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. Good morning. Thank you. I saw some tour guide doing that. He'd say something and he'd go... and they don't yeah so when the Buddha was asked by a traveler who noticed his unusual appearance what are you are you a god he said no are you a water spirit he said no are you a demon no are you a human being no then what are you and the Buddha replied I am awake So I think Zen is really basically about this question that we need to be asking ourselves if we so choose.

[01:07]

What are you? What are you? And if we can find out that indeed we are awake, I think that's the greatest discovery of them all. Which we already are, but we seem to have forgotten what a big deal it is to be awake. So Zen became a tradition as it followed along after each human who endeavored to remember that they are already awake. And as best it could, try to help them along the way, kind of like a good Anja and Jisha might do. So as you know, there are these two main strands of Zen I've been talking about that arrived in Japan from China. There's the Rinzai Zen and the Soto Zen. So they've been around for many centuries and offering slightly different understanding, maybe, of how to remember that we're awake. So I've spent the better part of my practice life, in fact, it's way more than half my life now, under this banner of Soto Zen.

[02:16]

And, you know, our teaching is emphasizing this Shikantaza, or just sitting, just sitting. So I felt kind of reluctant to begin to undertake a study of koans. I understood that was the primary approach of Rinzai's end school, you know. It's kind of like a rival school, perhaps, you know. Which I'm used to from living in San Francisco and having rivalry with the Los Angeles Dodgers my entire life. So I understand about rivalry and my school and your school. But our founder... The founder of Soto Zen, Dogen Zenji, who returned to Japan with Dharma transmission in Soto Zen, had also already received Dharma transmission in the Rinzai tradition from his traveling companion, whose name was Myo Zen, who himself was the Dharma heir of Myo An Esai, who's the founder of Rinzai Zen in Japan. So this is pretty high and pretty close to the origins of that tradition.

[03:24]

Even though I have been quite content with my practice and the teaching of Soto Zen, based as it is on the kind of mind-blowing and gut-wrenching teachings of Dogen Zenji, such as the Genjo Koan, in which he tells us that it's our everyday life experience that's the most challenging Koan of them all, as we well know. So, even so, I have really enjoyed these last couple of years turning towards the teachers and the teachings of the Rinzai school to try to understand better just what they are up to. So what I've been offering this practice period are some thoughts about my encounter with the koan tradition through my own informal study of these two koans in the Gateless Gate. the one you're familiar with now about the dog, and then soon to be familiar with about the fox. And the fox, it is going to be paying off its karmic debt for 500 lifetimes.

[04:29]

So given that koans are recordings of conversations between two, usually two people, who are interested in the seemingly hidden secret of life. And I think it's really important that each of us finds out what our koan is and what secret are we looking for to answer our deepest concerns. So as I've said, some good examples of koans that are kind of reeking of real curiosity or things like, what is it? No, really, what is it? And where are you from? And where are you going? Why did Bodhidharma come from the West. And, of course, are you awake? Are you awake? So how a student of life answers these questions is what makes that exchange worth remembering, sometimes for a very long time, or even written down, as these collections of koans have been made for us to use.

[05:38]

So how koans are used by the Zen tradition as I have been studying, is still up for discussion. Is it the just sit of Soto Zen, or is it meditating on the words of the Zen ancestors, as our friends in Rinzai tradition are taught to do? So, one understanding I have about the distinction between these two approaches to the realization of our already-awake is that Soto Zen places emphasis on the oneness or the interfusion of essence and function, of Buddha and sentient beings, of form and emptiness, of the ultimate and the conventional truth, the host within the host. So in the Song of the Jewel Mir Samadhi, which we chant every week of our Tassara week, our founder, Dongshan Liang Jie, says that the emphasis... in our tradition, as he states in the last few lines of the Song of the Jewel of Mary's Samadhi, is to practice secretly, working within, like a fool, like an idiot.

