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. Good morning. Welcome. Welcome, Sam. Maybe tomorrow you could all come on the floor. I think that was nice. And Greg asked, too, I thought, oh, that's nice. I won't do it now, but a little closer. I've been paying attention to my toes. I noticed during Orioki, and also just now starting to realize I was going to lecture, that my toes start to curl. So I'm trying to keep an eye on them. All right, relax, it's okay.

[01:00]

Not going to run. So my plan for our sashin is to begin discussing this koan. The title of this practice period was about the dog and the fox, so I thought it would be time to get going with the dog and whether or not the dog has Buddha nature. But first I thought it might be helpful to see how this story came to be so important in the Zen tradition. which it is, for over a thousand years. So my understanding of this story, of this koan, is that the primary target is a student of Zhaozho's. You know, imagine a young monk who has not yet come to a full realization of the ultimate truth. That phrase, the non-dual, all-inclusive nature of reality, such as the Buddha had under the Bodhi tree. So in order to talk about the koan, it seems like it might be useful to explore where this notion of an ultimate truth came from in the first place.

[02:08]

So that would mean looking back to the very beginnings of Zen, which according to Zen is beginningless. Beginningless time and infinite space from which all things have dependently co-arisen. And the proof of that is right now. That's how we... all came to be here, dependently co-arisen, beginning with the birth of the universe. So here we are, this particular time and this particular place. It's basically a miraculous appearance. So a very good example of how time and place are viewed in Zen is in one of the fascicles of Dogen's Shobogenso. Shobogenso means the treasury of the true Dharma eye. And this fascicle is called Uji. Uji, time being. So Dogen begins Uji with a quote by Yao Shan.

[03:11]

Yao Shan, I know there are lots of names and it takes a while to sort of figure out who is who and who gave Dharma transmission to who. And it's really a wonderful study all in and of itself. Yaoshan is one of our ancestors that Dogen really respects, and he quotes frequently. Yaoshan is a disciple, a descendant of Shurto. And Shurto is the author of the merging or harmony of difference and equality, the Sandokai. So this brings it all much closer to home. This is our so-called lineage. So... These are Yaoshan's lyrics to the song, or what this song that I have been saying is, you know, what I'm calling the ultimate truth, is the song that we can't hear. We will never hear until our human ears are unplugged. Yaoshan says, For the time being, stand on top of the highest peak.

[04:14]

For the time being, proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean. For the time being, three heads and eight arms of a fighting demon. For the time being, an eight or a sixteen foot body of the Buddha. For the time being, a staff or a whisk. For the time being, a pillar or a lantern. For the time being, the children of commoners, such as Zhang and Li. For the time being, the earth and the sky. And then Dogen says that even though we ordinary humans don't doubt our use of time, the signs seem obvious to us. There's morning, noon and night. There's summer, fall, winter, spring. Obvious. And yet Dogen says we don't understand time. And that's because obvious and not obvious, understanding and not understanding, doubting and not doubting are also nothing else.

[05:20]

but time, time being, being as time. So Dogen's way of teaching and talking is pointing to the ultimate truth, which is the same truth that Buddha discovered in this place that we now call India, a truth that I'm calling the song, for which Buddha and Dogen and all of us have been writing some amazing and creative lyrics. In order to get to the ultimate truth, the one that is right here and right now, although it seems kind of funny, we need to go the long way around, you know, through the back door, so to speak. Just as Nargarjana said many, many centuries ago, the way to the ultimate truth is by means of the relative truth, by means of our everyday language and our plain old common sense. Relative truth and common language is really all that we have. all that we have that can help us to get to that place where the Buddha sat to listen and then to teach and where Dogen sat to listen and then to write his poetry.

[06:32]

The place where all concepts such as truth and time and Buddha and Dogen and mountains and rivers and me and you simply melt away like snowflakes on the hot iron skillet, or like dewdrops in the warmth of the summer sun, if we can remember that. So before we get to that place, we need to understand how we and snowflakes and dewdrops, iron skillets and everything else are being made. We need to understand the act of creation itself. So I want to start by telling a story. the kind that we're used to. This is a regular old story, familiar. And that is, it has a beginning. It's not beginningless. It's not timeless. It's a story from the early Buddhist tradition before Dogen and his comrades turned our stories into dewdrops and melting snowflakes.

