Stream audio:
Talk Notes
Thank you everybody for your patience and welcome. Chris and I have been leading a series of talks and this is three of five talks where we are looking at a Chinese ancestor named Huineng and we credit him with a very core document called the platform sutra.
How about now? Too close. How about now? Now, now, well, maybe.
And in keeping with our looking at ancestors, we are looking at Dogen. And Chris is going to talk about how she sees Dogen's teachings interacting with Huineng. So, if you haven't been here, a quick recap. Huineng theoretically was an illiterate child who after his father died and was thrown from office was forced to live in poverty with his mom. And he became a wood cutter and he sold wood in the market.
One day it is said he was selling his wares and behind him he heard a person chanting the diamond sutra and at that moment he became enlightened. Is it true or is it a story? We don't know and frankly we don't care because it it helps us to understand something. So the story goes that he at that moment said I must get educated in the dharma. I want to learn. I want to be enlightened and I will go to the monastery. So he went to a monastery where the fifth Chinese ancestor Hongren was presiding and he launched a poetry contest to see who would be the next ancestor, the sixth ancestor. The favorite wrote a poem which was actually rejected and Huineng's poem was rejected. He had just spent eight months in the rice pounding room. And that was what he did all day, every day. He didn't sit, he didn't chant, he didn't go to dharma talks. He was just in this room getting the rice ready for people to eat it. And yet he won the poetry contest by basically saying, "We don't need to claw our way step by step into enlightenment. We're actually all pure and enlightened as we are. Our job is just uncovering it.
These were harsh times, 7th century China, and he was advised by Hongren to get out. So Hongren took him into his rooms at midnight and gave him the teachings, explained the Diamond Sutra a little bit further, and then said, "Here's my robe. Here's my bowl. Now go." And he went. It took him two months to get to his first hiding place, but he'd been followed. And one person followed him. And, I mean one person ended up following him and it's said that Huineng put the robe and the bowl on a rock and then went and hid. And the usurper came to the rock went to pick it all up and couldn't move it. Couldn't budge anything. And at that point he realized that you can't try and steal the dharma. So he said, 'I don't care about the robe. I just want the dharma. And at that point, Huineng came out and said, I will teach you. And they went together. But it was still 7th century China. And it was still very scary out there. Outlaws were harsh and were told that he hooked up with a band of hunters and lived secretly with them for 18 more years until finally he decided he was ready and he went to the temple that he wanted to join.
When he got there, he heard a couple people arguing over a flag. One said, "It's the flag that's moving." And the other one said, "No, it's the wind that's moving." And he went, "Hey, you guys, it's your mind that's moving." And the abbott of the monastery said, "Come on in. we want you. You are our teacher. And with that, he began his teachings. So that takes a good part of the actual platform sutra telling this story and then getting to the point where he begins his teachings. Last week we just got started talking about his teachings. And at this point, imagine him safe in a temple giving talks. And I'm just thinking there are all these words that we hear and we say them. I'm thinking about prajna. We just said it tonight. Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva when deeply practicing Prajna paramita. But what is it? You know, I said that many times and wasn't really sure what it was. So I'm going to read you what Huineng said about Prajna.
Okay.
Maha Prajna Paramita is Sanskrit. In our language it means the great wisdom that leads to the other shore. This teaching must be practiced and not simply chanted with your mouth. If you chant it with your mouth but don't practice it, it's like an illusion or a mirage. But the dharma body of those who practice it is the same as a Buddha.
In this world of ours, space has room for the sun and the moon and the stars, the earth and its mountains, rivers, and every plant and tree. Bad people, good people, bad teachings and good teachings, heavens and hells. All of this exists in space. The emptiness of our nature is also like this.
What does Prajna mean? It means wisdom at all times to keep your thoughts free of ignorance and always to practice wisdom. This is what we mean by the practice of Prajna. One thought of ignorance and Prajna stops. One thought of wisdom and Prajna reappears. A person whose mind is full of ignorance says I'm practicing Prajna. But Prajna has no form. It's the nature of wisdom. Oh, this could be good.
It's just that my mouth is so dry.
Again, thanks for your patience.
