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, everyone, for being here tonight. And thank you, my friend, for inviting me to give this talk. David for being here to support us. I'm just so happy to be back in Tassajara, to be with you all, and with the mountains, and the creek, and butterflies, and dragonflies, and those yucca plants.

[01:00]

And so I heard there will be a skit night tomorrow to celebrate the Interdependence Day. And so tonight I'd like to talk about the Interdependence Day. I make some scribbles here on the back of recycled paper. And so my hope is to convey some feelings I have for the nature of interdependence or interconnection of all beings. So it is a fundamental Buddhist teaching that everything is interdependent.

[02:09]

And there is a term called interdependent co-arising, you probably have heard of. Yin Yuan. That means everything or all the phenomena arise due to causes and conditions, due to their interconnected nature with other things. Everything, everyone is dependent on everything and everyone else. And for it to be, to exist. And so, For anything to happen there in the phenomenal world, there's causes and conditions. Yin, yuen. Yin being the cause or the seed for something to happen, yuen, being the conditions that help to bring this cause or seed into something else.

[03:30]

And so, at this very moment, we are all here, sitting in the Zendo. And what brought us together tonight, in this exact moment, in time and space, that we happen to be here tonight, sitting together, And what kind of causes and conditions brought you here, brought me here? And I see there are quite a number of people who actually came from countries far away. What brought you here? And what are the conditions in your life that allow you to practice here? be here in the Zendel, in this valley.

[04:36]

And if we think about it, there are innumerable, innumerable events and beings that have contributed to us being here. And that's a Pretty miraculous thing. When we look at this Zen Do, we're not the only one who sits here. There have been innumerable fellow practitioners who have sat here, who have practiced here. And they left their marks. The zendo feels so seasoned because of them.

[05:49]

And I heard the story of this floor when the zendo was first built. It was not painted or stained, right? It was white, like natural wood color. And over the years, as everybody walked on it, it has turned into this beautiful dark polished floor. As I walked with from the abbot's cabin garden to the zendo. We passed the bridge, and I saw two little rocks dangling. Did somebody put it there recently? I saw these rocks, and I thought, oh, how sweet.

[06:52]

How long have they been hanging here? I never noticed it. And how long have they existed in this world? And how long have the mountains and the creeks have existed in this world, in this valley, that allow us to be here? We had a monthly Suzuki Roshi memorial, part one, in the memorial hall for the Roshi, just an hour or two ago. And just to think that Suzuki Roshi himself lived here.

[08:02]

touch some of these things that we touch today. And because of his causes and conditions, and our causes and conditions, we get to be here. And this goes on forever and ever. We think back, you know, since Kirishi brought this practice from Japan to the US, and Dogen Zenji, Master Dogen, brought it from China to Japan. And how many generations of people who have practiced with each other like this?

[09:04]

And from India to China. How many people's lives and stories have been reflected in each of our lives, in each of our stories? During the pandemic, I wasn't able to go home, to go back to China for four years. And so since last year, I got to go home. And I think I'm trying to make it up. So I have gone quite a few times. And just this year, I've gone twice. My family is in Guangzhou in China.

[10:10]

And so during this last visit in May, I took a few days to go over from Guangzhou in the south, go over to the eastern province of Zhejiang, and I went to visit this little temple called Tian Tongsi near the city of Ningbo, and that's where Master Dogen met his master, Lu Jing, and practiced there with him. And I just had an impulse to pay homage to go there and visit. I have been to many temples in China,

[11:17]

This one really touched me. When you get to the temple, before you, usually there's like a grand gate, mountain gate, and then you enter and then you have this grand Buddha hall, and many halls fall like that. Most temples lay out like that. And so this temple, Tian Tongsi, when you enter the temple's land, you don't see a big gate. You see a stone path that goes on for maybe half a mile. It's not very big. It's a stone path.

[12:19]

And on this path, you walk through three little gates. Very simple, very earthy kind of gates. And the path is lined by many, many pine trees. So as you walk toward the temple structures, you actually have to do this walking meditation before you see the Buddha. And so as I was walking on the path, the sense of space and time kind of fell away, and I felt, I felt the presence of the people, presence of Dogen Zenji and Master Wu Jing and all the ancestors, and to feel, to realize how they have

[13:47]

lived in this space and touched things here and breathed here, I was just moved to tears. And then as you approach the Buddha hall, you have to ascend a few steps. And there is this good old cypress tree And the sign, it's well protected, and there are a lot of red ribbons. People send prayers or hand prayers. And the sign says, this cypress tree is 1,500 years old. And, well, Dogen came to this temple in the 1200s during the Song Dynasty. And... where Master Wu Jing lived and practiced.

[14:52]

And before that time, the temple had existed for almost 1,000 years already. So it had been a temple for a long time. But then later on, it became a Zen temple. And then during the Tang Dynasty, the 600s, 600 to 700-ish, when there were different schools of practice kind of formulating. There was Soto school, or Chaodong, being one of the five Zen schools. And this temple became kind of a temple where the Soto Zen tradition was practiced. And during that time, many masters lived there, including Master Hongzhi Zhengjie, who developed the style of silent illumination.

[16:11]

And that's kind of the predecessor for just sitting. So Dogen Zenji wrote some fascicles about this Master Hongzhi's teaching and practice. And so this is a long lineage. And so 100 years after Hongzhi, there was Master Wu Jing, and then a few decades into that master Dogen came from Japan. And so this is like the background story. I was looking at the cypher tree, and I was just really amazed because this tree had been standing there for 1,500 years.

