This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Welcome to Green Gulch. So this morning I want to begin my talk with a story about which appears from a classic text of the Theravadan tradition written in the 5th century by Buddha Gosha. The text is called The Path of Purification or the Vasudhimaga. Thus have I heard. While the Blessed One was living at Savati, it seems a certain deity came to him in the night in order to do away with his doubts and asked, Lord Buddha, the inner tangle and the outer tangle, This generation is entangled in a tangle. And so I ask of the Buddha this question.

[01:03]

Who succeeds in untangling this tangle? Well, last Friday, for a great many people in this world, the new year began. And not only the new year, but a renewed cycle of years. Last year was the year of the rat and this year the ox. Next year is the tiger, then the rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. So the word zodiac itself comes from a Greek word meaning the circle of animals. And in this case, these animals are named by their location on the East Asian lunar calendar. So as I began thinking about cycles of life with the arrival of the Chinese New Year, I did a little looking into the stories out of which these 12 zodiac animals are derived. And since I happened to have been born in 1948, a year of the rat, I was particularly interested in finding out a little bit about my own cosmic fate.

[02:13]

So to both my delight and horror, the story of how the 12 animals were chosen, with the rat being first, therein the delight, was not the kind of story I wanted to hear about my birth animal, and therein the horror. Well, here's the story anyway. This is from an ancient Chinese folk story called The Great Race, which tells how the Jade Emperor decreed that the years on the calendar would be named for each animal in the order that they reached him. However, to get to where the Emperor was seated, the animals would first have to cross a formidable river. The cat and the rat were not good at swimming, but they were both quite intelligent. So they decided that the best and the fastest way to cross the river was to hop on the back of the ox. Now the ox, being kind-hearted and naive, agreed to carry them both across. As the ox was about to reach the other side of the river, the rat pushed the cat into the water and then jumped off the ox and rushed.

[03:20]

the jade emperor thereby being named as the first animal of the zodiac calendar the ox had to settle for second place and the poor cat never made it to the emperor at all and ever since has been chasing after the rat as well as being dreadfully fearful of water therein the delight and the horror Well, as it turns out, what really interested me about this story was the opportunity to reflect on my Buddhist practice through the lens of yet another possible clue to my own identity. I've known for years that I am a Pisces by yet another system of cycles and that I was assigned from birth a female body, white skin, brown eyes, big feet, and an urge to hide from large crowds of people. In any given moment, those intersections of my personal and my social identity arise through me and as me, producing a rather dizzying array of behaviors and responses to where I am, who I think I am, and who I think is there with me.

[04:33]

I know that all of us have this same complex challenge in knowing who we are. as well as a challenge of finding for ourselves a reasonably safe passageway through this entanglement that we call our human life. And therein is this ancient Buddhist story that asks on behalf of us all, who can untangle this tangle? The reason I know about this story is that the very thing I did over 40 years ago now in endeavoring to get answers to my own big questions, such as, who am I? was to enter the portal of practice at the San Francisco Zen Center, which, without a doubt, added further layers to my already oversized ball of entanglements. So while I was thinking about today's talk, and in particular this question of identity and entanglement, I had an amusing image come into my mind of a playful kitten with a neatly wound ball of yarn. And although the yarn was tightly wound, it wasn't too long before the kitten...

[05:39]

began to unravel it. So I would say that that's a pretty good way of understanding how Zen practice works in meeting the challenge of the tangles. It unravels them playfully, persistently, and effectively from both inside and out, starting with the solid sense that we have of our own identity, of what I casually refer to as myself. This search for ourselves and for a truly authentic and satisfying result is at the core of the Buddha's teaching. I think most of you know by now the instruction from our Zen founder, Dogen Zenji, that to study the Buddha way is to study the self. The self we truly believe is there and that we are somehow, for good or ill, destined to protect and to be. And yet when another of our famous ancestors, Bodhidharma, was asked by another emperor of China, Emperor Wu, who are you facing me?

[06:42]

Bodhidharma said, don't know. And that was the truth. He no longer knew how to answer that question. And yet Bodhidharma, like all of us, certainly didn't start out his life unraveled. He started out with an identity, one that perhaps is impossible for any of us to even imagine. He was the third son of a Raja from a family of the warrior caste of South India. And it was believed that by his teacher, Prajnatara, that he was an incarnated sage. So, you know, not as grandiose as his, perhaps. We all have our own version of how and under what conditions we started out our lives. You know, me in a suburb of San Francisco, the daughter of a restaurant manager and a housewife. Where and how their parents got to San Francisco, I really don't know. What I do know is that my last name is German and that both of my parents spent time in an orphanage.