[06:48]

Just to continue in this way is called the host within the host. No gaps. So again, as far as I understand from what I've been reading, the emphasis of Rinzai's school is on realizing the emptiness aspect of reality through what might be called a breakthrough. Eureka, I found it. I found it. I think I've told you this story already about Suzuki Roshi and the salamander. Did I tell you that? No? Oh, good. So when Suzuki Roshi was a boy, his elementary school class went out into a meadow to look for this particular species of salamander. And... Suzuki Roshi found the salamander and he yelled out, I found it, I found it, to which his teacher replied, Suzuki, we are looking for the salamander, not for you. So in the Soto Zen teachings, whether we recognize it or not, these breakthroughs are understood to be already happening in each and every moment.

[07:57]

Each and every moment is a breakthrough of our conscious awareness as it comes into intimate contact. with each and everything. We are breaking out of the dark and into the light of awareness. Every moment. And again, as Dongshan says in his poem about the song, because there is the common, there are jewel pedestals and fine clothing. Because there is the startlingly different, there are house cat and cow. Ye with his archer skill could hit a target at a hundred paces, but when arrow points meet head on, What has this to do with the power of skill? So when subject and object meet head-on, where's the skill in that? Every moment. Arrow points meeting. Just this. Just this is it. So meeting head-on is what our heads are doing in every waking hour of the day. We are meeting sounds and sights. We're meeting tangible objects and odors and tastes.

[08:59]

And we are meeting thoughts head-on. You know, bam. Sometimes we almost fall down. It's so rough. And other times it's so faint that we can barely hear what's happening. And so then we bow and we laugh, or sometimes we growl. You know, the animal body knows the way to meet the world without needing to be taught. So we in the Soto camps are even warned against making much out of a big experience. which for many may be quite difficult to overcome. You can get stuck on the memory, on the remembering the odor of baked apples from yesterday's pie. So there's this imaginary boundary that separates the imaginary self from the rest of reality, and when that drops away, we humans may construct an imaginary boundary of a no-self, an absence,

[10:02]

which is a lot more powerful than the one you had before. This in Zen is sometimes called a sickness, and it's notoriously difficult to cure, because I found it. I found it. It's mine, my precious. So I once asked Soto Zen teacher, Japanese teacher, Katagiri Roshi, I don't know if any of you ever met, a wonderful teacher. He came to California to help Suzuki Roshi, as did Kobanchino. to found the San Francisco Zen Center. So they were very young monks when they came, and they both ended up being teachers in their own right. So I was Kategori Roshi's jisha during one of his visits to California. And so I said to him, I would really like to take up the formal study of koans. And he said, oh, what a great idea. Why don't you go study in a Rinzai monastery? Which is not what I was expecting him to say. And then he said, koans can be very helpful, but they are often very hard to get rid of.

[11:07]

And yet, when Dogen went to his Chinese teacher, Ru Jing, to share his breakthrough experience, which he had just had, he said, body-mind dropped. And Ru Jing responded, drop body-mind. In other words, now drop that. Don't get stuck. Don't hold on to it. Let it go. Whatever you've got over and over again, just drop it, drop it, drop it, drop it. like rain on the roof. So with these cautions in hand and from nothing more really than my curiosity, I went ahead and peeked into the workings of the so-called rivals and tradition to see what helpful teachings might be available for me in there. And anyway, koans really don't belong to anyone, no more than air or show tunes do. And as with all of the Buddhist teachings, they have been freely given and they've been widely distributed. So here again, and perhaps for the last time, the Sashin, you'll be relieved to know, does a dog have Buddha nature or not?

[12:13]

So questions similar to this one that might touch us somehow inside, might give us some kind of squirmy feeling, are referred to as barriers or gates. And as I've said, what they're doing is inviting us to break through into our own hearts. That's really the point of all of this. Open our hearts. A friend of mine told me a story once about asking an elderly Rinzai teacher who was visiting in the States, and she was driving him somewhere, I think to Zen Mountain Montessori back east. And then kind of as a joke, she asked him if he would give her the answer to the last koan. And he said, sure, but don't tell anyone. The answer is love. So the most important thing about studying these stories is that they have a direct connection to our hearts, to the things that we really care about.