[07:38]

So this traditional story is from the old wisdom teachings of the Pali Canon. And it's about a young boy who was born in Kapolevastu, about 2,500 years ago, and who through great effort realized for himself and then for all of us what the ultimate truth was and what it had to do with a pathway to the end of suffering, a pathway both in and out of time. So the story of the young boy is itself a timely one. It has a beginning and a middle and an end. He was born into a large family. lots of relatives. His parents were a king and a queen. They had considerable wealth, and they were the rulers of the Shakya tribe, which was a warrior clan. The elements of this story are not really very different from many other human stories that have been told, except there are a few exceptions to this story. And among them is that at his birth, a shaman predicted, to the delight of his father, that the boy would be a world-honored one.

[08:46]

However, there was this catch. Unless the boy was sheltered from unpleasantness of every kind, he would become a spiritual king, motivated by compassion, rather than a great warrior king like his dad, motivated by the pursuit of wealth and of power. So because of this prediction, the boy's father went to great lengths to ensure he never saw anything that wasn't pleasant, well-built, and beautiful, you know, kind of like the boy. himself or so it says so as the young prince grew he was given every possible training in the arts of warfare and and the arts of lovemaking and yet what was perhaps different about him from his peers was that he was very sensitive he had strong feelings and he was easily upset seeing servants and animals being badly treated At the age of 14, he went with his parents to the spring plowing festival where the oxen were being driven with long braided whips and where the animals were being startled out of their nests as birds of prey circled eagerly overhead.

[09:58]

All of which was horrifying to the prince. So no longer able to bear the sight of such suffering, the young man went away from the festival crowd and found a quiet spot to sit under a rose apple tree. Perhaps it was in full bloom. Without making any effort, he suddenly found himself at peace, utterly content. And years later, the memory of that precious time became very important as he struggled to find a pathway to free himself from suffering. At the age of 27, he married a young cousin, Yosudara, who gave birth the following year to a son that he named Rahula, meaning little fetter. Yosudara, who had been a friend of his since they were children, was very concerned to see her husband in such misery due to his obsession with breaking free from the world and its sorrows.

[11:01]

Once Siddhartha had become aware of the facts of life, that all living things, including a handsome young prince, will grow old, sicken and die. He had grown despondent, taking no pleasure in his family's summer palace or the war games that his cousins loved to play. And then finally, as we know, he cut off his jeweled topknot, gave his beloved horse Chanda to his servant, kissed his sleeping wife and child goodbye, and slipped out of the palace and into a dark forest. So over the next six years, this unhappy young man tried a number of techniques to escape from the cycle of his suffering. And what he learned from those earnest endeavors was that neither meditative trances or extreme asceticism would free him from his personal torment, but only just temporarily he felt free, meaning that for a time. But whatever he did, whatever he tried, in the realms of the relative truth, without fail,

[12:08]

came to an end. And so he said, this is not the way, this is not the way to the end of suffering, which then freed him to look for a way, one that had not been tried before, which as it turned out was to turn the light of his awareness away from escaping into the heavens and onto himself, onto the workings of his own mind, his imaginarium. where the very act of creation is taking place. Without a plan or a structure for practice, without any tricks, he remembered the rose apple meditation he had experienced by accident when he was a child, and so he entered there. I thought of a time when I was a boy when my shakyan father was working and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose apple tree. quite secluded from sensual desires, secluded from unwholesome things. At that time I had entered upon and abode in the first meditation, which is accompanied by thinking and exploring, with happiness and pleasure born of seclusion.

[13:21]

And I thought, might that be the way to enlightenment? Then following up on that memory... there came the recognition that this was the way to enlightenment. And so I ate some solid food, some boiled rice, and bread. So the next thing he discovered was a refrain, which I really appreciated. I've actually practiced with this quite a bit myself. And he faithfully repeated this refrain every step of the way, all the way to his final liberation. It's a simple one. It's kind of like a mantra. he said over and over again, I allow no such pleasant feeling that arises in me to take power over my mind. I allow no such pleasant feeling that arises in me to take power over my mind. So from the rose apple meditation, accompanied by this mantra, he entered into tranquility. And then from tranquility to insight, and from insight to awakening.

