This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Thank you very much. Greetings, Venerable Abbott and Tonto and Sangha. I haven't been to the city center for quite a while. It's great to be back here and see many familiar faces and new friends as well. Yes, this passing away of Zenke, Blanche is a loss to the Zen center community. Such a big part of Zen center for so long.

[01:02]

I have many memories of her, but the one that stands out when I think of her is maybe 20, 25 years ago at Tassajara, when I was in my 20s, a gung-ho young practitioner. And in Sashin there, sometimes we would do night sitting, and generally be the... The younger people in their 20s and 30s would, after the formal schedule would end, would sit up into the night. But Blanche would always be there. And sometimes sitting all night long in the Zendo. And the young ones would start dropping away at 2 or 3 in the morning. But Blanche would still be sitting there. So I just think of her as totally devoted to Zazen and Zen practice in general. as well as being very kind and compassionate to everyone she'd meet.

[02:08]

So big loss. May her way of kindness and devotion carry on here endlessly. So the tanto invited me to come speak on the Xin Xin Ming, song of the trusting mind and particularly the nature of mind teachings in this song. The song of the trusting mind or trust in mind is a poem by the third Chinese Zen ancestor. Maybe the first song of Zen writing in this world system, ever. And very beautiful poem, very inspiring and accessible.

[03:10]

And I think it's being studied here now, yeah? So many things could be said about this, but particularly nature of mind. We could say this poem is all about nature of mind. why would we be interested in the nature of mind anyway? We could look at what's the basic problem of human life. Well, there's discontent comes and goes, and according to the to the Buddha from the earliest teachings, this discontent or suffering, is based on grasping, holding, mind, clinging to objects outside itself would be one way to say it.

[04:20]

There's many ways this could be said, but this is one way that the Zen tradition expresses the basic problem is we we feel as if there are objects outside the mind we're actually like almost programmed like wired as as sentient beings not just humans all sentient beings we're set up this way to relate to an external world and get a hold of it so that we can do things with it and survive. I think we might be able to survive without getting a hold of an external world but maybe not as well. It seems like survival of the fittest depends on the ones who can grasp the objects of the external world most wholeheartedly. So therefore at this point in evolution we are like the best graspers of the world.

[05:28]

We've just evolved to be that way. It's one story about this. And it works in many ways. The whole world we've created, and yet there is big problems with this too. If we look at our discontent, our suffering, our difficulties, we can always trace it back to this. grasping at objects as separate from mind. We could say the duality between self and other, mind and objects. So we could talk a lot more about if that is actually so, but we could examine in our own experience as we sit here. if we feel any discontent arising.

[06:32]

Is there some kind of holding or grasping to an objective world outside, apart from, separate from this awareness? I think so. It just might be hard to identify. We might not think of our experience in this way. And therefore the Buddhas and ancestors contemplating this and experiencing this looked for ways to break free of this stuck kind of grasping. How can we be free of this duality, this belief in duality? There's not really a duality. it's discovered, but there sure seems to be.

[07:34]

So how can we work with this? And it's one way to look at this song of the trusting mind, that it's a way of working with this misperception of reality. So to just quote some lines, some different verses from this song, that we can explore. Are you using the translation? Richard Clarke, yeah. I think it's a pretty good one. I like that translation. There's some places where he's quite liberal with the translation, too, if you look at the Chinese. But there's one part near the beginning, I think, where he says, the way is perfect, like vast space. where nothing is lacking and nothing is extra. It doesn't actually say the way there. He kind of put that in. So I think it's okay.

[08:37]

But we could say the way here means mind or awareness. And we might say this whole song of trust in mind is about mind. I like to use the word awareness because mind can mean the thinking mind. dualistic mind. So awareness or the true nature of mind. Suzuki Roshi had the term big mind, I think is what he meant by this. So really, there's no subject of the sentence. It really just says perfect like vast space. We might say it, awareness, big mind, is perfect like vast space where nothing is lacking and nothing is extra. or complete, like space is always complete and perfect in the sense that nothing's lacking and nothing's extra in space, empty space.

