It's good that it's not raining, huh? Are there good indoor spaces for the kids if it is raining? Where do they go if it rains? Where does everybody go? Wheelwright Center. Wheelwright Center? Yeah. But if there's a conference going on in the Wheelwright Center, you're in trouble, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Pray for non-rain, right? Don't you kind of feel like going with them?

[01:06]

It's kind of too bad. I feel like it. Transitions with children is so much fun. I remember reading that childhood is... Can't hear me? Not in the back. Turning it up? Yeah. I remember reading one time that childhood is an endless series of balance imbalance, balance, imbalance, balance, imbalance, where you kind of get stable, you know where you are and what's going on, and then you don't, and then you're anxious, and in every transition you're going through that.

[02:20]

But the book didn't mention that this never stops. It's not just childhood. So, yeah, so every... Every parent knows when the transition time comes, oh boy, if we could just get them from here to there, then everything will be all right for a short while until the next one comes. Anyway, it is Arbor Day, so I thought I would talk about a Zen story about trees, that that would be a good thing to do. So here's my story about trees. It's a famous Zen story. You've probably heard this story before. It's a dialogue. A monk asks Zhajo, what is the meaning of Bodhidharmas coming from the West? And Zhajo says, the oak tree in the courtyard. So that's the story. Short, short exchange.

[03:23]

And I guess everybody here knows who Bodhidharma is. A legendary South Central Asia, legendary Central Asian monk who is supposed to be the one who brings Buddhism from Asia to China. And his story goes that he goes to, he's summoned to the court of the Emperor Wu of Liang, and the Emperor Wu asks him different questions about Buddhism as if Buddhism were a sensible religion with doctrines and practices and so on. Bodhidharma gets really disgusted with these questions and he turns on his heel and he leaves and he goes to the hinterlands where he goes inside of a cave and meditates without moving for nine years. That's the legend of Bodhidharma. So Bodhidharma stands for the sort of severe, uncompromising and experiential truth of Zen.

[04:31]

So it's a stock question in Zen stories. What's the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West? It means what's the living reality, the living truth of Zen? Which is what this monk in the story is asking. What's the living truth? What's the real point and the real essence of what we're doing here? And Mishao Zhou says, the oak tree in the courtyard. Well, Zhao Zhao is one of my favorite Zen masters. They all look alike, but after a while, when you get used to them, they're a little bit different, one from another. And I like Zhao Zhao a lot. He's almost the opposite of... His style is almost the opposite of Bodhidharma's style. He's very simple and kind. And his answers in all these stories are... really ordinary, and his patience is deep.

[05:36]

And I'm sure you all know many of his sayings. His sayings are some of the most famous in Zen. When someone asks, does the dog have Buddha nature? And the answer is, no. That's Zhao Zhao's answer. When someone says, please give me deep instructions in Zen, and the answer is, wash your bowls That's also Zsa Zsa's answer. And, you know, there's a lot of mystique and pizzazz around these Zen stories. And if you kind of add a dash of mystique and pizzazz, it all sounds very Zen. But when you think about it, they're rather plain answers, you know. They're pretty innocuous answers, and I think this is what gives them their deceptive profundity, exactly because they're so plain.

[06:43]

Zhaozhou knows what he's saying. He prefers not to make a fuss, but just simply to point out our life. He brings up the ordinary world in ordinary terms, And when he does that, somehow he has a way of bringing up the whole of our life and the whole of the truth, which is, of course, always contained in the ordinary, everyday things of our lives. And this is Zhao Zhao's great power as a teacher. He doesn't really need to be spectacular. And that's what he seems to be doing here in this story. You're asking about the living meaning of Zen, the profound truth of human life? Oh, it's right here, this oak tree in the courtyard. Why don't you look at it sometime?

