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. Thank you, Mako, for inviting me to talk. Thank you to my teacher, Paul Haller, for his guidance. Thank you. And thank you to all of you for coming to Tassajara and being here together. I was invited to speak on the Paramitas on the fourth day of Sishin. And it's very much with Sishin mind that I speak today.

[01:00]

What does it feel like to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words? People usually think of the Buddha when they hear Tathagata. I'd like to explore the Tathagata's meaning differently from another direction in the sense of the Tathagata Garba, which is the womb, the womb of the thus-come, also known as the womb of emptiness. I don't assume that there aren't other people in this room who have born a child.

[02:09]

When I bore a child, I was quite young and without resources and living in a culture and time before doulas. Jane Fonda's workout book was pretty much the resource that I had. If there's not a cultural support for pregnancy, there's so many ways that you can say, and no one ever tells you that. You've heard parents say that even today, probably. A good one is, I never knew I could love anybody so much, even though they're married. So it is really quite a phenomenon. What also stands out for me as the thing nobody tells you is that the uterus, which is such a small, delicate thing, you'd see it in pictures and it's like this flowerly little vase or something.

[03:19]

It's actually a giant muscle you never heard of or felt. And it has the strength of 10,000 horses. Your mind has no relationship to it at all. You can direct your attention towards its assistance but this one muscle is the true boss of everything. We all have a womb of emptiness and it's a muscle with the strength of 10,000 horses. It may well be that people come to Tassajara with gaining ideas, but that's not who the real boss is at all. An emptiness muscle with the strength of 10,000 horses is what brought each one of you here. When I was a child, I experienced the womb muscle of emptiness many times.

[04:29]

It's part of being a human being. And if we're lucky, we're born into a culture that knows of it. I wasn't so lucky and was born into a culture of ignorance. And so as a child, I would experience the vastness of the universe and then it would go away. And, you know, you couldn't really ask, where did it go? There was no way to do that. So Buddhism provides us the training for us to feel this muscle, this womb of emptiness, and to develop it. Shantadeva writes, by building up the imprint of emptiness, the imprint of existence is diminished. This imprint is muscle memory.

[05:30]

There's a process of unbinding the self that we can engage in, remembering, developing our muscle of emptiness. And the Tathagata actually speaks to us from this awareness. What came up for me in kind of wandering through and waiting for something to land as I'm wanting to discuss the paramitas in a way that's really grounded in our practice as we're doing it now. And I'll say when I was coming here and I got my sutra book cover, the book that was in it was No Time to Lose by Pema Trojan. We have so many wonderful reminders I found Bodhidharma.

[06:46]

A scanty passage. It doesn't say much. And what appeals to me is that he says so little but there's a deep practice in what he's offering. And so I thought I'd just give it a try. Here's Bodhidharma. Cultivating... The paramitas means purifying the six senses by overcoming the six thieves. Casting out the thief of the eye by abandoning the visual world is generosity. Keeping out the thief of the ear by not listening to sound is morality. Humbling the thief of the nose by equating smells as neutral is patience. Controlling the thief of the mouth by conquering desires to taste, praise, and explain is devotion.

[07:46]

Quelling the thief of the body by remaining unmoved by sensations of touch is meditation. And taming the thief of the mind by not yielding to delusions but practicing wakefulness is wisdom. When Avalokiteshvara clearly saw that all five advocates are empty, it's the self that is empty. Bodhidharma's brief statements are actually practices of self-examination and the unbinding of the self. The aggregates are otherwise known as clinging aggregates. Bodhidharma here is referring to the third aggregate, which is recognition, perception or consciousness. Sana's way of grasping is to form a concept. Bodhidharma offers the paramitas as practices that will redeem the senses such that what is unwholesome becomes wholesome.

[08:54]

Casting out the thief of the eye by abandoning the visual world is generosity. Vision is the first. Form is the first. And generosity is the first. How does this play out? Here's a description of the functioning of vision in our grasping. Visual consciousness arises on account of visual forms, and the eye, the meeting of these three, is contact. On account of contact, there is a sensation. What one senses as a sensation, one recognizes. What one recognizes, one then thinks about. What one thinks about, one is obsessed with. What obsesses one is the cause of the number of obsessions which assail a person with regard to past, present or future visual forms cognizable by the eye.

