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 afternoon. Good afternoon. Nice to meet you. Okay, well, we had to cancel the free beer. So I hope there's no rioting. But I know you all came for Dogen and not the free beer, so... I talked, what, last week? Was it last week or something? Some week. About... There was a chapter in, or a classical in Shobogenzo called Inmo. So I talked about that. And I... did not talk about this, which probably should have been my first presentation instead of my second, but this is my second.

[01:00]

And what I want to talk about today is this little book that my teacher wrote called Understanding the Shovel Genzo, which has been kind of my guideline to Understanding the Shovel Genzo, because my teacher wrote it and I read it. And I actually... rewrote this book in a large measure and put it out as a book called Sit Down and Shut Up. And Sit Down and Shut Up is sort of a, began as a sort of trying to make a little bit more pop culture savvy and longer, more detailed version of understanding the show Bogenzo, but then my publishers wanted more punk rock and stuff in there to sell it to the mass audiences. So it got a little bit sidetracked, although I think it's okay in the end. But what I'd like to do here is just kind of... I think this is a really good little pen, and I'm not going to stand up here and read it to you, but I want to just kind of go through what's in here.

[02:08]

And this is in the Tassahara library. So... Well, it's not in the Tassahara library now, because it's in my hand now, but... So, Shobo Genzo is as... I think most people in here know, because you probably went to Hastan Ashi's lecture last night, but I'll just briefly say it again. It was written in the 13th century, 1200s, I always get that messed up, by a Japanese Buddhist monk named Dogen, or Ehe Dogen, Dogen from Ehe, Eheji Temple. And it... is a very dense, very difficult to read book in 95 or 75 or 12 chapters, and that's how there's a whole historical thing about that. These days it tends to be... My teacher, Nishimi Roshi, put out an English version in 96 chapters, and actually Kastanahashi's new version is also in 96 chapters, so that's sort of become the standard these days.

[03:17]

And basically he wrote... a lot of, I suppose you'd call them essays these days, which were delivered as speeches to his monks in the temple where he was the head of practice or whatever he was, the abbot, I suppose. And these were preserved and Many of these have the title Shobo Genzo, which means Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Shobo Genzo, and then followed by a subtitle. So usually they're grouped together. It's a very difficult book to understand, and as evidence of that, even though Dogen started his temple, and his temple was very successful and spawned what is now the enormous monster... organization known as Sotoshu in Japan. I shouldn't call Sotoshu evil, but anyway. But it's a big organization, founded based on Dogen's teaching in his lineage and the temple that he started, became very successful.

[04:30]

However, the writings, the Shobo Genzo, the writings that Dogen did, remained for about 400 years, almost completely unknown. I mean, they were known to exist, but hardly anybody read them. There's a story that the heads of what eventually became Sotoshi didn't understand Shobogenzo themselves and didn't want to print Shobogenzo up for the masses because they were afraid they'd be asked what it means. So... That's one story I heard. But it's a quite difficult book. And it's only really become popular, even in Japan, it started to become really popular in the 20th century. It had existed, a printed version, it existed since I think Kaz said yesterday's 1600s. But really, it didn't really catch on until the 20th century.

[05:33]

And now in the 21st century, it's being widely printed and we could assume read. There are several problems with Shobo Genzo. One of them is that he is trying to explain, in part, a lot of the philosophy of ancient Chinese masters. So when we receive it ourselves, we're not familiar with that background material that he is drawing on. So that makes it, I mean, that's just for starters one of the difficulties. But that's a fairly easy one to overcome. You could just go back to the source material or in the case of the Nishijima version of Shobo Genzo, there are copious footnotes pointing me to all the Chinese sources and sometimes just giving me the relevant quotes that you need to know in order to follow the story. Another problem is that he had to practically reinvent language.

[06:38]

The phrases and words he used in Shobo Genzo are not standard even in Japanese, even in ancient Japanese, so it That's also difficult. But that can be somewhat overcome when you're reading it in English, because you're not worried about that, you're just getting words. The thing that makes it most difficult is the contradictions. The problem with understanding Shobo Genzo these days is the fact that it is a highly contradictory... And we're not used to that. In fact, one of the ways we tend to gauge whether a piece of philosophy is reasonable or not is whether it's contradictory, right? If you're reading a philosopher and you find the philosopher contradicting himself or herself all over the place, your likely response is to just

[07:48]

stop reading because what's the point? The guy doesn't know what he wants to say. Dogen, on the other hand, his contradictions are not accidental at all or the result of sloppy workmanship or just forgetting what he said two minutes ago and this kind of thing. They're actually integral to the work and are actually a way in which it expresses itself. And that's But it's very hard to understand. In fact, some of the earlier translations I've seen seem to try to fix the contradictions, which thankfully Tanahashi's one doesn't and Nishijima's one doesn't. But some of the really early attempts at translating it into English are just trying to fix the contradictions. So I'll give you some examples. One of the examples that he gives in this pamphlet, I think, is is quite, should be quite familiar to you.