[14:27]

And given this great success, you know, we too are invited to explore our minds through tranquility practice and insight practice, shamatha and vipassana. While keeping this critical refrain at the forefront of our effort, I allow no such pleasant feelings that arise in me to take power over my mind. I was thinking we could put a sign there at the Tassajara Road, you know, saying that refrain along with its complement. The Buddha also recited, I allow no such painful feelings that arise in me to take power over my mind. So if we can steer this kind of even course between these continuous arisings of our emotions and our thoughts, our fantasies, whether pleasant or unpleasant, then we might find what the prince found, which is this breakthrough experience, breaking through the veil of illusions that had been trapping him. all of his life, trapping us, all of our life, in the painful isolation that we call a self.

[15:36]

The first story in the transmission of light is a testimonial to this discovery of the true self, of the Buddha nature, which is the same in everything and in everyone, beginningless and endless in each and every moment, time being, being, time. And then the Buddha declared, I and all beings on earth have attained enlightenment at the same time, all together, all inclusive, non-dual realization. So at that time, having recognized, having heard and studied and become this awakening experience, he began to teach based on his realization of the ultimate truth. So one important development that has taken place in Buddhist history, which then became what we call the Soto Zen, is a shift away from overly valuing the moment of realization, the breakthrough experience, toward valuing the practices that lead to that experience.

[16:42]

You know, the how-to of getting enlightened. In other words, to the path. We study the path, the way. Which is why this statement the Buddha made, enlightenment is the path and the path is enlightenment, is really encouraging for us as we're seeking to follow his example. The example of a pathway that's directly beneath our feet as we walk, right foot, left foot. And as in the dew drops and in each drop of water, as Dogen also helps us to try and guide us to the way, a way to see pathway that can only be taught and followed by means of the relative truth. The truth about our relationships to the world, about the parts of ourselves, and about our estrangement from what is ultimately true. I remember dear Mel Weissman once said to us that if you want to save all beings, that means you have to save all the beings that you are.

[17:44]

So, once again, from Nagarjuna's masterful work called The Fundamental Wisdom of the Buddha Way, about the two truths. The Buddha's teaching of the Dharma is based on two truths, a truth of worldly convention, the relative truth, and an ultimate truth. Those who do not understand the distinction between these two truths do not understand the Buddha's profound truth. Without a foundation in the relative truth, the significance of the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate truth, liberation cannot be achieved. So before these Middle Way teachings had taken hold of the Buddhist tradition, the path was pretty much understood as a method for eliminating obstacles that are blocking a realization of the ultimate truth, as it was understood. Obstacles that were like dense, dark clouds covering the moon. And then once those clouds were cleared away, liberation would be accomplished, you know, in the end.

[18:52]

And those obstacles are well known and they were elaborated in the early teachings, becoming the primary focus of those aspiring to escape from suffering. Greed, hate, delusion, pride, and skeptical doubt. I think some of you might know the name Byron Katie, might know about her. She's become quite a popular healer and has helped a great many people. She's an author, a spiritual innovator. And her story, what she calls her own awakening, happened at the age of 43, at which time she had been suffering for quite a long while from addiction and depression. And then one morning she woke up on her kitchen floor in her own vomit. And she asked herself, what am I doing here? This is a great koan, you know, a great question. What am I doing here? What are the causes and conditions of this situation that I find myself in right now?

[20:00]

So the correct answer that we'll be hearing more about in Ruhasa Sashin is what ended Bajang's seemingly endless life. circling as a fox. And the correct answer is what led Byron Katie to find relief from her addictive behavior and allow her to become a support for many, many people. And the correct answer, as the Dalai Lama said, following the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, is don't look for blame, look for causes. Beginning as causes, such as those that we chant at the start of morning service. each and every day. The early Buddhists who focused on renouncing obstacles in hopes of escaping from samsara engaged in a lengthy process of purification, the arhat path, which I spoke about in class. Once freed, arhats need never return to the suffering of human existence. And this view of nirvana can be seen as liberation for a person, a single person.

