Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: For more information on Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, please visit our website at www.ancientdragon.org. our teachings are offered to the community through the generosity of our supporters. To make a donation online, please visit our website.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: So welcome to Rahatsu Sashin Everyone.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Day.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: A few folks online see Mark Split, Joe Dale, who I hope you're feeling okay.
You know, join us anytime. It works. Nicholas Joyner and Tigen.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: In a room full of ground bodhisattvas.
So, you know, just to get us on the same page, although my guess is everyone knows this, you know, Rahatsu means the eighth day of the twelfth month. And in Japanese Soto Zen, this is the date that Buddha's awakening under the wonderful Bodhi tree is celebrated.
Some of you might know, in Southeast Asia, it happens in the spring, but this is our Bodhi Day.
Let's say we're moving towards Bodhi Day.
And, you know, this is a time of year when many Soto Zen Buddhists are sitting sashin, sitting Rohatsu sashin.
So we're actually, you know, joining together the energy of our practice probably around the globe.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: It's a nice thing to contemplate.
You don't have anything else to do during sushi.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: And this evening, we conclude the evening with the full moon ceremony, AKA Bodhisattva precept remembrance ceremony. I think the full moon is actually fullest tomorrow night.
But we're doing our full moon because we got something else to do tomorrow night.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: But I think it's really kind of great.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: I think that this sutra that we will study, Buddha's first sermon, Setting in motion the wheel of Dharma, just sort of the theme for our Sachin.
Maybe I'll even say something about it, but I think it was said to have been preached under a full moon or on a full moon time.
So those are auspicious times.
So it's great that we begin Sushin this way. And then tonight when we recite the precepts together, we kind of join in this ancient tradition of monks coming together a full moon to renew their commitment to the Dharma.
So during the Sishin, throughout the Sachin, there'll be some storytelling of the Buddha's experience and teaching after awakening. I think last year we kind of covered endlessly sitting under the Bodhi tree.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: But after awakening, you know, Buddha actually had to learn how to teach and figure out.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: What to do.
And so we'll look a little bit at how he taught during this xin.
I also just want to encourage you to pay close attention to your own experience during this Time, you know, some of you are sitting five days.
I mean, we've quieted things down, you know, there's going to be no more orientation in the morning, no more chatting during tea. We'll just drink tea, we'll taste tea.
So when else does this happen in your life, to have this time to settle?
So I say, you know, during Sasheen, you know, they say we gather the mind, but we touch the heart, mind of awakening and go into cultivate root this vow to awaken for the benefit of all beings.
And then the sushi disappears and forget all about it.
But notice your own awakening and your own response to that awakening.
Be like, oh, I'm not good enough to awaken. That's just ego.
But notice, notice what happens when we touch this luminous space.
Investigate this thoroughly. Bodhisattvas before, during and after, or at least the appearance of such.
I'm going to say some things about the Buddha's story.
And as I tell this story, I think I'd like to just encourage everyone to reflect on your own story.
What brought you here today to this Sachin, to this practice?
What is your ground, your soil, your earth of awakening? What are your struggles?
And what is the teaching that is transmitted, embodied by your conduct and actions of body, speech and mind to give you enough to do next five days?
So you all know this Buddha grew up kind of in a privileged life, shielded by parents from painful things.
You know, I guess the equivalent is now when everybody gets the first prize in the class for something and they don't have to deal with, you know, what is it? Thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: But sooner or later innocence is lost.
And for Siddhartha, the Buddha before Buddha, name of Buddha before Buddha, was at age 29, had like this crisis, right? Emotional crisis, because he saw some painful things, like a sick person, my friend who lives in the basement, his father is dying and he's spending all this time with a very sick person.
And it's difficult to be in that process of real sickness and old age and death.
And this shock, you know, impelled this seeking journey, this shock of the loss of innocence.
And it's like Buddha was Siddhartha, let's say, was stressed out.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Realizing all this and what to do about it.
You know, personally, you know, I remember feeling this loss of innocence in my childhood.
You know, politically, environmentally, I really realized at a pretty young age the world was a mess.
My family was reeling, self destructing, and I intuitively found a secluded place and started meditating.
But it wasn't until much later, my mid-20s, that I found my teacher.
Then I just was like, this is it, embrace Zen practice.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: I want to learn to do what that person can do. And I'm still working on it, still inspired, luckily.
But we all have our stories.
Buddha had a story, I have a story, you have one. But your story is just as important as Buddha's.
Remember that.
So, you know, it seems that this Siddhartha in crisis noticed wandering ascetic seeker who seemed pretty calm and said, well, maybe that's the way to go and gave up everything, you know, for a while at least on this quest to find out how to live and what really matters.
