Good morning. One day, as the Buddha was sitting with the congregation, he said to the monks, Oh, monks, just as the ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, my teaching has one taste, the taste of liberation. So I've been noticing over the years that sitting... often brings up for me images of ocean travel, just as it did for Chirteau in his dream, riding on a sea turtle on the great ocean of reality. And as it seems to have done for another of our practice leaders here at Green Gulch, thank you, Jiryu, for your oceanic lecture one Sunday ago. When I was sitting in Michael's seat as the head monk, Don't even remember what year that was. It was a while ago. My own poem at the end of the practice period during the Shusou ceremony also had images of the water element.

[01:22]

On the inhalation, the world arises. On the exhalation, the world descends. Like a bright green turtle on the open ocean. Wonderful, wonderful. So water is one of what are referred to in the Buddhist teachings as the four great elements, the Mahabhuta, which make up the entire universe. There's wind, fire, earth, and water. These elements may also be arising for you as you're sitting through these many days and weeks of our practice period, just as they did in Shurto's poem, Following His Dream. And it appears in the recitation of the Sandokai that we do every day. Fire heats, wind moves, water wets, earth is solid. Eye and sights, ear and sounds, nose and smells, tongue and tastes. Thus, with each and everything depending on these roots, the leaves spread forth.

[02:29]

Mahabhuta. And then recently, I was at a board meeting of the San Francisco Zen Center's board, and I heard a story about water, and so my ears kind of perked up. The story was about Pacific Islanders who travel for thousands of miles on the open ocean. By means of what the person telling the story said was wayfaring. And then he made a distinction between wayfaring and navigating. that sounded a lot like the way that I have come to understand our practice of zazen. So that's what I want to talk about this morning, this distinction between navigating and wayfaring. I think these are useful metaphors in beginning to understand what the Buddha was doing there under the tree and what we're doing in our seats most of today. Navigating according to the dictionary, has to do with having a plan by means of instruments and maps that give the navigator a direct route for arriving at their destination.

[03:41]

Perhaps some confidence in the route by which others have traveled safely before them. So when we endeavor to navigate while we're sitting, we may come to imagine that there's something off with the map or maybe with the instructions. or that we're simply doing it wrong. We've gone the wrong way, or maybe even have the wrong map. I think many of you have read and heard about a variety of meditation instructions. I certainly have. I've read about a lot of them and tried a number of them as well. There are elaborate mind-body trainings in the practices of yoga, as well as in the early Buddha sutras, such as mindfulness of your body. mindfulness of your feelings, of your thoughts, and of the elements of your thoughts. These are taught in the Great Sutra on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the Maha Satipatthana Sutta.

[04:45]

So these traditional methods for meditation, whether they're Buddhist or non-Buddhist, consist of concentrating our attention on some specific object, such as a visual object, a sound, maybe on our breathing, concepts, stories, deities. And by doing that, we can develop very heightened states of concentrated awareness called samadhi. Samadhi means joining together or one-pointedness of mind. And all of these teachings are extremely valuable and they're available to us and to you, and you're welcome to try them all. as you like. It is your own mind that is seeking to understand itself in whatever way it can, out of self-respect, you know, true self-respect. Wisdom is seeking for wisdom. Mind is seeking mind.

[05:45]

Heart is seeking the way. And so therefore the Buddha also kindly said to us that the path is enlightenment. Enlightenment is the path. It's your intention that matters most. No matter which foot is forward or which foot behind, ultimate truth, relative truth, ultimate truth, relative truth. Light is stepping into darkness and darkness is stepping into light. And as Suzuki Roshi says in his first talk on the Sandokai, if you say, it is many, San, it is many, If you say it is one, do, then it is one. Many and one are different ways of describing one whole being. When we understand that, we are harmonizing the many parts that we are with the many parts that we share with all things.