[08:48]

It's a chapter, I'm going to write out the kanji, which I, since I moved away from Japan, I haven't done, I haven't had to write kanji very often. I hope my writing is so sloppy. Some of you should be familiar with that. Soft. Yeah, I know, it should be fix it there. So many of you should be familiar with that, and if you're not, pay attention to the t-shirts that about a third of the people around here are wearing. That's what's written on them. It says Shinjin Inga, which is deep belief, cause and effect. Deep belief and cause and effect. And that is the name of the chapter of Shobo Genzo. I'm You know what, the next one is too damn hard to write, so I'm not going to try it. But there are two chapters.

[09:49]

One is Shinjin Inga, and one is called Daishugyo, which means Great Practice. And in both of these chapters, Dogen talks about the same ancient Chinese poem story, which is Hyakujo's Fox. And again, probably a lot of you know Hyakujo's Fox, but I've It's not that long, so I'm just going to read it off to you. When Master Hyakujo Ekai, who was given the title Zen Master Daiichi, gave his informal preaching, there would generally be an old man there always listening to the Dharma with the monks. When the assembly retired, the old man would also retire. Then one day he did not leave. The master eventually asked him, who is this person standing before me? The old man answered, I am not a person. Long ago in the time of Kashapa Buddha, who was a legendary Buddha that supposedly lived before even Shakyamuni, like bazillions of years ago, I was master of this temple. One day a student asked me whether or not even people in the state of great practice fall into cause and effect.

[10:53]

I answered, they do not fall into cause and effect. Since then I've fallen into the body of a wild fox for 500 lives. A wild fox is a symbol of something that... is sneaky. So now I am begging you, master, to say for me words of transformation, or turning words. I long to be free of the body of a wild fox. Then he asked the master, this wild fox, old Zen master guy, asks to the master of the temple, do even people in the state of great practice fall into cause and effect or not? The master said, do not be unclear about cause and effect. Under the influence of these words, the old man realized a great realization. He made prostations and said, I am already free of the body of a wild fox. Now I would like to remain on the mountain behind this temple. Dare I ask you, Master, to perform for me a monk's funeral ceremony. So they perform a funeral ceremony for that fox body.

[11:55]

Now in both chapters, in both of the fascicles of Shobo Genzo that I mentioned, he quotes this story. But in the first one, in Shinjin, sorry, Shinjin Inga, which is another thing. In Shinjin Inga, he says, his commentary is, they do not fall into cause and effect is just the negation of cause and effect, as a result of which people fall into bad states. Do not be unclear about cause and effect is evidently deep belief in cause and effect. as a result of which the listener gets free of bad states. We should not wonder about this and we should not doubt it. So, he's saying that there's a big difference between they fall into cause and effect and they do not fall into cause and effect. So, you know, they fall into cause and effect does mean basically are they subject to cause and effect.

[12:58]

However, in Dai Shubyo, he quotes the same, the very same Koan and says when we have groped for and grasped great practice it is just great cause and effect itself because this cause and effect is always the whole reality of causes and the complete reality of effects it has never accommodated discussion of falling or not falling and has never accommodated words of being unclear or not being unclear if they do not fall into cause and effect is a mistake then do not be unclear about cause and effect might also be a mistake. So, what? So basically, he's just saying, you know, in one fascicle of Shobo Genzo, he says, there's a big difference between don't be unclear and do not fall. And then he goes on to say, it's the same damn thing. Another good example, in a chapter called Busho or Buddha Nature, he says,

[14:04]

National, and this is in one, in two paragraphs, he contradicts himself. National Master Saiyan from Engkai in the Koshu district was a veteran master of Basso's order. Sorry, we don't care about that. He once preached to the assembly, all living beings have food and nature. So all minds are living beings, and living beings all have Buddha nature. Grass, trees, and national lands are mind itself. Because they are mind, they are living beings, and because they are living beings, they have Buddha nature. The sun, the moon, the stars, are mind itself. Because they are mind, they are living beings, and because they are living beings, they have Buddha nature. Good. Thank you. Thank you for explaining that to us. Doga. But in the next paragraph, he says, Zen Master Dai... Diane of Dayisan Mountain, once priest to the assembly, all living beings do not have Buddha nature. We should grope further. How could all living beings be Buddha nature? How could they have Buddha nature? If any have Buddha nature, they might be a band of demons, bringing a demon's sheet.

