But part of what I enjoy about these series of different speakers that we have on a given topic is that you get to see many different aspects of the same concepts. And some of the speakers come at the dharma with an appreciation and awe of the ethereal intangible aspects and others more with an appreciation of the tangible self-improvement advice. The dharma it can be read as poetry or sort of the instruction manual for life. And there can be tension between these two ways. In my practice period class, a sangha member protested that no matter how much I wanted things to be linear, that just wasn't the way that they saw them. And linear thinkers like myself would describe the ethereal interpretation as esoteric. And the ethereal group would describe the other group as concrete thinkers. And while I freely admit that I come at this stuff more from the washing machine users manual version of things whether you listen to the dharma and hear the mysterious harmonics of the bell or a satisfying click of things falling into place the teachings all have value. I did appreciate Desiree's talk last week and especially this smaller part where she pointed out that it isn't only the great and famous people who have an impact on the world. I'm a bit of a history geek and I especially like medieval history and when you study medieval times you learn about Longshanks or Malleus Scotorum, Roberto de Bruce and Tokugawa Leyasu. But for every Edward I, the hammer of the Scots, Robert the Bruce, and the Shogun who unified Japan, there were hundreds or thousands of unknown people who created the causes and conditions that allowed them to become famous and succeed.
Never mind all the other causes and conditions like climate change, technological advancement and calamities like the bubonic plague which actually created the conditions that led to the establishment of the middle class in England and the abolition of surfdom. So the famous get their names in the history books but everyone and everything got us to where we are today. We've been talking about the paramitas. Dana paramita, sila paramita, ksanti paramita, virya paramita, dhyana paramita and prajna paramita. We've been covering these in Sunday dharma talks for months. We learn them and we relearn them. We cover the different ways of seeing them, of feeling them, of being them. We've talked about how they interrelate and inter are and that in fact each and every one contains all the others. And then we leave the temple and we get into traffic. We meet unpleasant circumstances. We hear the news about an orange toddler that somehow we gave the job of most important man in the world. And what happens to all of this? How do we implement it? And I've read the users manual. Now what do I do? So, while you're here at the Zendo and you're new, you start by fumbling to find the right page in the chant book and then rushing and trying to find the part of the chant because you've missed part of it while you were looking for the page. And then it's easier and you find that you can chant the heart sutra, the hymn to the perfection of wisdom and the Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo from memory without the book. And finally, you might find yourself chanting, Kanzeon na mu butsu as you're on a long bicycle ride or a jog.
Zen and Buddhism in general can come off as an extremely complex set of rules, lists, stories, fables, miracles, ancestors, temples to visit, chance to memorize, and sutras to learn. But at its heart, the basics are simple. And it is the basics that are the most important thing. The we talked about giving our merit to Bodhi Dharma our founder in China and his and in his bloodstream sermon he he said long ago the great monk Goodstar was able to recite the entire cannon but he didn't escape the wheel because he didn't see his nature. If this was the case with Goodstar then people nowadays who recite a few sutras or shastras and think it's the dharma are fools. Unless you see your mind, reciting so much prose is useless. I think you don't have much more of an authority than bodhi dharma. Go look at his picture. He's pretty neat. So I've shared before that I also practice Japanese martial arts and there are many things that the dojo has in common with the Zendo. One of them being a system in that in karate are characterized as ranks. 18 years ago after five year five years of steady practice I got the karate equivalent of my rakusu when I became shodan. 13 years ago I did the equivalent of a practice period and became nidan. Both shodan and nidan in karate are considered to be senpai, senior student. Eight years ago I obtained novice ordination or sandong and a year ago I was given karate dharma transmission and became yondan. Both Sandong and Yodan are sensei and a yondan can open- I can open my own dojo. Literally a karate temple. In karate we have kata. These are the forms we practice over and over and over and over and over and over and over. And these are our sutras, our chants. And just like Zen, some karate practitioners revel in learning as many katas as possible. Some people learn more than a hundred katas and can perform all of them well from memory. Hopefully these people remain to become senseis. The purpose of kata and the other exercises we do, however, is to thoroughly ingrain the basics of how to move your body in such a way as to deliver the maximum amount of kinetic energy through a one square inch area around your index and long finger knuckles or some other bony prominence in your body into the body of an opponent. You're also training your body to be able to reliably aim that energy at a soft spot on your opponent's anatomy and to be able to do all of that without thinking about it or worrying about the fact that at that precise moment in time your opponent is trying to do the exact same thing to you. So memorizing the kata no matter how many you learn is not the point. As the martial arts master Bruce Lee pointed out in a movie and he was paraphrasing a Zen poem by Rokan. It's like a finger pointing the way to the moon. Concentrate on the finger and you miss all that heavenly glory. And I sometimes find surprisingly good explanations of Buddha Dharma in pop culture. Bruce Lee isn't the only example. A favorite movie of mine is The Last Samurai with Tom Cruz. And if you can get back past the premise of the white patriarch intervening to save a foreign culture that he's fallen in love with, which is basically dances with wolves or Avatar go to Japan. I's a very good historical epic. And in one scene in particular, Cruz's character, he plays a guy named Captain Algren, is trying to learn Japanese martial combat methods and is failing spectacularly. And Algren's captor and host, a guy named Nobutara, steps in and gives Algren advice. And please excuse my accent. I'm imitating the movie. I'm not making fun of Japanese people. Says, "Please for you, too many mind." And Algren replies, "Too many mind." And Nobutara replies, "Hi, mind the sword. Mind the people watching. Mind the enemy. Too many mind. No mind." And in the movie, Algren goes on to learn to do things without overthinking them and to just do it.
The yoga school of Buddhism developed the concept of the store consciousness. or Ālayavijñāna as the deepest layer of the mind which contains all the seeds of our self. The mind consciousness acts as the gardener watering the seeds of love, compassion and mindfulness and weeding out the the sprouts of anger, fear, resentment and hate. If we were working in AI and we're trying to program a robot to act like a responsible human, we would need to program it with rules. And Isaac Asimov famous famously developed the laws of robotics in his series of books I Robot and the Foundation series in the early 1950s. But if you were to program the robot with the precepts and the paramitas, it would be a pretty good start to get a decent human being out of it. So what we do here in the zendo is preparation. We're developing muscle memory programming. We don't need to think about the paramitas by training our mind in the quiet moments here on the cushion at home and while we're out on walks and so on. Our main our mind is trained to react the way that we want it to when we face the combat of day-to-day life. At this point, the list, the sutra, the kata falls away and we can see the moon. If you train in the precepts and the train in the paramitas when a situation arises, you won't need to think which paramita applies here or how would I use the precepts in this situation. When we leave the Zendo, we have no mind. If you've done the preparation, if we've done our kata, our gardening, and we go into the world and live in the moment, the pathways that have been forged in our biology will help us react according to our training. And sitting in meditation isn't really doing nothing. You're rewiring yourself with every breath. So I have a very short talk for today because it's lovely outside and rather than have us all discuss things other than we have brief discussion after this I would like us to go out into the beautiful day and just experience the paramitas and the precepts as your body has ingrained them from sitting here and I've always thought of that I think these the stories that we have of sudden enlightenment I think are clever advertising because we all want to just walk out and boom everything is just we got it right but I think this process is more I've likened it to refinishing furniture to sanding and sanding and making it smoother and rubbing off the the sharp edges and sometimes times you come and the sangha rubs off your sharp edges for you. So, thank you very much and I that's all I have for you today.