After six years visiting all the great teachers and trying to find all sorts of techniques to be freed from the body.
Because in that time the body was considered, you know, the source of torment.
Sometimes we feel this during Sachin couple days, body really starts to feel a little torment.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: But I was thinking about this, thinking this quest to be free from torment interestingly included a lot of self inflicted torment. So it wasn't enough to be like, I have to get rid of the body. But then it was like, okay, I'm going to deal with my stress by self mortification, self mutilation, you know. And as a psychologist, I'll say it's very interesting that self injury remains today away to cope with or handle being overwhelmed emotionally, whether it's cutting oneself internally or externally, you know, self beating.
And this actually works for a while, kind of distracts a bit, but then there's usually a big mess.
But anyway, it was very common practice for the spiritual quest to include intense deprivation, you know, wild, intense meditative trances, anorexia, you know, eating a few beans or sesame seed per day, even trying to stop breathing, you know, which doesn't work very well because if you have a healthy body, your body will want to breathe.
So you just get racked with pain.
And then after trying all these things, you know, Buddha remembered this peace that he felt just sitting quietly as a child in nature and decided to let go of this self beating and accepted a bowl of delicious rice pudding, found a nice tree, prepared a comfy seat. Sound familiar? You know, like Artenzo, I don't know if we've got some rice pudding on the menu, but I saw some kind of, some kind of bread pudding or something. What is that, carrot? Yeah. Okay, so pretty good.
So we actually get just enough during sasheen. That's kind of one way that oroki, the word is parsed.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: This was such a radical thing to be Able to feel like, oh, there's this other way of like just being nourished.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: Just enough and that, that's good enough to awaken to some very deep truth, to find this path out of this difficulty called erroneous view of life.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Sadly, he had five good friends who were on this kind of self mortification path with him and they thought he was wimp and you know, not going against the grain. So they like abandoned him, ran away.
And then, you know, 2,500 years ago or so, Buddha said under this tree, the famous Bodhi tree, sacred ficus tree on the seed of awakening, the Bodhi Manda, you know, you all have your little seats awakening here.
It's kind of amazing. We're doing the same thing over and over again 2,500 years later.
And made continuous effort to stay completely present with everything that arose in the mind body until he found some kind of profound peace with everything and everyone internally and externally.
That didn't, that didn't stop probably the pain in his legs.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: Or heart.
But his relationship shifted, let's say.
Ah, and at that moment, oop, awake and stayed awake just kind of, that's the trick, right, that we're working on. How do we stay awake?
Ah.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: The sage of his clan, so enlightened at age 35. I know at that time that might have been middle age or so I don't know what the average lifespan of someone was and is part of the neck of the woods at that time.
But you know.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: After this kind of intense journey, Buddha looks up and sees the morning star in a new way, way liberated from ideas and just saw star probably for the first time.
And then what now what?
So I was like, what did Buddha say exactly when he woke up? What was those first words?
And I found that with any of these old stories there are many versions. One is he simply saw the morning star and just said, how wonderful, I'm awake.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: There's another version, it's kind of intense from the Dhammapada, early writing of Buddhist sayings. It says something like, I've seen you, house builder. You shall not build the house again.
Your rafters are all broken, your roof peak is demolished. My mind set on demolition, has reached the end of craving.
So this is, you know, kind of dealing with the ego, let's say the house builder, the house builder, the ego wracked with insatiable craving for more or less constantly.
You know, it can be a little chilly in here, so don't beat up on yourself. If you're too cold, get A wrap or move to a corner, you know, but. But you can spend a whole sasheen, you know, wanting more or less of something.
I want this person to be that way, or I want more of more people to see me in this way, you know, blah, blah. Okay, there are some other versions where Buddha was delighted to be awake, but kind of like, now what do I do with this? Nobody's going to get it.
Those are beautiful lines. The ambrosial Dharma I obtained is profound, immaculate, luminous, and unconditional.
Even if I explain it, no one will understand.
I think I shall remain silent in the forest.
That which is free from words cannot be understood through words.
Likewise, the nature of phenomena is like space, totally free of the movements of mind and intellect. So this is from a little version, clearly Mahayana, clearly a little bit later than the rafter version.
But, you know, that feeling of, like, I can't express this.
Nobody's going to get it. I'll just be silent in my own little forest in private Idaho.
Clearly, that plan didn't work out.
But whatever Buddha said after awakening, it apparently took him some time, Some people say 49 days to teach after this awakening.
First he was in this, like, liminal space.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: And, you know, In Asia, this 49 days is kind of a special bardo, like liminal transitional time, sometimes between birth and death or death and birth.
