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. So here again, as I promised you is one of the most important teachings in the Zen tradition written by Indian ancestor Nagarjuna in the second century. of the Common Era. This teaching, including the beginning portion that I read yesterday, is taken from chapter 24 of the Mulamajamaka Karikas, meaning the fundamental wisdom of the middle way. So, what is the middle way? The middle way is that way of not falling into one side or the other side of any dualistic propositions, of which there are many. There's right and wrong, inside and outside, self and other, black and white, men and women, gay and straight, and so on.

[01:04]

So it might help us to see why this teaching is important for us to try to understand. In the middleweight teachings, Nagarjuna uses the terms ultimate truth and conventional or relative truth. And he also uses two terms familiar to us from the Heart Sutra, form and emptiness, as another way of explaining the two truths. Now, I don't know how these words strike you as lyrics to the song, but I'd suggest that you listen. And the more often you listen to Nagarjuna, the more likely you will be able to understand what he is saying about liberation. 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 drawn between these two truths do not understand the Buddha's profound truth. Without a foundation in the conventional truth, the significance of the ultimate truth cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate truth, liberation is not achieved.

[02:10]

By a misperception of emptiness, a person of little understanding is destroyed, like a snake. incorrectly seized or like a spell incorrectly cast. And for that reason, that the Dharma is deep and difficult to understand and to learn, the Buddha's mind despaired of being able to teach it. For whom emptiness is clear, everything becomes clear. If emptiness is not clear, nothing becomes clear. If you perceive the existence of all things in terms of their having an essence, that is, some independently existing own being that seems to isolate the object from everything else around it, then this perception of all things will be without the perception of causes and conditions by which that thing has now appeared, that is, by dependent co-arising. As a result of perceiving that way... effects and causes, agents and actions, arising and ceasing, will be rendered impossible. Whatever is dependently co-arisen, that is explained to be emptiness.

[03:16]

That explanation, being a dependent designation, meaning words themselves depend on other words for their meaning, is itself the middle way, is a non-dual expression that includes both the relative truth and the ultimate truth. So here's that last... verse once again whatever is dependently co-arisen that is explained to be emptiness that explanation being a dependent designation is itself the middle way something that is not dependently arisen such a thing does not exist therefore a non-empty thing does not exist whoever sees dependent co-arising also sees suffering the first noble truth and its arising the second noble truth, and its cessation, third noble truth, as well as the path, fourth noble truth. And then Nagarjuna goes on to say, and yet, liberation is not some ultimate reality existing beyond the phenomenal conditioned world, somehow behind the veil of conventional truth, for that would commit us to eternalism, you know, for example, heaven or life everlasting.

[04:28]

Emptiness is the ultimate truth of reality and of liberation. Nirvana too is empty of its own existence. There is nothing that distinguishes samsara from nirvana. There is nothing that distinguishes nirvana from samsara. And the furthest limit of nirvana is also the furthest limit of samsara. Not even the subtlest difference between the two is found. So that having been said, the monk then asked Jaojo, does a dog have Buddha nature or not? Well, the answer to this koan is what our practice is guiding us to understand and to realize, that nothing distinguishes samsara from nirvana or a dog from Buddha nature, that not even the subtlest difference can be found. So how we come to see that and to understand that is still up for discussion. Do we just sit, Shigantaza? Or do we concentrate in our meditation on the mysterious words of the Zen ancestors, such as Mu?

[05:30]

So in order to discuss the use of koans in our tradition, it helped me to learn a little more about how koans came to be used in Zen in the first place. And although koan study is common to all schools of Zen, there are varying degrees of emphasis. In my understanding, the Rinzai school uses a koan curriculum with checking questions and capping phrases and gestures and quotations from Chinese poetry. And yet one popular understanding is that koans refer to unanswerable questions or meaningless statements. However, in Zen practice, a koan is not meaningless and not a riddle or a puzzle. Teachers do expect students to present an appropriate response when they're asked about a koan. Koans have also been commonly misunderstood as an entryway into some kind of pure consciousness that's devoid of thinking altogether. This understanding is widely criticized in Zen, as we know from the koan embedded in the fukanzazengi, in which the teacher instructs the students to think of not thinking, to which one of the students replies, how do you think of not thinking?

