledge, you have been rewarded a worldly treasure. That treasure has appeared because there is enlightenment in you. just as the treasure of the mind appears in anyone with enlightenment.

[10:55]

So after hearing this third son of the Raja, the Buddhist master knew that he was an incarnate sage and perceived that the prince would be his spiritual successor. He knew the time was not yet ripe, so he kept silent and did not single him out. When the Raja died, the third son went to his coffin and entered into a trance for seven days. Emerging from the trance, he went to Prajnatara to request ordination. Following his ordination, he received Buddha's precepts and was given instruction on the finer points of his master's teaching. After some time, Prajnatara said to him, you have already attained full comprehension of all principles. Dharma has the meaning of greatness of comprehension, so you should be called Dharma. And thus he changed his name to Bodhidharma. After 60 years serving his community in India, Bodhidharma knew the time was right to follow his teacher's wishes and travel to China. After three years in the year 527, he arrived in China by sea.

[12:02]

And with him, he carried all of the philosophical insights based on the Mahayana Sutras of such mythical luminaries as Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu, thereby adding to Zen's medicinal brew the intellectual underpinnings of the emptiness teachings of the Prajnaparamita Sutras and the mind-only or Yogacara teachings of the Lankavatar Sutra and the Sandhinyamochana Sutra. On his arrival in China, he had an audience with Emperor Wu of Liang. This is a very famous audience in which the following exchange took place. If we had a Shusou... for our practice period, then you would have heard this story recited at the beginning of the Shuso ceremony. On meeting the emperor, Bodhidharma was told that the emperor had built many temples and was a great patron of the Buddhist monastic community. The first thing the emperor asked him was how much merit he had gained for those obviously meritorious actions. Bodhidharma replied, no merit.

[13:08]

Confused and perhaps a little irritated, The emperor asked him, who are you facing me? And Bodhidharma replied, don't know. I think one of the reasons we have all agreed to sit in this room together in an upright posture, as the Buddhas and ancestors had done, as Bodhidharma had done, and as the Buddha had done, is to deeply consider, with our whole body and mind, just what it means to be awake. It's something that we really want to know. and it's fairly certain that neither Bodhidharma or anyone else is going to tell us and it's not that the ancestors don't know it's just that it can't be said so this is what I'm going to talk about today what is it that we do and don't know about who we are and what it means to be awake beginning with this teaching called the bloodstream sermon attributed to our first Chinese Zen ancestor Bodhidharma who says

[14:11]

Everything that appears in the three realms comes from the mind. Hence, Buddhas of the past and future teach mind to mind without bothering about definitions. A monk asks, But teacher, if they don't define it, what do they mean by mind? Bodhidharma replies, You ask, that's your mind. I answer, that's my mind. If I had no mind, how could I answer? If you had no mind, how could you ask? That which asks is your mind. Through endless kalpas without beginning, whatever you do, wherever you are, that's your real mind. That's your real Buddha. This mind is the Buddha says the same thing. Beyond this mind, you will never find another Buddha. To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. The reality of your own self-nature, the absence of cause and effect, is what's meant by mind.

[15:12]

Your mind is nirvana. You might think you can find a Buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond the mind, but such a place doesn't exist. Trying to find a Buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space. Space has a name, but no form. It's not something you can pick up or put down, and you certainly can't grab it. Beyond this mind, you will never see a Buddha. The Buddha is a product of your mind. Why look for a Buddha beyond this mind? He goes on. If you don't see your mind as Buddha, invoking Buddhas, reciting sutras, making offerings, and keeping precepts are all useless. Invoking Buddhas results in good karma. Reciting sutras results in a good memory. Keeping precepts results in a good rebirth. And making offerings results in future blessings. But no Buddha. Even if you have a mountain of jewels and as many servants as there are grains of sand along the Ganges, you see them when your eyes are open.