But you go through this transition state.
And I think Sacheen has this kind of liminal quality, this quality of transformation.
49 days, Sacheen be interesting.
But after awakening, the story goes, Buddha kind of blissed out, you know, hung out in a forest alone, not. Not going very far away from this Bodhi tree, too.
I love the fact that the earth and this tree and earth and tree spirits are featured in these. These early tellings.
But it was like, maybe he was afraid, like, if he left the place, he'd lose this. You know, like, the minute you walk out of Sachin, minute you walk out, go insane, and then you're like, oh, I just forgot everything that just happened in that week or five days or one day or period of sa.
[00:17:19] Speaker B: So it said the first week he just, like, stayed meditating, feeling the bliss of deliverance.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Maybe there was, like, a little attachment to that. I don't know.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: The next week he walked around a little bit, but, like, would just stare at the Bodhi tree.
Some say unblinking, which is kind of wild.
But, you know, just FYI, it's fine to blink during Zaucen. Your eyes might need it. Like, some people are like, I'm not gonna. I can't blink.
And then what happens? Their eyes are like, watering like crazy, but it's like, it's okay to blink. But Buddha maybe had some special power that his eyes didn't become dry.
But, you know, at this place, at this place, I exhausted limitless suffering.
So he was kind of like in wonderment.
Then the story goes, the third week he did Kinhen, like, walked back and forth. It's called the cloister. Walk back and forth around this tree. Not around it, but. But from the tree to where he was standing, back and forth. So I think it's so interesting how all of our zazen and actually our practice is still doing this, right? We're still replicating or.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Finding our own way, but there's something about this walking in a circuit back and forth, you know, sitting.
That is our way at least.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: So.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: It'S interesting to again, pay attention.
Right after the Sachin, you know, what is it like to continue your practice?
How do you have this transition after touching the source, this fast, luminous mind?
It seems like Buddha was experimenting a little bit.
At some point, heavy rains came and a giant king snake protected the Buddha. You know, you'll see this serpent with, like, hooded serpent protecting the Buddha from rain.
Finally, at some point, an Indian divinity God of sorts implores Buddha to teach.
Gotta tell people about this.
Make some requests.
There's always the three requests, right? Please teach me.
Buddha's like, no, nobody will get it. You know, I just want to sit here in silence under this tree.
Maybe I feel a little bit of that craving for silence since I've kind of cut out a lot of the opportunities for noise during this session with our schedule shift. But, ah, finally, Buddha with some great divine eye saw the world and said, there might be some people with but just a little dust in their eyes, some people who could see, see the words that I might say, might teach, who might learn.
So after a while, he decides, maybe these five friends who I happen to know hang out in this deer park down the road, they might be interested.
And, you know, they've been doing these wild practices, so maybe they're ready to actually open up to something new.
And Buddha learns to teach over the next 45 years of his life.
But his first attempt is kind of a dude.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: On the. On the way to the deer park where he thinks his friends might be hanging out, he meets a wandering ascetic.
And the ascetic, like, notices there's something going on with this person and is like, like, who is your teacher? And what do you have to teach the Buddha?
Buddha's reply.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: I am an all transcender, an all knower, unstained by theories relinquishing all liberated from terminating craving or liberated by terminating craving.
Who should I give credit to? I have no teacher and no one like me exists in the world.
I'm going to Varanasi to set the wheel of the Dharma in motion.
In a blindfold world, I'm going to beat the deathless drum.
So Seta kind of looked at him and said, may it be so friend, and departed.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: You know, I love it. May it be so friend.
Yeah, okay, what are you.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Drinking or smoking or something, you know, and wanders off.
But he's still.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Goes to meet his friends at the Deer park, these friends who abandoned him. And they actually are open to the teaching at some point.
And that's where he teaches this first sermon, the Sutra of Turning the Wheel of Dharma.
We're going to chant this entire thing, or pretty much the entire thing, every evening during evening service, before supper.
So that, that'll be fun.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: It's a little, not too long, but it's a little long. But it'll give everybody the kitchen plenty of time to prep things.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: But also we get this in our body, this repetition.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: But we'll explore that later, maybe during this sasheen, if I'm still here tomorrow, the next day.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: And also look at some other ways the Buddha taught how he related.
But I wanted to return to a couple more takes on Buddha's initial utterances after awakening that come from some later sources.
And you know, you all know these koans, which are usually like dialogues between teachers and students or monks.
But.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: There was my favorite, maybe my very favorite case is case 67 in the book of Serenity in this medieval collection of teaching stories. And it's not a dialogue, it's just kind of this proclamation from the Avatamsaka Sutra's version of something that Buddha taught. And in some ways this, this really opens up how we as sort of modern Mahayana Buddhists, Zen Buddhists, see these first utterances. So Buddha's like, how wonderful.