[06:36]

To which the teacher says, non-thinking, non-duality, neither thinking nor not thinking. The middle way, between silence and sound, true and false, dogs and Buddha nature, is the essential art of Zazen. In fact, the central theme of many koans is the identity of opposites, form and emptiness, essence and function, ordinary and holy, busy and not busy, thinking and not thinking, in which the teaching of non-duality is explored again and again. Hakuin's well-known koan, two hands clap, and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand? It's clearly about the two and the one. The koan asks you first what duality is, the two hands, and then what is non-duality, the one hand. In another famous koan, what is your original face before your mother and father were born, the phrase father and mother also refers to duality. So this teaching of non-duality would be familiar with

[07:37]

the teachers tell us, to someone educated in Chinese poetry and philosophy where so much thought is presented through images of paired opposites. Your original face alludes to the original non-dual, all-inclusive nature of reality itself, and mother and father to the split, which in the worst of cases we call a divorce. Victor Horry, who's a Renzi Zen teacher, says that in the beginning a monk thinks a koan is a motionless object, on which to focus their attention, kind of like a chair. But after a long period of repetition, the practitioner realizes that the koan is also a dynamic activity, the very activity of seeking an answer to the koan, which the student is actively doing, at which time the koan comes to life. In studying the koan, the self sees the self in action, not directly, but under the guise of this koan. When one realizes this, that it's me asking and answering the questions inside my own mind, then two hands have become one.

[08:39]

The student becomes the koan that he, she, or they is trying to understand, thereby becoming the sound of one hand, just this person. As for Zhao Zhou's poor dog, who is still waiting to learn its fate, do I have Buddha nature? Zhao Zhou again says, mooed. In Rinzai Zen teacher John Terence's commentary on this koan, he cites Rainer Maria Rilke's advice to a young poet. I would like to beg you, dear sir, to have patience with everything, unresolved in your heart, and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday, far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. So it may be that the first step in entering into spiritual practice, in other words, into a deep inquiry about this life, is to find out what your questions really are.

[09:48]

You know, what is it about your life that seems unfulfilled or unsatisfactory or just simply stuck? And although you may already feel the question, you know, sometimes referred to as a great doubt, unless you discover a way to articulate it, it remains in the realm of what I'd call unrequited love, the unnameable, unlocatable, unrecognizable missing piece of your own heart and mind, a kind of vague and persistent longing. Many years ago, when I was still a somewhat new student at the Zen Center, I went to meet with Ed Brown, who was then living at Green Gulch. So I went upstairs, quite nervous, entering the room, sat down, and I looked up, and I asked him with a sad face, what about this longing? So he looked at me, he smiled, and then he started to laugh. And I, too, then started to laugh, and that was about how our first meeting came to an end. And that question, to this day, still makes me laugh. You know, what about this longing? Such a question, the ones that seem to ache, are referred to in Zen as a barrier or a gate, such as in the title of the collection of koans in which Zhao Zhou's answer to the dog question appears, a collection called the Gateless Gate, the Mumangkan, the gate that Reverend Angel talked about so skillfully

[11:05]

this last week. John Terence says that if a koan is interesting to you, the way a song or a poem might be, then it might be worth your trouble to spend some time with it, writing it, chanting it, remembering it at the oddest times, as if the koan is remembering you. So this koan of Zhaozhou and the dog has been around a very long time and is still considered the best one for beginners entering into systematic koan practice of the Rinzai approach to what we might call, dare call, a breakthrough experience. So this question of breakthrough itself is one of the hallmarks of where the two schools, Soto and Rinzai Zen, seem to part ways, at least as far as emphasis is concerned. And I'll talk about that a little more as we go along. So what is the gate that we're trying to open anyway? Tarrant calls it the gate of the heart. I really like that. The gate that opens up our hearts to the simple joy of being alive. Another way to understand opening the gate is to think of it as entering into a new or a different space than the one you're already in, kind of like a reincarnation.

[12:10]

In the case of koans, that might mean opening to a new way of seeing things, such as the shift that can take place by focusing on the context in which the present moment is being lived, or what Suzuki Roshi called our big mind. Mostly we humans seem wired and subsequently trained to focus our attention on the content or the foreground of our field of awareness, you know, words or images, memories, sensations and stories. In Suzuki Roshi's terms again, our small mind or our self-centered mind. Once you begin to identify with the background, with the context of your life, then the foreground, in particular the stories that we call problems, may begin to show us what they truly are. How one by one they arise and one by one they simply vanish. Like those lovely snowflakes landing on a hot iron skillet, you know, with a slight sizzling sound. If you think of all the stories you've told yourself over the years to say nothing about this past week, about death or injuries, cold weather, blisters, broken hearts, fear, hunger, money, anger, you know, where are they all now?