[06:49]

That's kai, sando kai. So this is the good news about our practice. It is just perfect. The way it is, no matter what we do or how we go about sorting out our life, it's perfect. The bad news is that we may not think so. Just as Suzuki Roshi says, if we say it's great, it's great. If we say not so great, then it's not so great. So cycling through sad and happy, angry and confused, round and around again, is called samsara, meaning endless circling, endless suffering. So it really is for the sake of those of us seemingly lost at sea, you know, the seekers, who will most likely need a guidance system to help them find the way. And yet given that there are many parts included in the one whole being, including among guidance systems, it may be hard for us to decide on which is best.

[07:58]

Here at the Zen Center, we offer an ancient practice that was given to us by Suzuki Roshi called Shikantaza. Shikantaza is a Japanese translation of a term for Zazen. And it was introduced to our Soto Zen ancestor, Dogen Zenji, by his teacher, Chinese Zen master, Tiantong Ru Jing. Shigantaza means a number of things, can be translated a number of ways. It means by all means, or merely, simply, or just sitting. Just sitting. This is the term that Ru Jing gave to Dogen as the style of Zen that had been passed down to him from his own Zen ancestors, reaching back centuries to Shirtou, who we are now studying, and to Dongshan and Hongzhi, and what became known as Soto Zen. So Shikantaza is an aspect of our self-study often referred to poetically as silent illumination.

[09:08]

My Dharma brother, Taigan Dan Layton, wrote a book about this type of meditation called Cultivating the empty field, and it's filled with the poetry of 12th century Zen ancestor Hongzhu, in which he tells us that Hongzhu was the first Zen master to fully articulate silent illumination, that being a form of non-dual objectless meditation in which the essence of Buddha's own enlightened vision is realized. a form of non-dual, objectless meditation in which the essence of Buddha's own enlightened vision is realized, the harmony of difference and equality. So silent illumination involves withdrawing our focus from some particular sensory or mental object to allow for an ever-widening field of all-inclusive attention.

[10:13]

such as the great ocean of reality itself, throughout time and space. As we allow our awareness to expand toward the furthest horizons of our imagination, objects themselves become transient guests, just moving in and out through the ocean of our awareness, each on a voyage of its own, like the rain, and like the birds and the drum. and the bell. Like our past and our future. Like our wishes and our dreams. Just passing through. In his first talk on Shri Toh's teaching of the Sandokai, Suzuki Roshi says that our effort in Zen is to observe everything as it is. And yet even though I say so, we are not necessarily observing everything as it is. We say, here's my friend. Over there is a mountain and way up there is the moon.

[11:18]

But your friend is not only your friend. The mountain is not only the mountain and the moon is not only the moon. If we think I'm here and the mountain is over there, that is a dualistic way of thinking. But that is not the Buddhist way of observing things. We find the mountain. our friend, and the moon, within ourselves. Right here. This is big mind within which everything exists. So as you may remember from our class, the English meaning of sando kai is the many, san, and the one, do, as good friends, kai. Which echoes the Heart Sutra, in which we've heard that form, the many, is emptiness, the one. And emptiness, the one, is form, the many. And that's also true of our feelings and of our perceptions of things, like mountains, friends, and the moon, and of our impulses to take action on what we see, think, and feel, of what we like best and what we don't like at all.

[12:37]

And then this entire package of teachings through words is arising from and entering in to the great ocean of reality itself, just like consciousness arising and falling as we breathe. Buddhist meditation, as taught to us by Suzuki Roshi, is to welcome into our zazen practice all of our judgments of good and bad, right and wrong, self and other, so that they can be taken into account as part of the many parts that block us from seeing things as they truly are. The kind of true seeing that begins with noticing just what we think we are seeing right now. Master, I call it a cat. What do you call it? The master replies, you call it a cat. So the question, perhaps for today, to the great teachers of the past might be masters, you call it just sitting.

[13:43]

What do we call what we are doing here today? So that's what I want to be sharing with you this morning is the answer that those great teachers gave to the question of just sitting. Some in the poetry of Hongzhi and Shirtou and some from our own dear ancestor Suzuki Roshi that hopefully can guide us away from navigating. while we sit, thereby allowing our body and mind to wayfare, like sea turtles on the great ocean of reality, their true home. Just sitting, what Hongzhi calls silent illumination zen, includes a strong devotional element, a reverence toward nature, toward the sea and the turtle and those tiny human passengers. And it includes great gratitude for the teachers that had come before him, in particular Shurto and Dongshan and their poetic teachings on the relationship between the ultimate and the relative truths, between the ocean and the turtle.