What does paramita mean? This is Sanskrit. In our language, we say what leads to the other shore, which means what transcends birth and death. When we are attached to objects, we give rise to birth and death. Like when waves form on the water. This is what we mean by this shore. When we are free from objects, there is no birth or death. Like when a river flows on forever. So we say it leads to the other shore. This is what we mean by paramita.
So, Huineng really revolutionized this concept and in his talk about, in his talks about Prajna and of course he talks about it all through the sutra. The main things are that we have inherently got a prajna wisdom - nature - that it isn't created by seated meditation or acquired from outside sources. So isn't it ironic you know as committed Buddhists we sit and sit and sit and sit and study and study and study and study but Huineng says that's all fine that's good you are already perfect inside. You just have to find it. And then he talked about "no thought" and Chris is going to tell us a little more about that in a little bit. The practice of prajna means keeping the mind free from mental constructs and not abiding in any single thought. And if you remember, if you were here the first class, we talked about the line that Huineng heard when the when he was a wood cutter and someone was walking by and it basically said just live with a non-abiding heart or a non-abiding self, a non-abiding mind.
We have it.
By mere talking about food, you won't appease your hunger. And this is exactly the case here. Talking alone won't enable us to realize the essence of mind and it serves no purpose in the end. What we have to do is put it into practice with our mind.
So, I want to read a little bit more because I think that it's good for us to hear text. Sometimes it's a little awkward and particularly people who who study Dogen for the first time go, what? But they say that eventually we love it.
Yeah.
I have to tell you that my iPad and my book have two different page numbers. So, I'm looking at what am I reading on this page and okay, here we are.
I'm sorry. I'm really looking and not finding verse 27.
I know it does. I know it says that. Okay.
Okay. I'm just going to read. Remember the thing that Huineng starts so many of his talks with. Good friends, since ancient times, this dharma teaching of ours, both its direct and indirect forms, has proclaimed no thought as its doctrine, no form as its body, and no attachment as its foundation. What do we mean by a form that has no form? To be free of form in the presence of form and no thought. Not to think about thoughts and no attachment, which is everyone's basic nature. Thought after thought not to become attached.
When you go from one thought to another, don't become attached to any dharma. Once one thought becomes attached every thought becomes attached. Which is what we call bondage. But when you go from one thought to another without being attached to any dharma, there's no bondage. This is why no attachment is our foundation.
And he goes on to say to be unaffected by any object is what is meant by no thought. To be free of objects in our thoughts and not to give rise to thoughts about dharmas. But don't think about nothing at all. Once your thoughts stop, you die and are reborn somewhere else. Students of the way, take heed. Don't misunderstand the meaning of this teaching. It's one thing to be mistaken yourself, but quite another to lead others astray and then to criticize the teaching of the sutras while remaining unaware that you yourself are lost. Thus the reason we proclaim no thought as our doctrine is because deluded people think in terms of objects and on the basis of these thoughts they give rise to erroneous views. This is the origin of all afflictions and delusions.
I'm going stop there and Chris has some things to say about some other stuff. And I just want to just reiterate in terms of all of that, you know some of you probably familiar with Pema Chodren. Her big thing is don't get hooked. You're going to think, that's who you are. You're gonna, you're going to be attached to objects that's our that's who we are. Just don't get hooked
Testing. Testing.
Good. No. Good. Okay, great. How about I get the light turned on?
So the first talk was entering the mirror. The second was pounding the rise and I think that the third one should be unhooking the mind. Hannah has just so nicely introduced us to Huineng's understanding of prajna. Wisdom, no thought, and the inseparability of meditation and wisdom. Those teachings became foundational for the Zen tradition that Dogen inherited nearly 600 years later. So, Dogen founded or ended up being the founder of our Soto Zen lineage. When he was a young man, he traveled to China and found his teacher there. He returned to Japan and the first thing he did was write some very interesting documents. One is Fukanzazengi recommending Zazen to all people and the other one was Bendowa basically introducing his method of meditation to Japan.
So when he, when Dogen traveled to China originally, he was not looking for a new Buddhism. He was trying to understand the Buddhism that Huineng helped shape originally. So rather than asking does Dogen agree with Huineng, I think it's more interesting to ask what does Dogen do with these teachings 600 years later? How did he receive those teachings or deepen them or bring them into the very ordinary reality of our lives?
So, I confess I do like Dogen a little bit and I noticed that he never starts with presenting us with techniques. He starts with questions.