[15:08]

They would like to cover all living beings. Because Buddha nature is just Buddha nature, living beings are just living beings. Living beings are not originally endowed with Buddha nature. What the hell are you talking about? And it gets even worse. Yeah. The one everybody loves to quote, our old friend Mr. Genjo Kohan says, when all dharmas, Genjo Kohan, he's a Jewish dentist in New York, when all dharmas are seen as the Buddhist dharma, then there are delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life, there is death, there are Buddhas, and there are ordinary beings. When all the myriad dharmas are not of the self, there is no delusion and no enlightenment, no Buddhas and no ordinary beings, no life and no death. Confuse me again, Mr. Dogen. Okay. The Buddhist way is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, so there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, there are Buddhism beings. What? Okay. Though this may be true, flowers fall even if we love them, and weeds grow even if we hate them.

[16:12]

Confusing. And, just to give you one further example, to show that he contradicts himself even within a single sentence, this little... this little gem right here. An eternal Buddha said, mountains are mountains, rivers are mountains, rivers are rivers, sorry. The words do not say that mountains are mountains, they say that mountains are mountains. Thank you, Dogen. Thank you for explaining this to us. Now, when you first read Dogen, Nishima Roshi likes to tell the story that when he first started reading Dogen, he was fascinated by it because he found it in a used bookstore. when he was a teenager. He used to like to go into used bookstores and look for unusual, weird books. And he found this book Shobo Genzo and he read it and what caught his fascination was the fact that here was a book written in Japanese that was considered to be a classic that made no sense at all. And so he understood that there were people who revered this book and who thought very highly of it and he really

[17:19]

that just kind of got him. He wanted to try to figure this book out because it made no sense. And it's obviously, when you read it, you don't get the sense, or I never have gotten the sense that it's the ramblings of a crazy person. It's not sort of like, I don't know, Charles Manson's diary or something like that. It actually seems to be saying something. But... And it seems to be saying, it seems to be trying to reach for something, but what is that something? And a lot, there's been kind of a, I think among sort of Zen nerds these days, there's an understanding that this isn't really the best way of understanding Buddhism, but it's still out there within the pop culture. So sometimes when I say this, people go, wow, we understand it's not that way anymore. But I don't think really the vast population gets it yet, which is the idea that Buddhism is just, especially Zen, is just illogical.

[18:29]

That what it's trying to do is smack our heads up, smack us upside the head with something weird so that we'll get out of the realm of logical thinking into this other realm of illogicalness that's somehow more real. Dogen himself had strong views against that point of view. He says in Shobogenzo, in Great Song China today, which is the 1200s, there's a certain group of unreliable people who have now banded together so that a few real people cannot defeat them. They say that this talk of the East Mountain moving on water and such stories as nonsense, sickle, we don't need to worry about that, are stories which cannot be understood rationally. Their idea is as follows. A story that has anything to do with intellectual thoughts is not a Zen story of the Buddhist patriarchs. Stories that cannot be understood rationally are stories of the Buddhist patriarchs. This is why we esteem Obako's use of the staff and Rinzai's cry of Katsu.

[19:32]

which are beyond rational understanding and intellectual consideration, as a great realization before the spouting of creation. When we say that the skillful means of the masters of the past often use words that cut through confusion, we are describing the negation of rational understanding. And Dogen says about that, people who speak like this have never met a true teacher and they have no eyes for learning and practice. They are just small dogs I love this when he gets on a rant here. Who do not deserve to be discussed. For the last two or three hundred years in Sun China, there have been many such demons, many such shavelings, like the band of the six shavelings that you don't need to know about. It is pitiful that the great truth of Buddhist patriarchs has gone to ruins. So he was pretty explicit that what he was reaching for was not something beyond rationality. So what was he going for? And this is where Nishijima starts explaining his viewpoint of this.

[20:35]

And so I'm just going to read you a couple of paragraphs. I wish I had my own copy so I could mark this up, but I didn't want to mark up the library's copy because I would have gotten beat while I had. Let's see. After I'd read the Shobo Genzo many times, I began to see that with his use of contradictions Master Dogen was pointing to an area which was outside the area of intellectual debate. He was pointing to the existence outside the rational intellectual area. When I was young it was difficult for me to believe in a world that was different from both the world of thoughts and also from the world of my perceptions. Master Dogen talks about the ideal world of theory and the world of matter as we perceive it. but he uses these two viewpoints to describe the real world, the reality in which we exist. And after reading Shobo Genzo, I too began to say in the world, the world in which I existed, blah, blah, blah. This was a surprise to me. Since the beginning of my life, I've been living in reality, but I've not noticed this fact before.

