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.
So welcome again, dragons near and far, new known and unknown.
We have some new people with us today, so I want to just welcome people who came for zazen instruction, and especially our friends from San Antonio Zen Center. Is that right? Julie and Julie's son, who is from Chicago, I think, or living here. Okay. Yeah. And Andrew, is it? Yeah.
And. And some people online especially. Hi, Rayrin. It's wonderful to see you and other of our friends here. And in the house, we have Tigan Dan Layton, our emeritus guiding teacher, whose blessings flow through the blood of Ancient Dragon, enriching our practice.
So I'll just say something about scholars.
Laurie, could I just say there are.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: 10 people here in the Zen that.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: We'Ve already said named.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: So I let you know we are all here.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: We're all very excited about the talk.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Thank you very much. Rehren.
This is Milwaukee Zen center, our dear dharma friends with 10 more people there.
So this is, you know, a record crowd.
Fortunately, the cloud seems to be able to hold more people than this room sometimes, but that may be just an illusion.
So I'll say something about Scholar's Corner. Just like normally on Sundays, the teaching seat is held by a dharma teacher, someone who is transmitted dharma transmitted in lineage, or a lay and trusted teacher or someone who has been a head student, so who's been a longtime practitioner.
However, on occasions, we're really lucky. We have a wonderful pool of scholars, really initiated by Teigen and bringing in people such as Steve Hein and Brook Ziporin and so many others. You know, not everyone who's a scholar of Buddhism is a practitioner.
But these teachings, to know where we came from, you know, when we chant the meal chant, we say, you know, that we should know how this meal comes to us. And I think it's good to know how the dharma comes to us in its various ways.
And we're very lucky to have as both a member of our Sangha, but now in the dharma position of our scholar, Hawk Hop, who is a longtime Zen practitioner, but also a scholar of Chinese Buddhism and I think Chinese Buddhist material culture. Would that be correct? Studied steels and also.
Yeah.
Bricks and tiles and walls. You know, things like that.
And in that capacity, he has offered to come to us and share some basic teachings. So this is really wonderful for us.
And I'm Looking forward to learning from Paul in this capacity and we hope to have bring others including a scholar of actually Japanese Soto Zen Buddhism, who's relatively new faculty member at the University of Chicago, Stephane Lika, also very interesting and also people who teach college students, university students actually can communicate the dharma in pretty clear terms. So this is what I'm hoping. So without further ado, I think Paul could maybe say a few words about himself and then I will pass the mic along. So thank you very much.
Thank you joining us everyone.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: My dad's from San Antonio, so it's nice to have you here. So I clipped this on. Is that works I can.
So thanks for the introduction. Is that working dangling like that?
Thanks.
So what I'll do today, what I'll do in a minute do now is you know, a scholars talk, but more of a professor's talk I think as Hougetsu kind of alluded to. This will be a version of something that I do when I need to bring students, you know, say we're reading from a range of, of say Chinese religious traditions and then we get to Buddhism and you know, I, I need people to be up to speed kind of fast.
So this is a version of, of what I say to them or actually hand out to them.
So it'll cover a lot of material but very basic, very basic stuff which I think most of you will already know. I, I think that's a good thing for myself anyway as a practitioner I like to, I don't know, I find it hard as a practitioner to get ever get beyond the basics, the very most basic things. So, so I hope it will be, I hope it will be helpful in those terms and then we'll have a discussion afterward which I'm, which I'm really looking forward to.
Okay, so Buddhists have from, from the beginning of Buddhism, as far as we know, understood the crux of the human problem, right? That is for them the problem of unavoidable suffering or unsatisfactoriness, right? This word dukkha gets trans. Got translated into Chinese as something that means basically bitterness, difficulty, right?
To be the centrality.
So the crux of that problem, right, is the centrality of desire to our being in the world, right? And more specifically, really self defeating attachment to the things that we desire and identify with.
So the reason why this is seen as a problem in essence is that the things, that is the objects, states of affairs, et cetera, that we want and that we identify with are impermanent. They don't last.
This includes not only Things out there as we experience them, as I experience the world, but everything, in fact, our very selves, very importantly, right? And those aspects of ourselves that we are attached to, youth, beauty, desirability, clear mindedness, a strong memory, you know, the list could go on. They all arise and fall away, sometimes immediately, but some, but always eventually.
So if you rely on them, if you identify with them, if you feel that you must have them or must be them, then you're going to be in trouble, right? This is going to lead to suffering, difficulty, unsatisfactory.
So that's the, that's the number one, right? The first thing to me, the just, the basic teaching of Buddhism is impermanence.
But when Buddhist contemplatives, when Buddhist meditators, Buddhist thinkers, whoever, Buddhists looked more deeply at that, right, at that problem, they saw that it wasn't just that things don't last in the ways we want them to. It was that things were never actually there in the, in the ways that we thought they were.
This, in the ways that we thought.
[00:07:36] Speaker C: They were is very important.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: So this is why, and you see, you see this throughout Buddhist writings, right? And it's why specifically in the Platform Sutra, one of the most basic kind of originary texts of the Zen tradition, in some, not every edition, but in many editions, it is said fundamentally there is not a single set, right? In Chinese, in fact.
So in fact these Buddhists said that the way things appear to us, the way we experience them, they are in important ways entirely.
This is important entirely, the product of cognitive, emotional, socio, cultural, et cetera, projections.
Thus, and here, for me, not just for me, I think we're getting close to the heart of the matter.
