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. Good morning, everybody. It's my Dharma family in the room. Abbott David and Tonto Nancy. I want to thank you for inviting me to speak to address the assembly. Thank you so much. And I want to honor you who are here. I mean, I see people who I have known for my entire adult life, like senior Dharma teacher Paul, for my practice life, like Jose. We were at Tassajara together about a million years ago.

[01:04]

Like my first student, Don, who taught me how to teach. And to my current Dharma family, my Jiko Benjamin, who cannot be here to hold the incense or flowers and so on. And I want to thank you for being here online as you have been for the last year and a half. Or for coming here today, maybe for the first time. Now, I want to say that I haven't been feeling well and have an emergency. I will ask Abbott David and Tonto Nancy. To, you know, just take up some discussion if I have to have a brief absence.

[02:09]

So thank you for being with. Thanks, everybody, for being with me in this state. So today I want to talk about something important. And important and urgent. So there are things that are unimportant. There are things that are important but not urgent. There are things that are urgent but not important. And there are things that are important and urgent. And what I want to talk about today is important and urgent, but also if we rush with it, it won't get properly done. And that is practice. Okay, so practice is important and urgent, and if we rush or if we don't do it, it won't get properly done.

[03:11]

And that just seems so simple and stupid to say, so simplistic. So, like, why would anybody even say that? I want to say it because it's a feature of our life of studying the human condition that we sometimes tend to ignore or spiritually bypass. So sometimes we don't practice or we don't do what we have to do because it seems like other things are more urgent or more important than doing this. doing what we have to do. And it's also hard to discern what we have to do. A lot of times it's hard to discern what we must do, what we must do. Starting when I was ordained in January of 1982, I've been visiting people who are sick or dying, and they're

[04:28]

Two things that they want. I sometimes say, well, what is it that you wish for right now? What is it that you need right now? And the first thing that most people say is an ordinary day. I want to walk the dog. I want to go shopping. I want to run the vacuum cleaner. I want to darn my socks. I want to play with my grandkids. or have an ordinary day with my significant other. So they'll say things like that. And the other thing that they'll say is, you know, I never realized what was important until today. So many other things seemed important. I never realized what was really important. So I want to talk about realizing what's important and urgent as the fourth turning of the Dharma wheel.

[05:39]

Okay, I think I better explain what the turnings of the Dharma wheel are. Excuse me, for some people this is a repetition because you've been taking flu's class and you've been studying this in other ways. I hope it's okay with you if I just quickly go over what the turnings of the Dharma wheel are and why I am saying that doing what's urgent and important might end up being the fourth turning. So you all know the story of the Buddha and how the Buddha realized that the human condition was the most important. that he needed to study, practice, and fathom in this life to help himself and to help everybody else. The Buddha had been kept away from all kind of suffering and distress.

[06:43]

He was a child of privilege. And the idea was that he was going to be a king. His parents did not want him or his father... And stepmother did not want him to be a great sage, which was the other possibility, according to the astrologers. They wanted him to be a king. So as a sheltered young boy or young man coming into manhood, he saw a sick person on the street. He saw an old person on the street. He saw a dying person on the street. And then he saw a monk on the street. And so the first three, he asked about, does this happen to everybody? And the answer came back, yes. Ordinary people understood this, but he hadn't yet understood this. And then he saw a monk and realized that there were people who were interested in fathoming the nature of human life.

[07:54]

So he did. And after a lot of trials and tribulations and mistakes, he realized awakening and brought forth the first turning of the wheel at Deer Park in Sarna. There's a wonderful stupa there that shows where this happened. And so he realized that the basis of suffering is that when we think that when we identify with what's not self when we rely on what's impermanent and when we're when we fantasize about what's real that inevitably will suffer and that this happens all the time because that's what people do and not only it's is it what people do it's how we're built So we're genetically programmed, and our senses are programmed to do this.