[13:20]

Where are those stories? So what I'm not suggesting by coming to see the contents of our minds as mere appearances or mere stories is to then disrespect or disregard those appearances. This very important issue is taken up in the second koan in the Mumonkan, Hyakujo and the Fox, which I'll be talking about in the Rohatsu Sesshin. In the case of this koan about the dog, it's useful to set aside resistance to the shifting from the foreground, the stories we tell ourselves, to the background, from the vastness of reality itself, out of which all things, including all of our stories, have appeared. And then we can see if shifting perspectives might be of use in our life. especially because shifting is already what's happening. We may just not be so aware of it. So this shift to perspective is what the Buddha saw and talked about. And yet it might be hard to believe without passing through the gateless barrier of great doubt. The great doubt about what we think and feel, what we see and believe about what we see.

[14:22]

And then there's the biggest one of all, who we imagine ourselves to be or not to be. Does a dog have Buddha nature? Koans, as I've said, have been around a long time, and through those centuries, many sincere humans, like us, have made use of them to understand themselves and this world, and in particular, what we call the problem. For Shakyamuni Buddha, the problem was the suffering of humanity due to transiency. We might say that his was the koan of birth and death, just as it's written on the Han that we strike each morning before Zazen. Great is the matter of birth and death. No forever. Gone. Gone. Awake, awake, each one. Don't waste your life. For Dogen, the driving question that drove him across the sea to China, as I read to you last, Hashin, was this one. As I studied the many schools of Buddhism, they all maintained that human beings are endowed with Buddha nature at birth. If this is the case, why did the Buddhas of all ages, already in possession of enlightenment, find it necessary to seek enlightenment and to engage in spiritual practice?

[15:29]

So what might be the driving question or problem for you? Finding your own question is the most essential part of the spiritual journey. It's the first place that you take a step. By making use of these ancient conversations between sincere seekers and those who had gone before them, the ones we call our ancestors, we can begin to locate not only our own questions, but also the ones we didn't even know or suspect that we had, such as whether or not a dog has Buddha nature. What this koan is basically about is the monk's own doubt about whether or not he, himself, or herself, or themself, has enlightened nature, the very same question Dogen was carrying on his harrowing sea voyage to China. Technically, the correct answer to this question about the dog, according to Buddha's sutras, is yes, of course, all beings have Buddha nature, which this monk already knew, as did his teacher. So how come Zhao Zhou says no? So that's the real koan, the one none of us can easily escape.

[16:35]

You know, excuse me, that is not the right answer. It's certainly not the way that I understand things. And, you know, who are you anyway? This is how we tend to react. It's a pretty familiar response when someone that we hope will simply give us affirmations instead put up a barrier that's higher than we know how to jump. both an unattainable barrier and an unavoidable one, if you even care. And if you don't, that's a koan too. There's a great kid's story I once read to my daughter called Charlie and the Lion. Charlie keeps saying to his parents whenever they threaten him with consequences for his failed schoolwork or housework, I don't care. And then finally one day, as Charlie is on his way to school, he is eaten by a lion in one gulp. So it's quiet for a while, and then there comes this muffled and plaintive cry, I do care, I do care, at which the lion throws Charlie up, Charlie gets washed off, and he heads off to school, a changed man, so to speak. So what the teacher is doing is basically blocking the monk from using his usual tricks, intellectualizing, emotionalizing, or willfulness, to meet the obstacles in his life, all of which reek of selfishness, either as conceit,

[17:50]

or a self-effacement. Instead, he finds himself with no escape, no easy way out, or so it seems, just no. In such a situation, the human body and mind tend to freeze. So it's interesting that our biological ancestry is said to have started, first of all, with mushrooms, and then passed through the tortoises on the way to mammals, and then to what we call humans. And we share with our animal ancestry a vital mechanism that's called the vagus nerve, So it's the nerve that, among other things, connects our brain to our stomach. So when great-grandmother tortoise was frightened, the vagus nerve would cause her to freeze inside of her shell. In mammals, the vagus nerve signaled them to fly. to fight or to flee. And as humans, we have the same two reactions, depending on our level of fear, or if we feel safe enough, we have the option of opening our hearts, relaxing and inquiring further into what has just arrived into our field of awareness.

[18:51]

What is it that thus comes? Safety is an essential ingredient for us if we are to feel curious, empathetic, or compassionate about the other that thus comes. And safety, in other words, is a very important component to our vow to live for the benefit of others. And in order to feel safe, it's good to test the ice before stepping out onto the lake in early winter. The Zen understanding of this process of freezing and then melting away is called a realization, dropped body and mind. Dogen's words to his teacher at the moment of his realization. Or as Rinzai said when he melted, there's nothing to it. Or the second Chinese Zen ancestor who had been sent off by Bodhidharma to search for his mind, I've looked everywhere for my mind and I can't find it. The mind cannot be had. And then there's our founding ancestor, Tozan Ryokai, unseeing his face reflected in the water. He said, just this person.