[07:47]

The trees are profound teachers. You want to find a really good... Some people are looking for a really good spiritual teacher, so I recommend... A tree. You would do well to go out and study Zen with a tree like the children maybe are doing now. And it says in the early suttas, the Buddha said, go sit under a tree. He specifically said to the monks and nuns to go sit at the root of a tree. Maybe because it's sheltered under the tree. But also maybe because when you sit under a tree, you have a peaceful mind. I have on my telephone a Kindle application. Maybe you have that on your telephone. And the logo is a picture of a tree with someone sitting under a tree reading a book, which seems like a very peaceful thing, doesn't it, to do?

[08:57]

Sit under a tree and read a book. And now that you think about it, the Buddha also sat under a tree, didn't he? When he was completely defeated and undone by his efforts to transcend himself, he basically completely gave up and sat underneath a tree. And it was there under that tree, the descendant of which, supposedly, is still going, there in Bhagaya, India. He sat underneath that tree and that's when awakening dawned on him and he then went forth. And this experience is available to us now. We can do that. We can sit under a tree. We can stand under a tree. We can walk mindfully among trees.

[10:00]

You can give a hug to a tree. It's become a kind of joke, you know, tree hugger. But it's actually pretty profound if you were to think of it as a meditation practice to hug a tree like the children are doing. Or just look at a tree for ten minutes. Just ten minutes, just standing there, looking at a tree. Really looking. And being. present with yourself and with the tree, this would be, I think this would be a pretty profound religious experience. When I first started practicing Zen years ago, I moved from the eastern part of the country out here to the west. And the first place I lived was in a redwood forest. I was very fortunate to find that, a little cabin in a redwood forest. And every day I would go out and sit under a redwood tree and I would put my back up against the tree and I would look up, past the, all the way up the trunk and past the canopy and up to the sky beyond.

[11:15]

A little circle, a blue sky up there. Redwood trees are really tall. Really, really tall. The sky is so far away up there. how many millions of people come every year down the road to go to near woods to see the trees. And I hope some of them actually do see the trees because they're so famous it's hard to see them now. But I guess, you know, maybe they have enough of a presence that more than a few people actually see the trees. There aren't that many places where you can actually walk in an old-growth redwood forest, but there are some places, and a few years ago we went walking in an old-growth redwood forest.

[12:17]

And there's a very special feeling in those forests. Very quiet. And you feel the presence and the dignity of the trees. Redwood forest is unlike other forests. It's a lot neater. There's not so much debris in a redwood forest. And there's a lot of spaciousness under the trees. If you go to pine forests or other evergreen forests, it's not as neat, especially in the mountains where there's storms and you see the violence of the uprooting of the trees and the breaking of the trees. You can see that here on Mount Town, too. You can see the carcasses of the old trees slowly fading back into the soil. If you go really high in the Sierra, up at Timberline, where not very many trees grow, you can see white pines

[13:27]

which are amazing trees. They grow right out of the rock, it seems, or out of that little bit of soil that can collect. Gnarled trees, always twisted, but also with a tremendous presence. And you just feel the strength of their capacity to endure these conditions. Then we have our domesticated trees. the ones we plant and that we have around our houses. I have Monterey cypress trees around our house. And there's some eucalyptus trees on the side of the hill just like here when you drive in that long double row of eucalyptus trees. A lot of people don't like eucalyptus trees. And they think they should go back home to Australia where they belong. I don't mind eucalyptus trees.

[14:32]

I kind of like them. The bark is so amazing. You know, pink and gray and brown and red and every color you can see. About 35 years ago, we planted the windbreaks at Green Gulch. These stands of trees, rows of trees that you see as you walk down to the beach. And these trees have tamed the ocean wind. So it used to be after Dharma talk on Sunday would go out to the lawn there and the wind would be whipping. You couldn't, there'd be like tablecloths with muffins on it and the tablecloths would be whipping and the wind would blow everything over. Because the wind naturally from the ocean would come up here and it would just be sucked up into the valley here and you couldn't grow very well. plants because the wind dries up all the seedlings.