If Huineng is right and wisdom is already within us. If meditation and wisdom cannot ultimately be separated, if awakening is not something we acquire from the outside, then what exactly are we doing when we sit in zazen? Why practice at all? Which was Dogen's original question. If we already possess Buddha nature, why spend all these hours staring at a wall? Well, those are not small questions.
They are actually the questions that gave birth to Bendowa, one of Dogen's earliest and most important writings.
I don't know about you, but I think most of us come to a Zen temple with certain expectations.
We assume that if we practice now, someday in the future, we'll change something about ourselves. will become more calm, maybe a little bit nicer to other people. Maybe it will make our lives feel more complete.
Maybe I'll become wise or less anxious.
In other words, zazen becomes another self-improvement project. So, if you hold that view that you will be a better someone in the future and that's why you're here, I'm going to ask you to reconsider. You're already pretty darn great just the way you're sitting here. You don't need to get fixed.
You're already you. You don't need self-improvement. Little tweaking here and there. Yeah. But but don't do it with this goal in the future. Bring it closer. Bring it to the present.
Don't think if you put in enough hours one day you'll arrive at that person you always wanted to be. You are already the person you want to be.
You are too critical of yourself in many ways. Our self-talk seems to be organized around that quite a bit. We tell ourselves we need to change. We need to become more acceptable, nicer and all this. You are perfect just the way you are. And yes, you could use a little improvement, but not through a self-improvement thing. It'll happen on its own.
In Bendowa, Dogen tells us that practice and realization awakening are one. He doesn't say that if you practice hard enough at some point in the future, you will find awakening. He said your zazen is the expression of your wisdom already. Sitting is awakening expressing itself. I think that's a pretty breathtaking claim and it actually totally harmonizes with what Huineng said, but of course we totally disagree with it.
We don't feel awakened when we sit here.
Dogen says that realization is already functioning in sincere practice.
Of course, that raises another question. If wisdom is present, if practice and realization are already one, why doesn't it feel that way? Why do we spend so much of our lives anxious, distracted, and angry or lost in our own stories?
To me, this is where Dogen becomes so practical. And it's the problem that he's trying to solve. And now we can take a look at how he solves it.
Meditation and wisdom are of one essence and not two.
I'm going to repeat some of the key points. And I'm trying to approach the same theme from different angles. So maybe I'm not the most eloquent person. Maybe something becomes a little clearer. So Huineng speaks about no thought, Dogen speaks about non-thinking. We hear that and instantly we see this Zen person, you know, sitting there, immovable thoughts, calm. It's not really that way. Our brains are thought producing organs.
The moment people will say he stopped thinking, it probably means you're dead.
Your brain will come up with plans, judgments, worries, song, shopping lists, brilliant ideas, and thoughts are not the problem. If they were, none of us would have any hope.
I can't tell you how often I've planned dinner, replayed conversations with alternative endings. Would I remember to lock the door? And yeah, there she goes.
Let me try a different image. Let's replace thoughts with elephants. Suppose I told you or, let's replace thinking with elephants. Let me say there are no elephants in this room. We can all agree on that. But that statement does not mean that the room is empty. There are people in here. There are thoughts in here. There are cushions and chairs and lamps. All kinds of things.
So saying that there are no elephants simply tells us that one specific thing is absent.
Everything else is absolutely present.
And we already agreed that our brains are thought producing organs. So they spit out thoughts nonstop. Most of them we don't even notice because we're not interested in them and they flip by so fast. But every once in a while that hook is baited with just the right bait and we go for it.
So, then you remember this and that. You get engaged with it. Thoughts appearing in your mind are not the problem. A thought arises and if we don't engage it goes away. If we feed it our energy, if we add something to it or we try to reject it, then we get hooked again.
The thoughts are not the problem. They're like clouds in the sky. They simply arise because that's what brains do.
So when we don't let a thought arise and pass away, what we do is we engage with it immediately. That thought hooks another thought and that one drags in the third and so it goes. Maybe someone walks by us without saying hello. Maybe they were in their thoughts. Something happened. But I'm thinking that's odd. Maybe they're pissed off at me. Maybe I did something wrong last week and I don't even know what. Or you remember something that you did to that person and you think, Oh, they they still remember. And so within 30 seconds I have completed a complete scenario with upset with anger with my response what I'm going to say to fix it. We have constructed this whole story.
