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. Everyone here in the Buddha Hall and everyone on Zoom everywhere. As you may know, we are in the last stretch of the fall practice period. And tonight we are going into Rohatsu Sashin. Rohatsu Sashin, Rohatsu means the eighth of the twelfth month. And this is the Sashin that celebrates the enlightenment of the Buddha.

[01:01]

And it is a custom that many practitioners sit through the night before Rohatsu. So, during this practice period, we came actually together every noon here for a noon service in the Buddha Hall. And we chanted a song of celebration of Samadhi. under the title Self-Fulfilling and Receiving Samadhi. This chant is the centerpiece of a Dogen fascicle called Bendoa, On the Endeavor of the Way. Dogen, who is the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, wrote the Bendoa in 1231. when he was living by himself and did not have exactly the plan to found a monastery yet.

[02:11]

But he wanted to make the teaching available that he had received in his five years of studying in Chinese Zen monasteries. He had also met his teacher Ru Jing in China. In the Bendoa, Dogen maintains that the wondrous Dharma and the actualization of enlightenment is transmitted from Buddha to Buddha, and that it has as its criterion, standard, or prerequisite, Giyu Samai. The footnote to the translation of this expression in the wholehearted way by Shohaku Okamura and Taigenden Leighton, explains this expression as follows. Jiyu Yusamai is literally the samadhi of self-fulfillment or self-enjoyment, or the samadhi of self-receiving or accepting its function.

[03:21]

Ji is self, Jiyu is a common compound means fulfillment or enjoyment, you alone means receive, or you also means function, and samādhi is of course samādhi, samādhi or concentration. So we can understand the samādhi of self-fulfillment and enjoyment as a samādhi or concentration on the self when it simply receives and accepts. its function, or its spiritual position in the world. The important point is that this is not a self that has an object. There is nothing other or outside of this self. The enjoyment and fulfillment or satisfaction is the samadhi of the self of which there is no other.

[04:24]

This is not an experience that is somewhere other, then here and now it is not something to be acquired or gained. When we hear the word samadhi, we think of something mysterious and wonderful and indescribable that happens maybe to our body and mind when we completely trust the moment and completely engage in one activity. so that we are free from self or other or comparison or judgment, just completely and exactly what we are doing in the moment. It is actually a continuity of moments, just flowing into one another, that we often only recognize after the fact a samadhi is not seen by a deluded mind.

[05:26]

that makes distinctions and uses language. Language can only happen on the background of delusion in the matrix of a thinking and separating mind. The fulfillment of samadhi is non-separation. Dogen writes about the indescribability, the unspeakable, of the wondrous dharma of Jijusamai. He says, all this, however, does not appear within perception because it is unconstructedness and stillness. It is immediate realization. If practice and realization were two things, as it appears to an ordinary person, each could be recognized separately. But what can be met with recognition is not realization itself, because realization is not reached by a deluded mind. In stillness, mind and object merge in realization and go beyond enlightenment.

[06:34]

Nevertheless, because you are in the state of self-fulfilling samadhi, without disturbing its quality or moving a particle, you extend the Buddha's great activity, the incomparably profound and subtle teaching. Last fall, when I was in the practice period at Tazahara, I moved to a morning service as Doshi without any interruption, completely taken by the ceremony. Everything was amazingly alive and radiant. Only afterwards did I notice that there was not a single disturbance in the flow of movements. No thoughts, no fear, no excitement. Something had just happened without me, without my package of habitual responses. I was without me for a few minutes, a liberating gift out of nowhere and a feeling of being completely alive and at ease.

[07:46]

The conditions for this to happen, I guess, might have been my surrendering to the forms and rituals of the Tassara practice spirit and a lot of sitting. I think actually that we create these amazing containers of practice spirits where we practice very intensely and are in the middle of a flow of a number of ceremonies to make this samadhi available. all of us. The chant of self-receiving and employing samadhi opens with these lines. Now all ancestors and all Buddhas who uphold Buddha Dharma have made it the true path of enlightenment to sit upright, practicing in the midst of self-fulfilling samadhi.