[15:32]

So we had to plant these windbreaks and they do pretty well, don't they? They do break the wind. They change the climate, the microclimate, right here where we are and all the way down toward the farm. And then there's Harry Roberts' cottonwood trees that he had many reasons why we should plant them. But the real reason was that He remembered them from his boyhood and he wanted them around. And that's why they're there. Then there's all the trees that line the streets of our American cities. How many people here grew up in a town with an Elm Street and an Oak Street? Oak Street in San Francisco. Eucalyptus Street. And there was an oak tree out here. Some of you old timers will remember Andrew Singletary's oak tree that split years before.

[16:40]

And we were all the time trying to figure out how to save that tree, even though it was splitting in half. We must have spent thousands of your donations to keep this tree going year after year after year until finally a big storm came and just floored it. And I remember Wendy. Johnson weeping to see that tree down along with lots of other things around the campus here. And there was similarly only a much larger oak tree down in Tassajara when you came down the road and entered the camp. There was this gigantic, noble oak tree that also came down with a crash in a big storm. And that was really sad. I don't know how old that tree was, but I think that somebody here knows this. Is this right, Valerie, that we made some nyo-is from that tree? I think the one nyo-i that the priests use for the service every day, I think, comes from that oak tree at Tassahara, I think so.

[17:48]

In Japan, there are trees more famous than the great poets that people visit, you know, on pilgrimage to see this noble tree, this great tree, several trees like that. And in Asia, monks go out and perform ordination ceremonies for trees. They ordain trees. And besides sitting under a tree, on Enlightenment Eve. The Buddha also was born, the story goes, when his mother held on to a tree. And also in the story of the Buddha, he died. It says in the sutra, lying between two twin sala trees. So trees are really important. in our lives, in our human story, in the Buddhist story.

[18:55]

And the word tree comes from the same root as the word trust. And doesn't that make sense? Doesn't that feel right? What would be more trustworthy than a tree? A solid and silent, patient, enduring, any kind of weather, you know. And trees seem to embody some of the best characteristics that we human beings prize. This trust, this steadfastness, this faithfulness, this dignity. Other words that are related to this word are truce, pledge, beautiful. words and beautiful concepts that I think come into the human heart from our long meditation on trees.

[20:00]

And that's why I think the practice of being with trees and practicing with trees is so profound and so beautiful, and it's something very particular and concrete. The feeling of being around trees and practicing around trees is unique. There's no other feeling quite like it. There's actually a little bit more to the story of Zhao Zhou and the oak tree than I told you. The way I told it with just those two lines is the way it's told in the koan collections, but if you look it up in the original version, it's a little bit longer. In this version, and I'm going to give it to you now, notice that the monk in the story is not at all intimidated by Zhao Zhou. When he doesn't like Zhao Zhou's answer, he says, wait a minute. which tells you something, I think, more about Zhaozho maybe than the monk. Anyway, here's the whole dialogue.

[21:02]

The monk says, what's the meaning of bodhidharmas coming from the West? And Zhaozho says, the oak tree in the courtyard. And the monk says, wait a minute, this is not serious enough. I want a better answer. So he says, teacher, don't tell me about outside things. I am asking about inner truth. And Zhao Zhao says, I'm not teaching you about outward things. So the monk says, well, all right, then what is the meaning of bodhidharmas coming from the West? And Zhao Zhao says, the oak tree in the courtyard. Seeing the whole dialogue gives you a better clue, I think, as to what Zsa Zsa was saying here. It's there even in the short version, but this makes it pretty obvious.

[22:04]

Experience is experience. Our human experience is always limited, and it's always absolutely complete. If I say, you know, I saw the oak tree, that isn't quite right. What really happens is that there's a sight support or a sound support, and that merges with the eye organ and the ear organ, which gives rise to a consciousness. And that's the process of moment by moment lived experience. And this was known in ancient times by the Buddhists who had an amazing capacity for introspection, but it was also known to philosophers, and now we know it by imaging the brain.