[09:47]

You can also say space is what makes everything else possible. Everything is taking place in this vast space, but the space itself lacks nothing and has nothing extra. If we're looking at the things in this space, we might say there's too many things in this space, or there's not enough things in this space, but from the point of view of space, nothing's lacking or extra. So that's one way of looking at the nature of mind, and it has to do with this perceived duality of If the way is perfect and complete, that means everything is actually included in it. There's nothing actually external to it. Moving on to another verse in this song of the trusting mind.

[10:58]

To return to the root is to find the meaning. but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. So the root here, we could say, is awareness itself. How can we return to this basic awareness, this space that includes all appearances, but lacks nothing with nothing extra? To return to this root is to find the meaning, the true meaning, we could say, of reality. But to pursue appearances, that's like what seems to be the external objects, is to miss the source. The source, the basic awareness, is always here. It's actually who we are. It's not even hidden. It's like, we might even say, the most obvious...

[11:59]

experience there is is that we are aware but we're always looking outward at the externals so there's a practice of looking back at the awareness which is just unusual because why would we ever bother doing that to negotiate this world it's all about the external objects But in Zen practice, you can do this strange thing of turning around. So that's the next line here. To return to the root is to find the meaning, but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. At the moment of turning the light of awareness around, I think in this translation it says, at the moment of inner enlightenment, which is a kind of abstract, vague, translation, I think.

[13:01]

In Chinese, Sino-Japanese, it's this word hensho, which literally means shining back, backward shining. Sometimes it's combined. Later in the tradition, the term is expanded to ekko hensho, which means turning the light around and shining it back. We're talking about the light of awareness. But this seems to be the first place in the Zen tradition where this term henjo is used by the third ancestor here, shining back. So at the moment of shining back, or we could say turning the light of awareness around, there is going beyond appearance and emptiness. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of ignorance or false seeing.

[14:03]

So this is a meditation instruction in this song. How to start unraveling this illusion of duality. Our attention and awareness is so outward directed. How can we find another way? So our awareness is outward directed. This image is turning the awareness back on itself. So what is itself? Awareness. So it's like being aware of awareness. Which sounds tricky, right? And... But maybe not so tricky, actually. For me, these days, one way of talking about this turning the light around that I find just really helpful and very accessible is not so much like we're imagining our outward-directed awareness, like bending back and looking at itself.

[15:14]

I think this gets too strange. But just to simply ask ourselves the question, am I aware? Or if the I gets too complicated in there, what's that? Just to ask, is awareness present right now? Is there awareness? Is there awareness? And when we ask this question, we have to ask it in a kind of like sincere way. You could say with beginner's mind. We might say, well, of course awareness is here, but we can't just go jump to the conclusion to ask in our experience, is awareness here? Is there awareness? And when asking this question in this very open kind of sincere way without preconceptions, naturally, in order to answer the question,

[16:21]

It feels as if the attention or awareness is turning back just a little bit. Or we might even say withdrawing a little bit. When we ask the question, is awareness here? We don't usually send the awareness out to look out there somewhere, right? It's natural when asking and trying to answer, is there awareness? There's a little bit of turning back the attention. You know, actually, it's not really turning back because this awareness has no location. It's not back there. It's not in here. It's just that our awareness is so outward directed that as a kind of antidote for that, it seems as if it's moving back. It's not outward. It's just a little bit withdrawing into its source. This could be a problem if we're looking back for awareness or we're looking inside the head or something, because awareness, it's pretty clear to see, has no location, no physical location.

[17:39]

Modern people might say, well, it's a product of the brain, isn't it? A bunch of electrical activity in the brain. This is like a modern story from science. And even modern science cannot explain, and maybe will never be able to explain, how awareness itself is produced by some physical electricity and synapses and stuff. So I think with beginner's mind, we don't need to get into brain and science and all. Just our direct experience. Is awareness here? Yes, of course. How could it not be? Well, let's say as soon as we say yes, of course, we're in a way, we're back in a kind of slightly dualistic mode of experience. We're kind of concluding something. We feel kind of comfortable. Yeah, awareness is here.

[18:43]

We've answered a question. But we could say in the kind of gap or the moment after we ask and before we say yes, of course, I'd say there's a non-conceptual direct experience of the awareness. Maybe a split second, just a moment. Is awareness here? Just in that looking back, we don't actually find anything, but there's some sense of yes, of course. Then we can ask further, well, Am I sure? How do I know that awareness is present here? And to answer such a question, we might go to the objects. Well, because I know that I'm aware, there's awareness here because I can see things and hear things. But without going to the objects to kind of prove that we're aware, can we still discern that we're aware?