[07:43]

So when I was given the link to a conversation about identity and entanglements a few mornings ago by black women teachers at a conference called Black and Buddhist, I experienced a profound invitation to look more deeply at my own identity. and social conditioning. Their wisdom and fearlessness, their compassion and deep regard for the Buddhist teaching was profoundly encouraging to me as our own Zen community faces both outwardly and inwardly the latest and repeating rounds of social unrest centered on white racist ideology. One of the teachers, a founding member of the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, and a long-time Vipassana and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner by the name of Spring Washong, gave a truly thrilling talk about her own recent, inspired discoveries of the missing pieces of her practiced body, the missing limbs of her identity, which she has now found in relationship to being born Black in America.

[08:49]

Through that discovery, her lineage now includes, along with Shakyamuni Buddha, Ananda, and Bodhidharma, her African-American ancestors. Foremost among them for her as a black woman is the great liberator, Harriet Tubman, who we may yet see honored on the righteous side of the $20 bill. This imperative to know our own entangled history and to find in it some completion of our own embodied reality here and now is essential to the path of true liberation, not only for each of us as a person, an authentic person, but for all of us who are struggling to survive here together. Something we will not succeed in doing if we don't find a way to do it together. New year upon new year for thousands of new years to come. It's a well-known truth about spiritual practice that overcoming the stranglehold that an incorrect view of our self has on our lives

[09:53]

will not be possible until we have developed a healthy sense of who we are in this world, of where we come from, how we got here and what we are to do with what is left of this one precious life. Until we have explored ourselves through our own family histories, the struggles and the successes that brought us to this life and to this country, until we have done the work of healing those woundings of misshapen views of ourselves and of the world, Whatever we do in our spiritual practice will simply bypass the wholeness that is needed to truly let go into the wonder of it all. So whether now for you is the month of February 2021 or the month of February 4718 as numbered from the reign of the Yellow Emperor in the third millennia BCE or one of the many other possible choices that each human has, to mark their time and history as members of this species.

[10:56]

Now is the only time, and here is the only place from which we can begin, over and over again. So, with these thoughts of personal identity in mind, I want to now talk some about the teachings attributed to Bodhidharma, whose true story begins at the moment he fully unraveled from his own personal history to become... along with Shakyamuni Buddha, one of the great unravelers of the Buddhist tradition. So as I said, he was the third son of a Raja and a child of riches, which for him, even when very young, was the wrong kind of wealth to be valued. In a story about Bodhidharma that appears in a text called The Transmission of Light, we learn quite a bit about who Bodhidharma was born to be and who he became instead. What's really wonderful about the transmission of light is the emphasis in each story on that moment when the student has an awakening to their own true nature, no different than the true nature of reality itself.

[12:00]

You know, that aha moment when the clouds of delusion disperse and the bright moon of awakening, as if, suddenly appears. That moment is sometimes called satori in Japanese or kensho, referring to an experience of what we might simply call the true meaning of life. Ken means seeing and show means nature. So seeing one's true nature. And it was this experience that Bodhidharma came to China to reveal to his fellow humans so they too might enter, realize and awaken to reality. So along with his story from the transmission of light, I want to share a portion of a sermon that's attributed to Bodhidharma. And through these teachings, I'm hoping to give you a taste of how Zen practice and insight works to untangle the tangles. This tradition, this traditional story about Bodhidharma, albeit very likely mythical, says that he is our first Chinese ancestors and therefore a keystone to how we've come to understand the pathway of liberation in the Zen school, starting with this vow to live and learn and teach.

[13:15]

for the benefit of others, the bodhisattva vow. And this tradition teaches about itself through these stories of the ancestors, who like Bodhidharma, Shakyamuni, Mahatashapa, Mahapajapati, Nagarjuna, Dogen, Suzuki Roshi, and thousands of others gave all they had to sending the teachings downstream to the generations to follow. A tradition that has been transmitted from warm hand to warm hand and from face to face for over 2,500 years. The mythic side of Zen includes poetry and fables, legends, archetypes, and a great deal of magical thinking. The very means that we use when our own human babies are distressed and crying. We tell them stories and we read them fairy tales. Zen's mythology confidently names the succession of ancestors who are connected, if not by DNA or direct association, by love and commitment to the light of awakening.