[23:08]

And we can see that experience, physical perception, is an internal event. It happens inside the heart. the mind, the brain. And when that internal event happens, we then say, I saw the oak tree. I'm seeing the oak tree. When I've said that, when I've thought that, when I'm acting on that information in my living, I'm living in a conceptual universe. a day late and a dollar short. All these things, eye and tree and see, are conceptual moves made from an immediate experience.

[24:12]

The immediate act of perception is something else. It is the intimate experience and profound experience of seeing, seeing, seeing, and hearing, hearing, hearing, of letting a tree be, letting it be what it is, which then makes me be what I am in that moment of perception. And at that moment, there really isn't any time and there really isn't any place There really isn't any me and there really isn't any tree. There's just this fullness of being together. Master Wuman, in commenting on this story of Zhajo and the young monk, says, if you can see intimately into this, there is no Shakyamuni

[25:18]

Buddha in the past, and there is no Maitreya Buddha in the future. Because this is really the secret of our practice and of our life. Our actual lives, our ordinary everyday experiences, our perceptions, our thoughts, perception by perception, thought by thought. bring up the whole of space and time and go beyond space and time. And that's actually happening, except we're not paying attention. Another old master, Wansong, comments on this story. He says, the oak tree in the courtyard, it's like...

[26:19]

one flower bespeaking a boundless spring. It's like one drop telling of the entire ocean. In every moment of our actual experience, if we're there for it, everything is included. We don't need anything else. We're always looking for something. What do we need more than what we have? So it turns out that even though he didn't realize it at the time, Ronald Reagan made a famous commentary to this case years ago when he said, you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all. He didn't realize how profound a saying that was. And this is the miracle of Ronald Reagan. He just was bumbled along being Ronald Reagan, and he became, like, the greatest American president since Abraham Lincoln.

[27:25]

Isn't that amazing? Truly amazing. I remember at Ronald Reagan's, when he died and they had the big funeral, I was at a session, and where I stay in the Pacific Northwest, the caretaker of the property lives on the other side of the wall where I stay in. And so he had the television on, playing the funeral of Ronald Reagan, which I guess was a really big deal, because he's such a great president, you know. I never thought so, but... Anyway, it didn't make me that happy. I was preparing my lectures, but thinking to myself, what a marvelous world that we live in, you know. that somebody could stumble into being a great president without knowing what he's doing. Amazing.

[28:28]

Should all give us hope. Anyway, that's an aside. It has nothing to do with my point. Back to the point. Dogen also has the most wonderful comment of all on this story. Listen to what Dogen writes. about the oak tree in the courtyard. He says, four or five thousand trees flowering along the street. 20 or 30 thousand musicians play strings and winds in the balconies. That's Dogen's poem about this. So I think when we practice Zen, We get a feeling for all this. And I think those of us who do sishin practice, intensive retreat practice, appreciate this.

[29:34]

That's what makes sishin practice so wonderful. When we sit there for a while and our mind becomes concentrated and calm, the whole world seems to flow. Everything seems to be one piece. Nothing is separate or out of place. Things seem to melt into one another in their emptiness. And it does feel, just like Dogen says, that there are 20 or 30,000 flowering willow trees and everything is playing music. And there's nothing to fear. and nothing to worry about. Everything is okay. I think it was the greatest stroke of genius of his whole lifetime that Suzuki Roshi passed out of this life on the first day of a seven-day session, so that all of these young students who were so devoted to him and would have gone nuts with his death could sit there and see that it was perfectly fine.

[30:49]

at least for those seven days. So the profundity of Zhaozhou's words lies in the fact that the ordinary oak tree in the courtyard is not just the conventional conceptual oak tree that looks nice, and it gives us shade, and it drops leaves all over the lawn, and that we need to hire a tree expert to take care of when it needs trimming, and write a check for that. The actual oak tree is more than that. And if we really would appreciate the oak tree for what it really is, the whole world would stop. And we and the whole world would become the oak tree.

