This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Morning, everybody. Nice to be back home at Green Gulch. I actually am talking to you from about a mile and a half from Green Gulch, where I live, here at Muir Beach. I have a title for my talk today. The title is, What is Your Body? Good question, right? What is your body?

[01:01]

It makes me think of one story from the Blue Cliff Record. Two monks are paying a condolence call, and one of them knocks on the casket and says, alive or dead, alive or dead, and the other one says, I won't say, I won't say. It also reminds me of another story. This one is collected in the Hidden Lamp collection of Buddhist stories about women. Seven women go to a charnel ground, and they see a corpse, and they say, what? What? What's that? times like that we really wonder you know what is our body we think we know what our body is but it's true you know we can't say we don't really really know what what what is it if we look we have a hard time figuring it out last week we had session

[02:29]

our annual seven-day session at our red cedars and community which is in bellingham washington we were on zoom of course but we usually have a beautiful spot where we sit and we we remembered the place but we weren't there but we sat all week long breathing And paying attention to the body, which is what we do, right, in our Zazen practice. We just breathe and pay attention to the body. Thoughts come and go. Sensations come and go. Sounds come and go. All of it is the body. The breathing is the body breathing. The sound of the bird is the body registering the sound.

[03:31]

The thought in the mind is the body thinking its thoughts. The Heart Sutra says all dharmas are empty. All dharmas are insubstantial, fleeting. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. We're almost not here. Or anyway, we're not here in the way we think we are. And that's our suffering, right? We think we're here in a way we're not. And we're always so frustrated and disappointed when it turns out that our lives are not as we would expect or desire. And... This becomes more and more personal the older you get.

[04:32]

Being alive is a strange and precious mystery. The human body is a strange and marvelous opportunity. I really think we have no idea. the body is so in in that session one of our uh guys up there at the mid-seater zen community is named bob rose and uh i was talking to bob rose in in donkasan and he was he told me he reminded me of a poem by robert creely so i'll read for you this poem of robert creely called the plan is the body I probably, you all know, Robert Creeley, one of the great, truly great poets of the 20th century. The plan is the body.

[05:39]

The plan is the body. There is each moment a pattern. There is each time something for everyone. the plan is the body the mind is in the head it's a moment in time an instant second the rhythm of one and one and one and one the two the three The plan is in the body. Hold it in an instant in the mind. Hold it. What was said, you said. The two, the three times in the body.

[06:48]

Hands, feet. You remember. I, I remember. I speak. It. Speak it. The plan is in the body. Times you didn't want to. Times you can't think. You want to. You. Me. Me. Remember. Me. Here. Me. Wants to. Me. Am thinking of you. The plan is the body. The plan is the body. The sky is the sky. The mother. The father. The plan is the body. Who can read it? The plan is the body.

[07:49]

The mind is the plan. I speaking. The memory. gathers like memory plan, I thought to remember, thinking again, thinking. The mind is the plan of the mind. The plan is the body. [...] I guess the reason I was thinking of this, what is your body, is because that's the title of one of the essays in my book that just came out called When You Greet Me I Bow.

[08:59]

So I'll tell you a little bit about that book and then I'll read some excerpts from that essay. So I was trying to think, how did this book come about? How come? Because I didn't sit down to write this book. This is a collection. And I remember that actually just now I'm remembering some Buddhist event I was attending some time ago, long ago, and I was in the men's room, you know, in the men's room with Melvin McLeod, who's the editor of Lion's Roar that used to be called Shambhala Sun. And Melvin often asked me to write things, and I write things for Shambhala Sun. And in the men's room, Melvin says to me, you know, we should collect your essays into a book.

[10:04]

You know, there's so many of them now. would be good to have a collection of your essays i said oh yeah great idea melvin you know but it seemed like too much trouble and too difficult to find all these essays anyway after about 10 years of uh that suggestion uh a volume uh came out called experience essays on thinking writing language and religion which were a collection of my essays on on that on those subjects that reminded me well maybe uh there should also be a collection of my buddhist essays and then i remembered melvin's urging me and then came forward one of our uh really brilliant sangha members of the everyday zen community cynthia schrager who uh has her doctorate in english and is a very astute reader of texts and editor of texts and she volunteered to find out find all these things that i had written because there were a lot of them right and they were all over the place and i couldn't even begin to figure out where to find them so she found them all i mean even even going so far as to going into the attic of the editors of magazines that are now defunct that didn't have internet you know like online files and had only paper files and she found things put it all together selected about half of what i had published over the last decades

[11:34]

And then she thought about it all and she organized everything into categories. She said, here are the things you've been thinking about for the last 30 or 40 years. Because these are not Dharma talks, these are essays, you know, things that I, because I'm concerned about our, you know, Buddhist tradition in the contemporary world and as a cultural exchange from East to West and so on. said here here are the things you've been thinking about for the last 30 or 40 years and the essays roughly sometimes it was a bit of a stretch but roughly fit into these four categories and so the book is divided into these four categories and each category has a bunch of essays previously published and sometimes a bit updated and the four yes i'll just tell you the four categories uh are first of all This has to do with something that I feel about our Zen tradition that I was not taught, you know, when I was a student of Zen in my early years.