[19:51]

We can imagine... being in a completely silent room with our eyes closed, ear plugs in, maybe even like a sensory deprivation tank, something like this. I've never been in one of those, but I imagine it's meant to be so you don't even feel your body, hardly at all. All the senses are like off. But even just sitting very comfortably in a dark, completely silent room, and then to ask, well, how do we know awareness is present here? We still know, right? And it doesn't depend on the objects in such a case. We can have virtually no engagement with the sensory objects, but still there's a sense of like, of course, there's awareness, even without thinking. There's this clear knowing, is there not?

[20:55]

all the time, constantly. Even if we're dull and really sleepy, there's a kind of clear knowing of that. As soon as we awake in the morning, some meditators might even say, even through sleep, there is this clear knowing. It's just so subtle. A clear knowing that's also empty of any graspable... characteristics, actually. All we can really say about this awareness, it seems, is that it's clear, knowing, kind of bright in a way. Even if we feel dull, there's a kind of light. That's why I think they use this metaphor of the light of awareness. It's alive, right? It's cognitive. It's cognition. It's knowing, and yet the awareness itself putting aside the objects that it goes out towards, the awareness itself is empty of any physical location, any graspable qualities.

[22:14]

When we look for what is this mind, what is this awareness, we can't get a hold of it, which is why this kind of simple practice of turning the light around or just asking, is awareness present, is a little hard for us just because we're also used to looking for something and finding a thing, but the awareness is not a thing. It's the only, we might even say, it's the only experience we can possibly have that's not a thing. It's the source of... thingification of relating to all things and objects. It's the only experience that's not an object. We could say awareness of awareness, but that's not really two things. It's just being awareness. So this third ancestor in the poem says, at the moment of shining back, or the awareness,

[23:24]

turning back on itself. We might say, just asking, is awareness here? There's going beyond appearance and emptiness. We might say, going beyond the duality of appearances, the objects of experience, and emptiness, the vast space of awareness. Going beyond the appearances and the emptiness and the empty space as two different things. If we have some taste now of, is awareness present? How do I know it's aware? Again, without going to the objects, how do I know it's aware? We have to just say, awareness knows that it's aware. There's no other type of thing on the outside of awareness that's kind of confirming awareness as being aware. There's not like a me that's like, oh, I know that I'm aware.

[24:30]

When we're really in the experience of awareness, the only way to confirm that it is aware is by the awareness itself. So... How do I... How do we know awareness is here? Awareness knows it's here. Now in this case, awareness is functioning without anything else other than itself. But then we could go on to explore this a little further, hopefully without getting too distracted by words and ideas. But in our actual experience, in this awareness that is just aware of itself and that... knows it is aware itself, can we find any edges or boundaries to this awareness?

[25:33]

And I think we can explore a question like this without going into a sensory deprivation tank, just with our eyes open and our ears open. There's all kinds of stuff happening, objective experiences, but... even while all this is happening. Now we're kind of tuned into the awareness itself. Does the awareness seem to have any edges or boundaries? Like, does it end at the walls of the room? No, right? We can look out the window and it keeps going. Does it end as far as we can see? Well, not really. These ideas start to break down, right? Because awareness is not some physical... entity that has a certain measurement, how could it have any boundaries or edges, actually? And yet it seems in experience sometimes as if awareness, like when it meets an object, like the table, like awareness coming through the eyes, we could say, meets a visual object like the table, and it almost seems like awareness ends at the object.

[26:46]

I think that's part of the way our perception usually works. But we can explore that more deeply. Does awareness really meet objects? Even the Buddhist tradition in the early foundational teachings of the Buddha, Abhidharma tradition, it talks that way. It talks as if there's a consciousness, In fact, there's six consciousnesses that goes with the six senses, and they meet these six objects. So I would say that's a kind of provisional way of understanding. In this deeper way of looking from the later Mahayana tradition and the non-dual versions of Buddha Dharma, these early teachings start to break down.