[31:51]

We would easily give up everything and embrace the oak tree. We would be liberated by the oak tree. Still, maybe when the time came, we'd have to pick up the phone and get the tree guy in and write the check. But that would not cause us to lose track. of what we're really here for. In the last decades, 25, 30 years, there's been so much ecological and psychological and philosophical thought that explores this very point that Zhaozhou's making. Because the human mind is not an abstraction in the sky. It can't exist outside of a body and outside of a world. So our mind actually is the mind of the earth.

[32:57]

And the earth is our mind. When we, as we've done for some centuries now, in our youthful enthusiasm, go ahead and wreck the planet, with our excess of interesting stuff and our great need to pump bad smoke into the air. When we do that, even though we merrily go about our way, continuing to do this, without our particularly understanding what's going on, we are becoming sick. And when you think about it, this is a really good way to understand our world now. You can really understand a lot about what's going on in the world if you think that we are becoming sick with dread because we made the earth sick, and therefore we're sick.

[34:06]

And all of our drones and our Humvees and our terrorism, And our multitasking and our video games and our crazy financial markets and our even crazier politics are symptoms of our sickness. In Canada, they call the people who lived there before the white people came First Nation people, they call them. The First Nation peoples all over the world have been sick for some time now. because their mountains and lakes and forests have been taken from them and paved over, and they know that they can't be themselves without those places being intact. Well, now we also are sick in the same way. And we're also now beginning, without quite realizing what's going on, to feel the same things that they have been feeling.

[35:07]

So this is more than our being noble, and saving the earth. And it's more than our being sentimental over the loss of beautiful species. We're really sick and we're killing ourselves. So this is a good thing to know that we're sick when we're sick. It's very important to know you're sick when you're sick. This is how you cure yourself, right? You have a diagnosis. This is where we start. And no doubt, part of the cure for this disease is our spiritual practice. This is really important. I think one way you could understand Zhao Zhao's oak tree is as presenting some refined and desirable Zen mystical experience.

[36:12]

maybe would be beautiful to experience the oak tree as Zhaozhou speaks about it, but what would it really have to do with what happens on Monday morning? And I think that's right. If that's all it is, if it's just that we have a beautiful Zen experience, which we forget about on Monday morning when work starts, then, you know, it's dubious whether it's very worthwhile. Because we have to do more than that. We train in this truth about the oak tree. We don't just have a beautiful experience. We train in this experience. And we go back to our cushion and back to our retreat over and over and over again. And we understand this at many various depths. And we sit every day. And we remind ourselves of it every day.

[37:17]

And we then can't escape but to consider the implications of this truth for our conduct and the way we view our lives and our world. This experience of practice is something that we continue with until it revolutionizes our lives, the way we see our lives and the way we live them. And we will see the world differently. We will see a different world. And we will make different choices. Maybe our spiritual practice, and I don't mean just our Zen practice, but our religions of our world can help us to collectively wake up from this brutal dream of exclusive, self-protective identities, and see what we all have really wanted from the beginning, what will make us really happy and really fulfilled, and that is a collective well-being for all of us, for all people and for our Earth.

[38:44]

This question, why did Bodhidharma come from the West, is asked in hundreds of Zen stories, and there are many different responses to it. Zhaozhou's is one. And so when people comment on this story, they often bring up other responses. And one of the other responses that's often brought up is the one by Master Linji, who said in response to the question, if there had been a meaning... he would not have been able even to save himself. If there had been a meaning, he would not have been able even to save himself. This makes Linji sound a little bit like Samuel Beckett. But I think he's not saying that Zen is meaningless, at least not exactly. And I don't think Beckett is either, actually. I've always been cheered up by reading Samuel Beckett.