[14:52]

Those teachings are familiar to us already through our frequent recitations of the Sandokai, the harmony of difference and equality, and the Hokyozamai, song of the jewel mirror samadhi. I'm the Sandokai. Light and dark, the ultimate and the relative truths oppose one another like the front and back foot in walking. Phenomena exist, the relative truth. Box and lid fits, the relative and the ultimate in harmony. Principle responds, the ultimate truth responding to the cries of the world. And arrow points meet, the great mystery of friendship with all things. If you don't understand the way right before you, how will you know the path as you walk? Progress is not a matter of far or near, but if you are confused, mountains and rivers block your way. I respectfully urge you who study the mystery, do not pass your days and nights in vain.

[15:58]

And from the song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, the dance of Dongshan's awakened mind as it ponders one and then the other, of the two truths. It is bright just at midnight. It doesn't appear at dawn. It acts as a guide for beings. Its use removes all pain. It's like facing a jewel mirror. Form and image behold each other. You are not it. It, in truth, is you. This type of meditation instruction may move us the way that wind moves the sails of a great ship. At first there's this flutter, and then they fill to overflowing. Magnificent to see. And just as the wind in the sails does for the ship, these poetic sounds of the ancestors may offer guidance for our own life of wayfaring on the open ocean.

[17:01]

A life in service to the wind. and to the water and the earth and the fire, and to all the conditions that we meet in each and every step along the way, the ones we love and the ones we hate. Each of those conditions serves as a signpost to the realization of unlimited freedom. Those freedoms which have been summarized by the Buddha as three realizations. They are the realization of emptiness, the realization of signlessness, and the realization of wishlessness, the three hallmarks of the samadhi of the Buddhas and ancestors. As we just sit, each of these concentrations takes its place in the ever-widening circle of awareness in the form of three gifts. The samadhi of emptiness gives us the gift of freedom from self-centeredness.

[18:01]

No such self. The samadhi of signlessness, the gift of freedom from being fooled by appearances of any kind, such as the dichotomy between the darkness and the light or between the self and the other. No such things. And the samadhi of wishlessness or aimlessness, the gift of dropping away of whatever belief we have that this voyage we are on will take us anywhere other than here. No such place and no such time. Communing with the source, the great ocean of reality, traveling the pathways, embracing the territory, and treasuring the road. Naturally real, yet inconceivable, as Dong Zhuan says. And yet it is not within the province of delusion or enlightenment. So don't get stuck there either. Don't get stuck anywhere. Don't even get stuck here. While some styles of Zen training emphasize sudden insight, as in a spontaneous answer to a wayfarer's quest, where am I?

[19:14]

Where am I? Who am I? Why am I here? These are koans. And then other styles, such as ours, emphasize wayfaring itself. The mastery of craft. and the confidence of the craftsperson in the disciplined act of creation itself. Just this is it, as a bowl of green tea, a splash of black ink on white silk, or the elaborate iron grates that cover the sewage holes and the sidewalks of Kyoto. Wonderful. Wonderful. The mind that we have when we practice zazen is our big mind, which it can't help but be, because that's what it is. And that's what we realize when we just sit. The great mind just sitting there in the shape of a human being. Once we are able to see things as it is, Suzuki Roshi tells us to accept things as it is.

[20:21]

If we don't accept things as it is, then the mountain won't be the mountain itself, our friend won't be our friend themselves, and the moon will not be the moon itself. Form is form, emptiness is emptiness. Instead, they will somehow appear to us as though separate and out of our reach, and we'll feel stuck in our longing for the mountains, for friendship, and for moonlight. Wayfaring allows us to pass through that invisible gap of separation by not getting stuck there in what we think or how we feel. There's a flow to ocean travel, a constant change, and there are many wayfarers just like us that will meet along the way. Hello, how is it going? Are you well? Do you need anything? Goodbye. Take care. Just this is it. Like arrow points, meeting in midair, just this one time, as a perfect moment, a perfect meeting, one by one by one.