[21:40]

It is said that when Gautama Buddha was practicing Zazen one morning, he experienced the mountains, rivers, grass, and trees were all Buddhas. This is usually called Buddha's enlightenment. we tend to think that after years of intense effort, his state changed. But after my own experience, I began to see that in fact, the story of Botama Buddha's enlightenment didn't mean that he entered some special state, but that he clearly saw for the first time the reality in which he was living. If we take the Shobo Genzo as a description of an intellectual system, we can never make sense of it. We can say that the object of Master Dogen's writings was a description of reality, but reality cannot be captured in words. From Gautama Buddha's time onwards, Buddhists have made their efforts to capture reality in words, and this, I feel, is a basic reason for the tremendous volume of Buddhist sutras. Master Dogen is not trying to construct a self-contained intellectual theory. He is trying to use all the tools of philosophy and logic to point to something else, something beyond that.

[22:46]

In the area of reason and logic alone, we cannot embrace systems of thought containing gross contradiction. But reality itself contains contradiction, which I think is the important point. Reality, the real world we live in, is contradictory all over the place. And what we try to do rationally is to find something beyond contradiction, which... you know, which makes our brains comfortable. So an intellectual description of reality must find room for those contradictions, however unacceptable that may feel to our intellectual powers. I'm not going to try to read this whole thing for you. But he, Vishjima in his pamphlet relates this to the Four Noble Truths, which we chant... uh, here every morning, uh, as part of the, oh, why am I?

[23:50]

Heart suture. Heart suture. Thank you. Heart suture. Um, in Japanese, uh, what is it called? Uh, sh, sh, uh, ha, ha. That's, um, okay. Well, anyway, uh, what do you do? Suffering origination. Suffering, no cause, no origination. No path. Right? Yeah. So that's usually the way it goes. Usually the Four Noble Truths are the truth of suffering and all the will of the suffering, the truth of aggregates, it says the cause of suffering is desire, that's Samadhyaya Satya and Nirodha Satya, the truth of denial, it says we should rid ourselves of desire, and Marga Satya, the truth of the right way. This was another stumbling block for Nishima Roshi when he was writing this and he talks about it. He says that this made no sense to him and frankly I have to say that it never made a lot of sense to me because a lot of my life isn't suffering and you know some of it is and the idea that that the cause of all suffering is desire well that sort of made sense to me but then desire is impossible to get rid of really.

[25:11]

if you didn't have the desire to eat and breathe, you wouldn't be alive. So, it seems to be trying to get you to do something a bit ridiculous. And he relates this to one of the bits of Gegril Koan, which goes, When all dharmas are seen as Buddhist dharma, There are delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life and death. We just read this. There are Buddhas and there are ordinary beings. When the myriad dharmas are not of the self, there is no delusion, no enlightenment, no Buddhas and no ordinary beings, no life and no death. The Buddhist way is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, so there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, and there are beings and Buddhas. And though all this may be true, flowers fall even though we love them, and weeds grow even though we love them. And this is a good encapsulation of the fourfold logic that is related with the Four Noble Truths in which Dogen speaks.

[26:24]

I'm going through a huge amount of material very fast. But we only got an hour, so I'm going to try to lay this on then. The first sentence is, when all dharmas are seen as the Buddhist dharmas, there is delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life and death, there are Buddhas and there are ordinary beings. This, according to what Nishchima Sensei writes here, is speaking about life as it appears to us if we look at it through the lens of what we would call idealism or... Let's just say idealism. So from this basis, we find difference between many categories, delusion and realization, practice or experience of life and death, Buddhism, ordinary persons. So there's obviously differences. If we look at it in an intellectual way, there are these differences and we can see them. The second sentence tells us that if we view the world as separated from our own subjective viewpoint, and if we view the world objectively, we can find no difference.

[27:33]

So the second one is when the myriad dharmas are not of the self, there is no delusion, no enlightenment, no Buddhism, no ordinary beings, no life and no death. So if we look at things from a purely sort of materialistic point of view, we can't really say much about anything. Everything we see around us is just the permutations of matter and energy. And so to call something Buddha or ordinary being or life or death... or practice, it's all sort of, it's just categorization and the real world is something else. The third sentence, I'm just going to read bits and pieces of what he writes here. The third sentence, he says, Buddhism is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity. So Dogen is saying, that Buddhism is different from relative comparisons of large or small, heavy or light.

[28:34]

The phrase originally transcended over abundance and scarcity needs some interpretation. He seems to be saying Buddhism does not belong to the area where we compare, where we say this is more valuable than that, this is not as important than that, and so forth. In this sentence, he contrasts, he uses the word butsudo. I'm going to write that down. So what he's pointing to here is... is Buddhist activity. So Buddhism meaning Buddhist activity rather than Buddhism as a philosophy or an intellectual construct.

[29:43]

And he says in this area, that's the third sentence, the Buddhist way is originally transcended over abundance and scarcity. So there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, there are Buddhist and ordinary beings. Which to me is saying... What's obvious? You can intellectually consider it one way, you can intellectually consider it the other way, and you can fight between these ways of thinking forever. But in the end, you are encountering things, and provisionally we can call them, as he does, Buddhas and ordinary beings and life and death and et cetera, et cetera, whatever you want to call this. The The example that he gives here I think is a good one of what he means by the Buddha way or Buddhist activity.

