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. Is everybody feeling a little more spacious? There's even more room here if you want to. I don't care if you sit close to me. I won't do anything, okay? I promise not to. get out of hand too badly. So welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. How many people are here for the first time? Welcome. Oh, please come closer. No, I won't do anything. So good morning, everybody. We are sitting a one-day sitting today. So in a one-day sitting, We purify body and mind through settling the self on the self.

[01:09]

We just sit and walk, eat, chant, work, and then the spaces in between are filled by all the other things that we turn away from in order to do those things. So there are lots of things that you're not supposed to do in a one-day sitting, and we learn about those by unconsciously doing them and then figuring out that we need to return to the schedule. And isn't life just like that, where we have an intention or something that we really want to do that's really deeply interesting for us for a lifetime, for a whole lifetime.

[02:13]

And yet somehow everything else keeps coming up again and again and again until we can settle with the most important things in life. So I want to speak today about a case in the Genjo Koan that we've been studying this practice period. A practice period is many days, sometimes up to 90 days of sustained sitting and walking, attending talks, sometimes periods of silence, mindful work, and so on. And we do this with other people. And it's meant as a way to study the self. And this practice period is being led by Zen K. Blanche Hartman and Daryu Michael Wenger. And he's over here. And they're my Dharma sister and Dharma brother, and I'm assisting them from time to time.

[03:19]

And the head monk for this practice period is Lian. And so it's a very rich practice period in which we're studying genjo koan. Genjo koan means a koan is a public case. In Zen, public cases or stories from the literature are used as a focus for meditation. And in this case, the genjo koan is the koan or the public case or the practice opportunity realized in everyday life. And last week, Rosalie spoke about habit energy and karma and how that arises. And today we're talking about how the koan manifests despite habit energy or in the midst of habit energy or even through habit energy or through daily life.

[04:24]

So the case at the very end of the Genjo Koan goes like this. Zen Master Bauder of Mount Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why then do you fan yourself? Although you understand that the nature of wind is permanent, Bouger replied, you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere. What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere? asked the monk again. The master just kept fanning himself, and the monk bowed deeply. So an equivalent for today is, let's see.

[05:29]

My friend had the heater going in her room because it was freezing cold. Someone came in and said, you're a Zen person. The nature of heat is permanent. You should go to a place where there is neither hot nor cold. Why do you have to keep the heater on? And so my friend said, what, are you nuts? And just kept sitting there enjoying the heat. And the other person said, oh, whoops. And... sorry, okay, I get it, and left. Okay, so that's an equivalent case in modern life. Actually, there are two different ends for this story.

[06:34]

In the Shobo Genzo, Genjo Koan, that we read, the ending of the story is like this, after the monk bows. Dogen makes the moral of the story. The actualization of the Buddha Dharma, the vital path of its correct transmission, is like this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you will understand neither permanence nor the nature of wind. The nature of wind is permanent. Because of that, the wind of the Buddha's house brings forth the gold of the earth and makes fragrant the cream of the long river. Isn't that pretty? In another version of the Shobogenzo, this is how the story ends. After the monk bows, this is an alternate version of the ending.

[07:39]

The master said... even if I have a thousand monks, what is the merit of monks if they don't have the actual function? That's like you saying to your friend, what are you kidding? Even if I had a thousand friends, what's the use of having a friend if they don't just function as a friend? And so... I wanted to know a little bit more about this Zen master, Bouger of Mount Mayu. And his name was Mayoku Hotetsu, actually. And he was known as Mayu because that's the place where he came from. So there's two stories. And these were quoted by Shohaku Okamura. And here are the stories. So one day, Mayoku and Rinzai were having a little Zen party.

[08:41]

Rinzai was the founder of Rinzai Zen. And a great Zen master. And he was actually a third generation student of the same teacher who Mayoku or Daoji was the student of. So Mayoku is asking Rinzai, The Bodhisattva of compassion has a thousand eyes. Which one is the true eye? So Rinzai grabbed Mayoku by the lapels and said, The Bodhisattva of compassion has a thousand eyes. Which one is the true eye? Speak! Speak! So he shook him and said, Speak! Now! So Mayoku... grabbed Rinzai by the hand and dragged him off his abbot seat and sat on it himself. And Rinzai stood up from the seat and said, how are you?