[21:08]

personal liberation, which sounds good, and it is good. And yet there might be a problem with the idea of oneself alone becoming liberated. This was something that even the newly enlightened Buddha was tempted to do after he found his calm and free moment under the tree. He was tempted to remain silent and content to the end of his days. In the Mahayana tradition, the Buddha's wisdom is understood as an insight into emptiness as the ultimate truth. Insight from which the Tathagatas are born. Insight that led the new Buddha to get up from his seat and go and find those he could teach. Tathagatas are the ones who have arrived at suchness, at just this-is-it-ness. Neither coming here nor going from here. There's no here. There's no there. And there's no somewhere in between.

[22:10]

Just Mu. Which is another way of saying that Buddhas have realization of the non-dual relationship between what are called ultimate and relative truth. Realization that samsara and nirvana, here and not here, myself and yourself, inside and outside, relative truth and ultimate truth, are not two. and they're not even one. And therefore, even though you can imagine escaping from samsara, there is no other place for you to go. Both nirvana and samsara are empty of inherent existence, as are the ones who are hoping to escape. Nowhere to go, and no one to take with you. There is no you. In Zen Buddhism, emptiness is best revealed in the seemingly mundane or meaningless events of our everyday life, such as watching the flow of the water down the Tassajara Creek, or how the light glitters in the kitchen windows, or the unusual way that your friend is folding their wiping cloth.

[23:25]

Very interesting. And yet emptied in an instant and vanished in a flash. As Dogen goes on to say, pleased honored followers of Zen, long accustomed to groping for the elephant, do not be suspicious of the true dragon. Zen koans make a lot more sense when we realize that the teacher is often simply pointing at some familiar object that the monk has been overlooking time and time again, like a tree in the garden, or a pebble that just struck the bamboo, or a staff, or a shout, Or better yet, the unusual way that you too are folding your wiping cloth in the zendo. So these are time-honored examples from everyday life, which are concrete and they're sensate. And more to the point, they are literally right at hand, you know, just like this right now. Where are your hands right now? How are my feet doing? How's the cosmic mudra?

[24:30]

How are you breathing? Is there some tension anywhere in your body? I don't know if some of you may like to draw. I'm a late plumer. I learned how to draw not so many years back. And I think I began to notice in that activity of drawing, this kind of merger that happens when you gaze at an object for a long time, something that you're trying to draw. I remember one of the first drawings I did, I showed my teacher. She was a high school drawing teacher. She was really good with us grown-ups, kind of timid. And she said, does that look like that? I looked at my drawing. I said, no. She said, well, why don't you make it look like that? And I said, well, how do you do that? She said, you have to look at it. Oh. I see. I didn't know.

[25:32]

So anyway, I got better as I looked at it, you know. So some years ago, I began to co-lead some retreats here at Tassahara with this wonderful teacher. Her name is Leslie Katz. She sadly has passed away. And we called our workshop Learning to Sit, Learning to Draw, Learning to See. And I think all of us in the course of that workshop began to appreciate the common ground of our practice of meditation and of drawing. both of which were helping us learn how to see, to really look, to really see. I think this common ground may open for us that barrier that's called the deathless scene, which is always taking place, the deathless scene, right where we are, right in the present moment. Just as Dogen says in the Genjo Kwan, it is an established way in Buddha Dharma to deny that birth turns to death. Accordingly, birth is understood as no birth.

[26:33]

It is an unshakable teaching in Buddha's discourse that death does not turn into birth. Accordingly, death is understood as no death. Birth is an expression complete this moment. Death is an expression complete this moment. They are like winter and spring. You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring. In the story of the Buddha's awakening, that's in the transmission of light, this awakening to suchness, to non-duality, it was recognized by him in the scene, the perfect scene of the morning star. And then the second story, the transmission to Mahakashapa, took place on seeing a flower being twirled in the Buddha's hand. You know, just what is it that the Buddha and his Dharma heir are seeing? What are you seeing? And one possibility is that that moment and every moment is that we see reality as wondrous and beautiful, as awesome and awful.