[10:12]

You can repeat this as is so often done in the Buddha's teachings for each of the senses. A helpful explanation of rupa or form is that it's like when you look off into the distance and you see far down the road the speck of a person. The danger of the visual form, person, is that it usually leads to some kind of objectification and obsession. It matters that we sit with our eyes cast down and a soft gaze and facing the wall. This is a practice of abandoning rupa. A long time ago, I asked my teacher if I could sit a solo sasheen with her to initiate my sasheen practice with her before I went off to other centers who could provide them on a regular basis. And so I did this, sitting zazen for a week by myself in a large brick building,

[11:20]

It had been a train turnaround station in the 19th century and so the ceilings were high, the walls expansive. I was also the Doan and my body became the clock. My body became coextensive with the brick walls. Everything was presencing together in this materiality and I was so completely contented. I thoroughly understood how someone could do this for years at a time. The explanation of rupa as the person we see in the distance, and that this is a fundamental problem for us, reminds me of what Suzuki Roshi said about providing a wide pasture. Often people emphasize the spaciousness of the pasture as a tolerance for unruly behaviors but its value for me is in the description of our own liberation and maybe it's more like facing the wall.

[12:26]

This is what facing the wall means to me. Vision and people have become unbound and free in the all-presencing of suchness and it is vast. Because of this practice, when we are gathered at work circle, everyone is sparkling in the suchness of just being who they are in the universe. Generosity is facing the wall, bestowing and bestowed. Like returning to the breath, we can return to the wall, softening the gaze, allowing peripheral vision. And if our mind loses this continuous contact, if we can feel our grasping mind just come back to the wall. Keeping out the thief of the ear by not listening to sound is morality.

[13:30]

We have do not play or listen to music in our shingi. It's not emphasized as a practice so much as a rule. This is how it lands on my usually when it comes up. In zazen, the sounds of the environment are crucial as what Suzuki Roshi called letters from emptiness. The song of the canyon run is my very own body returning to the present sing moment. The lesson in this is that what is actually occurring in the soundscape without my interest or manipulation is the door of freedom from selfing. The remoteness of the wilderness is the soundscape of our training ground. I've brought people to the top of the mountain so they can hear the profound silence of mountains and valleys. And the response was, this is the seventh day of Sesshin.

[14:37]

When we chant Kansayan in the morning, chanting with our ears, entering the mind of one body, notable is the minute of silence afterwards. Filled with an energy of quiet, a silence that has its own deepening of sound. In Rinzai, they speak of this quite deliberately as cultivating joriki, an energy that is palpable in silence. I've experienced something like this happening in the realm of conventional moral loyalty as well. Here at Tassajara and in argument with a friend, in meeting to talk about it, we agreed to apologize to each other beforehand and then again afterwards, just to see if anything happened between one moment and the next. And so we began by apologizing to one another, one after the other, each apologizing in the limited way that it was possible to say at that time.

[15:52]

At the end of our conversation, a real drilling down into the differences of our narratives and perspectives, you might think there would be a more elaborate and specific apology, as though we would get it right or do it better this time with words. But that's not what happened. We simply turned towards each other and said, I'm sorry, saying those two words completely, speaking through our own suffering and the harm we had caused. Nothing else needed to be said. Connection and care instantly drops away all the othering that a tangle of words so easily renders. Having each other, hearing each other in the silence that's there in the midst of causes and conditions is awakening to belonging. Humbling the thief of the nose by equating smells as neutral is patience.

[17:09]

Our nose is instinctively trained to protect our life by making things smell bad so we won't eat them and die. This is natural and very practical. However, our ego will move into just about everything. We have in our Shingi to refrain from wearing scents in the Zendo, not because of people's allergies, more that adding to the scent environment is an adornment that actually takes up a lot of space. In general, it's good training that the only fragrance is an offering to the Buddha. Making an offering is a rich and complex engagement with practice. And with this in mind, it's often said in our tradition, before making an offering, bowing or chanting Buddha's name, you need to sit zazen. We speak of refinements in our ritual practice, but it can be understood from a Buddhist understanding of Zen training as coarse when we speak of refinements in this way.