[13:16]

And it's not so easy, actually, to know what we really care about because of the continuous and seamless flow of images and notions that keep appearing within the vast reaches of our conscious awareness, nonstop flow. One teacher had said about his own life that it had been a river of faces. River of faces. That might be familiar to you as well. Our immediate response to things that appear, especially faces, could be, is this the most important thing? Is this the one I've been waiting for my whole life? Or maybe it's that one. Or maybe it's those. No, I'm pretty sure it's this one. So Zen in itself can be seen as a radical method for untangling ourselves from toxic thoughts and upside-down views. Zen understanding based on the ultimate truth is that there is nothing that we can say or think that can capture reality as it truly is.

[14:25]

And the Zen exercise is to accept for ourselves responsibility for entering through a tear in the veil of illusion into a realization of the ultimate truth, and that is... There's no veil, there's no tear, there's no entering, there's no illusion, no realization, and no truth. And there's no no either. And Jay Garfield, who I also really enjoy reading and watching, he's done a number of videos, teaching videos, very funny guy. He wears a tie with chili peppers on it. And he's a Tibetan practitioner as well. He says in his commentary on Nagarjuna's Middle Way teachings that the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth. So as I said yesterday, there is nothing holding us hostage to suffering except our mind's attachment to its own productions, its own thoughts and opinions, its own projections. And therefore, Zen is nothing more than the realization of the mind's innate freedom.

[15:33]

Liberation is not some ultimate reality existing beyond this phenomenal conditioned world, beyond the veil of conventional truth. Emptiness is the ultimate truth of reality and of liberation. Nirvana, too, is empty of its own existence. So, what about the dog? There's a book that I've been reading. It's called The Book of Moo, filled with lectures and essays on this inquiry about the dog. And one of the essays that I like is by John Tarrant, who is a Dharma successor of Robert Aiken and author of a wonderful book called Bring Me the Rhinoceros and Other Zankoans That Will Save Your Life. So the title of John Tarrant's essay in this book is No, Nay, Never, Nyet, and Iye. Iye is a Japanese word for no, nay, never, and yet.

[16:35]

So in his essay, he talks about this koan as a transformation device that has only one purpose, to open the gate of our joy and our freedom. In order for that gate to open, we're going to have to make some very painful decisions about what we are willing to let go. Even though we might not be so happy with the structures that we've built around ourselves, structures that we think will keep us safe and mostly hidden. And even though we might think that we want to break out of those old habit patterns, we are taking a big risk if these devices begin to work and the structures that we think are protecting us begin to fall away. Which leaves us pretty much standing there, as they say, butt naked without a leg to stand on. I once heard this story about an animal liberation festival that takes place in Japan every year where hundreds and hundreds of birds are freed from their cages to the delight of the crowds.

[17:40]

Everyone cheers. And then if you stay around until later that evening, you can see how all the birds fly back into their cages, where perhaps they feel most safe and well-fed and at home. So I asked my teacher what to do about the terror I felt as my carefully constructed cage began to peel away, layer by layer. And he said, you have to get used to it. You have to get used to fear. Get used to not being you. So it's not so comforting, but as with most things that seem actually true, that was one of them. So this story about the dog as with all koans, is intended to be a lantern or a vial of light that the ancestors have carried and then left behind to help guide us and to help illuminate the pathway for those who follow.

[18:41]

A pathway through the darkness of delusion and into the light of what we hope will be a new day. So why this particular story about the dog and the Buddha nature came to hold such a strong position in the Rinzai tradition has to do with the same basic doubts that we have over here in Soto Zen about ourselves as human beings. In fact, these are the same doubts that all humans have, regardless of their spiritual tradition, their ethnic origin, their race, their ability, or their gender pronouns. So one piece of advice that John Tarrant gives us who venture on to this well-trodden path is to avoid the trap of perfection. The perfection of wisdom includes avoiding perfection. There is no perfect anything or anyone. We are just this person doing what this person does in just this way. And yet, as Suzuki Roshi kindly reflected about us, there is always some room for improvement.