[16:20]

But what about when you close your eyes? You should realize then that everything is like an illusion, is like a dream. So many of the Enlightenment teachings about our Zen ancestors, such as Bodhidharma, are retold in The Transmission of Light, the Denko Roku. which has become one of my all-time favorite Dharma books. The book begins with the story of Buddha's own awakening. The second chapter is the story of Buddha's transmitting the Dharma to his first disciple. It's by this story that the Zen tradition marks its own beginning. There was an assembly of the Buddha's disciples, and at the assembly, Shakyamuni held up a flower, twirled it, and blinked his eyes. at which time Mahagashapa, among the seated and somber monks, smiled. So a good question we can ask ourselves is, why did Mahagashapa smile?

[17:22]

He was the great ascetic. He was not known for smiling. What did he see at the Buddha's wordless gesture? In response to the smile, the Buddha said to him, I have the treasury of the eye of truth. the ineffable mind of nirvana, and these I entrust to you, Kashapa. So on our lineage charts, which many of you may have if you've taken the precepts, then we have this first transmission of the Dharma, a teaching that is said to have been given outside the scriptures. And just a little later in this story of the first Dharma transmission, Zen Master Kezon says that the treasury of the Eye of Truth, the Shobo Genzo, is entrusted to oneself, Therefore you cannot call it Kashapa or Shakyamuni. There has never been anything given to another. There has never been anything received from anyone. This is called the truth. So this truth about nothing being given, nothing being received, we know well from our verses that we chant during breakfast and lunch service.

[18:34]

May we with all beings realize the emptiness of the three wheels, giver, receiver, and gift this idea about giving and getting nothing much like zen language runs counter to our usual way of thinking about things and as a result it's somewhat easy to imagine that those ancient zen people are really quite different from us being from another time another place with other languages than english other cultures than this one here in california whatever it is And so not only different, but completely separate from us, way over there. And yet when we are thinking that way about those people and places in our minds as being way over there, as Bodhidharma just said, there is no Buddha. So that might not be so bad if we only thought this way about the ancient teachers of the past, who I do think really are from faraway places like India and China and Japan.

[19:37]

But unfortunately, it seems that we think that way about the people who are sitting next to us as well. You know, they're like way over there. This way of thinking isn't really anyone's fault, it's just that it's wrong. There is no second person. The Buddhas, as well as our neighbors, only appear or disappear depending on whether we ourselves, as Kezon says, are diligent or slack in coming to understand the workings of our own mind. The only warmth the Buddha's body will ever have is the warmth that is taken from our own. No doubt the very reason for Maha Gashapa's smile. He felt the warmth of the Buddha's body inside his own body and the pungent odor of that flower deep inside his own nose. And again from the text, it's just because we do not understand ourselves that Shakyamuni Buddha passed away in olden times. If you never see him, you will be remiss, and even the hands of a thousand Buddhas will not be able to reach you.

[20:42]

I think this might sound a little discouraging, but I don't think that's how it's intended. What's intended is to inspire us to keep smashing away at the layers of habitual thinking that are trapping us inside this illusion of a separate self, you know, like a mother hen pecking away for the baby chick who's inside its shell. Dogen says of this experience of breaking free, as each of the ancestors escaped from the shell, they were unencumbered by previous views and understanding, and what had long been unclear suddenly became apparent. So although often described in dramatic terms, as I mentioned earlier, such as a shattering experience, in Zen such an experience is understood as an essential and a constructive one. as Thomas Cleary further says in this introduction to Kazon's text, this experience is constructive in the sense that escaping the shell is arriving at the threshold of a more complete and fuller life that lies fallow in our attachments to what we call our ordinary mind.

[21:53]

So all of the Enlightenment stories from the transmission of light take place at that very moment when the disciple has exhausted all of their tricks. And as their minds give up on finding some other place to land, some other place than right here, it becomes shockingly clear suddenly that there is no other place than right here. There's this image for the mind and its thoughts in a book by Karl Brunholtz, which is both very entertaining and informative, called The Heart Attack Sutra, that seems familiar to those who have spent long hours sitting upright on black cushions. It's the same image that appears in Dogen's teaching, in which the mind is likened to a small boat out on the open ocean with no land in sight. In the Heart Attack Sutra, Brunholtz suggests that the inhabitants of the boat, that is, our thoughts, our feelings, our impulses and projections, are like land-dwelling birds that for some reason have come along for a ride.