[21:29]

Suzuki Rishi says, when I am closely related to all of you and to everything, then I am a part of one big whole being. When I feel something, I'm almost a part of it, but not quite. When you do something without any feeling of having done something, then that is you yourself. You're completely with everyone and you don't feel self-conscious. That is true self-respect. Let your ears hear without trying to hear. Let the mind think without trying to think and without trying to stop it. That is practice. That is Shikantaza. Silent illumination. A small boat setting sail in the moonlight. And then Suzuki Rashi says, when you practice hard, you will be like a child. While we are talking about self-respect, there was a bird singing outside. Beep, beep, beep. That's self-respect. It doesn't mean anything.

[22:32]

Maybe the bird was just singing. Beep, beep, beep. Maybe without trying to think, the bird was just singing. When we hear it, We can't stop smiling. We cannot say that it is just a bird. It controls the whole mountain, the whole world. It is self-respect. So circling back to the beginning of my talk, I mentioned that I would share some of the teachings of Zen Master Hongzhi, along with Dongshan and Suzuki Roshi. Hongzhi had received great inspiration. from the lineage of meditation masters in creating his own body of work, his own instructions for just sitting. Here's one example. You must completely withdraw from the invisible pounding and weaving of your ingrained ideas. If you want to be rid of this invisible turmoil, you must just sit through it and let go of everything.

[23:37]

Attain fulfillment and illuminate thoroughly. light and shadow altogether forgotten. Drop off your own skin and the sense dusts will be fully purified, the eye readily discerning the brightness. Accept your function and be wholly satisfied. This teaching of casting off body and mind has been given both by Hongzhi and by Dogen Zenji as the essence of silent illumination. which as Taigen says in his book on Hongzhi's teaching, is simply focusing awareness on the totality of self to return to and enact the bright, shiny, empty field that is our own fundamental nature. Silent illumination is simply focusing awareness on the totality of self to return to and enact the bright, shiny, empty field that is our own

[24:40]

fundamental nature. In other words, to fill our whole body and mind with awareness just as the wind fills up those sails. And then, as my therapist once said to me, although great ships are safe in the harbor, that is not what they're built for. And therefore, up we come from our cushions, our wind-filled sails and our oceanic dreams to stand on our ever so human feet. Right foot, left foot. Right foot, left foot. Searching ever more deeply for a place to be so that we can be of service to others. Maybe you go to the kitchen. Maybe you clean the toilets or mop the zendo floor. Maybe you plant something or you pull out the weeds. Maybe you think that that's enough. Maybe you don't. But either way, the path is enlightenment, and enlightenment is the path, all being, whole being, Buddha nature.

[25:45]

And yet, as Hongzhi says, although we all have the clear, wondrously bright field from the beginning, the ultimate truth, many lifetimes of misunderstanding come only from distrust, hindrance, and screens of confusion that we create in scenarios of isolation. a mistaken relative truth, discordant with the ultimate, out of tune. And so therefore we study ourselves in every moment, keeping a watchful eye on the mind and on the activities of our bodies and our voices, and we allow our Dharma friends, teachers and sages of old to help us to see not only the beauty of this world, but but the unacknowledged suffering that arises from our personal and collective blindness if we fail to do so, if we fail to ask for help. So I'm going to end this morning with a wayfarer's poem from the great Dharma master and sailor Dogen Zenji.

[26:54]

Treading along in this dreamlike delusory realm, without looking for the traces I may have left, A cuckoo's song beckons me to return home. Hearing this, I tilt my head to see who has called me to turn back. But do not ask me where I'm going as I travel in this limitless world where every step I take is my home. Thank you very much. Mail. equally extend to every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's way beings are numberless I vow to save them

[28:00]

Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Munas ways are passable. Bro.

[28:32]

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