[39:53]

Maybe it's just me. You know, we're always looking for meaning. Everybody wants meaning. And we're finding it, you know, everywhere we can find it, under every rock. And once we get it, you know, we put it inside of one of those... pressurized spray cans, and we spray it all over everything. You know, meaning is being sprayed all over everything. And then we're walking around in a fog of meaning. Which is really good, because all that fog of meaning protects us from things. And the stark reality that life is really life. And things are really there. So it's not that hard to poke holes in all this meaning. that we have so blithely settled for as coping mechanisms.

[40:53]

And goodness knows our religions have also done this, been spraying meaning around all over the place for so long that who can believe it anymore? But the truth is that life is not dumb. Life does not require us to provide it with meaning. Life is eloquent. And all the things of this world have their own meaning. They don't need us to give them meaning. They speak on their own. That's what Suzuki Roshi is saying when he says, the world is its own magic. We don't need to create some magic. The world is its own magic. So this is what Linji is pointing to. To really see the magic of the world, we have to stop. concocting meaning. And let things come forward and speak to us in their own voices.

[41:59]

Let ourselves come forward and speak in our own voice. When we stop bothering the oak tree, when we stop needing to save it or cut it down because it's blocking the view, When we really let it alone, let it be the oak tree and listen to its words so that we can let ourselves be ourselves and listen to ourselves, then everything will speak to us and we will find out all that we need to know. When we stop bothering our friends and our relatives and ourselves, with all of our expectations and projections and preconceptions, and let everything step forward and actually speak, then we will know everything we need to know.

[42:59]

And only then will we be capable of doing what really, really needs to be done. And when we insist on adding more to that, we're adding suffering. Master Woman writes a poem on the case. Words do not explain. Speech does not signify. If you take up words, you're done for. If you ponder over phrases, you're lost. Well, this poem seems to be not about trees, And not even about perception, but about language. And this is something I've observed over the decades of contemplating these Zen stories. It's astonishing how many of them turn out to be about language, which you wouldn't think that medieval Chinese would be so concerned about.

[44:08]

But maybe it's not so strange. Because if you do a lot of meditation, and you do it not just to find a little peace of mind, but as a mode of investigating reality, which is how the Zen ancestors used it, you would end up with some thoughts about language. Seeing sees seeing, hearing hears hearing, and words point out words. listen to me now say the word hear, and to understand the meaning of that word is a profound experience, but it's not the same as hearing the immediate sound of the voice. We're constantly describing our lives to ourselves. We can't stop doing that. You know what happened to me yesterday?

[45:15]

You know what she said, and then what he did, and what I'm feeling now? We're all the time describing what's going on. And these descriptions are experiences, and they are things of the world, and they're very real. But we have to remember that they don't really describe what they say they're describing. So there's no escape from describing our lives, but we have to understand what's really going on. Like a vaccine, which is made from the disease that it's supposed to cure, words are the antidote to words. This is what Master Wu Man is talking about in his poem. If you take up words, you're done for. Excellent. One should take up words.

[46:18]

take them up as they truly are, and when you do, you will be done for. You'll be free of your suffering and confusion, and you'll be able to course in words and concepts without getting caught by them. If you ponder over phrases, you're lost. Excellent. Let's get lost. Let's ponder over phrases. And isn't that, after all, what... studying these Zen stories is all about. We're pondering, deeply pondering over phrases, taking them deeply into our hearts, into our breath, contemplating them and immersing ourselves in them until we are completely, completely lost. And so that's what we need to do. Let's join hands and get lost together. Lose ourselves completely. in trees, in the earth, in the air, lose ourselves completely in one another.

[47:28]

And only when we lose ourselves in our lives will we find some real sanity. And only then will we know how to live. Happy Arbor Day. Happy Super Bowl 40, what is it? 7 or 46 or 44. Yeah, happy Super Bowl 44. May it for once be a good football game, not a bad football game. And, yeah, please take care of your life and continue your practice. That's the thing. We trust you. that if we do continue our practice, we'll do what needs to be done. Thank you.

[48:24]

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