[22:55]

Those birds don't get very far before their impulsiveness to fly sends them up into the air. but before too long they return to the ship, being that it is the only place they have to land. He then says that it's in this same way that our thoughts and our emotions fly off into the sky of exciting things, but since they really can't go anywhere outside of the mind, they always come back and settle down at the very place from which they arose. So it is with those thoughts we have of a separate self or distant other or of everything else, for that matter. And as a result, we really don't have to nail down our thoughts or our feelings or we don't even have to worry about them when they're gone because they can't get very far and therefore always come home by themselves. I think that is the good news about the mind. The other side of the good news is I'm not so sure about whether it makes me happy or not, which is that we can never step outside of our own minds to see what the world might look like from any other point of view.

[24:02]

We just can't. And maybe that's the part of life we still haven't quite gotten used to. There's a Latin phrase I heard from a student years ago. It was common in the Middle Ages called homo bulla est. Homo bulla est. Man, person, humans, homo, is a bubble, a bubble of awareness, no more and no less, blown out of proportion and destined to pop. The root of the world's shunya, meaning emptiness, comes from the Sanskrit verb to swell, implying the notion of hollowness, like a bubble or like a balloon. When our minds are inflated by ignorance, we take a very little nothing and we blow it up into what appears to be a rather large something, a thought bubble. The thing about thought bubbles is that both the inside and the outside are exactly the same. They are full of air and empty of inherent existence. Dependently, core-risen nothings from which everything has the potential to happen.

[25:07]

Unfortunately for us, there's just no way to know if anything ever has. Knowing something requires words, and words are what bubbles are made of, other thought bubbles. Which reminded me of this wonderful poem about thought bubbles by Marin County's own poet laureate, Kay Ryan, called If She Only Had a Minute. If she only had a minute, what would she put in it? She wouldn't put, she thinks, she would take, suck it up like a deep lake, bloat indiscriminate on her last instant, feast on everything she had released, dismissed, or pushed away. She would make room and room as though her whole life of resistance had been for this one purpose. On the last minute of the last day, she would drink and have it. ballooning like a gravid salmon or the moon.

[26:09]

So as Kay Ryan's poem suggests, and the Mahayana texts agree, emptiness is not exactly nothing, nor is it exactly something. Emptiness is just another word pointing at the ungraspable nature of our thoughts, both while they grow vast and when they pop. Emptiness not only means an end of the world as we know it, but that a world outside of ourselves doesn't really exist, just some land-dwelling birds out on the open sea, returning home to the boat at the end of a long and tiring day. So here's a verse from the Udana 80 of the Sutta Pitaka of the Pali Canon, in which Shakyamuni Buddha describes his own experience of traveling on the open water. There is amongst a domain where there is no earth, no water, no fire, no wind, no sphere of infinite space, no sphere of nothingness, no sphere of infinite consciousness, no sphere of neither awareness nor non-awareness. There is not this world.

[27:10]

There is not another world. There is no sun or moon. I do not call this coming or going, nor standing or dying, nor being reborn. It is without support, without occurrence, without object. Just this is the end of suffering. So wishing to share this profound realization that ends suffering, many Buddha ancestors traveled to the far corners of the world looking for humans with an interest and potential to understand, perhaps helping to explain just why Bodhidharma came from the West. So I have once again run out of words. The nest is unraveled, and so I'm going to end. by thanking all of you for your great effort today and every day that we've been together here at Tassajara. In an institution that thrives on competition, such as this one, what else is there to do when, as the ancestors tell us, everyone is the best?

[28:15]

On the inhalation, the world arises. On the exhalation, the world descends like a bright green turtle. on the open ocean. Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you very much. 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 sfcc.org and click Giving.

[28:53]

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