The attachments, identifications, right, that are at the root of the problem of suffering arise from a fundamental delusion, right? As it's called in the tradition, a mistaking, that is a mistaking, taking things wrong, of the nature of things. That's both things out there and things, things in here, to think of it that way.
So the nature of that way, right? Oh, sorry, I skipped some.
I have to write things out because otherwise I'll just start going crazy with talk and I'll get lost. So thus and again, here we're getting close to the matter.
It's a mistaking of things, a delusion, right? Or if delusion seems too harsh and unhelpful a way to put it, we might put it in a friendlier way. I like to put it in a friend. The ways we take things to be lead to suffering, right? Lead to difficulty, lead to unhappiness, lead to un. All that stuff. And there's a better way. There's a better way to take them. A way that leads to being at home in the way things actually are, according to Buddhist, right? And the nature of that way, way, path, right? Sanskrit, marga, Chinese, got translated into this old Chinese concept of dao, right? That's the subject, as I understand it, of most Buddhist thought, right? How did take things correctly? How to see the world. Right, right. How to. And thus. And thus how to be at home in the world. So one of the most common metaphors Buddhists have used to discuss this state of affairs, right? This delusory state of affairs is emptiness.
Now, it's crucial to understand, really. Let me emphasize that again, it's really important to understand that when Buddhists. And Buddhists say that the world of our experience is empty, they are not saying that it is worthless or unreal or something to be disdained. I don't know. I mean, you're all kind of steeped in Buddhist stuff. But when I, you know, first raised these, this idea, this image, especially with college students, right? They often just say what? You know, they're just, you know, Buddhism's such a downer. It's suffering. The world is empty. The world is not even. The world is not real. I mean. But no, exactly the opposite. This is the point I want to make. Exactly the opposite. This is. And. And I just think this is so important to understand. When they say things are empty, this technical word, they mean, in fact, that they are real, that they are the very arena for human awakening and flourishing, and ultimately that they are the very body of the Buddha. So get back to this emptiness, this state of affairs for Buddhists is what makes all that possible, right?
So this can be very hard to understand, I think. So first, I'll go through it as clearly as I can as I understand it.
First, Buddhists have emphasized we have to be clear that what things are said to be empty of, right? The technical answer, textbook answer, is that they are empty of what Indian Buddhist thinkers called an atman, right? A word that in these contexts was translated into Chinese, taken into Japanese as self or me, right? Ga in one Japanese pronunciation chanted every month, right? Jo Rakuga Joe, Right?
So again, this is a technical philosophical term here.
Self and selfless have a tremendously wide range of senses in Buddhist teachings, especially those you'll encounter in practice and working with a teacher. And a real Dharma talks. Not this, right? But I'm. I'm gonna I'm talking here again about this old technical sense.
Self here means something like having an essential nature unrelated to, uncaused by, and unconditioned by other things.
I want to say that again, self means something like having an essential nature unrelated to, uncaused by and unconditioned by other things.
A thing with a self in this technical sense would be a thing that always existed just as it is, and will always exist just as it is, and that isn't essentially bound up with and shaped by and indeed constituted by the vast world of causes and conditions that Buddhists understand our world to be. Right, A world made up of things with selves. Those kind of selves would be reliable and wantable in ways that didn't cause suffering. Its things would always be there for us just as they are right now. We could rightfully take ourselves as just ourselves, purely ourselves, in such a world as standing in a way apart from the world, right autonomous, clear cut, fully and only ourselves alone.
Well, this is not the world we live in according to Buddhism. Instead, on their view, the world is entirely made up of conditioned things, including again us, ourselves, which are ever changing according to ever changing conditions.
So the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna is said to have made this especially clear.
Emptiness, he said, refers to exactly this constructedness, this profound and inescapable interdependence, or technical term, conditioned arising of things.
On this model, Nagarjuna's model is to say that any one thing is empty of itself. To say, to say that that any one thing is empty of itself is to say that it is in a sense full of everything else, that it exists entirely as a momentary node in an unknowable, an unknowably vast and mysterious web of ever transforming relationships.
So emptiness, this is Nagarjuna's famous thing equals interdependence.
Nagarjuna said that if you can really get this such that it works for you, then everything will work for you, you and you'll be perfectly at home in the world as it actually is.
You know, I like this image of like being like water in water.
I'll bring that up now because we'll come back to it. So the modern and very famous, I'm sure you've heard of him, Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh put it this way. He said things inter are right, things are not. If we take them to exist separately, they're inter being. The great Thich Nhat Hanh term is their true nature.
A flower is not a flower.
A flower is sunlight. And Dirt and rain and a seed and bees and time and goes on and on and on. A flower that's just a flower.
And here this is, this is an image I got from Dreux. Aporn was mentioned. I read his first book many years ago and this image really has stuck with me, so I always use it. So footnote Brooks a point. A flower that's just a flower is not a flower, right? Can't be a flower. It's a plastic flower, right? It's a dead flower. It's a fantasy of a flower, a dream of a flower. It's only by being all those other non flower things that it can be a flower.
And so it's flower ness, put it that way, resides crucially and irreducibly in all of it. And all the. All those things, all those in. Thus the very common set of expressions which I think comes first in a text called the Diamond Sutra. Very important Zen that you will know that go something like X is not X, that's how it's X, right? What X is not X, that's how it's X, right?