[09:00]

And so at that time, he taught the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and he began the teachings which would later be collected as sutras or direct teachings, as Abhidharma or the teachings about psychology and perception and karma. and how we transcended. And what would be known as the Vinaya were the rules for how monastics and practitioners needed to live together and function in the world. So he deconstructed the self, that was the first turning of the wheel, and deconstructed the idea of permanence, deconstructed the idea of reality, and left these teachings. which people then started to practice, first turning. But over time, people being what we are, even those teachings got reified and turned into doctrines.

[10:03]

And so the second turning of the wheel is given in the Heart Sutra that's chanted in temples every day, which deconstructs the deconstruction. Okay? and says that all of those things, that all of those categories into which human existence and the world were divided for the purpose of not thinking of them as the self, as permanent or as real, that all of those things are actually Shunya. So the English translation of Shunya is empty, but maybe a better translation of Shunya is full, full of potential. full of not knowing, full of the opportunity for curiosity rather than empty, which we have connotations of voidness when we think of the word empty, but emptied out of own being, emptied out of permanence, emptied out of reality.

[11:08]

So the medicine is also, you know, nothing to be kind of held onto and relied on or thought of as permanent or real. And we say that in the Heart Sutra every day. But over time, the teachings, the original teachings, began to be distorted. The original teachings about the deconstructions of the self and everything began to be distorted. And people began to have disagreements about them. Some of those disagreements lasted for thousands of years. And so the third turning of the wheel came into being, which was supposed to be a definitive analysis of what's real, what's true, what's permanent, what is the self. And it's taught in a sutra called the Sandhinyamochana Sutra. The school that teaches about it is called Yogacara.

[12:11]

And it introduced new ways of thinking about the self and how the self comes into being as a functional entity like we need a self to function in the world but we can't rely on it too much so needing it and having it is called conventional truth not relying on it or having it be A Dharma gate for inquiry or study is called ultimate truth, that ability that there's always more than what we think or who we are, always more than that. And then the ability to act appropriately or respond appropriately to the world is called skillful truth. So those are three truths.

[13:14]

I would not necessarily call them truths. I would call them reality or spheres, realities or spheres. You can call them truth, but that might sound like it's either true or false. But I more think of them as spheres in which we operate, in which we can function. for the development of our own heart and mind, and to help the people who we're with. So I think of ultimate, relative, and skillful as arenas of Dharma functioning. And so it's really, really important to understand that I'm not denying that the validity of any of the teachings. As a matter of fact, I rely on the validity of the teachings.

[14:17]

But I also feel like the teachings have to keep developing and questioning themselves, ourselves, or they'll become dead. We need to keep the teachings alive. So it's not like Tinkerbell, where we can keep them alive just by clapping. We need to keep them alive by clapping. applying them to our own experience and seeing if they're true, applying them accurately. So not kind of just giving ourselves a Cliff Notes version and applying that, but actually studying the real teachings so much that they come out of our ears and our fingertips. And then applying them to our lives and seeing if they're really true or not true in our own lives. And then through the process of actually testing out those teachings to allow them to inform our heart as well as our mind, to inform our emotional lives and how we are.

[15:30]

Keith, am I speaking okay? Keith? Can you... Is it coming across in the transcript? Give me a chat if it isn't, okay? So what I want to say is that we've got a problem in that when Buddhism got transmitted to the West, it got transmitted to people who already had all of our own different habits of thought and habits of action, individually, interpersonally, collectively, and structurally. And these individual, interpersonal, collective, and systemic spheres that the Dharma got transmitted into are actually selves for us.

[16:37]

Their selves and their sticky-like ideas of self that we would glom onto. And like, I'm a this, I'm not a that. Don't talk to me that way. I'm this way, not that way. Don't even go there with me. It shows an assumption that the self is real. It's a defense. Whereas the Dharma teaches us to have boundaries between ourselves and others, not defenses. Not defenses that push out what we don't think is us, but boundaries of, okay, let's see, I have this heritage or this history, so when you speak to me this way, it hurts me. Would you please know that about me and use your... use your discernment or discretion, knowing that I'm vulnerable in this particular place.