[09:48]

And Mayoku opened his mouth to answer and Rinzai grabbed him by the hand and pulled him off the seat and sat on it himself. So he sat back on his seat. And Mayoku walked out. So this is actually a very interesting story. It's not just two guys playing with each other. You know, they're playing with an understanding of what is compassion and how does it manifest. They didn't mess around. You notice this is not a long discussion. I'm not going to do this with anyone in the room, but, you know, boom, out of the chair. Boom! I'm sitting in the chair. It's like that. You can be pretty sure that they weren't being violent with each other. They were actually speaking about Zen. Here's another story about Mayoku as a teacher this time.

[10:54]

So this is years later. So there was another Dharma teacher, Riosui, who was one of Mayoku's students. This is many years later. And Riosui was a Dharma teacher, and he knew a lot about Zen. So he had studied very widely, and he was a very smart cookie. And so one day, Dharma teacher Riosui went to visit his teacher, Mayoku, or Baoju. So when Mayoku saw him coming, he picked up his rake and started to rake. I don't see you. So he wouldn't look at him. He would just rake. And then Riosui came closer, and Mayoku stopped raking and went back into his room and shut the door. So the next day, Riosui went to Mayoku's door and knocked.

[11:58]

And when Mayoku saw who it was, he shut the door again. But then, through the closed door, he said, Who is it? Who's there? Riosui said, Riosui. And as soon as his name passed his lips, he had a huge insight. And he exclaimed, Wow, my teachers didn't deceive me. teacher, teacher, if I hadn't come to see you, I would have been deluded by those sutras and commentaries for the rest of my life. Then Ryo Sui went home. And when he got back to his own temple, it was time to give a lecture much like this. And what he said to the monks was, well, everything you know, I know.

[13:02]

But what I know is You don't know. And then he stopped teaching for good and sent everyone away. So you can see there are this business of what do you know and how do you know it? What do you know and how do you know it about yourself is an important question in Zen. And so... It isn't any good to understand things intellectually without practicing them in this practice. And so what we do with these sittings and with this practice is, you know, the whole process is somewhat unknown to us in the beginning. And if we're any, if we are really studying, it's also unknown to us in the middle and at the end. And so what we do is look for teachers and friends, and we see what they do and try it out.

[14:10]

And so we stay. We keep being beginners. We're always beginners at what the world teaches us. So we always have to be willing to understand what the world teaches us, independent of what we do. think we know and what we think we don't know. Or as Suzuki Roshi put it, when you are you, Zen is Zen. So this you of when you are you, Zen is Zen, is independent of what we think we are, independent of how we define ourselves. It shines out brightly despite the ideas we have about ourself or the world. And it particularly is manifest in the cracks, in the spaces of what we don't know.

[15:11]

So usually life is more like the saying which is attributed to the Talmud. I don't really know if it is in the Talmud, but it is attributed to the Talmud. We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. Okay? So usually, how we are is a conglomeration of the habits of thinking and doing that we have. We have a fixed idea of what we are, and therefore we have a fixed idea of what the world is. But when we study, when we study For instance, the nature of wind by fanning, or the nature of heat by turning on a heater. The heater is just a heater. The fan is just a fan. The wind is just the wind, and we are just ourselves.

[16:14]

So when you are you, Zen is Zen, isn't a... I forget what that is, the word for when you say something that's completely obvious and... A tautology, thank you. It isn't a tautology. It is actually a kind of logic, however, that is Buddhist logic. Now, usually when we talk about unusual logics in Zen, we're talking about the logic of emptiness. So A is not A. Therefore, you know, A... A is not A, therefore A is A. So usually we're talking about something like, you know, this is not a stand. So it's a stand, I can sit on it. So it's usually some logic like that, which is the logic of emptiness.