[14:21]

So this is the title of Kezon's book, The Transmission of Light, The Light of Awakening, which does not differ among divisions of gender or race, wealth or intellect from the Buddha's very own. It's through the stories of these names and how they each got onto the Zen ancestor list that Zen further sets itself apart from other schools of Buddhism. Shakyamuni to Mahakashapa, Mahakashapa to Ananda, Prajnatara to Bodhidharma, Rujing to Dogenzenji, Shunryu Suzuki to all of us. So all of the efforts and insights that occurred in the many centuries following the Buddha's death have crystallized into narratives such as this one of Bodhidharma's life story and his primary teaching. So for those of you who aren't already familiar with the image of Bodhidharma, he is usually depicted as an ill-tempered, bearded, wide-eyed, non-Chinese called the blue-eyed barbarian.

[15:24]

Later on, as a result of the story of him spending nine years meditating in a cave, he also came to be known as the wall-gazing Brahmin. In this story from the Transmission of Light, we are introduced to Bodhidharma as a young prince who is meeting for the first time with his future teacher, Prajnatara. Prajnatara means the wisdom jewel. So as we listen in on this story, try to imagine the relationship that is taking place between a fully realized Dharma teacher and a young person with the potential for becoming his disciple. Prajnatara has come to pay a visit to the Raja. who has just gifted him with a priceless jewel. During the visit, Prajnatara, being a Zen teacher and all, asks the three young princes a question. Is there anything comparable to this jewel? To which the first and second sons respond, that jewel is the finest of precious stones.

[16:25]

There is certainly nothing better. But the third prince, Bodhidharma, replies, this is a worldly jewel. And finally, Prajnatara asks, Bodhidharma responds, is the greatest. So hearing this, Prajnatara knew that this young prince was quite special and predestined to transmit the truth. So once the young man had fully ripened, he would be sent by his teacher to China for the benefit of those whose hearts and minds were open to this teaching. So when you're asked this classic Zen question, why did Bodhidharma come from the West, you can truthfully answer because his teacher told him to go.

[17:33]

This story for me has a universal quality. You know, human children are given choices early on, which lead them either toward a greater curiosity about themselves and about the world, or leads them to a contracted worldview, a mindset, selfish, self-centered. The two older princes who will most likely inherit the kingdom are dazzled by material wealth as a measure of their personal value. Bodhidharma, advantaged by his lower ranking in the royal family, has already opened the aperture of his mind, the one and only gateway to liberation, the one and only thing that money, property, ranking, and education can't ever buy, an open heart and a clear mind. As the years go by and Bodhidharma matures as a human being and begins to teach, His widening sense of reality and of himself appears again and again in his devotion to the truth, a truth that thrives on kindness and generosity, on ethics and patience, that thrives on diversity, equity, inclusivity, and accessibility.

[18:50]

Many decades from this first meeting with Prajnatara, Bodhidharma keeps his promise to his teacher and travels by sea for three long years, to arrive in the south of China in the year 527. And so the story goes. Once in China, he encounters Emperor Wu and has what has become a famous encounter, which in our own time is the basis for testing Zen students as to their understanding of these challenging teachings and as to their own understanding of themselves in the light of Bodhidharma's awakening. This story is found in several collections of koans. as the first case in the Blue Cliff Record, and as here, the second case in the Book of Serenity. Emperor Wu of Liang asked great teacher Bodhidharma, what is the highest meaning of the holy truths? Bodhidharma said, empty, nothing holy. The emperor said, who are you facing me?

[19:55]

Bodhidharma said, don't know. The emperor didn't understand. Bodhidharma subsequently crossed the Yangtze River, came to Shaolin Temple, and faced a wall for nine years. Well, time went on, and after the nine years alone in a cave, Bodhidharma found his disciples and wrote a sermon, which has been passed down as one of the earliest examples of Zen teaching. It's called the Bloodstream Sermon. This teaching is the one that I think best reveals the role Zen language plays in untangling both the outer tangle and the inner tangle. And how? By calling us back to our true nature and our true home, the luminous mind of no abode, as Reb calls his Dharma temple here in nearby Mill Valley, the mind of no abode. So as you listen to this ancient teaching from 6th century China, Notice what surprises you in Bodhidharma's answers to the young monk, and try to find, if you can, a single thread that you might follow to untangle the tightly woven ball of your own personal identity.

[21:10]

Here's the book, and I thought you might want to see the picture of Bodhidharma there on the cover. He's headed back to his home in India, carrying... on a pole, I don't know if you can see that, a shoe. And when his burial ground was unearthed back in China, they found the other shoe. It's part of the story of our founding ancestor. The Bloodstream Sermon. Everything that appears in the three realms comes from the mind. Hence, Buddhas of the past and future teach mind to mind without bothering about definitions. A monk says, but if they don't define it, what do they mean by mind? Bodhidharma says, you ask, that's your mind. I answer, that's my mind. If I had no mind, how could I answer?