[19:53]

So this is amazing, you know, right there all along. The moment when no self recognizes itself. So one way to work with cons, as I understand, or any problem for that matter, is to watch our judgments arise about the problem and then turn them over again and again. Is this a real problem? Or did I make it up all by myself? And little by little we may come to understand, as John Tarrant and others have testified, how intimate and tender life truly is. After years of struggle, my heart was at rest, and the world seemed like a much kinder place. Could this openness be the way that things truly are? Or as the Buddha said, remembering the rose-apple meditation, this is the way to things as they truly are. This is the gateway to liberation. In the introduction to the Book of Mu, the editors tell us that as we push through a challenge like these koans, we will experience along the way some great doubt, some great faith, and some great determination.

[20:56]

And in doing so, by making a great effort to keep going, we will come to know the indivisibility of our ordinary, everyday consciousness from great spaciousness. In taking up the dance between our everyday mind and the vastness of space, intimacy is realized. like the wisteria vines conjoining from a single source, or like our left foot and our right foot in walking, first this one, then that one, then this one again, and then that one again, and then neither, and then both, resting nowhere. Resting nowhere, it's been said, is the true practice of koan introspection, which of course is the true practice of our life. The opportunity to enter into this dance by means of koans, such as the dog and its Buddha nature, can be found in texts as early as the 9th century. One of the earliest versions of this well-worn koan includes a story about Mumon himself, as he worked out his own intimate response to Mu. After six years without progress, Mumon vowed not to sleep until he penetrated the heart of this Zen gate, and then one day...

[22:04]

As he heard the bell sounding for the midday meal, he experienced a sudden awakening. And then he wrote a verse. A clear sky and shining sun, suddenly a great thunderclap. In an instant, all beings' eyes are opened, and the myriad things come together as one. And the following day, Muman entered into his teacher's room to gain confirmation of his experience. His teacher, whose name was Yulin, said, Where did you see these gods and devils? Muman shouted. Yulin also shouted. Muman shouted again. And by this exchange of shouts, Muman's awakening was confirmed. So how about that? You know, just like the blue jays squawking and the babies laughing, frogs croaking and dragons roaring, these two sincere seekers found a way to let it all out face to face. They found a way to open the gateless gate, which at least one of them had been convinced was locked. As Zen teacher and psychiatrist Barry McGill says in his essay called The Baby and the Bathwater, the gateless gate of Mu is really the opposite of impenetrable, the opposite of locked.

[23:14]

The gate and life itself is wide open to us just as the way it is. In fact, there really is no barrier anywhere. So why is there a problem? Why is Mu, why is life so difficult to pass through? Well, it's simply because we haven't had an experience of the openness in our lives. We feel that there are barriers everywhere, inside and out, barriers that we don't want to face or to cross, barriers of fear, anger, shame, pain, old age, sickness, and death. We think that all these forms of suffering are blocking our path. We don't see or trust that they themselves are gates, are the path, that everything is a gate, and we can enter the Everywhere. The hardest and most difficult work of our practice, both on and off the cushion, is recognizing that we ourselves have set up the barriers that are splitting us off from the spaciousness of life. That's what this old story about a Zen teacher, a monk, and a dog is really about.

[24:15]

The problem of separation. Those imaginary barriers that we set up within ourselves, between ourselves, and against the world. I can remember when Sabrina, my daughter, at about age five, hid under her bed when our cat Aya had suddenly died. Somehow she hoped that hiding would keep her safe from the pain of that loss. In Roman's commentary, he summarizes our activity of barrier-making with a simple phrase, has or has not, as in does the dog have or have not, Buddha nature. Have or have not represents all the dualistic propositions we habitually use to cut ourselves off from just about everything. Even though the monk had been taught that the dog, along with everything else, is Buddha nature, he really doesn't believe it. He doesn't believe that a lowly dog, but more importantly himself, could be anything like an awakened being. In his imagination, the gap is just too high and too wide, like a blue cliff, as in the title of the koan collection by that name, the Blue Cliff Record.

[25:21]

The gap seems so real to the monk, and so his teacher is challenging him by hitting at what he has been taught with a big walloping note. Mumman's hope is that he will knock the blinders off the monk's eyes and pop the corks out of his ears in order for him to see how this splitting between himself and his Buddha nature is happening. Maybe if Jajo yells loud enough and often enough, all of the masks of self-hating might blow off, allowing the monk and all of us who follow to truly enjoy the show. Justice. Mu. Thank you very much. And thank you. for your kind attention. 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.

[26:22]

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