[19:48]

Zen teacher Terent then makes a case for why a dog? Dogs are very popular these days. particularly in the more affluent layers of society. They're pampered and groomed and well-fed. However, they are also competing for protein in many other locations in the world, and therefore they are themselves a source of protein. So street dogs are a good basic image for how many of us think of ourselves. Kind of low-down and homeless and unlovable and flea-ridden, always hungry. filled with longing, and estranged from the natural world where our healthy ancestors roamed in small bands with confidence in finding water, food, sex, and a safe place to sleep. And then Zhao Zhou, a highly regarded teacher in the tradition of the Bodhisattva vow, seems to say that dogs, like us, don't have Buddha nature. And there's no arguing with Zhao Zhou.

[20:54]

The conversation is over and you leave the room with only this word moo ringing in your head. Our opinions don't matter, our feelings don't matter, and we don't matter. Which is good, because those are the heavy burdens that we've been carrying around our entire life. And still, the answer no about the dog and about us is totally against the Dharma that the Buddha taught. for over a thousand years before Zhajo showed up. The Buddha said all beings, whole being, Buddha nature. And so then why does Zhajo say no? John Terence says that this question about the dog has been asked of Zhajo more than once by more than one monk. And sometimes he says no, and sometimes he says yes. which tells us why Zhao Zhou doesn't care about our opinions because he is not even interested in his own. And yet the fallback for Zhao Zhou is not, well, whatever.

[21:59]

It's no fallback and no fall forward. It's just yes or it's just no. This time with this monk, it's no. So on a more personal note, John Tarrant is a very good friend of a friend of mine. His name is Michael, who was married for a long time to my very best friend, whose name is Nina. And that makes it seem like a rather small world, except that all of us met around the Zen campfires when we were quite a bit younger, just as all of us are meeting here right now. Anyway, one day many years ago, Michael was driving Gregory Bateson to a conference in New York and Gregory Bateson is the ecology professor that I mentioned who told us the story about these new computers that think like humans. That is, they tell stories. So in this story, Gregory says to Michael that there's something he really dreads about these conferences. What is that, Michael asks.

[23:00]

Well, Gregory says, these people don't have a sense of humor. And then curious, Michael asks, what does that mean to you? And Dr. Bateson thinks a while and says, a sense of humor depends on knowing that what you think doesn't really matter. And what's more, that you don't really matter either. Not likely at a conference, I would imagine. So life isn't about whether or not we matter. And yet thinking that we don't matter, just like a stray dog, might make us think we matter even more. I really don't matter is a very big kind of mattering. What these teachings about us and our identification with poor dogs are trying to help us to release is a core belief that we have about the world and about ourselves. And that is that this shouldn't be happening the way it's happening. And it certainly shouldn't be happening to me. We imagine that by objecting to what's happening, that it will stop.

[24:03]

Or it'll change into something that we do like a lot better, especially if we push really hard. And if that doesn't work in our defense, it's your fault. I can also remember a story about this wonderful teacher named Charlotte Silver. I think she lived to be 105, maybe. Her last birthday cake was just like a forest fire of candles. And she was sharp all the way to the very last day. I used to visit her. She lived near a beach down from Green Gulch. One time I went to visit her, and she looked at me. She said, fool, would you like to take a nap? I said, yes. And so she got out of some blankets, and she put her chair back, and I put my chair back. And we slept for about an hour. It was the best visit I've ever had with anyone in my whole life. And then another time, a couple of years later, I went to see her. She kept asking me, fool, why aren't I dying?