[27:49]

They work well in the somewhat unexamined way of looking at things, but how do we know that there's a consciousness that actually meets an object? We could say consciousness in Buddhism generally refers to the experience of dualistic consciousness. Even the sense consciousnesses are dualistic in the sense that they have an object. It's a subject like an eye knowing a color or an ear knowing a sound. So consciousness means like the appearance of duality. But awareness, if we're talking about non-dual awareness, you could say that experience has no edges or boundaries and it includes the experiences of colors and sounds and tables and the experiences of eyes and ears, so-called subjects and objects. are all arising in this big space of awareness.

[28:52]

So it doesn't exactly discount this early teaching of dualistic consciousness functions in this way. We could say the appearance of this duality is all happening in this big space. And therefore we could even say that the true nature of dualistic consciousness, both like... the sensory consciousnesses and the thinking consciousness, the true nature of that is actually just the big open space that includes them. And in fact, the later Buddhist tradition does speak this way. Particularly the Yogacara tradition says that all six or sometimes we say eight consciousnesses, which all appear as dualistic knowers and known objects, At realization, these dualistic consciousnesses are all revealed to be actually non-dual open space of awareness.

[29:56]

Sometimes that Yoga Chara tradition talks about it as transformation. I think that's maybe a little bit misleading. to translate it that way because it sounds like magically the dualistic consciousnesses are transformed into non-dual wisdoms or awarenesses. I think it's not really like they're transformed. It's just they always were non-dual awareness. It's just that on this deeper examination, the dualistic consciousnesses are revealed to actually be non-dual awareness. They just appear as dualistic consciousness because, again, that's the way we've evolved to relate to a world. Does this awareness have any limits, boundaries, edges? We can't seem to find any, which then we can conclude that all this stuff...

[31:01]

of our experience that seems to be happening through the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind. It seems like a world of objects. It must be within this awareness. If the awareness has no edges or boundaries, that means there's nothing outside it, just by definition. If something has no edges or boundaries, it must mean everything that's happening must be included within it. So then we can start to look at our experience a little differently. All of these appearances are arising within this big space, and they appear to be separate, and that's why we suffer and grasp at the separate objects. But if we can, just questioning and examining our own experience, try out this slightly different view.

[32:05]

Everything still appears just exactly the way it always has, but now everything is appearing within the awareness. How could that happen? And this is where we can't really fathom how all these appearances can be happening within this... Boundless awareness. And it brings up other questions. Is there one boundless awareness that looks like a bunch of different people? Or is there a bunch of different boundless awarenesses? And if we say it's boundless awareness with no limits or edges, we can't say there's a bunch of different ones. So we have just a few generations after... after the third ancestor of Zen here in China, Huangbo, one of the great Chinese ancestors, said, I think, upon examining this experience, he says, all Buddhas and all living beings are only one mind.

[33:10]

There is no other reality. And here at Mind, I would take to be this all-inclusive, non-dual awareness, big mind. He says, this mind from beginningless time has never been born and never passed away. How could such a thing ever be born and pass away, right? It's neither blue or yellow, has no shape or form, just emphasizing that awareness itself has no characteristics. It doesn't belong to existence or non-existence. We could grasp it as like, this is the one true reality of the indestructible, essential mind, if we start to grasp it as some existent thing, then it's another graspable object. It doesn't fall into existence, but also it doesn't fall into non-existence because we are directly experiencing it every moment. It's not even hidden, right?

[34:12]

It's just like our life itself. And so on. Huangbo says, this very being is it. But when you stir thoughts related to objects, you turn away from it. It's like space which has no boundaries and cannot be measured. This one mind is itself Buddha. Buddha and sentient beings are no different. It's just that sentient beings, with dualistic consciousness, seek externally grasping appearances. If you use mind to grasp mind, you will never succeed. And the third ancestor says this too. To seek mind with mind is the greatest of all mistakes. In Zen we have this story like the fire god searching for fire.

[35:12]

And I think it just means it's the greatest of all mistakes to think that there's two different things. To open to mind itself is not a mistake. But to split it into two, having one part look for the other, is just confusion. So the third ancestor... Do we end around 11? Well, I'll jump ahead to, I think, one of the later verses in this Song of the Trusting Mind. I think the Clark translation says all is empty, clear, and self-illuminating, but it has no pronoun in the Chinese. And I think my take on this verse is he's talking about the mind. We could say it, this nature of mind that this whole poem is celebrating. It is empty, clear, and self-illuminating with no exertion of the mind's power.

