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. Mike seems to be working. I want to thank Paul, Paul Haller, my teacher, for... giving me such strong guidance in the palm, like Mako, and I really speak. This was an invitation made only two days or something. So I will do my best. We just chanted, I vow to taste the truth of the detailiest words.

[01:03]

And we should take that seriously. What is to taste that truth? So I wanted to speak with you all tonight about how our liturgy came to be. There's a group here that has been studying the Wulin ancestors, and they're waiting for us in present times. And I was inspired very early on by these questions. It was a very personal devotional inquiry of mine when I was raised as a Catholic girl. And in that inquiry, just as a teenager. Given the church that I was part of, there was very little representation of wisdom teachings that could help me.

[02:08]

And so I went to theology for inspiration, some description of my experiences, and possibly some guidance. I knew that there was a great mystery in the world. And I knew what suchness felt like. But this wasn't what was being taught by those who were close to me. And there was no lack of effort. I was given plenty of proximity to the church, I eventually came upon the understanding, and this was at that time widely read among the women that I knew, that there couldn't be any ritual or spiritual life that could include women in a patriarchal society, patriarchal system.

[03:16]

This was my understanding as a young woman. And for such a thing to occur, it would need to be defined by a female gender that was creating itself outside of that patriarchal system. I was at this time when I was understanding this and what it actually meant for the world, for myself. I was pregnant, and I was dropping out of college to raise a child. And I was deeply shaken by what was being said by these women, that there is from within the Catholic Church. There was enough truth in it for me to know that this was an important move to be making. It had to be done.

[04:20]

And I also knew that given what lay before me, I wouldn't be a part of it. So I first came to Tassajara in 2014. And this was for a practice period. And I'd been shaken earlier by this experience, this understanding, this curiosity and feeling of adventure that felt important to me. And then I was also puzzled by At Tassahara, there was something about the physical act of annealing prostration and hearing Mahatma Japani's name that moved in me unexpectedly, like a kukini. What had decades ago been that shaken feeling was felt as a deep gratitude for the 1,000 bare feet of women named here, felt here in this room.

[05:25]

As we said in our opening chant, I vowed to taste the truth and I felt this deeply. I believe that this deep tasting happens for all of us in relationship to the liturgy. If we're chanting it day after day, there are moments that are hard to describe but that are deeply felt. It's the embodied weight of our true feeling. It makes, it inspires us. and moves us in our devotions. Taking in this feeling, tasting this vow, completely understanding that there were some very bold moves in the naming of a woman in this zendo. I set out to discover how a woman's name had entered the zendo in this way. In my understanding, I see the history of our liturgy in two parts. It's measured by how our liturgy differs from what's offered by the Sotoshu.

[06:32]

And in significant ways, our liturgy does differ in decidedly different ways it differs from the liturgy of the Sotoshu. And so the first part of this distinction, the first era of our liturgy, holds close to the bone of the fundamental teachings as they are expressed in the Sotoshu liturgy, but defers from it significantly. And this is brought forward by translations that were made available into English in the Prajnaparamita literature and in the translation of E. E. Dogen's Shokugento fascicles. which are in our liturgy very differently than they appear in the Silk Dotion.

[07:33]

The second part or era of our development of our liturgy is more revisionist. This is when there were things in our liturgy that just didn't feel quite adequate to what the community was experiencing in their practice life. And so this would include love and kindness. the inclusion of female ancestors. And very recently, land acknowledgment from the Asungo people would be such a religious move of our liturgy. Something that, again, is not something that is included in the traditional Japanese liturgy. So I'd like to tell you a story of how what is known as the Prajnaparita sutras began to be chanted here, and then through Govita's teachings on prajna, how I understand their significance for our practice. First, Makahonyaharmitashindo, or the Heart of Great With Perfect Wisdom Sutra, through millennia, has been a precious material object buried in caves, under rocks,

[08:51]

inside a statuary. It's been kept and saved for posterity as a paramount expression of the Dharma, their strong faith in its power and protection. The translator responsible for its textual appearance in the world, that is the short version that we actually chant, claims it was given to him by a suffering stranger as a protection for his long and dangerous journey. And in 1962, Master Wa stated that because of the great Master Wa's, the teacher that founded 10,000 Buddhists not too far from here, because of the great merit of chanting the sutra, San Francisco had not yet fallen into the ocean. So there's a great value attributed to this, and along with that great value, there's great effort on the part of translators and teachers to bring a sutra to the world, such that it's possible to imagine that it's continuously arising from this great sphere called planet Earth, given all the languages, all the practices that embody its expression.