I now see that all sentient beings everywhere fully possess the wisdom and virtue of the enlightened ones.
But because of false conceptions and attachments, they do not realize it.
Like everybody, everybody's awake, but they don't know it. But it's great that they're awake. They don't realize it, but maybe, maybe they, they can. You know, that's a whole sachine can be devoted to this case.
And again, it, it goes back to the Avatamsaka Sutra, which by the way, by some accounts was actually the first thing that Buddha taught this giant tome.
But that Buddha was like, no, nobody can get that. So I better just do this other little sutra that we'll chant.
Some people are actually chanting the whole Avatamsaka Sutra, which is, you know, almost 2,000 pages.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: But.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: That sutra, Avatamsaka Sutra is sort of another level of like the entire universe awakening together at all times.
So we have all these stories.
So here's one from Dogen, from Hotsu Bodaishin, which is arousing the mind of awakening or rousing Bodhichitta.
And this is also really closer to maybe what we're familiar with, as opposed to the person, you know.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: Seeing the house builder and breaking down the rafters. You know, that kind of language.
But this is when the morning star appeared. Buddha said, I attained the way simultaneously with all sentient beings in the great earth. So no longer is this just sentient beings. It's the entire universe awakening together.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: So this wheel, this wheel of Dharma keeps on turning, revolving and evolving.
This is what we're doing here in Sashin, turning, being turned by the Dharma.
And this brought to mind a modern commentary, which I think some people will share, that's in the form of a song.
And I've. I've asked, we could distribute.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: So I don't have a great voice, but there are many people in this Sangha who do. And I enlisted a couple of them to help us with a little sing along to conclude this talk.
Because I think that we can see that there's these awakening and commentaries by this, of this all the time happening everywhere.
And this little song was made famous, I think, by Louis Armstrong. Is that. Is that right?
I think Paula, Paula knows it probably.
So it's called what a Wonderful World.
So on our little Bodhi Mondas, we can sing this little song together and we'll figure out how we can teach this to the whole world.
So Asian, do you want to hit it?
[00:27:57] Speaker C: What a wonderful world.
[00:28:06] Speaker C: Of white bright blessed day.
[00:28:15] Speaker C: To myself.
[00:28:18] Speaker C: What a wonderful world the colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky Also.
[00:28:46] Speaker C: I love you.
[00:28:54] Speaker C: I watch them grow no one watch more than I know and I think to myself.
[00:29:07] Speaker C: What a wonderful world.
[00:29:19] Speaker B: Oh, yes.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: So with all the pain and all the suffering, this wonder of the world, and what is your way to this?
How will you find it? How will you turn the wheel?
So we have a little bit of time for discussion if you'd like.
So thank you all very much.
May your Sachin continue wonderfully. Thank you. Aisin and Wade for backup.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: I think the kitchen has three minutes.
Anybody have a story?
You know, Buddha was a person, a human person, just like all of us, trying to figure it out and fumbled a little bit, like all of us, but also when the time came, creatively responded and opened a way.
So I hope in this Sachin, you find your way with a highway.
Good.
Anything else, Tom?
[00:30:31] Speaker C: Yeah, truly, we haven't lost our way, did we? Just be quiet enough.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: Find out?
Yeah, it's always here, but sometimes we don't see it.
But we actually in the Sachine, are helping each other see it, feel it, taste it, touch it, gather it, or just look down at your feet.
And, you know, I like the fact that Buddha was kind of blissed out and was kind of enjoying that and then was like, now I gotta do something. I gotta teach.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: You know, that, like, it's okay to enjoy a little bliss.
Just don't hold on too tightly.
But don't forget how wonderful this world really is.
Okay, so I think that it's time for the kitchen to leave. It is now 11 o', clock.
[00:31:30] Speaker B: At least by my time on my computer. And thank you, whoever is going to the kitchen to prepare our food and serve us, thank you very much.
And.
[00:31:45] Speaker B: Not yet.
In a minute. You can stay standing, though.
I just wanted to mention that service, which will happen, you know, after some zazen and Kinhan is a little different, so just than we normally do. It's a little, little, just a little different. So we'll just take it slow and roll with it. But we have some beautiful things to chant and I want to thank everyone online and I know Mark Split and Dale, Joe, I don't know if you're just popping in for a while or for how long you'll stay. And Nicholas, you're around Tigan, but happy to see you on board in whatever way works for you.
And I'm gonna say goodbye to online people and start our chant in a second, so.