So seeing things this way, Buddhism urges. And here's another key point. You won't get fixated on any X and any particular X imagined as separate from everything else. In fact, the very idea that you could fixate on any one thing just wouldn't arise. According to these Buddhist thinkers, this kind of emptiness, or this angle on emptiness is sometimes called other dependence.
It's the understanding of emptiness that has given rise in the modern world to the sense of these strong parallels between Buddhist thought and modern ecology. For, for example, there's another very important angle on emptiness, which is sometimes called the imagined nature.
It's becoming. People are talking about this a lot these days. And some of you will know that this particular phrasing comes from an ancient Buddhist philosopher named Vasubandhu. But I'm not gonna mention him too much or at all. So on the one hand, using the previous example, the imagined nature simply refers to. To incorrectly taking the flower to be just a flower that is mistaking a set of relationships and processes for their momentary product, right?
But it can also refer to all of the cultural or affective content of our experience.
Seeing a human being, that's how I put it in class, as somehow inherently a professor, right? Or experience in experiencing him as a figure of dread is know because you let AI write your paper or your latent paper or something, right? You know, all of that, just like flowerness is the product of a way of seeing that is conditioned by various personal, cultural, historical, et cetera, processes or conditions. It's not there, according to this, apart from them, it's utterly contingent on a particular context in history.
So you might experience the human as the professor, while he might experience himself as a father or a husband or a mandolin wannabe or a White Sox fan. You know, which one, which one is he?
So this, you know, all of this in the language of certain schools of Buddhism, is mind for consciousness only, right? Wei xin, wei shi.
There's different terms for it.
I'm not saying that this.
Scholars get into a lot of arguments about. Is this saying that the. There's no actual there, there. There's no this. The mind, the world is somehow this product of this, some kind of mind. Some people say that. Some people say, and this is how I take it, and I. At least how I'll be presenting it in a kind of technical, word, phenomenological sense, right? Where it's just how you experience the world, whatever it actually is. Ontologically, the world that I. That I experience is this, right? It's made up of this. It's imagined, right?
And so my. This professor business, you know, it's a fairly trivial example. But for such Buddhists, the world of our experience itself, all the way down, as people like to say, is entirely mind only as you experience it. It's a dream from which we must awaken as a Buddha, right? Who means, you know, the person who woke up.
So for some Buddhists, the point is to cease all imaginings of this sort and experience reality simply as it is the incomprehensibly vast and mysterious other dependent mind formed play a phenomenon to things, to see things as they are, that is, or things as they is, right? As Suzuki Roshi used to say, as I understand it, I hope you begin to understand why he might have said that rather than seeing them through our desires or dislikes or cultures or personal histories, you know, that is how compassion can arise.
For Buddhists who say that seeing this interdependence, seeing things interdependently, is to see things with compassion, see things compassionate. So that's another of the main points I'm trying to make. So here. Here's what I take to be the rub, right? I'm going to try to bring it home here. So if our normal human construings of things and emotional responses to them are the central problem, then how should we view the world? You know, what do you. What do you. Do you know, how should we live? So to go Back to the flower example, do Buddhists mean that if one knows that the flower really, what the flower really is, is only interdependence with the rest of phenomena, everything else, you know, it's not. Oh, sorry. Not only interdependent with the rest of phenomena, but entirely just a fantasy of what we think it is and how it feels to us. If that's what it is, should we then ignore flowers? Should we just treat them as trivial ephemera, you know, or products of delusion, and instead focus on some abstract or mystical sense of the whole or the one, or truth?
No, no.
Flowers, these Buddhists insist, are still. And really, here's the point I'm going to try to make, all the more so to be enjoyed and cared for, of course.
So the Heart Sutra, I think, offers some help here when it says, this is a loose translation, things are empty, but emptiness, the vast oneness, is none other than things, individual things, right? That we experience, that is the whole in some mystic sense of cosmic unity, apart from the diffuse particulars of the world, doesn't exist either. It's also just another provisional taking of the world of our experience.
So what does exist then?
Flowers, of course, right? Each flower, just as it is, is itself the whole.
This is very important, I think. So are, so are. And this is speaking to myself. My neuroses and mistakings of the world are also, right, the world and you. This is what. You hear this all the time. You read this all the time in Buddhist texts, just as you are right now. That's the real world, that's the body of you. But you have to see them correctly. So many Buddhists, especially maybe in East Asia, well, it starts in India, have taken this a bit further for them, the flower or the book or the wind or the computer or. You know, my anxiety about this talk, you know, is really the Buddha, right? The Buddha as universe, the cosmic Buddha, even while it is simply a flower or my anxiety, right? The idea that the true nature, this idea, right, that the true nature of each thing and all things is the Buddha is sometimes called Buddha nature or the womb or embryo. Interestingly, same word of the Buddha, this word, Tathagatagarbha, which you may have heard before, Buddha nature, this. This idea originally just seems to have meant that each of us has the potential to become a Buddha eventually, right? So in the early Mayana texts, Lotus Sutra, Buddhahood is something that you attain over eons, right? Of time. But. But over time it came to mean no act, something different, right? That in fact what we that we actually already are and always have been Buddhas. We just don't know it, right? We don't see it.
Indeed, again, in some cases that everything is the Buddha tile, broken tiles and fence posts.
There seem to always be broken tiles and fence posts around in Zen texts, right?