[30:43]

God, I hate it when they give these biographical things that don't matter when he gives this. Haku Kyoi of Tang, China was a late disciple of Master Buko Nyoman and a second generation disciple of Master Kosei Daijaku. Who cares? When he was the governor of the Koshu district, he practiced in the order of Master Choka Dorin. All right, whatever. One day, Kyo-e asked, just what is the great intention of the Buddha's Dharma? Dorin said, not doing wrong, doing right. Kyo-e said, if that is the truth, even a child of three can speak it. Master Dorin said, if a child of three can speak the truth, but an old man of 80 cannot practice it. And so it's pointing to the idea of... the idea of doing right and not doing wrong is very different from the actual conduct of doing right and not doing wrong. The idea, to give a nice one that a lot of Buddhists like to haggle about, the idea of compassion and actual compassion are quite different things.

[31:54]

And so this points to the meaning. So he's talking about action. So first he gives a subjective point of view. Then he gives an objective point of view. And thirdly, he gives a point of view of what Nishima Roshi likes to call the philosophy of action, action in the present moment and what's actually really going on. And this philosophy of action I'm going to read you what he says here. Action is described in Buddhist theory as the contact between subject and object. It is the meeting of inside and outside. This is seen in the Buddhist insistence that mind and body are one. Action always takes place in the present moment. Time here and now is the subject of a chapter in Shobo Genzo titled Uji, which is existence, time. In this chapter, Master Dogen explains that the present moment is the stage for all action. So action is different from thinking.

[32:58]

Action is different from perceiving with the senses. So matter is what we call sense perception. In Buddhist philosophy, we often turn what we generally tend to think of as our common sense point of view upside down, which is the common sense point of view tends to say that matter exists first, and because matter exists, ouch, I hurt my hand. For you all, right here. Not badly. But if you kind of delve deeply into lots of Buddhist philosophy, you will find... an idea that since perception comes first, if you go through the 12-fold state of a 12-fold chain of code-dependent, code-origination, whatever, you will see, and I can't rattle it off for you right off the top of my head, but you will see that perception occurs, I think, two or three steps before the existence of matter to be perceived.

[34:09]

So that's kind of an important... idea to keep in mind. And so what Dogen does in Shobo Genzo is he lays out three philosophical points of view, subjective, objective, and action as a point of view, and then sums it up with reality. So his sum up in that little bit of Shobo Genzo, Genzo Koan, sorry, is about the flowers falling even if we love them and weeds growing even if we hate them. So things are just as they are. Whether we look at them this way or look at them that way, they are still as they are. And I just want to read one little bit here. Okay. It is sometimes seems the first paragraph of Genjo Po and Master Dogen may be suggesting the existence of a strange area of the intellect which is not idealistic or materialistic or a combination of the two.

[35:19]

But I think this is a misunderstanding of what he means by transcendence of abundance and scarcity. To transcend abundance and scarcity means to get out of the area of intellect and sense perception. it does not mean to get rid of the two areas within the intellect. It is not an intellectual denial of the intellect resulting in emptiness." Here's that in quotes. It is impossible for us to rid ourselves of the difference between abundance and scarcity within the areas of the mind and sense perception. But Bhottama Buddha and Master Dogen alike discovered that the area which is not within, sorry, discovered that area which is not within the mind or sense perception, the area of action. the discovery of this area and the clarification of its nature in philosophical terms solves the problem of the conflict between idealism and materialism, which Nishimi Roshi also sees as sort of the basis for all of the sort of problems.

[36:23]

Basically, if you look at history, it's sort of a conflict between an idealistic point of view, replacing a materialistic point of view, replacing an idealistic point of view, replacing a materialistic point of view, and so on. This is often the case. Both Hegel and Marx seem to have noticed the need for a resolution of this conflict, and they both attempted to find a philosophy that rose above this difference. Neither was successful, because their philosophies did not end... did not in the end point to a reality beyond the areas of intellect or sense perception. Although Hegel's interest in world history suggests his interest in the real world outside of the world of ideas, he became trapped in his concept of the world spirit, which pulled him back into intellectual considerations. Marx's interest in material solutions trapped him in the belief in the ultimate reality of matter, and in the end he too failed in his attempts to transcend the conflict. Buddhist dialectic, however, differs in important ways from Hegelian or Marxist dialectic in that the Buddhist dialectic has four phases, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and reality.