[27:43]

And at the same time, we know that the patterns are fragile and transient, that there is nothing that we can take a hold of. No thing. No nouns. Just verbs. Just flow. Where's the star now? Where did the flower go? Where did the Buddha go? And Makashapa, where did he go? Where are we going? Tathagata. No coming, no going. Another name for Buddha, another name for reality. So, as I had been saying, in the Mahayana Buddhism, the idealized role model changed from the Arhat, a never-returner, to the Bodhisattva who vows never to leave, until all beings can go too. In the Lodha Sutra, which is foundational of Zen understanding, it's revealed that Buddhahood is not just a potential in some long distant future, but it's an actual fact.

[28:51]

All beings, whole being, Buddha nature. So then the question... What about the dog? Mu. No. So that comes back to our story about Zhao Zhou and his answer to the monk's question in case number one of the Mumongkhan, the gateless gate, which is a collection of koans, and it begins with a preface written by the 13th century Rinzai Zen master Mumong. The Buddha mind and words point the way. The gateless gate is the Dharma entry. There is no gate from the beginning. So how do you pass through it? Haven't you heard that things which come through the gate are not the family treasure, as Angel so beautifully explained to us? Things gained from causes and conditions have a beginning and an end, birth and death.

[29:53]

Such talk raises waves where there is no wind and gouge wounds in healthy flesh. How much more foolish are those who depend upon words and seek understanding by their intellect? They try to hit the moon with a stick. They scratch their shoes when their feet itch. The person of courage unflinchingly cuts straight through the barrier, unhindered even by Nata, the eight-armed demon king. In the presence of such valor, the 28 Indian ancestors and the six Chinese ancestors beg for their lives. If you hesitate, however, you'll be like someone watching a horse gallop past a window. Within the blink of an eye, the horse is gone. Case one. A monk asks Zhao Zhou, has the dog Buddha nature or not? Zhao Zhou says, moot. So during the next four days of the Sashin, I'm mostly going to be talking about this koan, this brief story from the gateless barrier.

[31:03]

In the Zen tradition, these koans are records of actual conversations that happen between two people who are both interested in the secret of life. There are some examples of real koans that maybe you've asked yourselves, like, what is it? Why am I here? Where are we going? Is there anywhere to go? And who cares anyway? Or from the Zen tradition, what is the highest meaning of the holy truth? As the first ancestor, Bodhidharma, was asked by the emperor of China. So how a student asks a question is what makes the conversation something to be remembered and then passed along. And sometimes, like with this koan about Zhaozhou and the dog, for many, many centuries. And studying koans is a way for us to understand the Buddhist teaching, and it dates way back to the Tang Dynasty in China, which was called the Golden Age of Zen. And this word zen itself, which you may know, comes from a Chinese word chan, which in turn comes from a Sanskrit word jana, meaning trance or concentration.

[32:14]

And it's for this reason that we in the Zen school continue to seek realization. by attending to the products of our human imagination while sitting upright and still. And of the many things we incessantly imagine, the most important are words themselves. Mu. No. And yet there is no agreement on the best way to study words as we rifle through our imaginations in search of those that might lead us to liberation. So when Zen arrived in the West, all the way to California, it was by way of two successful lineages that ripened on their way from China to Japan, Soto Zen and Rinzai Zen. And these two traditions are often thought to represent different approaches to awakening, either through concentrated study of koans, as in the Rinzai tradition, called Kana Zen, or through the practice of upright sitting,

[33:19]

Silent Illumination Zen, Mokusho Zen, the objectless meditation of the Soto Zen tradition. And yet Dogen, who was very fond of koans, he collected a number of them while he was in China, and he studied them intensely and used them often, wrote in the Genjo koan that our everyday life experience is the most fundamental koan of them all. So whatever differences there might be, koans provide us with invaluable lessons on the teaching of the two truths. The ultimate truth? Mu. No. And the relative truth? Dogs and their Buddha nature. Humans and their Buddha nature. So, coming to understand the two truths allows students to understand not only koans, but also to understand the truth of our everyday life. So tomorrow I'm going to talk about the two truths yet again.

[34:23]

Seems like that's really all I ever talk about. Beginning with the writings of our second century Indian great ancestor Nagarjuna. Okay. Well, thank you all very much. 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.

[34:57]

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