[17:18]

But... The logic of the Lankavatara Sutra, which is more like when you are you, Zen is Zen. There's a sutra named the Lankavatara Sutra, the sutra of descending to Lanka, like Sri Lanka. Enlightenment arises in Sri Lanka. It's actually a sutra that's central to our school that's not talked about very much. not talked about very much in this building, I should say. People generally talk about other sutras, like the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra and the Lotus Sutra and a lot of other sutras are mentioned quite a bit. But I haven't heard anyone really speak about the Lankavatara Sutra in a long time. But the Lankavatara Sutra is the sutra that Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen in China,

[18:25]

brought with him from India to China. And in the Lankavatara Sutra, it's more like... It holds up A and not A at the same time, but doesn't return it back to A. So it's more like wood, not wood. Wood... not wood. It's more like that. And it leaves the contradiction intact. That because this is a stand, I really don't know what it is. Or because I don't know what this is, it's a stand. It just holds up both sides at the same time. And that's really important to know when you're doing something like washing dishes or sitting zazen, that it isn't what we think it is.

[19:29]

We can't necessarily say what it is. The only thing we can know about it is that it isn't what we think. I've recently had an experience of the importance of real life not being what I think. I've been practicing with some serious injuries. And I can speak about this because I'm familiar with this case. It's not that this is a special thing that's different from yours. So for instance, other people in the room have been practicing with sickness, with grief, with despair, with transition, with physical difficulties. Everyone has something. And do you know the feeling of dislocation that arises when you have something or something happens that's quite a change or quite different that you can't really define yourself with?

[20:35]

And yet you have to do the normal things and understand how to collect yourself again. This is one of the main feelings that Zen practice gives us equanimity for. it's given as a way to reduce our anxiety and difficulty and suffering with change, with sickness, with old age, and with death. So in one of my injuries, I was putting a quarter in a parking meter and a wall from a construction site suddenly fell on my head and back. and gave me a brain injury, and suddenly my world was different. And then in the second injury, I was almost healed from the first one when an SUV hit me, and I had multiple injuries and another brain injury.

[21:40]

So I have various symptoms that I deal with every day and that I'm working with to heal. And just to give you a feeling of everyday activity with traumatic brain injury, you know, how many people in the room drive? Okay, so, or ride a bike. Okay, so anyway, those are usual things that we do. But suddenly, let's say I wanted to drive somewhere with... traumatic brain injury, the first rule is don't. So suddenly I'm in this world of don't. So even, you know, quite some time later when I get tested and can drive again, it's still very difficult.

[22:41]

So then it becomes, first, don't drive unless no one can take you. Public transportation is too daunting. And only drive if it's absolutely necessary for survival or for healing. And then begin to make preparations. So get someone to help you back the car out of the garage or have them do it because you can't. Then have large mirrors to instead of the regular mirror, have a large mirror so that you can see more. Then, be willing to drive really, really slow with flashers. Be willing to reserve twice as long as you think it should take. Be willing to suddenly forget the route.

[23:43]

Be willing to stay in the right lane. Be willing to stop when your eyes begin to blur or when you get a headache or get dizzy or start to throw up. Be willing to leave the freeway or the street and sit down someplace for a long time. Be willing to do whatever is necessary to do. be willing to repeat this as many times as necessary. So what sustains that? What sustains it? What gets you there? Because persistence doesn't work. It doesn't. Just to say, I'm going to get there, doesn't work. And basically, if you think about stopping the pain, nothing stops the pain. But my experience is the only thing that works is settling the self on the self and letting the flower of the life force bloom.

[24:56]

This is Kategori Roshi's expression. He talked about this in relation to zazen, but there isn't any part of life that we can't sit with and find the life force, even driving with TBI. Okay. And the thing is that that's only one of the many injuries. You know, you could repeat this for a broken foot or that, you know, I'm just talking about my own injuries here or the surgery of this place or that place or any one of a number of other things. Or just fill in the blanks because I'm not talking about just myself here. I'm talking about, I'm taking myself as an example. But this is, for all of us and not just for me. But the point is, whenever you have something, and there's always something, there's always something in life that makes persistence or forcing or any strategy that we have not quite work and not quite be it.

[26:12]

There's always something like that. The thing is that you can take the inadequacy of our strategies and survival techniques in several different ways. I mean, one way is to suffer and say, oh, nothing's the way it should be. Oh, no. And I'm making light of it, but you can suffer as much as we can suffer. in so many different ways and so many different degrees, from mild annoyance to severe dislocation. But in practice, one of the ways to take suffering or inadequacy of our strategies is to see the virtue of The inadequacy is a crack where the light of life can shine.