[08:50]

Those who attained enlightenment in India and China followed this way. It was done so because teachers and disciples personally transmitted this excellent method as the essence of the teaching. In the authentic tradition of our teaching, it is said that this directly transmitted straightforward Buddha Dharma is the unsurpassable of the unsurpassable. From the first time you meet a Master, without engaging in incense offering, bowing, chanting Buddha's name, repentance or reading scriptures, you should just wholeheartedly sit and thus drop away body and mind. Wholehearted sitting is not depending on bowing, reading scriptures, and bowing is not in the way of wholehearted sitting. So what is this sentence about? Does it say let go of all the framework?

[09:55]

Does this point to the immediacy of just sitting, shikantaza? How do we reduce sitting to just sitting? The very first time I met my root teacher, I did not think that he was a master. I had no idea, by the way, who he was. I also had no idea what zazen was. I was in the middle of a sashin, which I didn't really understand. And I think that all these conditions helped me to not form ideas at that time of what should happen. And it seems it was the first time I met a master and I started sitting. Later on, I lost my innocence and sitting became more complicated. The deep stillness of sitting, with no thought of sitting, got lost in institutional obligations and responsibilities.

[11:03]

My concentration training, my practice was not developed enough to be unmoved in the midst of the requests of my positions, and I struggled with Zazen. For example, when I was a guest cook in my second summer at Tazahara, I started making menu plans in the Zendo during Zazen. and it became my most efficient work time, the samadhi of menu planning. Bendua is a commentary not occupied with initiations into samadhi practice, which is left to the secret transmission between teacher and disciple, between Buddha and Buddha. Bendua is celebrating and encouraging sitting in stillness as the essential form of practice. the scenery of transmission of Thudama is self-fulfilling samadhi. In the ceremony of Zazen, we practice sitting at the gate to the unconfined realm of samadhi.

[12:13]

One of my teachers used to recite Rumi to encourage us to make an effort at the gate of samadhi. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the door sill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep. Self-fulfilling samadhi is an abundance that can be actualized in each person. Sitting upright is named as the authentic gate of practice. Sitting upright is face-to-face transmission. What is sitting upright? What is face-to-face?

[13:15]

Upright? Sitting? Sitting is actually what we transmit. Again and again we offer Zazen instructions. We describe the shape that the body takes to sit beyond the boundary of ordinary thinking. We admonish us to leave all agendas behind, to not compare or judge, to not want to achieve anything, to be utterly flexible in mind and body. We help ourselves by taking up mental postures, as described by Christian Dillow, in the path of aliveness, like don't move to enter deep stillness, or don't scratch to enter non-reactivity, or don't invite your thoughts for tea coming from Suzuki Roshi for non-thinking.

[14:27]

or don't correct your mind for non-interference. Zazen is sitting together and facing the universe without getting stuck in one way or the other. And this not getting stuck is often facilitated by the teacher whom we can trust and show ourselves to. In his commentary to the meditation chapter of the 2nd century Samda Nimachana Sutra, Rabbi Anderson relates a meeting between Dogen and his teacher Ru Jing, where Ru Jing tells Dogen that the practice of the Buddhas and ancestors is to sit in the middle of the world of suffering of all beings, and that this sitting with all beings and listening to the cries of the world is what enables the birth, of what is called Nyushin in Japanese, which means supple, soft, or flexible mind.

[15:34]

And Dogen asks, what is this supple mind? And Rujing said, it is the willingness for body and mind to drop off. Zazen is understood as the Dhamma gate of repose and bliss. of ease and joy. The sitting posture is meant to be awake and relaxed at the same time, fully grounded and trusting, and at the same time, fully upright and energetic. We sit in stillness to open our mind to being without expectations. We have no expectations to pass a gate. Before one passes the gate, they might not be aware of it. Someone might think that they need to pass a gate and might look for it a long time without finding it.

[16:44]

Someone finds the gate and maybe it does not open. If it opens, they might have passed through. As soon as they passed, they realized it was the self that passed. Nobody passed through a gate. There has never been a gate. Self-receiving and fulfilling samadhi is the complete abandonment of all gates. It is forgetting the self and be actualized by what is right now. We follow the ritual of sitting in stillness to enable us to sit together and realize that we sit together with all beings, realize oneness with all beings. Rituals only function as a communal communication. We communicate zazen to each other without words.