So this last idea that everything is right was maybe most famously illustrated in, in East Asia anyway, in the tradition that feeds into Zen in a text called the Awakening of Faith, right? With this imagery of ocean and waves, or I like to say lake and waves, right? Lake Michigan and waves, the ocean. It's the same thing, right? Going back to what I've said before, the ocean, the lake itself is the whole of conditioned interdependent phenomena. We might say pure emptiness, right? To use the Heart Sutra language, and each wave, each individual wave, a myriad waves of the ocean, right? That, that's momentary, that in this stands for, you know, moment. Momentary instantiations of the whole or of flowers, right? Or enough. In the Heart Sutra language, forms, form and emptiness, water and way, waves and water, etc. So each, in this image, each ever changing wave is the great ocean or Lake Mishnah, right? Lake Michigan is only ever just waves arising and falling away. There's no lake apart from the waves.
You know, forms are empty, but emptiness is nothing other than forms.
[00:24:33] Speaker C: Same thing.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: There is no pure Lake Michigan, right? Apart from the momentary conditioned play of waves, even when it's perfectly flat. That's just another conditioned moment.
So see what this does the text say, if that is true, right? Then this very world of things, again, broken tiles and fence posts to keep it in a Zen idiom, right? Or of neurosis and beauty is itself the pure land as they, as the text, the realm of reality, right? The faji, the Dharma dat, the arena in which awakening of as a Buddha can occur. And in fact, as I understand these texts, this stuff, the only such world that there is.
So note how far we are at this point from, you know, we will have encountered, I think, as the early pictures of Buddhism, in Buddhism, of salvation that you find in which require the so called nirvanizing, right? Nirvana, which is really a verb, Nirvanaizing, that is extinguishing of karma and all things of, you know, and eventually of being reborn as an arhat and then being, not being reborn, kind of leaving the world.
It's not like that, but it's also a related picture, right? It's connected too, because attached. Because also attaching to individual things in, you know, in mistaken ways, attaching to individual waves as opposed to the lake, you know, the individual waves that the. As opposed to the lake that the waves are instantiations of, right? That will, that will still lead to suffering, right? If you get too attached, oh, this wave, it was so perfect. How can I live? The wave is gone and your friend could be like, dude, it's lake. Let's just go first. Let's just swim, right? You know, can we just. Let's just go.
So.
Oh, I actually had that.
Now I'm going to go through what I just said. So why would you weep for the falling away of a wave?
We know that it's really just the lake, which is still there, still rising and falling according to wind, tides and other conditions, right? So take delight in this. In swimming in the lake. Buddhists of this model urge rather than attach your happiness, your sense of self, your very sense of who you are, right? To any particularly fine curve of ever disappearing wave.
But the problem with images, always this one too, is that they, you know, they go too far. They don't really work because of course, this one doesn't work either fully. Because, you know, it seems like we're apart from the lake, but no, we are the lake, right? We are waves in this, right? So how do we see the ocean, the lake? Buddha nature. When we are it, right? We are Buddha nature. We are the lake.
So one of my latest favorite Zen bits, one Zen sayings goes like this.
There's a single. This is from a guy named Chang Xing huilong.
Lived from 1854 to 9:32. I'm sorry, 854, not 1854. 854 to 932.
I mean, I'm just going to read it in Chinese because I. I just have to for my own satisfaction, right?
So there is a single exposed body in all phenomena. The ocean, right? The body of the Buddha, the Buddha nature.
Only by. But only by affirming yourself, that is yourself, that is a wave that's fully a wave that's fully the lake that is an X. That's not. By not being X is X, right? The flower, that's everything else. And thus the flower, right? Only by affirming yourself in this way can you become intimate with it.
A single exposed body within all phenomena. Thank you very much.
I'm off the hook now, I think.
Not completely.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Put you back on the hook in a minute.
Thank you so much, so much for bringing forth these concepts. And I don't know why, but this, you know, body, body exposed to the golden wind, you know, whatever you read sounds really beautiful in Chinese for some reason. So thank you for sharing that. And I think what we're going to do so that we can have more conversation with Paul in the room is we'll serve tea in the zendo. So I think Artenzo, Mike, Bo, and maybe Paul will just kind of, you know, very simply, informally offer tea and treats while we have our conversation. So I want to thank, thank you servers and Tenso San for.
Then they'll return to us.
So I think Paul really beautifully opened up. It was so funny. When I was thinking about your talk, I'm like, where's intimacy in this? And this is what you end with, you know, that we're.
But so I'm going to pass this back to Paul and then I think we'll pass around a mic in the room to people who would like to offer any reflections or questions. And then also anyone online, you have the hand function or a physical hand, and our techno wade will help us. And I think this, this is also how we are one practice body.
You know, so many people are creating this very event with their great efforts. So thank you all very much. And Paul, you're back on the hook.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Oh, all right.
I have water.
So wait, this is going to have to be passed around.
[00:29:55] Speaker C: There's another.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: You can hold on to that. Okay.
I see David Ray online. Oh, David. Hi, Paul.
[00:30:05] Speaker D: Thank you. Thank you so much for that talk.
So, you know, I've. I've been in the, you know, in, in. In the Dragon for five years and what you're, what you talked about, you know, it's.
It feels like it's the main thing that has sustained me through what was the hardest, whatever you want to say, darkest period of, of my life. The, the emptiness teaching felt like it was, was the thing that made it possible just to continue.
And that having been said, right.
The lightness of the emptiness teaching maybe isn't always the most skillful way to deal with a human issue.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:44] Speaker D: I mean, it wouldn't be the thing to say to somebody who just got a cancer diagnosis. It wouldn't be this thing to say to somebody whose child just died. You know, the thing about, oh, the wave.
