Before every Dharma Talk we chant:
An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect Dharma
is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas.
Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept,
I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata’s words.
無上甚深微妙法 Mujō jin jin mimyō ho 百千萬劫難遭遇 hyaku sen man go nan so gu 我今見聞得受持 gakon ken mon toku juji 願解如來眞實義 gange nyorai shin jitsugi
(source of the kanji - sotozen.com)
Line 1 Mujō jin jin mimyō no hō
mujō - unsurpassed ("not above") jin jin - very deep/profound (must be two different kanji) mi - small / subtle myō - mysterious hō - dharma
The Dharma / dharma - both the deep (downwards) and profound (upwards). Shohaku saying this is significant: up with the Buddhas with prajña and down with suffering beings at the same time with upaya.
The core of the first line - jin jin mimyō no hō - is a phrase from the Lotus Sutra, chapter 2, Expedient Means.
After the fabulous opening scene on top of Vulture Peak with it's vast assembly of bodhisattvas, arhats, monks, nuns, laypeople in which the Buddha goes into a deep samadhi and this amazing celestial light emanated from his forehead he comes out of his deep meditation to share some insights into the nature of the Dharma. The line about the "unsurpassed penetrating and perfect dharma" - and remember this is all happening in Chinese - the Lotus Sutra translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva and then being quoted by early Zen teachers in our dharma talk verse. The English can vary in translation but the Chinese matches up character by character.
Anyway after an initial bit of prose the first verse of the chapter is the Buddha sharing with us [Burton Watson translation]
The hero of the world is unfathomable. Among heavenly beings or the people of the world, among all living beings, none can understand the Buddha. The Buddha's power, fearlessness, emancipation and samadhis and the Buddha's other attributees no one can reckon or fathom. Earlier, under the guidance of countless Buddhas he fully acquired and practiced various ways, **profound, subtle and wonderful doctrines** **that are hard to see and hard to understand.**
And it goes on for some pages around how long and thoroughly over many many lifetimes our Buddha, Shakayamuni - the sage of the Shakya clan - practices with many Buddhas of the past in order to understand the unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect Dharma.
So that's all standing behind the first line of this chant.
If I'm paying attention when I chant this before giving a talk it's intimidating: what an assignment. Somehow I'm going to share the unsurpassed, penetrating, and perfect Dharma? That's insane.
One time Norman shared with us he felt the same way but then realized well the good thing is that everything in the universe is also the unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect Dharma. It's just this.
He was playing with the wonderful truth of double meaning of the word dharma. It means about "teachings" and also "reality" - the true reality of how things are undistorted by confusion and filters and projections.
So it's both this lofty hard to understand thing - at the Lotus Sutra says - and it's so so very ordinary and everyday and just this right here. Nothing needs to be added or explained and figured out. Just this.
To the first line is the most important in this little chant with it's reference to the Lotus Sutra.
The second line in Sino-Japanese sounds like
百千萬劫難遭遇 hyaku sen man go nan so gu
Which is pretty literally translated into our English. The word for word Chinese would be something like:
one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, kalpas 劫, difficult, to come across, to meet.
So our "is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas" is spot on.
A kalpa is a really long time. I've heard different descriptions of it. Here's Shohaku Okumura's from Living by Vow:
Imagine that a storehouse with a capacity of ten cubic miles is filled with poppy seeds. Once every century someone removes a single poppy seed. A kalpa is defined as the time it would take to empty the storehouse.
And we're talking about it taking a hundred thousand million kalpas of practice, study, and learning to truly meet this Dharma.
And the third line then wonderfully contradicts this: we meet the Dharma right now.
我今見聞得受持 gakon ken mon toku juji
These 7 characters mean:
I, now, know or understand, hear, am satisfied, receive or accept, sustain or hold
So our
"Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept" is pretty good.
The second character kon 今 is now, right now. It was fun for me to meet this character again as it's the top half of the character for "mindfulness" - nin - which you might remember from our exploration of the Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo where it's repeated many times - about affinity with the Kannon and the Buddhas and being mindful of that connection morning and night. kun, now, is on the top of nin, and shin - heart/mind is at the bottom.
So even though it takes immeasurable time to understand the Dharma our vow is that we understand it right now. Shohaku complains a little that the word "now" isn't in the English, but it's implied by "having" - how can only do "having" right now. Still I was grateful for his complaint as it underlines the importance of "now" in this line. Right now.
This chant calls for us to hold both the vastness and incomprehensibility of the teachings on the one hand and the immediacy - the intuitive clarity - of the teachings and the reality these teachings reveal to us. Which isn't a special new reality, it's just the real reality. Right here and now.
Hold both of these sides is important. The teachings are minutely subtle and also revealing themselves right now: so simple too.
If you just think "I'll never understand any of this" that's a kind of passive resignation. So we understand it's all hard to understand but we keep making effort to understand - endlessly.
But if you just think "sure it's simple, just be present" there's a kind of arrogant ignorance in that - a lack of understanding that it's all more subtle than we can know with the kind of mind that judges and evaluates.
This holding of opposites is such an amazing, and often confusing, aspect to our way.
It's a bit like when people say "everything's practice" without realizing you also have to do the work of practice. Or when people say "the practice is really hard, I'll never get it" without realizing there's nothing to get.
It is interesting the the character indiciating first person, ga 我, is there in the Chinese, they didn't always bother with showing the 1st, 2nd or 3rd person as unlike in English you can get away without it, you have to deliberately add an extra character.
So we are being reminded that no one else is going to do this practice. We have to. In our English the "I" is put in the last line to make the English work better.
"I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata’s words."
And this line in Sino-Japanese - remember that's a way of pronouncing the 7 distinct Chinese characters that the root of each line. Our English is a couple of steps removed from that, but it's what we've got. And also remember that for a regular Japanese person to make any sense of this it also needs to be translated into modern Japanese - and there they use different pronunciations for the characters and add words and sounds to make things into sentences just like we would
Anyway the fourth and last line is:
願解如來眞實義 gange nyorai shin jitsugi
Here we have "Nyorai" 如来 again the Japanese way of saying Tathagata - the thus come one, the Buddha - Nyorai showed up last week in the dedication of merit verse - that takes up 2 of the 7 characters so literally with this line we have:
Desire, explain, Buddha, true, treasure, right conduct
So we desire to explain or share the true treasures, in the right way.
The treasures part is a special character that Nelson Foster makes a big deal about in his wonderful book Storehouse of Treasures: Recovering the Riches of Chan & Zen.
There are several Characters for treasure but the one they picked for the Three Treasures is used only for special magical treasurers that the emperors had which had special mystical powers. He says it's pronounced bō but here it's jitsu so that reminds me to share that although I've learned how to copy and paste kanji into online dictionaries and I'm starting to recognize a handful of them I don't actually know Chinese or Japanese so hopefully what I'm sharing is more or less correct!
But our "I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata’s words"
is a bit less literal than the other 3 lines. The character for "taste" isn't there, nor is the character for "words." More literally it'd be "I vow to explain the Tathagata's Treasures" but I do link taste is good and the talk being made of words that's okay too. This loose translation also opens the intention of this verse up to the whole assembly. The more literal version we might think only applies to the person giving the talk. We all vow to understand, to taste, the meaning of the Dharma.