[25:04]

And I said, well, you keep eating, Charlotte. And then I went to see her and she said, oh, I'm dying. I said, oh, Charlotte, I'm so happy for you. And she did about two days later. She was overjoyed. Finally, 105. Can you imagine? Too much. Anyway, I asked another old friend. I went to see a father of a high school friend who was also dying. He was 97. I said, do you recommend it? He said, no. too long anyway charlotte used to teach a discipline called sensory awareness at green gulch and every year she would come and hold workshops which were really delightful and we could sit in on her lessons so one of them i went to she told us all to lie on the floor and then she left us there for quite a while after saying if you lie there long enough something will change and i promise you it won't be the floor

[26:08]

which seemed an awful lot like what we do in the zendo. So when we object to what is happening, we're missing the thing that's happening. For example, you know, she left me, or I hate bean soup, zazen doesn't work for me, why did my dog have to die, and so on and so on. The solution to each of the emotional arisings is the same world round. We bear them. We bear them. Or if we're fortunate to study the Buddhist teaching, we allow the teachings to bear them with us. One of the things the teachings tell us is that life is not open to interpretation or to meaning. And so we don't need to bother with those things or with anything else for as long as what's happening is happening. While things are happening, we simply breathe gently and slowly through our noses down past our abdomens while allowing our bodies to do what they do best, continue to live, and continue to support us to find harmony with whatever has come our way.

[27:17]

We inhale and we exhale over and over again. And then we get up slowly, we walk slowly, we sit down again, we chant again, and we eat some wholesome breakfast in the company of our Dharma friends. Like this morning, that The cobbler and yogurt was fantastic. Wasn't it? You just had the cobbler. You just had the cobbler. You skipped the yogurt. Oh, well. It's okay. It's too cold. It's too cold. That was yummy. Creamy. Is that homemade? Is that yogurt made here? Kitchen? Yeah? Oh, it's great. Oh, good. Well, keep doing that. Okay. So in times like these, we may find ourselves not hating our circumstances or not hating our own state of mind, and maybe even starting to forgive our life for not being what we wanted it to be. And forgive ourselves for not living up to our own expectations, for not living up to our potential, which I think most of us have probably been told about.

[28:25]

So over time, time being the secret ingredient for Zen realization, we might discover that we can be what we are and what we've always been, which is timeless, boundaryless, and utterly free. There's another secret ingredient, Kwan's study, that John Tarrant lets us in on, and that has to do with acknowledging our reluctance to actually change and to notice the effort we will go through to avoid it, you know, just as the Buddha did through his meditative trances and his asceticism. I will not change. So in order to bypass our reluctance, we need to bypass our exquisite talent for reasoning and logic. We need to work around our cleverness, which is created by our delusional and our strategic thinking. Which is why this koan about the dog is so stupid. It doesn't make any sense and we can't work it out.

[29:29]

Does the dog have Buddha nature? You know? Who cares? I don't. But I am curious about what the teacher might say. And the teacher says, oh, are you really now? How about no? Does that work for you? The harder we work to get the right answer, the farther away from the right question we become. Because the koan doesn't make sense, we, who are the sensible ones, become frustrated and angry and prone to revenge. you know, stupid teacher, stupid dog, stupid Buddha, not quite ready to say stupid me. At that point, the koan is doing its actual work. It's bringing out the less noble parts of ourselves, the ones that we hate and we would like to pretend aren't really there. When my daughter was little and trying out some things that she'd heard in preschool, she kept calling me and Grace, her other mother, poopoo heads.

[30:31]

So finally I said to her, you're a poopoo head. And she got really upset and started to cry. You called me a poopoo head. And I said, well, you keep calling me a poopoo head. And she said quite wisely, yes, but you're a grownup. Embarrassing. So if we are lucky enough, those yucky parts of ourselves can be drawn out into the open so we can see them as well. and then we can decide if we want to make changes or not. You know, we are grown-ups, and no one else has the right or the power to change us if we don't want to change. When we begin to see all of our parts, you know, the good and the bad and the ugly, then we are embracing the whole of our life. And then we, too, might get the joke that comes when we no longer take ourselves too seriously. If the change we're asking of ourselves seems too small or nitpicky or minor, we might reject that thinking, I'm just going to hold out for big change.