[37:32]

The Buddhist dialectic says there are three kinds of ways to view reality, but in the end, the object of our explanations does not exist in our intelligence. It exists as it is in nameless reality. So in this sense, Buddhist philosophy serves as a bridge between philosophy and reality. This is why Buddhist theory seems so difficult to grasp. And after that, we go into a long explanation of how the Shobo Genzo is divided and which chapters point to which bits of this philosophical viewpoint. But I must have listened to the lecture or variations thereof on the lecture I just gave to you about, you know, 300 times over the course of 10 years. You know, I can't, I don't know how many. But my teacher was kind of one of these guys who had one thing that he stuck to and would repeat it over and over and maybe try to find variations on a theme, but he would always stick to that theme.

[38:44]

And so he gave this lecture over and over, pretty much any given Saturday at Hongbo-san Chome in Tokyo, the so-called Young Buddhist Association. You could go and listen to him tell you that Buddhism is about the subject, object, action, and reality. And my own take on it when I first heard it was, you are trying to trash what Buddhists have, what thousands and millions of Buddhists all over the world believe, namely the Four Noble Truths, how can you dare to do such a thing, you stupid piece of crap, you know, or whatever I thought about. And I used to just go along because it was the most convenient place to do zazen with the group and just kind of stay for the lectures out of politeness. Years and years of listening to this same lecture perhaps brainwashed me a bit or perhaps not because I was doing the practice and I was doing Zazen practice and it seemed to make sense to me and then when I started reading Shobo Genzo based on that framework of understanding it it was like suddenly the gates were open and it made sense and all of this crazy schizophrenic sounding

[40:12]

writing was clear. And I suppose the question I would ask, and I'll open this up to your questions in a minute, and I did ask to Nishijima a few times in different phrases is, well, if that was his point, then why didn't he just say so? And if that was Dogen's point, why didn't he just say, well, this is the point I'm laying out? And... I don't think the intellectual tools for him to lay it out that way existed in 13th century Japan, because we're talking about, you know, all these sort of advances in philosophy and Western outlooks and so forth. And I think he was trying in a sort of a poetic way to express this. But after kind of getting this... sort of fourfold viewpoint of Schobogenzo, it's very difficult for me to see it any other way. It seems to make sense.

[41:13]

And so I'm sticking to it until it doesn't make any sense. So there it goes. I used up most of my time, but I think we still have 15 minutes, so maybe I'll just open it up to... How often does he use this, and how do you recognize when he's using it? In Dogen, you mean? Yes. Well, the one bit where it's really clear, at least to me, is Genjo Koan. In that one, it's sort of laid out 1, 2, 3, 4. In most of Shobo Genzo, it's not laid out 1, 2, 3, and 4. Often, he's like in the... in those two chapters, the Shinjin Inga and the Dai Shugyo that I mentioned, where he talks about Yaku-jo's Fox, he's looking at it from one way for almost the entire chapter, and then he's looking at it from another point of view in almost the entire chapter, and he kind of sticks with it.

[42:17]

So it's not always laid out nice and neatly, one, two, three, four. How to recognize it, I would say, When you see him being contradictory, to me, that's the cue that he's starting to talk about something that's within this fourfold chain of logic and that he's trying to say that, look, life is contradictory. Deal with it. I'm just wondering if maybe he didn't say it in that way because he wasn't trying to induce an intellectual satisfaction. Probably. So that... I mean, he was speaking to practicing monks for the most part. But he's aiming at something other than... His aim was not... Yeah. His aim wasn't intellectual satisfaction. It was something... It was something which included the intellect, though.

[43:23]

Um... I feel like any attempt to sort of make Dogen a guy who was anti-intellectual is... No, that's not what I'm saying. I know you're not saying it, but I mean it's doomed to failure because he wrote, you know, a mazillion words. So he's obviously not anti-intellectual. But he was trying to use intellectual concepts to go at something that was not intellectual. And yeah, he was trying to encourage his monks in practice and encourage them to find their own understanding of this. which sometimes if you encourage people to get an intellectual understanding of things, what they end up doing is repeating the thing that you just said and not understanding it. We all know that. That's how you get a PhD. At least I don't know. That's what I've been told. I don't have a degree. I just have a temperature. I do have a bachelor's degree. Yes?

[44:23]

So, is Nichijino Sensei saying that this materialist view assumes that action doesn't matter? I'm having trouble distinguishing these two areas. No, I don't think he's saying the materialistic view says action doesn't matter. It is the materialistic view is trying to say that the fundamental The way I've always understood it, and we'll deviate a little bit from Nishijima and then go into Brad philosophy. The way I've always understood it is religion and idealistic philosophy come from the standpoint that, all right, we all, I think, experience two sides of light. a sort of side of life that is hard and materialistic and touchable and quantifiable and, you know, whatever. And we have this other side of our life which is not easily quantifiable, but we know it's real.