[12:52]

People didn't mention this, you know. But when you think about it, the Zen literature, the main subject of the Zen literature is actually not awakening per se, It's the transmission and communication of awakening between people. It's the only religious literature that I know that's almost exclusively built on dialogues between people. So awakening is that which comes up between us when we interact. So relationship in all of its dimensions, I think, is a really important theme for our practice. So that's the first category. The second one is emptiness. The Heart Sutra, as we know, is text, one-page text on emptiness. The emptiness teachings are very important to Zen. And they were something that, teachings on emptiness were something that really, really impressed me in the first decades of my practice.

[13:56]

So there's a lot of writing on those teachings. The third category is culture. Because when you... think about it you know you take a tradition from another culture in a language that you don't understand not only a language that you don't understand but a language built on radically different premises from the language that you speak so you're 100 guaranteed to misunderstand the tradition right you there's no way you can understand it in the way it was embedded in its original culture. So what about that? How does that work? So that's been something I've been interested in and seems a very important subject. So the third category is culture. And the fourth category is engagement. The practice is not a museum piece, although museums are good and the museum aspect of our practice is kind of interesting.

[15:02]

But for most of us, that's not what we're doing it for we're doing it because uh we're alive and we have to learn we have to live and we have to know how to live in our actual lives which includes our social lives our political lives our being citizens you know of a nation and a world so there's a whole bunch of and it's surprising all the different issues that i was writing about from the 9 11 terrorist attacks to peace in israel palestine to environmentalism to feminism and full inclusion in buddha dharma and so on and so on so those are the four sections in the book essays on relationship emptiness culture and engagement and i was very happy to think that i could publish a book in which i did not have to do any writing you know because it was already written but then uh cynthia and the shambhala editors said um well actually no you should do some new writing you know and i said oh no i don't want to write any new essays they said no you don't have to write essays here's what here's what you could do you could write notes so you could proceed each section with contemporaneous notes where you reflect on

[16:25]

things you wrote long ago and what you think about them now and how you disagree with yourself or agree with yourself and and and the difference in the context you know because i wrote things uh in in you know in a world that's quite different from the world we live in now so i thought well that would be fun you know that would be very easy i wouldn't have to you know write a polished essay that i have to think about it and everything i just write very spontaneous notes i did that there's a long section of notes in front of each of the four sections of the book so that's why the subtitle of the book is when you greet me i bow notes and reflections from a life in zen so anyway that's a little bit of a background to the book that and uh to the essay that i'm going to read for you when you greet from from this book when you greet me i bow What is your body? And I won't read the whole essay. I'll just read excerpts on it and hopefully, and maybe improvise as I read, I think of something else to say.

[17:32]

And hopefully it'll all sort of make sense. So I'll read you the first paragraph or two. This was published in 2013. We think about our bodies all the time. How do they look? What's their state of health? Are they aging? Are they sufficiently strong, attractive, impressive? These questions churn out an almost endless stream of thinking, feeling, and spending. Consider all the clothing, beauty products, food products, accessories, books, equipment, therapists, health products, body workers, and so on that make up such a huge portion now of our economy. And it's true, everything depends on the body. Without it, we are literally nothing. Transcendent concepts such as consciousness, soul, higher self, Buddha nature.

[18:37]

What are those things? Is there any meaningful reality to them? Or are they just expressions of our hope? And anyway, whether there is any reality to them or not, they would not be if it were not for the body. For one thing, you need a mind and a brain to think the thought of Buddha nature. So the body is fundamental. But what is the body? We take the body completely for granted, just the way we take the sky and the earth for granted. And yet, like the sky and the earth, the body is much more than we know. What we think of as our body, what we feel, imagine, and dream about, what we unthinkingly assume our body to be, is not really what the body is.

[19:37]

And what about you, me, I? The self. How does the self relate to the body? Since we know that when we pass away, the body is still there, but the self isn't there anymore. How does the self relate to the body? Where is it in the body? If we say my body, it sort of implies that there's somebody else who says my body. The body doesn't say my body. And yet, without a tongue, without a brain, without vocal cords, I can't even say my body. So think about it. From what perspective are we viewing our body?