[22:15]

If you had no mind, how could you ask? That which asks is your mind. Through endless talpas, without beginning, whatever you do, wherever you are, that's your real mind, that's your real Buddha. This mind is the Buddha, says the same thing. Beyond this mind, you'll never find another Buddha. To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. The reality of your own self-nature... The absence of cause and effect is what's meant by mind. Your mind is nirvana. You might think you can find a Buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond the mind, but such a place doesn't exist. Trying to find a Buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space. Space has a name, but no form. It's not something you can pick up or put down, and you certainly can't grab it.

[23:17]

Beyond this mind, you will never see a Buddha. The Buddha is a product of your mind. Why look for a Buddha beyond this mind? Buddhas of the past and future only talk about this mind. The mind is the Buddha, and the Buddha is the mind. Beyond the mind, there's no Buddha. Beyond the Buddha, there's no mind. If you think there's a Buddha beyond the mind, well, where is he? Where is she? Where are they? There's no Buddha beyond the mind, so why envision one? You can't know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself. As long as you're enthralled by a lifeless form, you are not free. If you don't believe me, deceiving yourself won't help. It's not the Buddha's fault. People, though, are deluded. They're unaware that their own mind is the Buddha. Otherwise, they wouldn't look for a Buddha outside of mind. To find a Buddha, you have to see your nature.

[24:19]

Whoever sees their nature is a Buddha. If you don't see your nature, invoking Buddhas, reciting sutras, making offerings, and keeping precepts are all useless. Invoking Buddhas results in good karma. Reciting sutras results in a good memory. Keeping precepts results in a good rebirth. And making offerings results in future blessings. But no Buddha. So how was that for you? Did something surprise you about that teaching? Could you imagine a way to engage with these teachings that say that this very mind is Buddha? How do we work with that? In the Zen school, we begin by sitting down in an upright posture, if possible, under a tree. So now that I am nearing the end of my talk, I want to return to the story that I told in the beginning. Thus have I heard.

[25:21]

While the Blessed One was living at Savati, it seems that a certain deity came to him in the night in order to do away with his doubts and asked, Lord Buddha, the inner tangle and the outer tangle. This generation is entangled in a tangle. And so I ask of the Buddha this question, who succeeds in untangling this tangle? To which the Lord Buddha replies, When a wise person established in virtue develops concentration and understanding, then as one who is ardent and wise, they succeed in untangling this tangle. So the good news is that there is a way to untangle ourselves and our views of the world through the practices that brought relief and freedom to many serious seekers of the past. To Shakyamuni Buddha himself during his six long years in the forest. his seven long days under a tree, his 45 years of teaching others, and his peaceful rest in the company of his family and his students who dearly loved him.

[26:28]

To Bodhidharma, through his devotion to his father, his teacher, and his task. These are all examples of selflessness. In other words, of offering the realization of their being no abiding self, no matter how well constructed. of there being no permanent objects, no matter how carefully made, and of suffering, without complaint. Why me? No me. We all long to be free of the kinds of bondage that have been forged by human greed, hatred, and delusion, such as the stories of the Black Buddhist teachers who I heard talk about their own lineage and about the Black Moses named Harriet Tubman. after which my partner and I watched a recent film by that name, Harriet. I highly recommend it. We may never find a more true-hearted and selfless example in our modern era than her, determined to find freedom for herself and her family and for anyone else equally determined to be free from enslavement as she was.

[27:33]

There is no comparison between my life and privilege and the life of a woman slave in America. And yet I too... have longed to be free from my own conditioning as both a woman and as a delusional human being, but I can't become free without the freedom of my partners. As Spring Washam wisely said, without the oppressed, the oppressor has no one to dance with. Her obvious joy at ending the mind-made traps allowing for her liberation is a great encouragement to me, and I hope for all of you as well. We must free ourselves and one another as the only assignment left for us before leaving on the one-way ticket for home. I told my friends the other day that I had a brief image of a womb of light as I was sitting in the Zendo the other morning. The light of this precious sun-drenched planet into which I and all of you have been born. I saw how having been born into the womb of light together with all of you,

[28:39]

and this is the part that made me laugh, makes us womb mates. Something about seeing that and feeling that was so deeply loving and joyful. Seeing this world as if for the first time as a brief and miraculous illumination to which there will be no return. Joy and sorrow are the conjoined twins of the Buddha's profound wisdom. Without love, no loss. Without joy, no sorrow. Without darkness, no light. Without you, no me. And without beginnings, no endings, which is where I am right now. Thank you very much for your kind attention. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. 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 sfcc.org and click Giving.

[29:45]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[29:48]

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