[45:25]

We have feelings, we have experiences, etc., etc. We have that side. And it seems to me that perhaps our brains might be hardwired so that this is like the final sort of dividing line after which the brain just cannot pass. Things either have to be viewed intellectually from one point of view, which is that sort of materialistic, or the other, which is idealistic. And so I think most of our philosophies, the idealistic and religious philosophies, come from the point of view that this subjective, unquantifiable, experiential side of reality is reality. And the material side of reality is something else. It either doesn't matter or we're spirits trapped. When I was making tea the other day, I got a little card from those yogi teas that say we are spiritual beings experiencing a material reality.

[46:27]

And that's the point of view. So I wrote not in there to make it a little bit more Buddhist. So that's the other. And the materialistic side says... No, this experiential, soft, spiritual side of reality is just an illusion created by the bubbling of chemicals in our brains, and the real reality is hard, fast, nuts, and bolts stuff. So it's not saying that action doesn't exist. It's saying that it's different. The point of view of action is in action, in actual moving around and doing stuff, those two are never separated. I mean, there are people... I used to be a big fan of reading books in which people would claim to have had the experience of spirit without matter, you know. There's, you know, millions of these books.

[47:28]

And I was very fascinated by this. And that was initially what I got into Buddhist practice for, was to try to find this pure spirit area that I thought... must be the real basis of reality. And my experience of things has been that that doesn't seem to exist. I'm provisionally going to say that it doesn't exist, you know. Maybe when I die I'll be given a harp and wings or maybe, no, probably not because I don't believe, but I've been reading the Bible a lot lately so that might count for something. But My own experience, I did this thing in Montreal a few years ago with this guy. He was a psychologist who was very interested in spiritual stuff, and so anytime he had a quote-unquote spiritual master or whatever the hell, he would get that person to go into a sensory deprivation tank, and he'd ask them to tell him about their experiences.

[48:33]

And this is supposed to be this thing that gives you the experience of pure... spiritual reality, because it's a thing that's intended to make you completely unaware of your body. You know, you're floating in salt water that's exactly 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and there's no light, and there's no sound. But even there, you know, I didn't feel like I was able to contact this non... And I'd kind of given up on it by then, you know, because it was only a couple years ago. But I just fell asleep. And then I had to pee, and I'm like, let me out of here, I gotta pee. I didn't want to pee in the nice 98.6 salt water. Oh, sorry, sorry. Integrated action. Integrated, yeah. It transcends abundance and scarcity, so it's beyond, you know, abundance and scarcity being a symbol for

[49:35]

our intellectual ideas of abundance and scarcity, or, you know, measuring things, judging, judging or measuring things. So, the Buddhist way transcends abundance and scarcity. Anything, really. We respond to things as they are in an integrative way. Yeah, we hope so. Is that, okay. Yeah. I'm just trying to clarify the point being put forth by the framework that you... Yeah, I think so. And, and, and that's the idea is, you know, is to my, my understanding of Zazen, although I'm the worst Zazen practitioner in the world is, is that it is a chance to, or somebody vying for that title. We should have a throw down. Um, is, is, it's a nice quiet time to just, um, put aside abundance and scarcity and just kind of try to experience things as they are because you're doing an action.

[50:41]

It is the doing of action, but it is an action that's very still. And through that stillness, you can kind of hopefully contact a little bit of this. But, you know, then again, as Dogen often also says, it doesn't matter whether you feel like you understood it or you feel like you didn't understood it, it's still there. Kind of my one recent sort of thing that I brought back from Sesshin was kind of a feeling that there's no... I mean, I've been saying this to people for years, but I just sort of felt it very strongly as a real thing, that there's no right or wrong way to do zazen unless you're... you know, doing it like this or something. You know, as long as you're putting the effort into it and doing it sincerely, you are doing it right, even if it feels like shit. It's still, it's as much good zazen as, you know, if you're having distracted zazen, that's as much real zazen as having, you know, as jogging when you're distracted as real jogging.

[51:50]

Although, of course, you know, you are making an effort to try not to be so distracted, but you know, sometimes it can't help it, you know. Anyone else? I think the flies have questions. Using the word action, you know, often karma is translated as action. Is that what he's meaning or is he meaning, another way action could be parsed is just this change. Yeah. Well, I would say both are in there. I remember whenever that would come up in a lecture when somebody would talk about karma, Inishima's knee-jerk response was always, karma is just action. So I'm sure he was referring to it, but I never heard him say it in the terms of this. I never heard him use karma when he was doing a lecture about this subject-object action analogy. But action to me always meant what we are helplessly involved in, whether we want to be or not.