The same thing happens with our preferences and aversions.
Something pleasant happens and immediately the mind says I want more of this. I hope this never changes. Something unpleasant happens and the mind goes. I want to get rid of this. I should actually correct this. It's not so much the mind, it's our ego speaking. It's our self that is getting involved here.
And often we think this shouldn't happen to us. This shouldn't have happened to me. How do I make this go away? So attachment, desire, and aversion attach themselves to our thoughts and without noticing we stop experiencing reality directly. It's getting run through a filter. We are experiencing our own commentary about reality.
I'm thinking how much this resembles social media. You open Tik Tok or Facebook reels intending to watch one short video. An hour later, you go, "What did I just watch?" Before you can take a breath, the next video is flung at you. It's not about content, it's about engagement. And our thoughts work the same way. Our brain wants us to engage. It doesn't care about the content. The ego wants to reaffirm itself. So it strings you along thought after thought after thought.
Dogen looks at this ordinary experience and offers something quite remarkable. In Fukanzazengi, Dogen writes, "Think of not thinking. How do you think of not thinking? Non-thinking."
Made zero sense to me the first 500 times I read this.
I was thinking he was describing something that only these Zen people can experience. But it's exactly what I described. It is being the observer in your own mind. watching thoughts arise and fall away without engagement.
When we sit, thoughts do not stop.
The mind, the brain does what it does.
So Huineng and Dogen meet beautifully. Huineng says wisdom is already inherent in our nature. It doesn't come from somewhere else. Dogen says, practice enlightenment. Our zazen is a manifestation of our wisdom of our awakening.
So when we go on the rights that ego is offering us, like the video reels, we become caught.
We abide in our thoughts in our thinking and we mistake them for reality.
One of the things that I find absolutely fascinating is how quickly thoughts disappear when I do not feed them.
If I immediately let my brain go into planning mode, another thought joins and then another and then I think about what else is connected to this and that. But if I just let it sit, it just fades on its own within seconds.
So that has been one of the great discoveries and practice for me. I used to believe it was my thoughts that were the problem.
I think this is what Dogen means by non-thinking. Just being present with what is to become an observer within my own mind. Not to let the thoughts create chains and drag me along.
Dogen says something in Genjo Koan. He says when one side is illuminated the other side is dark. Every thought reveals something, but every thought also leaves something out. Every judgment, every certainty captures one aspect of reality while obscuring another. Practice does not make us smarter. I mean, maybe it makes us a little bit more humble. We become less certain that the first story our mind tells us is the whole story. It also changes how we understand wisdom. It's not having the right thoughts versus the wrong ones. Wisdom is recognizing reality.
And reality is always much, much, much larger than what I can think. That realization does soften me and opens my heart. It makes me much slower to even judge myself which was quite nice because we are very harsh to ourselves.
Let's all be willing to remain a little bit more curious.
That is why Dogen says in Bendowa that practice and realization are one. Let's not think if we crank out our practice one day we'll arrive at non-thinking. Dogen gently turns that upside down. Each time we get caught by a story, we simply return to our breath.
Every time we loosen our grip on a thought instead of tightening it, practice and realization are expressing themselves.
I'm going to tell you a little story about my staying at Tassajara.
That non-thinking thing was absolutely driving me nuts. And here I sit staring at the wall right in front of me.
And my thoughts were just like my continued thinking. It was just bothering me and hour after hour of zazen starting at 4:50 in the morning till 9:00 in the evening. I got so tired of this thinking. And all of a sudden, in the wall in front of me, one of those hidden safes in the wall opens. It's lit up all red inside and it had like this feeling attached to it. Put your thoughts right there. So, I went ahead and I took my thoughts and I put them into that safe deposit box and for me that was a crutch that I used. Ut it was just a way for me to manifest that non-thinking for myself and I'll be darned, it worked, you know. So I would just wait for the safe deposit box to open up and I would put my thinking in there and enjoy maybe a minute of you know non-thinking.
And then thoughts come back. But it's so essential to our practice that we at some point get a handle on our discursive thoughts.
It's not a permanent solution, you know, it's just something to work with. And if you found something of value in this talk, please use it and if not, forget every word we said. Thank you so very much for coming tonight.