[10:09]

For me, it's in the spirit that we chant, O Buddhas throughout space and time, O Bodhisattvas, Mahasattvas, Wisdom beyond wisdom, Mahaprajna paramita. Let me make an offer. It's central to our religion. The first chant card, with an English translation for Makahan Yahari de Shingo, and in use by SFCC, was printed for Shamir Suzuki's Abbott installation in 1962. And realizing that the future of Zen in America would be aided by a thorough understanding of Prajnaparamita, he encouraged his students to study with an exceptional translator, Edward Collins, who was at Berkeley at the time, and a group of 16 students did so, auditing his classes altogether.

[11:28]

I feel it's important to briefly relate to you, Edward Concey's own narrative out of gratitude for all translators for their extreme devotional effort in bringing us the Dharma in what have often been very difficult times. And so it's important to know that in 1924, Edward Concey refused to hang the Nazi flag from this balcony window and subsequently fled Germany. He then worked in partnership with Karagande Reis, who translated the poems of the blues nuns. As though taking it back from the Germans, Kanse devoted his life to translating the Prajnaparamita Sutras, and his efforts are even today unparalleled in their breadth and focus. While archaeology and history was being used to shore up the racism of nations, Kanse turned to Buddhist translation to protect and to liberate. And no small part of this for him was the role of the feminine deity from modern times.

[12:38]

Kanzai wrote that an important innovation which profoundly affected the whole tone of Buddhism consisted in the introduction of feminine deities, and that The Mahayana believed that men should, in their meditations, complete themselves by fostering the feminine factors of their personality, that they should practice passivity and a loose softness, that they should learn to open freely the gates of nature and to let the mysterious and hidden forces of the world penetrate into them, stream in and through them. When they identify themselves with the perfection of wisdom, they merge with the principle of femininity without which they would be mutilated men. It's my experience that with gender particularly, there's often a reaching for truth and also a distorted confusion of contingent demands in relation to power.

[13:46]

Here, the feminine as they orientalized others in full view And at the same time, as a political refugee from Nazi Germany and in America, and during the Vietnam War, from the heart of wisdom, a man is speaking to the woundedness, the mutilations of our divided world. Even from the colonialism from which it is spoken, it's an expression in an historical movement that moves me. This is California in the 70s. At this time, Zanzetia was quite focused on establishing a practice center that would survive the loss of its teaching. And it needed for traditional, it's needed for traditional teachings and practice was paramount. Significantly, former abbess Eshin Linda Ruz Katz was taking classes

[14:54]

with Konz as a student, before Shinri Suzuki ever invited the others to join. He enrolled in 1971 and graduated in 1972. It was also in 1971 that a formal program of study began at City Center, and invited by Richard Baker in 1973, Konz was sponsored to come to City Center to inaugurate a formal program of study there, focusing on the Prajnaparani to literature that he had translated. It was in this year that Baker was quick to accept Linda Luce Kutz's selection of this passage as an echo for our liturgy. I'd like us to join in with each other's voices and chant from page 10. In a secret book which I have placed nearby, there will be one. This is Hymn to the Perfection of Risto.

[16:04]

Some of you may know this by heart. It's chanted daily in practice periods here at Tassajara. It was originally brought to us because Richard Baker had wanted to create a physical body, a phenomenal expression of the trimming of merit by having people simultaneously chanting sections of the Diamond Sutra. This was something that he'd never really seen before. He kind of made it up, and it was intended to be in some relation to what's known as Fanning Sutras, which is this cacophonous opening up for the 200,000 line Perfection of Wisdom Sutra way back in the 19th century. The Tibetan emperor would request that the merit of this sutra be performed in ceremony by the monks.

[17:16]

And so they would take sutra books, which were folded, and they would fan them in the air. And each person is picking up a book at a different time and shouting its title and slamming the sutra book down. So it comes off as this fairly raucous, celebratory visual called fanning the sutras. And Richard Baker wanted that feeling. to enter the Buddha Hall in the cacophony of our voices, reciting the Dhanu Sutra as Edwin Kanzi had translated. And so almost to the perfection of wisdom was the echo that they needed for this particular liturgical event. So let's chant it together. Hymn to the perfection of wisdom.

[18:22]

Hymn to the perfection of wisdom, the lovely, the holy. The perfection of wisdom is like a snake. The entire world cannot stain her. She is the source of light, and from everyone in the triple world, she removes darkness. Most excellent are her works. She reigns light so that all fear and distress may be forsaken, and disperses the gloom and darkness of delusion. She herself is torn in a vision. She has a clear knowledge of the own meaning of all the dharmas. Oh, she does not get away from it.