[36:18]

Here, thought, feeling, knowledge, and imagination are of no value in trying to find it. So I think it's a beautiful summary of this nature of mind. It's empty, clear, and self-illuminating. We've already talked about this. It's empty of any graspable characteristics. It's clear, knowing, self-illuminating. and it's self-illuminating. It's not created or illuminated by anything outside itself. It illumines itself. With no exertion of the mind's power, meaning completely naturally, this is always the case. One of our later Japanese Zen ancestors, Menzan Zenji, has an essay called Self-Fulfilling Samadhi. Whereas I think I would propose another name for this being, this awareness.

[37:20]

It's the samadhi or the absorption in the self, the true self of this awareness, just enjoying itself and fulfilling itself naturally. And he calls this shikantaza, just sitting. He calls it zazen. And this is menzan. He says... Now I'll explain the way to clarify and rely on this samadhi, this way of being. This is done simply by not clouding the light of your true self. It's the light of awareness. When the light of awareness is clear, you follow neither dullness nor distraction. And he says, the third ancestor said in the Song of the Trusting Mind, It's empty, clear, and self-illuminating with no exertion of the mind's power. This is the vital point of the practice and realization of this samadhi.

[38:23]

So in our Soto Zen tradition, our ancestor Menzan pulls this verse out of the song of the trusting mind. It says, this is the vital point of our zazen. And I think it's beautiful that he chooses this verse. I think it's a wonderful summary. He just comments briefly here. Empty, clear, and self-illuminating means the light of the true self-awareness shines brightly. No exertion of the mind's power means not to add the illusory mind's discrimination to the reality. When you make mental struggle, the light becomes illusory mind and the brightness becomes darkness. If you don't make mental struggle, the darkness itself is revealed to be the self-illumination of the light. He says it's like a jewel illuminating itself. It's like a mirror reflecting everything without bothering to discriminate.

[39:31]

In this self-enjoyment samadhi, just keep the light unclouded without getting into discrimination of objects. So this is a little bit about the nature of mind as I would understand it in this song of the third ancestor and a way of looking at zazen practice. And the function, again, what's so great about non-dual awareness? It's cool. Well, the point of it is that if we can open to this more and more, there's less grasping at objects. And if we could realize it completely, we could still operate in the world of appearances all within this boundless awareness. A little bit like in a dream, still completely interacting. in the vivid dream, taking care of beings with compassion and kindness in the dream because of, why wouldn't we, right?

[40:33]

But then not being caught up in that this dream is somehow outside of this awareness. So sometimes, also this awareness is called Buddha nature in the Mahayana tradition. There are some of the classic texts talk about Buddha nature in just this way. It's empty. It has these two sides, particularly of emptiness and clarity and self-illuminating. And in the Buddha nature tradition, it said that the natural qualities of kindness and compassion flow forth naturally from this big awareness. And not in some magical way, like, you know, compassion just, you know, is suddenly born. I think it's just that kindness and compassion are simply the natural response when there's no objects outside.

[41:42]

It's not some sort of magical created thing. It's just the way the awareness responds. when there's no duality, is kindness and compassion. So non-duality is many wonderful benefits. At least it appears that way. So we could go on and on with this question and answer period later. Yeah, I hope we can explore it a little bit in the question and answer, in our own experience. Does this make sense? Or is this some wacky Zen story? It's not really like in accord with the way we usually experience things, and yet it's only the slightest shift.

[42:42]

I think it's like, in a way, you could say a shift of perception, but it's not really like anything's different. It's just... It's this openness... to a vast, all-encompassing awareness. Well, all the effort that it took everybody to come out here this morning and the attention that we're giving to Dharma and practice is good, I think. We call it merit. We gather any positive energy and... good aspirations that we've gathered here and we offer it in this boundless awareness to the appearances of all suffering beings. The pieces of the boundless awareness really caught up in duality and therefore pain. We wish our positive energy to touch and release all beings.

[43:49]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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