[17:49]

Ritual, with its highly repetitive and mannered modes of speech and movement, addresses one's somatic being and inscribes the self with a set of perceptual orientations, affective dispositions, and automatic responses that are precognitive. Robert Scharf says that. Ritual does not express content. The content of ritual is rather to play with a source of trying to produce content. Applied to our ritual of Zazen, this could mean Zazen engages in what we might think is the source of thinking and self. Dogen's general recommendations for Zazen, Fukan Zazengi,

[18:52]

describes in detail the sitting posture that we take, gives instructions to cast aside all worldly affairs, and then suggests, think of not thinking. How do you think of not thinking? Non-thinking. This in itself is the essential art of Zazen. Phukhan Zazengi does not give us the details of how to work with this mind and its habits. It does not describe steps and stairs of the way. It suggests to leap into the most advanced form of meditation, according to other schools, all at once, objectless meditation. Zazan is not a method learned in steps of linear order. It is embracing the inconceivable totality of being in one single form. That is why breathing seems to be one of the few accepted objects of this objectless meditation.

[20:03]

Breathing is an involuntary mechanism controlled by the oldest part of our brain, the reptilian brain, that also controls other basic survival functions like the heartbeat. When we are aware of our breathing, we tune into one of the core mechanisms of being alive. We can manipulate breathing voluntarily, and we can try to be with breathing, to not manipulate it. And this is the level where we are confronted with our awareness taking over, mindfulness becoming control. And on the other hand, our intention, to keep a wide and flexible mind. This is a very fruitful area of practice, holding awareness without control. An area of self-awakening which is opening to the full catastrophe of living, opening to everything expounding the Dharma as it says in the chant.

[21:21]

Grass, trees and lands, which are embraced by this teaching, together radiate a great light and endlessly expound the inconceivable profound Dharma. Grass, trees and walls bring forth the teaching of all beings, common people as well as sages, and they, in accord, extend this Dharma for the sake of grass, trees and walls. Thus, the realm of self-awakening and awakening others invariably holds the mark of realization with nothing lacking, and realization itself is manifested without ceasing for a moment. What happens here in this section of the chant? Grass, trees, and lands teach us the inconceivable, profound dharma. What are they teaching us? This sounds like the experience of self-fulfilling samadhi.

[22:24]

that cannot be described. Zazen can open us to the experience that everything is immediately communicating to us, is teaching us the wondrous Dharma. Everything, grass, trees and lands, teach us dependent co-arising. The ceremony of sitting upright in stillness offers us a form for coming as closely as possible to meet life. to meet our deepest intention to be liberated with all beings. This sitting with all beings and the universe is a cooperation that shows reciprocity in its mutual support. As long as we learn concentrating to become a better person, we are suffering. And yet, I suggest concentration.

[23:27]

For example, counting our exhalation ten times and starting over, and maybe even counting the times of counting, and hearing the bell on the third outpress, the second count, helps us to stay on and look at something without moving into it or away from it. We need to develop this upright tranquility to not get scared of what is right in front of us. I suggest concentration in this way as we have to meet our being distracted, our conventional disposition for endless dreaminess, our addiction to discursive thinking. We need to gather focus and energize our capacity to see the workings of our mind, to become intimate with the layers of delusion, the many ways of pictures that we are wrapped in.

[24:35]

And again the Fukan Zazengi. You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech. Then learn the backward step and turn your light inwardly to illuminate yourself. Body and mind of themselves will drop away and your original face will be manifest. If you want to attain suchness, you should practice suchness without delay. This is a description of turning the light inward and illuminating the place where thoughts are born. we can start to see that our perception of the world and things out there is just what our mind can reflect as the world, and that there is nothing other than the concepts of our mind. This also lets us see that we each produce our particular world, our conception of the world, which is unique and different from anybody else's.

[25:44]

Our suffering evolves with a cognitive production, with the way we conceptualize the world, with a tunnel vision we are endowed with. So we make an effort to see clearer and clearer that we are looking at the mind when we think we look at the world. In this process, we come to the point where we can let go of the obsessions, where they lose their power, and where we explore an open space, an empty mind. Thank you for listening. 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 Dorma.

[26:48]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.88