[17:42]

So that's the difference between a defense and a boundary, which we can have at any level. And in the West, we tend to have focused on the individual defenses a lot more than we focused on interpersonal, institutional, systemic, or cultural defenses. But right now during COVID, when everything's raw and being exposed, is a time when our institutional, our systemic, our cultural defenses are being exposed. And particularly the defenses against people who have, against systems that have means to uphold those defenses are being exposed. OK, so I could say more about that or try to prove my point, but I'm not going to.

[18:44]

I'm just going to put that out there, even though it's an unsubstantiated statement. So please feel free to challenge it because, you know, I could be completely wrong. OK. So what I propose is the fourth turning. It comes from. a restatement of that problem of defense. To say that, and I want to go all the way back to one of the Buddha's original Vinaya teachings about Parajaka offenses. So there are various levels of offenses in the Vinaya, which was the rule for how monks live together and practice. So the Vinaya set a container in which the the individual practitioner wouldn't have to worry about the ethics of their daily life. Daily life was based on gratitude or offering, and daily life was based on receiving, giving, and kindness.

[19:51]

And daily life was also based on the progressive ability to concentrate and realize the truth of human existence. And how to deal with it, what to do about it. And so there were various levels of offenses. And how the Buddha dealt with them was by having people get together every two weeks and talk about their rules. And how they had either omitted or offended against those particular boundaries that the community had set. So that's how the Buddha dealt with it. So there were special rules for women, which I hope over time we can examine this in our tradition and so on. Many special rules for women based on the culture of the time. But basically that was the practice every two weeks. And we still do this. We still do this upasata ceremony.

[20:55]

We do this... as Riyaka Fusats or the full moon ceremony that we do once a month where we say the Bodhisattva precepts, the Bodhisattva precepts are the kind of condensed version of the precepts that was established about a thousand years ago that we transmit and follow today and we support each other to follow them. And all of San Francisco Zen Center and its 70-odd affiliated groups are organized not only around Zazen but around the precepts so that we can all support each other worldwide to care about, for instance, whether we're really taking refuge in awakeness or something else, for instance, whether we're really committed to not harming.

[21:55]

or whether we aren't. So we do this every two weeks. But there were some offenses called parajika, which means completely defeated. They make the person who commits those offenses completely defeated, which means that that person, has to disrobe, and can't be a monastic anymore with the community. So there's parajaka offenses. And so when we think about those offenses in today's world, we generally focus on the three most dramatic ones for us, which are murder, stealing, and sexual practices. So those are the ones that people mostly remember. But there's a fourth parajaka offense.

[22:56]

And that is to falsely claim insight that you don't have. Okay? And fortunately for us, because, you know, I just want to say that every time I open my mouth to give a Dharma talk, I realize that I'm wearing this robe. So it means that a lot of people think that a person wearing a robe, particularly a brown robe, particularly if they have like a little implement of some sort, is stating that they're an enlightened teacher. That would be making a false claim. No one is enlightened in that way. Completely enlightened. And yet we have ideals about enlightenment. And the wearing of the robe and the sitting on the Dharma seat equates you with someone who knows a Buddha.

[24:01]

And even some of our ceremonies say, like when you ordain someone, there's this little statement, this last bit of hair is called the shura. Only a Buddha can cut it off. Now I'm going to cut it off. Will you allow me to cut it off? And the person responds, yes. which means you're standing as Buddha to that person, or you're accepting this other person in the role of Buddha. They're very, very easy to guam on to that in an idealistic way. And a lot of San Francisco Zen Center suffering in the past has been because young people idealized a teacher. And then when they turned out to have human flaws, they could, you know, There was no feedback until it got so egregious as to split off the relationship and, you know, kill it off entirely. So I'm not saying that that was true of everybody, but I am saying that an immature teacher-student situation is one in which there is no possibility of feedback about real issues.