[20:43]

Are we viewing it from inside, peering out from the body's eyes? Or are you viewing it from outside, looking in the mirror like we look at a portrait in a portrait gallery? But how could the body be external to itself? That couldn't be. The body must be contained in the experience of looking. So what you see and call my body must be something else. is the body of the flow of sensory experiences, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, tactile sensation. But what about that? Where do you smell? Do you smell in the flower, or do you smell in the nose, or do you smell in your brain? And then there's this thing, although it's not a thing, I guess, that we call

[21:46]

awareness or consciousness definitely that's not physical everything we experience though in the body comes through us through comes to us through our awareness but where is the awareness is it inside the body somewhere could you locate it inside the body it's very doubtful right but it can't be outside the body. It's very perplexing, really. And yet, without awareness, there's no person. There's no body, really. I mean, the body, without awareness, is the equivalent of a stone or a piece of metal it's it's physical stuff not it's not the human body so uh this is not just me you know obsessing about these impossible to the answer questions also the early buddhist pundits thought about this because this was absolutely central to the buddhist teaching right what is non-self anatta

[23:16]

if we don't consider the body. So the Abhidharma is the Buddhist science of subjectivity. The early Buddhists were very rigorous in examining the human experience. They didn't have fMRIs or anything like that, but they had intense capacity for subjective investigation. And it was their conclusion that there is no body per se there's just a variety of momentary mental events some of them are connected to what we call physical but they themselves are not physical so for example if i'm in my session and red cedars and community in bellingham and i'm sitting there and i have a pain in my back I say, ouch, my back, but actually it's a mental event, right?

[24:23]

The sensation of pain is a mental event. It's an event that occurs in my awareness. If I was unconscious or had no consciousness, there's no pain in my back. So I say it's my back, but really it's a mental event. And the same with hearing, seeing, and all sense perceptions. They're mental events. that are stimulated by what we call physical objects, which the Abhidharmas called rupa. So there is rupa. They analyzed that there is such a thing as rupa. But they thought that rupa was itself a form of consciousness, a different kind of consciousness. What's the difference between rupa and arupa? The difference is that And this is, I've always found, absolutely fascinating. The difference is that rupa is defined as that which can be molested, that which can be broken.

[25:31]

So a body can be broken. You can make a hole in it. You can break a limb. A thought cannot be broken. It's indestructible, you know. Awareness can't be broken or molested in any way. But rupa can be broken. That's the difference. Even though rupa itself is a form of consciousness, maybe a much slower form of consciousness. It provides the illusory basis for our experiences. But in actual fact, there is no body. There's just a continuous flow of momentary conscious events coming and going. yet we have to admit that our body as an experience that we feel is our body is very persuasive not only uh are we conditioned to think of it that way but everybody around us thinks of it that way we would be like somehow insane if we didn't think that this was our body

[26:51]

And our whole system of language is based on the metaphor of the body. Most of our feelings and commonplace ideas about our lives are based on the metaphor of the body. It is a really foundational thought for our lives. So now let's zip back several thousand years. It's the Buddha's Enlightenment night. He's sitting on the Enlightenment seat. And Mara, the evil one, does not want the Buddha to awaken. This is very bad news for Mara. So Mara is trying to do everything that he can to distract the Buddha from awakening. And think about it. What does Mara use to distract the Buddha, to dissuade the Buddha from awakening? He uses the idea of the body, the idea that Buddha has a body.

[27:53]

So first, Mara tries to entice Buddha with all kinds of great, wonderful, sensual things to distract him from his determination to awaken. But the Buddha is unpersuaded by this. He's got discipline, right? The gorgeous dancing maidens did not impress him. He's still sitting there. So then Mara tries the opposite tack. demons that will attack and shoot arrows in the Buddha and burn him up and bust his body in every conceivable way to frighten the Buddha into abandoning his quest for awakening. But that doesn't work either. So then Mara now assembles all these minions of helpers, you know, who... you know, the gorgeous maidens, the sumptuous meals, the attacking demons, and says, here's my army. What do you have, Buddha, to counteract this force?

[29:02]

And the Buddha, this is the famous moment when the Buddha touches the earth. An image depicted you see in many Buddha statues touching the earth mudra. The earth is my witness and my support. This is my strength. So in touching the earth, the Buddha was not just calling on the earth goddess to protect him. He was saying, in effect, the earth is my body. My body expresses earth, is produced and supported by earth. is made entirely of earth elements. And there is nothing on earth, no matter how frightening, that can threaten this indestructible earth body.

[30:07]

Even if it were broken up into a million pieces, as it will be, it will remain. Every molecule of it going home to its source, its mother who gave birth to it, who embraces it now and always will embrace it. And with that touching of the earth, the Buddha then goes on to enter the various concentration states that eventually lead him to awaken. The Buddha's body in the Mahayana Sutras is an object of great discussion. There are three Buddha bodies. The Dharmakaya, or true body of Buddha, measureless, all-encompassing, perfect, beyond perception and concept. The Sambhogakaya body, the enjoyment body, the purified, perceived body of perfect meditation and teaching.