Yeah, the wave rises and subsides. And I also notice in our practice body that, you know, the older forms of Buddhism that are more ascetic and more, you know, one might even say more dualistic. You know, people, we reach for those too, and sometimes they seem like the skillful medicine. So I wonder what thoughts you have about that. Sort of about the limits of emptiness. Teaching and about the skillful usefulness of these older forms of Buddhism that we keep around.
[00:31:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you so much.
Well, with the difficulty of the term emptiness and I, I, I feel that deeply mainly as a, you know, again as someone who is a teacher in the classroom. Right. As students, it really turns everybody off and in fact I've to, to an extent that can be hard to recover from. Right. And they'll just get attached to this idea. No, that just says everything is empty. It's not to the, you know, so I, I, I often, or sometimes I don't, I don't raise it or at least I've been thinking more and more, maybe I just start with. And you know, with interdependence. Right. Or start with connection. Start with these kinds of things.
My, my favorite, you know, the difficulty of the term emptiness story is from, I think it's from Tich Nhat Hanh's Heart of Understanding, his commentary on the Heart Sutra where he has a.
And I'm a dad with a young daughter. And so this, you know, maybe it especially hits me hard, this particular story because you know, the, the dad is, he's really feeling that, you know, it's like what emptiness or interminence, you know. And I, this is just, I don't like it. Right. It's, it's not helpful. You know, I, it's just a downer. And, and the, the young child says but, but dad, you know, if that was, if it weren't that way, then I couldn't grow up.
You know, I couldn't grow up. I, I would just be stuck. Right. I mean, as a, as a little kid and being a little kid's great. But you want to grow up, right? I mean, you know, we all, and that really something I think about all the time and, but, but the difficulty of it, of it remains, you know, it's hard to be the, to make an off, to be able to make an offering like that kid could. Right? It's, I certainly don't always or very rarely if I ever feel skillful enough to do that. And Buddhism, as you say, right. As so important to keep in mind.
It's such a rich and old and vast, really vast tradition across cultures. And there's so many means, right. This word upaya means that one can become skilled in. Right?
And finding the right one is the thing. Right.
You know, I, and here I feel like I'm, I'm going to be trying to, trying to let myself off the hook a bit. You know, I, I take it I. It was helpful for me to think of this as a scholar's talk, you know, and not a dharma talk. Someone this morning said it's a dharma talk. I'm like, wait a minute. No, that's not what I signed up for, you know? Right. This is a scholars talk, right. I'm going to talk about. I'm going to tell you what the books say, you know, like. And, you know, I think they're. They're true. I mean, I'm a practitioner. I try, you know, hard, you know, to understand and then to live them, but, you know, feeling like I can kind of pull back and say, well, that's why we have other. That's why we have Sangha. Right. That's why we have teachers. Right. So a little bit of a dodge at the end, but thank you, please. Carl. I've struggled in my own practice. Sorry, look at.
[00:34:32] Speaker E: I've struggled in my own practice to how much ritual I put to the zazen before. I love ritual. I have a religious studies concentration and I love ritual.
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Me too.
[00:34:44] Speaker E: How do you balance it out? Because I find it helps me center when I'm going into zazen to say something like the sutraverse or the Heart Sutra before I go into zazen. But how do you balance that ritual out?
[00:34:56] Speaker B: And how does it.
[00:34:57] Speaker E: Witness to the practice?
[00:34:58] Speaker B: It's so. Yeah. Thank you.
This is. This is an issue close to my heart as I have. Some people know, I been. I started out kind of half and half in a different form in vipassana style, where there was almost no ritual. You just kind of go and you sit down and do it. You get up, you do something else, right? There's not. The ritual is not there so much at all. Even I was amazed. I remember at one place I went to, there was. I was like, there's not even a Buddha anywhere place. So I found a small one kind of tucked away in a hall. Well, and I've always.
I liked that. Right. But I also love the. The ritual rights, you know, what we do in here in the Zen way. Right. Which has both. Right.
And for me, I can only say, for me, trying to, I don't know, collapse is the right word, but sort of, you know, merge bring together. Right. So there's little, you know, offering incense, walking, putting your hands like this or like this, bowing in different ways.
The difference between that and zazen, right? I mean, what's the difference really? I mean, the. You know, should.
One of the main things in my practice as I talk to myself about it, is you Know, there's Zazen means sitting Zen. Right. There's also walking Zen, standing Zen, classically laying down Zen and washing the dishes Zen, you know, et cetera. And this is trying to, again, collapse doesn't seem like the right word. But, you know, ease the difference, you know, between these things is for me, is becoming. Is becoming more and more helpful. Even though I. And I admit, I'll just say, you know, I'm embracing our way, the ancient dragon way. But I'm still like, okay, I should. I should do some prostrations.
I saw Howard's hand first, then Paul, perhaps the other Paul.
Thank you, Paul, for a wonderful talk.
As somebody who was part of the Brook Zorin Club for. When I was at the university, I never got the pleasure of taking one of your courses or hearing one of your lectures in person.
This is more of a form question than a content question. And maybe it's similar to. Maybe you've already kind of answered this. I'm not sure. But as somebody who has a neur. Neuroses and sicknesses around studying too much. Yeah. You know, libraries of university press texts on Buddhism.
Not as much as you, I'm sure. How do you balance study and practice? Yeah. What is the role of study for you in your practice?
Thank you. Yeah. People are just.