[25:19]

But the realist issue that wearing the robe and giving a Dharma talk brings up is that there's the implication that there's someone sitting in that seat who is awake, who is a Buddha, to all the listeners who are doing this. And so, you know, as a teacher, I constantly have to consider that and what will normalize. me as a human being so that horizontal transmission is also possible because without the understanding that we're all humans together, that trust of taking that seat of Buddha is invalid and false. Unless we know we're human, we can't actually be teacher and student. Unless my student can actually say, you are wrong. and have us talk about it.

[26:22]

It's not a real relationship. It doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong. I'm not saying that. That doesn't matter at all. So in some sense, if I actually know that I'm making a false statement and I continue to make it and don't question it, then it's a parajika offense. And it means I invalidate my Dharma position. I invalidate myself as a person among people expressing the Dharma, as a teacher among students expressing the Dharma, if I abuse that idealistic trust in that way. Suzuki Roshi said, don't destroy their beautiful dream. And so this means a lot to me.

[27:24]

But what's so interesting is that at that time they didn't have, at that time in the vineyard, it didn't say, but at this time, probably in the United States, we need a statement of what knowing or not knowing is. So have you heard the statement by James Baldwin? Innocence does not absolve you of the crime. Innocence is the crime. He was talking about racism. So when you have people saying, that's racist, or you're not awake, you act that way towards me, towards this whole group of people. And that's called then you know. If you don't know, if you don't actually hear that feedback, you can't say you don't know.

[28:34]

Do you know what I mean? You've been told. That information has come to you from someone else. That is called denial. So that's what... We don't have a rule about. We don't have a rule that if a whole group of people gives an institution or a group of people or, you know, anyone real feedback about something as important as, but you're hurting me or you're killing me. And the person continues to say, no, I'm not killing you. This is good for you. I'm enlightened. Listen. that that is assuming a Dharma authority that we don't actually have. So what I'm saying is that the fourth turning of the Dharma wheel is about impact, is about history, is about power.

[29:35]

That to see those topics in light of both the first turning and the second turning and to actually hold the three spheres of the third turning in relation to topics, I shouldn't say topics, in relation to the dynamics of giving and receiving feedback. Maybe the fourth turning that the United States of America has You know, France, Great Britain, South America, Mexico, you know, the countries, the many countries who are receiving the Dharma within the past 50 years in the majority view, because the Dharma has been with those countries for many, many years in the immigrant view.

[30:44]

You know, this may be the fourth turning of the wheel. And actually, this view of what the fourth turning of the wheel might be, that goes with what many of the Tibetan lineages think the fourth turning is. They think the fourth turning is the Vajrayana. So I want to know, why is this important? And I want to go back to a conflict in China. A long time ago, there was a conflict in China between the northern school and the southern school, which you can read about in a book called the Platform Sutra. Okay, so there was a monk called Shen Xiu, who's a stand-in for the gradual school. And then there's a monk called Wei Neng, who's a stand-in for the southern school. And Huinang ended up being our ancestor, the sudden school.

[31:52]

It ended up being our ancestor. And of course, all the different dharmas go back and forth forever. And even on our lineage papers, it's very clear that the transmissions of many schools come together as our transmission. And it even says, this is the main point. It's exactly the same main point in this school, this school and this school. And now it's your main point. So our lineage documents say this. OK, so that's that's clear. But I want to say that we've retained a I believe that we've retained a practical bias towards sudden awakening. And. This. So I won't go through the whole story of the. It's like an origin myth of, it's one of the origin myths of our particular lineage. And I won't go through the whole story except that I think that we may have retained some of the kind of cultural and practical biases of that particular point of view.

[33:03]

And we may be kind of devaluing historicity, history, karma, and so on. There's something really wonderful about being ordained and receiving a Dharma name. It's incredible. But what about the names that our parents gave us? Do we just dump them? So that's a, it's a question. There's something wonderful and interesting about seeing through our suffering. It's incredible. It's a real relief. But what about our suffering and the people are suffering? The people who our suffering is involved with. What about that? You know, how do we express the entire truth of who we are? Where is the skill? So I do want to say that this particular dichotomy isn't just the property of the Chinese.