[31:35]

Whole change. What I'm being offered right now can't possibly be what I want. What I want will happen when I wake up. And then we go back to sleep. The longer we stay with the intention to study our minds with our full attention, the more likely we are to soften to what's actually there, which, as it turns out, is not much. Thoughts come and go, feelings come and go, insights come and go. Tathagata. And at that time, we may notice a growing kindness for our condition as a human being, a condition rife with transiency, selflessness, and dis-ease. When kindness appears, we can begin to embrace those parts that we had locked in the basement cellar, the dogs that had been whining and crying and howling for our attention. but even more importantly, for our affection. Dogs have names like fearful and jealous and angry, stubborn and greedy and clumsy and moody.

[32:40]

And then there's the big one, always right. As John Tarrant points out, on one side, it is simply our incompetence and our distractibility, our greed and our fear that makes us fall apart at little things. And on the other side, it's our detachment. that makes us indifferent to the big things. And even so, given how it is that we are, this is the moment of true revelation, a moment of honest reflection in which we can stop whipping the dogs and kicking them back down the stairs. We can accept that, yes, that is a dog and it's my dog. I raised it, I failed to train it, and then I locked it in the basement and I am now truly sorry. So with that, the cellar vanishes, the dog vanishes, and the upset vanishes, as it says in the Ehe Koso Hotsugamo that we just chanted.

[33:41]

By revealing and disclosing our lack of faith and practice before the Buddha, we melt away the root of transgressions by the power of our confession and repentance. I really am sorry. This is the pure and simple color of true practice, of the true mind of faith, of the true body of faith. So from then on, when someone asks you, what are you, you can honestly say, I am awake. I am awake to my whole self, to all of me. Moo. So now the funny thing is, and I do mean funny thing, the freedom we find when we let the dogs out of the doghouse... and yet see how they continue running around barking and chasing after buses, is the freedom from wishing for better dogs, and instead finding our own dogs are very funny, and even lovable. It's truly hilarious when we stop and watch what the mind has been producing that we have been believing.

[34:45]

All these long years, I'm too tall, they got more stuff than I got, they don't understand me, they certainly don't like me, and who do they think they are anyway? So this arrival of a sense of humor doesn't happen because of something that we've changed about ourselves or about reality. It happens because we are finally paying attention to reality. And reality is very funny. Especially when we stop rejecting the experiences that we're having, when we stop locking the best parts of ourselves up in the cellar. Becoming familiar with all the ways we've been stopping ourselves from being ourselves opens the gateway to who and what we truly are. Fearless, egoless, relatively unopinionated, kind, and funny. No is able to face off our self-hatred and our other hatred by seeing how hatred, like lust and ignorance, are just thoughts to which we have attached some feelings.

[35:47]

Just to stop at feelings. And the thoughts simply melt away. As John Terence says at the end of his essay, it's never been anyone else who's causing the problem. And not only is it not anyone else, it's not even you. Even you are not a problem. And then one morning you wake up and it has become crystal clear that the problem of existence is only an apparent problem, an appearance. And that existence is just existence. filled to the brim with richness and colorful lighting, discomfort and intimacy. John Cage, who's also a marvelous Zen teacher, said about his hard-won view of reality, if I think something isn't beautiful, I look at it for a long while, asking myself, why is this not beautiful? Until I realize there is no reason. So there's one final story I want to tell you this morning that I was reminded of when I was talking last night with one of you.

[36:56]

And he was saying that Moo reminds him of cows. Of course. Me too. So a couple years ago, Timo, who's our Gringold Farm Director, was driving in the country with his family and his two kids. They were probably about four and five at the time. And Miro, the older... The boy looked out the window and he said, I see a cow. And a little while later, Miro's younger sister, Luca, said, I see a cow. So given that there were no more cows around when she said that, Miro became a little suspicious. And he said to her, Luca, does your cow have leaves? And Luca said, yes. And Miro said, that's not a cow, that's a tree. the end little brothers and little sisters so helpful aren't they for each other just like us that's a tree 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

[38:19]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[38:24]

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