See me, I guess my buttons are just like. Oh, just exposed.
People are hitting them. Right.
Yeah. How indeed? I mean, this has been.
It's been a big problem for many years. Right. It's one reason why I, for example, at the UFC campus, you know, as you will know, I think you were part of it in the Ozon for a long time. Right, right. Led sittings on Wednesday evenings, I think. Right. In Rockefeller Chapel. And I didn't go, almost never went, because I had such a. I didn't know how to bring them together. You know, I started out in all this as a practitioner, and I've always thought of myself as a practitioner, but trying to. I couldn't. I had to hold them apart. Right. For whatever reason.
And over the last few years, I don't seem to need to do that.
And I'm not answering the question and I'm giving you a how. Right. Other than that sort of. I just, you know, it just became less of an issue.
I find myself even outing myself in that sense. You know, I want to. This is an important word and I don't want to use it glibly. Right. But it did feel that way to my fellow scholars, you know, out in the world. Right. I would say, well, you Know, you guys sit, right? And everyone's just like, you know, and. Because I do, right. And some of them don't. Some of them do. And. And I just feel much more comfortable with doing that. I don't know how it happened, Right.
I urge.
I don't urge you to let it go, you know, because it's hard and I couldn't have let it go 10 years ago, you know, but I. This idea of intimacy, you know, with what it is, right? What is this resistance? What is this for me, fear, you know, I won't be taken seriously on, you know, on either. By either side, right. That if you're, oh, you're a scholar, you're not a practitioner, or you're a practitioner, you're not a scholar, you know, this is like I say it was very hard and very painful for me. And you can ask Nils on how. I'm just really, just annoyed that living whatever out of him over many years, you know, talking about this stuff. Right. And.
But, you know, like a lot of these things, like, just kind of seeing what it is, you know, why is it there? I mean, and why am I so. Why do I have such a hard time with it? Why am I so.
Why do I lack confidence, really, in both?
I don't know if that's helpful, but that's sort of how I've done it.
Thank you.
[00:40:08] Speaker E: Thank you for your talk today, Paul.
Coming from. I. Yeah, every. I feel like every time I get like a full deep dive intro to Zen and metaphysics, it's like the intro is the whole enchilada. Like, it feels like. Like it's all there.
And I feel like I understand why I'm practicing a little bit better every time.
[00:40:26] Speaker B: So.
[00:40:27] Speaker E: Thank you.
I came originally to Zen from, like a Christian upbringing, and I felt like Buddhism was so much more pal. I was like a philosophy undergrad and like, Buddhism was so palatable because I was just like, oh, cool. Like, I don't need to reach for it or have like, faith. I can just kind of. It's there, like, logically why it makes sense. And then the longer I've been practicing, I think the more I've kind of enrolled around in Samsaric cycles, the more I've kind of been like, oh, well, this takes faith too. Like, there has to be. There's like faith in this paradox of the real and the, you know, delusion that I keep rolling around in. And so I guess I've. I feel like when I hear like, like such. I guess, like the description of, like, the flower, for example, it kind of, it's like, it feels kind of like an attempt to kind of like, get around the need for faith in a way in Buddhism. But that it, to me, I guess it feels like we still have to wrestle with faith even though there is like, sort of this logical proof for, like, look, like, this is what is like you, there's no self. Like, where is the self? Can you find it? No, there's no self. But yeah. Anyways, I guess I'm curious about how you see kind of like, you know, instead of a God. I feel like Buddhism is a bold claim maybe, but like, has paradox and this sort of subjective experience versus the, what we know to be true of the Buddhists in the Buddhist sense. So anyway, I guess I'm just curious. Yeah. Like, what do you see, like, as the role of faith in otherwise sort of philosophical practice?
[00:42:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you. I, you know, faith, and I like this word faith. I didn't grow up in a Christian background, so I don't have, but I, I, I have come to understand other people. There's a lot of baggage, there's a lot of stuff, you know, with that. And so this word in can be sheen in Chinese, similar, Japanese can be also translated as confidence. Right. Or trust.
I, I, I think I always wanted faith, right. Because I didn't grow up, I didn't have it, you know, it wasn't part of my worth growing up. And I, I do want it. And so I, I'm grateful that you put out that word.
And yeah, seeing faith, you know, it's not seeing faith, but being, having faith. Right. Trying to have faith in that from, for me, I think of it as that, that the world is real. Right. You know, that I am real. Right. That there is no self. But the self is real. Right. The self is real, but not in that way. Right. But in this other way, of course.
And, and because I don't experience it that way, you know, I can think it through and I think it through with students, you know, for a job, you know, my day job is thinking this through with students.
[00:43:09] Speaker A: Right.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: But that doesn't work for me. You know, sitting works for me and trying to develop a kind of faith right. In, in being. Right in, in action, you know, an action that, in a, in a way of life that is faithful. Right. In this way. And I'll just say on the paradox, this is kind of a, Anyway, I, there is, it's not a paradox. Right. This is my ultimately seeing that it seems like a paradox, but it's Actually not a paradox. That's my understanding that that's a kind of. That requires a kind of faith too. Right. It's a paradox from a certain way of thinking. Right. If you choose one side, then it's a paradox.
But if you do this other thing right, then it's. It's not, it's.
[00:43:55] Speaker E: It. It seems like. One class I tested Jiryu down at Spring Gulch, he talked about how the turn of the wheel of Dharma, like the history of Buddhism, you could kind of view it from this back and forth between like the reification of enlightenment.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: And the non reification enlightenment that like.