[34:07]

It goes all the way back to the very beginnings of Buddhism. So if you read a book called the Abhidharmakosha Bhasyam of Vasubandhu, there's this whole discussion about, well, you know, if there isn't a self, what carries causality? What allows you, who gets enlightened? If there isn't a self, who gets enlightened? There's a whole huge discussion about it. You know, I could talk for like three years on this particular dichotomy. what it means for us, body, speech, and mind. But I want to say that the people who won out in that book, the Abhidharma Koshabashyam, represents the teachings of the North Indians who had a dialogue in Nalanda University for a thousand years before the political climate of North India changed drastically with invasion and drought.

[35:11]

So the Sarvastavadhanes explained causality kind of descriptively and not prescriptively. But one of the things that the Sarvastavadhanes did was to say that there is a kind of... It's not exactly a selfhood, but a kind of a kind of suchness, a suchness of each dharma or element of experience. Each atom of experience has its own suchness. So they did say this. But there was a group of people called the Sotrantikas, whose descendants are the Theravadans of today, the Vipassana lineage. who said that the dharmas don't have own being, that the character of moments of experience only occurs for as long as they're with us, not while they're forming and not while they're going away.

[36:31]

So there was this huge disagreement that people tried explaining it all sorts of ways. And they try to explain what carries the causes of suffering, what carries the causes of awakening if there's no self. How does that happen? And so there's a lot of highly technical explanations for that. Are you with me? Is it okay? But I want to un-technify it. I want to un-technify it and just say... the concept of Dharma or atoms of experience that both schools came up with has to do with the now, has to do with living in the now and noticing the complexity of experience that arises now. We can never really notice what happens now. We can only, our noticing happens later, a little teeny bit later, but later.

[37:34]

So we can't really notice or experience what's happening now, only what's We can only say what's happened 16th of a second or so after it's happened. Okay? In all of the practices that we have. And that's called wisdom. But Zen practice emphasizes another side of practice as well. And it's not that the other schools don't emphasize it, but we emphasize it very strongly. It's even in the name of one of the old names of our school and our main practice. So we also emphasize, besides wisdom, we also emphasize compassion. So I looked up compassion, okay? And I found out that we have this word karuna for compassion, but there's also a word kripa for compassion.

[38:39]

And what is the root of that word? It's kri in Sanskrit. Kri is an interesting word because it's also the root of the word karma, which means action. But it's also the root of the word krama. Krama means steps, stages. The order, the manner, or the progression. So krama means gradual. Karma means action and history and its effects. Krama means steps, order, manner, or progress. Okay, in other words, gradualness. Krita means done. Krita is what has to be done. Krita means grateful. So when we know how something was done. We are grateful when we acknowledge how it comes to us.

[39:43]

Kripa is compassion. And so what I want to say, but I'm not going to blam onto it too much, is that the Dharma side is wisdom. The karma side is compassion. And that we need to understand that our compassion, links us with what has been done and what its results were, how it's been received, and that when we don't receive something, our wisdom is partial and our teaching is false to that extent. And when wisdom and compassion unite, when dharma and karma unite, then the teaching is alive.

[40:46]

Then we can acknowledge how it comes to us. We can acknowledge and work with impact. And we can proceed on the path in a grounded and effective way. So I think that that's where I want to go. I do want to just mention a couple of stories that were sayings, but I'll just mention them and not blab on about them. So some references. I want to just mention Ehe Dogen, the founder of our school's teaching, which he was commenting on a phrase that said, beings have Buddha nature. And his statement in response was all beings, whole being, Buddha nature.

[41:49]

So that's all beings, horizontal in space. Okay? So that's about Buddha nature, Bhusha. And So what if karma were like that too? All times, whole time, Buddha nature. All impacts, whole impact, Buddha nature. All communication, whole communication, Buddha nature. All history, whole history, Buddha nature. So a monk asked Joujo, All things return to the one. What does the one return to? Zhao Zhao. When I was in Qingzhou, I made a cloth shirt. It weighed seven pounds.

[42:52]

Okay. Thanks. 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.

[43:23]

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