[17:14]

And under this tree, so many people had passed. through these steps and walk into the Buddha hall or whatever else inside the temple. And I just felt very, very touched by it. By the way, Tian Tong Si, the name of the temple, means heavenly child. Beautiful mountains around.

[18:19]

The day I was there, it was blue sky, green mountains, and this long stone path lined with pine trees. I didn't stay for long, and I told myself that I could come back another time and stay longer. My friend and mentor in China, Venerable Hongzhi, teaches there every year.

[19:32]

So I came back to San Francisco on the flight from Guangzhou to Taipei, and from Taipei to San Francisco as the plane I sense to the sky and I look out through the window and I look down to the earth. It's so wonderful to see the sky and the earth from high above. you get a great view of everything down there.

[20:52]

And if you zoom in, you see people running around. You see cars, buildings. And in the cars in each building, there are people and everyone that have their own life. have their stories. When the plane takes off I like to think of myself being a bird that goes up higher and higher and Guiding? What's the word?

[21:53]

Gliding. Thank you. Tara is my English teacher. And it reminds me of when I imagine myself like that. pretend I'm a bird. It always reminds me of a story from Zhuangzi, a classical Taoist text. Probably not many people have heard of Zhuangzi as, not as many as Dao De Jing, maybe. Maybe some of you have heard of Dao De Jing. That's totally fine. Then I have a chance to talk about it.

[22:57]

Zen being a practice, when it started to evolve in China, it had very strong influence from Taoist practice, Taoist thought and philosophy. That's, I'm not talking about the Taoist religion per se, but Taoist thought. The earliest Taoist thought are represented by two master writings. The first one is called Daodejing by Laozi, who lived around the Buddha's time. 500 BC. And then the second master work was written by, or the teaching was given by Zhuangzi, the master who lived two, three hundred years later, like a couple hundred BC.

[24:06]

And in Zhuangzi, which is both the name of the master and the book, the name of the book, in Zhuangzi, There are lots of stories and dialogues that are metaphorical and that represent John Tzu's understanding of our life, of human existence. And a lot of the The stories and the words or phrases used in this writing became widely used in Chinese language, in Chinese culture, and in a lot of the Zen teachings, such as one-finger chan,

[25:14]

such as even the way the koan practice is done is very much like John's style, because he loves to tell stories and ask questions. Okay, so the birth story is from the first chapter, free and easy wandering, and the opening paragraph. So this would be the very first story you read when you open Johnson. The story goes, In the far north, as far as you can imagine, north, there is an ocean.

[26:21]

In this distant northern ocean, there is a big fish called Kun. Its name is Kun. And Kun is so big, It's like a few thousand li, as big as it reaches a few thousand li. One li is like half a kilo. So it's a few thousand, at least a couple thousand kilos. This is a big fish in that northern ocean. And in the month of June, the sixth month, well, I mean, Chinese calendar, June, sixth month, would be around now, actually July, the Western calendar.

[27:28]

The ocean starts to move and stir, and the wind starts to blow. And as the ocean moves and the wind moves, This big fish is transformed into a bird, into a big bird. And this big bird is also a few thousand leaves long. Well, it's back. It's that long. And this bird amounts on this slow wind and ascends to the sky. it gets as high as 90,000 li. Well, they just make up these big numbers. It just means it's very big and very far and very high. So you have to open your imagination to think about this.

[28:30]

As this bird ascends to 90,000 it flattened its wings and started to fly toward the southern ocean in the very, very south, as far south as you can imagine. And there lies the celestial lake pond. That's where it wanted to fly to. after the fish turned into the bird. And as it gets so high, it looks down. It sees dust, haze and dust on the planet.

[29:37]

And it sees all these living beings blowing their breath onto each other. And it looks around at the sky. It wonders, is blue the true color of the sky? And the sky is so vast, so deep and vast, is there an end to the sky, to the universe? And this chapter goes on with lots of stories. But that's the birth story that

[30:43]

I think about when I fly in an airplane and Zhang Zi, the master, always asks questions and he doesn't give any answers. Is Wu the true color of the sky? Is there an end? They're living. And what allows this bird to transform it from a fish into a bird in the first place? So the story alludes to some conditions of like in June,

[31:48]

There is very strong wind and then the ocean, the movement of the ocean. There's a lot of things throughout in the ocean. And if you read the English translation, you often see, instead of saying in June, it actually, because Chinese, classical Chinese, it's really hard to translate into modern English. Sometimes, actually, more often, a translation says, for six months, instead of the sixth month, because the Chinese just says, ,, the breath of June, the breath of the sixth month, which also means the wind. So all these movements and the wind allow this big fish to transform into a big bird and fly toward the southern ocean, toward the celestial lake.

[33:16]

movements in the ocean, in your life now. What kind of wind is flowing in your life now? From this story, actually, in Chinese culture, there is a phrase or an idea called preparing the wind or accumulating the wind. When there's enough wind, you're going to fly.

[34:40]

And so in Chinese, it means, you know, it means you, when there are all the causes and conditions, then something will happen. That doesn't mean that you don't have to do anything. That means you're part of the wind, that you are part of this set of conditions, and you are part of learning how to use or write with the movement of the ocean and the movement of the wind in your life? And what kind of bird are you going to transform into? Are you going to transform?

[35:45]

Maybe, maybe not. If you turn into a bird, where are you gonna fly it? Where are you gonna fly to? What's your journey? Sometimes trying to imagine when Master Dogen met Master Wu Jing, when he had the experience of awakening, then what kind of transformation happened to him?

[36:58]

Is this crossing point of space and time, here and now, what is that arises? interconnections and interdependence and turn everyone into a big bird here and for listening.

[38:26]

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.

[38:46]

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