[19:24]

The perfection of wisdom of the Buddha's perfect motion will be loved our love. And speaking with her, Linda Lewis was quite clear that it was largely because of the value of female gender that this section really stood out for her. But that while she now has a stronger understanding of its meaning, both historically and personally, and at the time she was at Tassajara, She was not aware of feminism and an emerging goddess culture that would soon be expressed within California Buddhism. Living at Tassajara at the time, studying the sutra over and over, the passage stood out for her as an expression of practice realization, and she was stunned by the lovely, the holy as a woman.

[20:30]

What I've so far related to you is historical and in the telling of that history. I've described different ways in how gender as a form has been poured into with narrativizing conditions at different times and by various people, reaching for truths in the midst of form. In the 1970s, from within the Catholic Church, feminist theorists were radically shedding light on the narrativizing conditions of patriarchal power and claiming a feminine power beyond that patriarchy. Men as well, within that same patriarchal system, were retrieving the Buddha's teachings from the cultural violence of war, turning the cultural feminine of their own time deeply into their suffering as itself. The Heart of Perfect Wisdom has everything to teach us about these narrativizing conditions. I found this as an adult, kept through millennia, freely given and with skillful means,

[21:35]

that what truly matters and can be seen, heard, received, and maintained is for everyone. How is this? I'll continue to show you through our liturgy and the efforts to manage it. Importantly, the Heart Sutra does not repent what the Buddha said right from the start. The Buddha as a person, a historical figure, an origin of the teachings, a source, is undone in this replacement by an avatar, a conceptual expression of a being. In some cultures male, in some cultures female, a shapeshifter. Out of respect for the Buddha as a form, Abhilokiteshvara steps in symbolic of skillful compassion, in order to show that all forms are empty, and that emptiness is formed.

[22:43]

How do we live in such a world? The other day, there was a beautiful, long, and colorful snake moving across the lawn, and many people stood to watch it in fascination. It wasn't only its appearance, but how it moved through the grass. Its markings in their movement show him so beautifully how the snake moved in fluid contact with the ground. Truly a dynamic wonder. In our liturgy we chant, she herself is an organ of vision. She has a clear knowledge of the own being of all dharmas, but she does not stray away from it. Like this beautiful snake, Prajnaparamita's whole being is alive in the awareness of the completeness and continuity of all pervading suchness. As the California kingsnake is not really a king, the perfection of wisdom is not really female.

[23:48]

Yet it matters that she's presented in this way, and it even matters that it may mean something different to you than it does for me. Given this relativism in our experiences, what is prajna wisdom? The fundamental point is that right here in the present moment, a completeness, satisfaction, peace, rest and nurturing can be realized no matter what gender you are. And it's from the direct experience of this that we can experience a profound gratitude for the gift of ours and everyone's human form, no matter the shape or color. I can realize this when I feel such gratitude for the feet of a thousand women. In this feeling of profound gratitude, the true dharma body is felt.

[24:52]

And in what our tradition It's often depicted as all hands and eyes. This is the Bodhisattva. There's a painting I love of a billion armed avlokiteshvara. They get a thousand, let's go for a billion. It's as though the entire universe is filled with hands and eyes, ready to respond to anything and with all the tools of the world at hand. Unlike the tiny little heart of I heart you, this is the symbol of Buddhist love, a nurturing compassion for all being, for she does not stay away from it. In this vision of love, emptiness is boundlessly full and generative. Don't has a way of expressing the same thing that I find equally beautiful, but it feels very different.

[25:55]

And I think it's responding to the question, how am I, in this body, and moment to moment, to express the suchness of all things that, given, practically speaking, I don't really have a billion hands and eyes and all those tools at once. How do we do that? And it is a matter of doing, and this is really important for Dogen. So first, Dogen's understanding of prajna is this. Rujang, my late master old Buddha said, the entire body is a mouth hanging in empty space, regardless of the wind from the east, west, south or north, joining the whole universe and chiming out prajna, ting [...]

[26:58]

This is an authentic air of Bhūla ancestors speaking prajna. The entire body is prajna. The entire other is prajna. The entire self is prajna. The entire east, west, south and north is prajna. The image, the entire body, is a mouth hanging in empty space. It is a depiction of a wind bell You may recall that we had a newsletter, San Francisco Zen Center, published on a regular basis called Wind Belt. And it was one of the first kind of magazine resources of Zen in America published by San Francisco Zen Center. So the Wind Belt, the entire body is a mouth hanging in empty space. regardless of the wind from the east, west, south or north, joining the whole universe and chiming out prajna.