[18:27]

What's more refined is the overcoming of dualities such as sacred and profane. Many of you are familiar with the ancient teaching of practicing with what is unpleasant, neutral, unpleasant. And with stories of bodhisattvas who will carry a mangy dog covered in pus and maggots for miles on end. In the Zen tradition, we clean the toilets and in our literature, this is where we get the language of shit sticks and rat turds in the soup. I'm reminded of a video I saw way back when YouTube was new and people in the Zen world were passing around Dharma talks as novelty items in the new world of technology.

[19:33]

In this video, the teacher was describing how crucial it is to examine your own suffering. And in Shanti Deva, we read quite a bit about the importance of practicing with our anger in the cultivation of patience. But there's more to it than that. In the video, the teacher started to make soup using cooking gestures that poured blood and... and bile and turds into the soup pot. And as he spoke, he described them, their vileness and their poison. And then he poured a serving into a bowl and he raised the bowl. And this is a YouTube video, right? So teachers buy themselves and they're offering this bowl to the universe. And he's shouting, you have to drink your stinky soup.

[20:44]

In somatic experiencing therapy, I discovered that this deep tasting has its own grace and beauty, the strength of 10,000 horses. controlling the thief of the mouth by conquering desires to taste, praise, and explain is devotion. When I was an art historian, I was a master, an expert of tasting, praising, and explaining. That's the gig.

[21:53]

And it was in that gig that I started coming to the Zendo. I would come every morning. I would come every night. It just came and came and came. And the teacher and I often were the only two people, you know, in a small Zen Center. Even if your hours are every morning and every night, or maybe because your hours are every morning and every night, there are going to be times when you're by yourself. So there would be, and one morning she turned to me and she said, Sometimes when I'm by myself, when bowing the first time, I say, I give my life to Buddha. And the second time I say, I give my life to Dharma. And the third time I say, I give my life to Sangha.

[22:58]

And then she said, will you say these words aloud with me? And so we bowed together. And as I said the words, I give my life to Buddha, It was happening. I was giving my complete entire life to Buddha as thou, and there was no taking it back. In the Maha Paranirvana Sutra, it says that thoroughly practicing the paramitas is extending the lives of others. Giving your life to Buddha is extending the lives of others. That's energy. That's some kind of energy. Rather than doing the bowing, we can actually be bowed in the energy of this. This can happen in anything we do. We can be bowed in our energy by a pot of soup, a dustpan, or to a person.

[24:08]

You yourself might be able to recall a time when the warmest, kindest words that came from you came because you were bowed. Kind speech is bowing. Quelling the thief of the body by remaining unmoved by sensations of touch is meditation. While we smell the practice of noting what is pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant is incredibly helpful, I've found for myself, this practice to be very strong in zazen.

[25:13]

And I should say that when doing anything like this, I've always discussed it with the teacher beforehand, is when I requested to sit in a solo sashin. This is the way that I practice, and in this case, it was with Reb. And this practice is... It's another way to drop into the body and to discover the mystery of its expansiveness and energy. Another way that I've experienced this was in Orinzai Sashin. Everyone else was working on koan, but because I had been sitting Shikintaza for so long, I was asked to stay with it. And so three times a day I came to the Dokusan with one question. What is Zazen? Nen, nen, nen.

[26:17]

What is Zazen? There came a point where I was describing this process as walking a tightrope trying... not to fall off on either side. On one side was yes and on another side was no. But the main thing was the concentrated effort and balancing on a tight rope or a slack line is a completely focused, every muscle engaged activity where you just stay in the keep going of continuous contact. The whole time that I've been thinking of this talk, a koan has been intuitively appearing as though the muscle of emptiness with its strength of 10,000 horses is sending me that letter.

[27:33]

Here's the koan and I offer it to you as well with trust in the Tathagata's words. In the sea of Issei, 10,000 feet down, lies a single stone. I want to pick up that stone without getting my hands wet. And then here is the stone inscribed with three lines. The top line is a signature.

[28:33]

The right line reads, cannot get wet. The left line reads, cannot get dry. Thank you again for being here, each one of you with the strength of 10,000 horses and the Tathagate's teachings to rely on as a guide.

[29:53]

Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, 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.

[30:16]

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