[00:44:10] Speaker E: Enlightenment is a thing that exists and.
[00:44:12] Speaker B: We have to realize it for enlightenment.
[00:44:15] Speaker E: It's just the reality we already exist in. And that there's a kind of paradox there and that, well, if I'm enlightened already, you know, why do I keep stubbing my toe and. Yeah, I guess I see that as.
[00:44:26] Speaker B: Being the sort of, like, I don't.
[00:44:28] Speaker E: Know, there's a debate there, I guess.
[00:44:30] Speaker B: Sure, sure, sure, sure. And I could be wrong. I don't want, you know, I'm not gonna. Who am I when. This is what Jiryu says, right? Yeah, but, but being intimate, right? With that, but with this. Is this a paradox? Is it not? Is it one, is it the other? What is it, you know, where am I?
[00:44:46] Speaker A: Ambiguity. Ambiguity as a hallmark of what Senate is really about and what our practices go.
Is that okay?
[00:44:55] Speaker B: That's okay with me.
Yeah, yeah. As a professor, I would say sure, let's try that. Let's try that.
See where that goes.
[00:45:04] Speaker C: I think that's.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: Thank you for your talk. And I was curious about what you said about moving from Vipassana to. To Zen and sort of what was your experience or motivation, moving from one to another.
Sorry, wanted to switch to tea from water.
What was my experience? Well, I haven't done Vipassana for a long time, but I was pretty deep into it. I did a lot of these 10 day retreats and things years ago.
It's, you know, it's different. There are differences. Of course. Can I ask what. I mean, I could go any and in a number of directions with that. What specifically are you. I was, I was just curious about sort of the long term practicing of each and where it sort of brings you.
Yeah, I mean the reason I love that stuff, you know, and the people there I knew and the teachers were great.
I still have really profound gratefulness, gratitude and respect for them, for me. And this is part, you know, know I'm I'm a professor of every classical Chinese. I love it deeply.
There's the kind of Chinese poetic, East Asian poetic. It's different in Japan and Korea, but it's. This is similar.
The poetic tradition. Right. The poetics. And. And Zen, in my understanding, comes profoundly out of sort of Tang and Song dynasty Chinese poetics. Right. And I just love that stuff so deeply, and I need it, you know, and I want it. And I've always.
You know, it's just always been home in a way. Right. You know, I'm not. I'm not Chinese, of course. I wouldn't pretend to be, but I. I just love that stuff so much that it was always going to be there.
[00:46:47] Speaker C: Right.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: And the texts, you know, all of that stuff in terms of sitting and the practice, you know, it just. Just kind of happened, you know, and I. I moved. I got the job in Chicago, moved here, you know, started coming to. To Ancient Dragon, and there actually were no kind of. I was like, well, maybe vipassana, Zen. We'll see how it goes. It wasn't a vipassana place. There was this place. Right. It was in a different place, but it was. It was all of you, and it was great. So that's how it kind of happened. I feel like that's not very satisfying. Well, if it's what happened, then thank you.
Thanks.
[00:47:24] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:47:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
Brian, at your leisure.
[00:47:28] Speaker C: Thank you.
Thanks. You're calling on me.
Yeah. I. I wanted to go back to what Howard raised and then someone else also tying in about faith.
It seems to me there's something about study. Whether we're listening to you right now or reading a book or engaged in more formal study, there's something about it that, at least for me, can become trying to try to get it, you know, trying to reify it. Tigan said one time, you want. You want to write it down on a piece of paper and stick it on the wall so you never forget it. And then the idea is that you'll. You really have it then, and you'll really be living it somehow. And zaza. And we were talking about the relationship between practice, practicing zaza, and studying. And it seems like zazen is an opportunity to really let go of that and trust to where faith comes in. That somehow what we expose ourselves to will have its own effect. The Dharma seems to have a life of its own. And it's not about trying to get it and incorporate it. It's something about exposing ourselves to it and then trusting that it will move through us in our life. And I don't know that's a distinction. I wonder if you. And maybe there's a quality of emptiness in study that is all ephemeral and kind of loose ends, and we're playing with it as an empty, with its emptiness, and yet it has a life. And something happens, especially through Zazen, where we let go of understanding. I wonder if you could address that a bit or if that makes any sense.
[00:49:08] Speaker B: It makes really deep sense. Thank you. I mean, one, I tried to stop myself from making too many sort of, you know, trying to say, well, what I'm going to do here is not really that important. I'm just a scholar, that kind of stuff. But. And going back to the scholar question, you know, scholar versus practitioner, I think in part, yeah. I mean, it's, I love this stuff. And this is my, you know, what I gave as a talk is my understanding, right?
And if I think it helps, I hope it helps.
But, you know, ultimately, you know, if it really helped and I wouldn't sit, you know, I wouldn't do practice, right? I, you know, I've read all the books, right. You know, I have a PhD in the books.
You know, I, you know, I'm a tenured professor at a fancy school of the books, right? I, you know, I know all that stuff. I could write a book on this stuff. I could write a Dharma book, right? No, I won't, I don't think. But, you know, but, but that, you know, and the old, how's the old thing go? That and like, you know, five bucks or even like seven bucks will get you a fancy coffee and thing, right? I mean, it's about sitting, right? And it's, and the, and practice, right? And hearing the teachings, hearing Dharma talks and sitting and, you know, when, when I, when I wash the dishes, I just wash, just wash the dishes, right. You know, as, as a kind of washing dishes, then, right? I mean, that, that is what has helped, right? That is what I feel like works its change, if any change has been worked, you know, and that's something like faith, right? That's something like practice. That is.