[31:18]

the body depicted in the statues that we see, and that inspire our practice. And finally, the mnemonicaya body, the transient historical body that appears in our world for the purpose of teaching ordinary beings like us. In Zen teaching, we just know that the ordinary human body that can be accessed in meditation practice is itself beyond the human body as it's normally conceived. Dogen calls it the true body. He says, I think in Fukanza Zengi, the true body is far beyond the world's dusts. And in the Song of Zazen, Hakuen Zenji says, this very body is the body of Buddha. And when you think about this,

[32:20]

actual physical body it's it's unbelievable really in its complexity it's it's a kind of a miracle you know we have like enormous establishment international establishment of medical science studying the body and they almost know nothing with all that they know you know they almost know nothing about the body the brain for instance who knows anything about the brain How does it do all that it does so perfectly, adjusting to any and all sorts of contingencies, producing thoughts, literary works, skyscrapers, gigantic cities, social systems, and so on and so on and so on. The heart, the heart, I mean, just think about it. The heart is pumping regularly every single moment of your life until the end. How does it do that, you know? On and on and on, no matter what you think about it.

[33:23]

You might say, okay, hard enough, stop. It won't stop. It just keeps going with great regularity and sincerity. How does that happen? The enormous knowledge and complex communication and movement that seem to occur effortlessly within every human body. We walk, we run, we jump, we shout, we sing, we play the piano. thousand miles the circumference of the earth of blood vessels in every human body if you removed all the flesh and all the bones and just had the blood vessels it would it would outline a perfect human body and blood is flowing through these vessels constantly Nurturing every cell in the body. Who can not be staggered by the immensity of the human body?

[34:29]

Which no one figured out. No computer designed it. No computer can understand it. There are no patents. No laws that govern it. Nobody knows where it comes from. Nobody knows how it was produced. And I'm not even mentioning the consciousness associated with this human body. A consciousness that knows itself. No clue so far as to how that works. So when we practice in Soto Zen, you know, really it's, to me, the most brilliant because it's so simple. You know, there's no spiritual themes to contemplate. No teachings to understand, really. We just sit there with our body, right? We just sit there and we breathe. I feel like our practice is basically sitting with the feeling of being alive, which we totally take for granted.

[35:39]

Thanks to the fact that we're alive, we have all these enormous problems, right? You have your problems, I have mine, then we have our collective problems. That's what we're thinking about every day. But if we weren't alive, none of these problems would exist. When we sit in Zazen, we're just sitting with being alive, period. And being alive is also dying, right? We inhale. We come to life. We exhale. We let go of everything. We're sitting with the feeling of being alive. Body, breath, consciousness. That's Zazen. The body. the true human body, which is not just a physical body. And that's our Zazen. Sitting with the body, sitting with our life, letting go of everything else, and just noticing what it's like, what it's actually like to be alive.

[36:47]

It's a blessing. to come back to that every single day of our lives and then get up from our seat and go forth and yes, deal with our various problems but on the basis of who we really are and what our life really is instead of on the basis of our confusion. So here's the last paragraph of the essay. One of the deepest themes in Western philosophy beginning with Plato is that the world of appearance is not real. So the job of the intellect, the human spiritual assignment, is to carry us beyond this corrupt physical world to a perfected world of non-material form, purely mental or spiritual. And that was what Plato saw as the task of philosophy. And it was the task of philosophy and religion in Western thought all the way up until the 20th century, when phenomenology, probably in part influenced by Buddhism, which never did have a mind-body split to begin with, began to break it down.

[38:11]

In our earth, threatened time, when we have to think in everything we do about the care and future well-being of our planet. It is now fitting and even necessary that we begin to learn and enact the truth that has always been engraved on our very skins, that body, mind, spirit, and earth are one expression, one concern, one opportunity, and one delight. So, everybody here who's listening, all of us oddly sitting together in our separate places, it's a

[39:17]

beautiful metaphor for our lives all of us here are very fortunate actually in that we have discovered the practice of just returning to the body the actual body past our conceptions of it and our various attachments attached to those conceptions of it and even though we don't understand and maybe never will understand, and even though we will always be inspired by our confusion, because we're human, we can every day return to this basic experience of being human. And it will change us. Whether we know it or not, it will change us. It will change the way we are in the world. And we really need this now more than we ever have.

[40:26]

So thanks to all of you for having joined me in discovering this. We're lucky people. It will help us a lot as we go forward, trying to figure out how to live this life in these crazy times. So that's my Dharma talk. I hope it made some sense to you. I don't know if it made any sense to me, but anyway. I appreciate all of you being here. It's very encouraging to me that so many people are practicing Buddhism. I think it's one of the great secrets, you know, that there's a ton of people who practice Buddhism, but there's no statistics. Nobody knows, you know, how many people. are influenced by Buddhist way of life more than we know, I'm sure. And thanks again. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[41:33]

Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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