[28:05]

Ting, ting, [...] ting. The entire body is hanging in empty space. It sounds like there's no support at all. It says in our chant that we rely on Prajnaparamita. However, it's not quite like that. And there are many teachers that have commented on this. We can't rely on the Prajnaparamita. There is no support. Hakuin describes this mistake as like putting a leg on a snake. The embodiedness of prajna is to feel ourselves and the dynamic gravity of our interbeing, which is different than the gravity that's felt as support. And Dobrik gives an example of what this is in one of his later festivals.

[29:10]

So I made something today. And it's interesting that I had to make it in order to show you what he is describing. So this is Has anybody seen anything like this before? It looks like it's a molehill, but it's actually a scale that would be used in a marketplace. Whoops. And so I couldn't make it the way that it would actually be. But let's imagine this will bounce. Let's imagine that this is a dish, and I put things in it to be weighed, right? And the weight is given a certain value. But that value is only in relation to this. And in order for it to have this value, you have to move this in order to balance. So it's an active participation in the gravity of things in order to find a balance here.

[30:13]

This is a very different kind of scale than we see in our liberty and justice. where you have two dishes and you try to create an equality between those two dishes so that they come out later. This is Dogen's description of prajna as equanimity. And he writes a balance in this way. When you take hold or when you let go, you need to study the common balancing scale. That's what this is. If you went to China today, you can probably see this in a marketplace. As soon as you understand it, the measuring of ounces and pounds will become clear and will express the dream within a dream. All value is only created in this relationship. Without knowing ounces and pounds and without reaching a level balance, there is no actualization of the balance point.

[31:24]

When you attain balanced equilibrium, you will see the balance point. Achieving balance does not depend on the objects being weighed, on the balancing scale, or on the activity of weighing. And I would say that when I was making this, what I discovered is that The length of this that I'm holding it from changes whatever's happening here. So any length of these strings is going to change what is going to be happening in terms of the balancing. Thus, deeply consider that without attaining balance you do not experience solidity, just hanging on its own in emptiness, The dream within a dream allows objects to float freely in emptiness. Within emptiness, stable balance is manifested. This is one way that Dovin is describing Prajnaparamita. at the end of her sutra, they chant, people have

[32:59]

Gandhi great lengths to actually not translate the last words to keep it as a Dharani spell that it become a mantra that brings us into our body for those of us who don't know Sanskrit which is everyone unless we might assume, and I hope I'm not wrong to assume, that it's a very physical and can be a deeply moving experience that we do in relationship with others. Of course you can chant it by yourself. And we've tried chanting it on Zoom. but it really has a certain kind of resonant quality when you're in a room with others who are chanting anything at all.

[34:10]

But the celebratory bounciness of gate, gate, para, gate, is something that has been cherished through thousands of years and kept as though it were a relic of the Buddha's own body that becomes our own expression of the Buddha body together. That's my experience of that mantra, the Hara Sutra. I want to share with you some translations of it so you can see a difference in the disposition behind what it might mean. So here's one that is quite old. I think it may even be in the late 50s by Max Müller. Oh, wisdom, gone, gone to the other shore, landed at the other shore.

[35:12]

Oh, wisdom, svaha. Thus ends the heart of the prajnaparamita. So this notion of gone, gone to the other shore, landed at the other shore, emphasized, landed at the other shore, and the great joy in that. And here's Mursang, a very recent translation, gone, gone, gone beyond, gone beyond all forms and contingent becomeings, the Awaking Mind homage. The difference between these two translations is important. Some people, even from not quite ancient, but long ago times, like Hakuin, laugh at the notion of going to the other shore, like they've completely gotten it wrong.

[36:14]

The same way that there's no way you can rely on Prajnaparamita, you don't want to go there, that's a mistake. The other shore is Prabhu. These are the teachings of the Zen tradition. To hold up the notion of the shore and to understand what that means. So without thinking of this as a complete dismissal, it's a matter of being right view. So I want to present to you something from Dogen's Genja Koan and submit that this is Dogen's translation of that mantra. So he writes this. It's familiar to you.

[37:17]

If you've chanted in our liturgy, you will recognize When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and essence are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging itself. So this scale, the physical feeling of it is that there's a lot of tension that I'm feeling in the bouncing here, in the gravity of things.

[38:21]

with my hand and my arm. But I also can feel these rocks. I can feel the consistency of the bamboo in this Tai Chi. So I feel like this metaphor of the scale, in an all-extriced and concrete way simultaneously, is practicing intimately and returning to where you are. Nothing at all has unchanged itself. In much the same way that that beautiful snake was crawling in the grass. All hands and eyes in the grass. Continuous contact with the ground. Opening. So as we chant the closing verse for the Dharma Talk, please consider its words and what we need for you.

[39:39]

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.

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