[52:50]

We're always acting, you know, even if we don't want to act, even if you're like me and you're a good wishy-washy Pisces who's trying to find a way out of acting at any given moment. This is one of the reasons why I still haven't decided where I'm going to live. Anybody who has an apartment that's cheap anywhere in the world, please let me know. But even when we're trying to avoid action, we're helplessly, we're acting. So that's, to me, action is just this. We're always involved in action. And always in action, if we look at it, we find there's this experiential or spiritual side to it, and then there's this material side to it, and they seem to be wrapped up together. And, you know, as Buddhists often quoted as saying, matter and, what am I going for?

[53:53]

I started thinking of something else in Lost My Trade, that the inside and outside world are exactly the same, meaning, or as Heart Sutra says, forms emptiness, emptiness is form. So what we see as emptiness, or what we see as this sort of experiential, undefinable side of reality, and what we see as form, are actually just two aspects of the same thing, which are intellect, it seems to be designed to separate into two pieces. And we can't stop it from doing that. And what Dogen seems to be pointing out in Shobo Genzo is that there's no need to try to stop it from doing that. That's what its job is to do. But there is a sort of experiential side of reality where, in a non-intellectual way, we can just... you know, whether we're aware of it or not, and sometimes, you know, sometimes you just suddenly go, ah, you know, and you're aware of it for a couple minutes, and then, and then you become unaware of it again, and you're like, huh, what?

[55:03]

I think in order to transcend these biology materials, or at least what you're talking about, you need certain degree of boldness. Of what? Of boldness. Because one of the crimes of the materialism of last century is accusing everybody who is experiencing something unrepeatable, undemonstrable to others, which is not experienced by others, is a craziness. And people like Rudolf Steiner, for example, who said, yes, I talked to Jesus, but Rudolf Steiner, I think, was a much greater figure than Einstein, making scientific and other contributions to culture on a daily basis. And it's just a unique example which allows somebody else to tell the same thing.

[56:11]

Yeah. Yeah, and I think we are coming out of a largely materialistic phase in history. I mean, one of the things, this is another Nishijimaism, so giving credit where credit is due, but it seems to be true. That world history, especially Western history, goes through that, we went through this long, long phase of idealism, you know, represented by religion, and then the Renaissance came along and said, no, uh, And it was because people saw that this idealistic religious point of view wasn't fixing everything the way it was supposed to. So they found another area of reality, which was materialism, and we started making our efforts to find the end point of that. And the 19th and 20th century would be sort of the culmination of trying to find this purely materialistic point of view and saying, well, we got flush toilets now, we got you know, refrigeration, we got all this stuff that science has given us, we're living longer, et cetera, et cetera, why haven't we found ultimate happiness, you know?

[57:20]

And so, you know, and it's sort of World War II would be a great example of where that sort of all collapses on itself. And then we're left wondering. And so I feel like my kind of take on what society is doing now is just kind of vacillating. There's a large... movement to say okay well let's go back to the idealistic way and I feel that unfortunately a lot of what is called Buddhism these days is just an attempt to go back to a spiritual point of view is not understanding Buddhism at all and seeing it's taking the spiritual aspects of Buddhism which do exist and trying to turn Buddhism into a kind of spirituality. And the word spiritual, I find that you have to use it sometimes, and that there is a spiritual aspect, and we could call what we do a spiritual practice here.

[58:21]

I don't object to that, but I don't think that's probably the best word for it. And I think it's a misunderstanding to think of Buddhism as a kind of spirituality, as a kind of return to an older... form of spirituality, it's not spirituality and it's not materialism. It has aspects of both. It sees the materialistic point of view as valid, which is why it's very important as one of the things that interested me in Buddhism to begin with was here was a religion, which is what I thought of it at that time, that didn't try to deny science. Every other religion I'd come across was trying to, you know, trying their damnedest to say we never landed on the moon or whatever, you know. ridiculous way, you know, evolution didn't really happen and all this bullshit. So, here was Buddhism which said, okay, science is useful and sensible, but doesn't go far enough. Spirituality is real, is a real aspect of our lives, and there are things which aren't, as you said, repeatable and quantifiable that are nonetheless real.

[59:32]

And it says these are both true, but we don't have to vacillate, we don't have to go this way to find the truth or go that way to find the truth. They are both provisionally true as far as they go, but reality is neither one of these things. Reality contains the spiritual side and the material side, and what we are trying to do in our practice is to find a kind of balance, a kind of place where they meet. you know, one of, another little Michijime-ism, I'll stop here, when he talks about shinjin datsuraku, dropping off body and mind, is the way he always reinterpreted or interpreted that phrase, that's one of Dogen's key phrases, dropping off body and mind, you know, as his description of his so-called enlightenment experience, if we want to use those dirty words. was that it was transcending body and transcending mind, so being neither mind nor body, but being, you know, body being the material side, mind being the sort of spiritual side, and finding reality, which dropped away.

[60:45]

Ah, now I am exhausted, and I have to be at work in half an hour, and I'm going to try to go take a bath. 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.

[61:16]

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