[27:17]

So, for instance, with healing from traumatic brain injury, one of the things that pain gives is that you don't have the luxury of cheating yourself of any part of life. You can't live in a world where you prefer pleasure over pain, or you couldn't do normal things. You can't persist in delusions that pain and suffering are the same because they're not. And one of the advantages of something like that is that it's so present and it's so much a condition that it allows the greater questions about suffering to be addressed. So it can actually teach you happiness if you're willing to face it. So I highly recommend looking at the inadequacy and looking at the pain and sitting with the difficulty, not because it's fun, but because it's necessary.

[28:33]

And doing that will teach you something amazing, like fanning. So the teaching is in a difficult form. It's not in the easiest of forms. So you may want to start with something a little annoying instead of something profoundly difficult. Anyway, the healing process... I could say about 99% of the healing process, whether it's from an injury or from the gaping wound that is suffering in life, 99% of it comes from the fact that it's our nature. We're built to heal. When we remove the things that get in the way of healing, we heal.

[29:38]

So we can be mindful of those things that keep us from healing. And we can feed ourselves, feed the healing part of ourselves, the things that it needs to heal. You know, it's really interesting that one of the things that's interesting is how... how our ideas condition, our regular sense, our regular ideas condition our ideas about healing. So for instance, in the West, we have a very strong idea about objectivity. And so we think that doctors and healers or even our own inner doctor or our own inner healer is supposed to be objective. And we often think that, for instance, Sir William Osler, one of the founders of medicine, we think that he said that a doctor is supposed to be objective and can't be any other way or else they can't heal.

[30:53]

But what he really said was something quite different. The name of the essay in which he talked about that is actually called Equanimitas. Equanimitas. And what he said was, imperturbability means presence of mind under all circumstances, calmness amid storm, clearness of judgment in moments of grave peril, immobility and passiveness. Anyway, that's what he really said. And he did say that a doctor had to... had to maintain facial control. And I think that's where our idea about objectivity and neutrality come in. But actually, this imperturbability or calm, or as Suzuki Roshi put it, composure, means that the body and mind of...

[32:07]

the body and mind of healing is simply wide enough, deep enough, and stable enough to contain anything that arises. So I think I'd like to give you a sonnet of Shakespeare that talks about this. And Here it is. It's called Shakespeare's Fearful Meditation, according to this text where I found it. But here it is. They who have the power to hurt and will do none, that do not do the thing they most do show, who, moving others, are themselves as stone, unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow.

[33:11]

They rightly do inherit heaven's graces and husband nature's riches from expense. They are the lords and owners of their faces, others but stewards of their excellence. The summer flower is to the summer sweet, though to itself it only live and die. But if that flower with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity. For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. Okay. So, you know, on the surface, this is a poem about people who are unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow. Okay. being superior and others being inferior and let's not go there.

[34:15]

Okay? But the piece that I would actually like to work with is this. So just for a moment, take the part of you that is unmoved by the pain in your knees. And if it feels that an adjustment, not a fidget, but an adjustment is necessary, please make it. So an adjustment. And notice who's doing the adjustment, not a fidget, an adjustment. If it means taking your legs out of the zazen position, do that. If it means stretching them out, do that. Make that adjustment. Respect that. Meet that person who is practicing in an unmoved way.

[35:18]

So I'm asking you to meet that person here under these eyebrows, your eyebrows, not mine. You know, find that person's knees. I'm not asking you to just hold your knees rigidly in one place. I'm asking you to find the person who is unmoved by the torture of whatever is happening wherever it's happening and make the adjustment that that person says to make. And It means that you are the Lord and owner of your face or your knee or your healing or your suffering, healing from suffering. Not that you can control it, but that you can cultivate it. Anyway, that's what I think that is meant by the summer's flower to the summer's sweet.

[36:30]

That's what I think is meant by fanning. That's what I think is meant by sitting. We meet the sitter through sitting. So I've gone on too long, so thank you very much for your patience and your wisdom. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost, 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:16]

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