And it's not.
And, but, but so what's the relationship with, with the doctrine, right?
This is my question, right? You know, helps it, it guides, you know, it helps when, you know, I'm wondering, well, what. And then I can think back on these things, right?
But yeah, I would, I would just from what I hear you saying in part for me, it's, you know, if study was enough, if being a professor of, you know, of whatever, of this or that, you know, was enough. And it's great.
You know, I love it and I, you know, I do teaching is helpful and I think students, you know, you can see how students lives are changed, can be, but, and I'm sure that's true for me, but you know, ultimately it's, it's just being, you know, being in sangha. Right. It's the three jewels.
[00:51:43] Speaker C: Right.
[00:51:43] Speaker B: It's, it's sitting with others and listening to the, it's working with, with a teacher, you know, it's, it's just messing up, you know, all the time, again and again.
Right.
That is, that seems to be doing something good.
I don't know if that helps.
That's what I got there.
Please.
Oh, sorry.
Hi. Yes. As a fellow scholar, PhD and practitioner, you know, I, I, I recognize this division and it was part of me too.
But in Suki Roshi lineage, the point of study is to encourage practice.
So we study to encourage practice. I, I guess for scholars who don't practice well, I feel like there too, in some ways it encourages their practice, whatever that may be, formally or informally. So just to say that, and thank you. Yeah.
About the faith thing, just confidence and trust. Yeah. Is essential in Zen practice, but there's also the koan about the stage of faith and the stage of person not to get to too far into the weeds and anyway, thank you, Paul. A really good talk. Thank you. Thank you. And I look forward to those weeds when the time comes.
[00:53:15] Speaker A: Still with us?
[00:53:16] Speaker B: No, thank you.
[00:53:17] Speaker A: I guess they dropped off. Yeah. I was going to just mention say hi to them to see they had a whole Z people and I didn't know somebody wanted to say something, but this might be a good time to wrap things up.
I think maybe we'll take all of our cups out ourselves and put them in the kitchen. They'll be brief cleanup afterwards for anyone who wants to stay.
Am I audible?
Maybe I'll unhook you again.
Hook you again.
It's all good. Still.
[00:53:50] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:53:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
So these teachings are so beautiful and so powerful, these academic teachings, but they're not just academic, you know, they're teachings that have been honed and offered and sat with by people for centuries.
And yet, the minute you grab onto anything, what happens?
The minute you push anything away, what happens? I mean, you're confused. What happens? You know? And I think, Paul, you really made such a wonderful, like, comment of just how do we find our place in this world? How do we live with our limitations?
The fact that things are ambiguous and we can't ever know for sure on a certain level.
And I think this kind of inquiry can encourage us. And also, it's not necessary.
The test is, you know, do you feel the ground beneath your feet?
Do you feel the closeness or distance that you are inhabiting with others?
You know, these are, how do we live?
And these teachings hopefully support us in that. And, you know, we didn't mention the.
The C word or the L word, compassion or love.
But this is the heart of practice.
And this all comes from that wellspring, that source.
And so I, you know, I'm so grateful to Paul for being able to bring these tests. You know, sometimes Paul says something like, it doesn't say that, you know, in the Chinese. And I'll be like, okay, what does it say? You know, but this is good. You know, just from a personal perspective, I found a parallel. You know, I'm a clinical psychologist by training, but I also, my degree also entails specialty in research and social psychology. And the head of my department would see me at the health club and go, it's such a shame you didn't go into academia, because I'm a clinical psychologist means I work with people, not just with books. And although I had, you know, university appointment for decades, but, you know, there's this. This kind of tendency to split. And sometimes it is split or it appears to be split, and sometimes it's not. And, you know, this is, this is a wonderful opportunity, you know, to have Tigan, to have Paul, you know, to have people who are, you know, seeped in these great teachings and actually kind of can grok them from, you know, Tang Dynasty, Song dynasty perspective and then also offer them in a perspective that speaks to us today into our lives. So I just want to thank you very much, Paul, and you're not completely off the hook. We're going to have to pull you back for some more of this discussion. But I think about, is it this intellectual, like, oh, because I have this great prajna that, you know, we're all really so deeply connected to each other, there's no thing to hold on to. But I also think, I think compassion is first so.
And motivates all of this, because I think we all want to know how to live in this world in a way that takes care of it and takes care of ourselves.
So I just want to thank you very much again and thank all of you.
And I think what we're going to do is at the end of the talk, the speaker goes up and does three more vows and we'll chant the four bodhisattva vowels. And during that time, the speaker goes up and does three bows, prostrations at the altar, no incense, and comes back around.
And then we'll have announcements from our eno Then we'll get up, arrange our seats, and bring our cups back to the kitchen in some kind of harmonious way. So how does that sound? People up for that?
Thank you all very much. Bo.
That's perfect. Yeah. So may our intention equally extend to every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's way Beings are numbers.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: We love to free them all we vow to cut through be of trivializes being thou be vows freedom Delusions are inexhaustible Be allowed to cut through them Dharma against are marvelous Be vows to enter them God's way isn't possible Be out realize it being freedom the new trends are inexhaustible we about to cut to them Our law gates are boundless we are going to them with us ways unsurpassable we about to blue lights.
