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 I had given a Dharma talk about a month ago on a person named Upagupta.
And Uppagupta is part of transmission stories, starting with Shakyamuni Buddha and moving down through time.
This story is from a book called the Transmission of the Light. In Japanese, it's called Dankaroku. Uppagupta is chapter five in this story, in this book, and in these stories, it's 53 enlightenment stories covering about 1500 plus years of the lineage of our Zen masters.
It is also a discussion of a person becoming a disciple, of a teacher, and their relationship.
And it's also the story of within their relationship, how the student experiences enlightenment.
So they're all different student and teacher stories and different enlightenment stories.
So, as I said, Upagupta is chapter five.
So so far we've talked about Buddha, Kashyapa, Ananda, and Shanavasa.
So Shanavasa is the person who is Upagupta's teacher.
And I'll give you a little bit of a background again on Upagupta. He comes from a peasant caste.
He came to Shanavasa trying to explore the Dharma when he was 15 years old.
He shaved his head and became a disciple at 17, and he experienced enlightenment at the age of 22.
The original talk that was given a month ago dealt on one aspect of the story, which is Shanavasa asking his student, when you come to join the monastery or come to join the practice. Because technically, at that time, there wasn't a monastery. But when you come to join the practice, are you leaving your home physically or mentally?
And through their discussion, they came to the conclusion that you were leaving home neither physically nor mentally.
Because in actuality, we are not our bodies and we are not our minds.
These are things that manifest in time.
They appear and then they disappear with no trace.
So in that dialogue between Shanavasa and Upagupta, Upagupta experienced complete, unsurpassed enlightenment.
So I could say just enlightenment. But now it's important to say that he experienced complete, unsurpassed enlightenment.
So now this brings us to the other side, or the next side, or another aspect of this story. Because there was so much in this chapter, I couldn't talk about all of it.
Upagupta's enlightenment was so complete that his ability to transmit the Dharma was very powerful.
And it's said that it was so powerful that he brought as many people to enlightenment as the original Shakyamuni Buddha did.
No one before or after has brought that many people to enlightenment.
That's how complete and unsurpassed Upagupta's enlightenment experience was.
So with that being said, when the devil caught wind of how good Upagupta was at bringing people to enlightenment, a lot of you are smiling because they're like, okay, here we go.
He was very angry about this ability of Uptagupta to liberate so many people.
So he planned to use all his devilish power to destroy the Dharma. And remember, dharma is another word for truth.
So the devil's like, I'm going to use all my power to destroy the truth of our existence.
Doesn't want anyone to know.
So he waited for UTA Gupta to enter a very deep meditative state.
And then when that was happening, he approached Upagupta and he put a garland of flowers around his neck, a garland necklace, as a gift.
Beautiful thing.
But nonetheless, UTA Gupta knew what was going on, so he wished to subdue the devil.
So he rose from his meditative state, his meditation, and he went and transformed three things.
A human corpse, a dead dog, and a dead snake into a flower garland.
Then, with the flower garland in hand, he came up to the devil, and he spoke very gently, and he said, you gave me such a fine necklace.
Now I have a flower garland for you in return.
I love this part. The devil happily extended his neck.
I just have this image of all right to receive it.
So when the necklace was put on his neck and he received it, it immediately turned back into three stinking corpses of rotting flesh infested with maggots.
I know.
Now, even the devil was very disgusted by this, and he was very greatly upset.
So the devil has many extraordinary powers. But even with all his extraordinary powers, he could not remove the necklace.
So he's in a bit of a bind.
Now, before I go on with the story, let's look at the imagery of the human corpse, the corpse of the dog, and the corpse of the snake.
And Jan is very sad about this.
The human corpse points to humanity, us, which is subject to old age, sickness, and death.
So no matter who you are, that's a common trait we all have. Doesn't matter your circumstances, doesn't matter where you were born. We all suffer these things.
The dead dog also relates to animals too, or other living things too, are just as subject to this. It's not just unique to humanity. It's unique to anything that has a life at any given time.
They're subject to old age, sickness, and death.
So those things point to impermanence, one of the pillars of our practice now, the snake corpse, because of the flexibility of the snake, and, you know, a snake could actually eat its tail, right, because it's that flexible without the spine.
It refers to the cycle of death and rebirth, or the cycle of samsara, that continuous death and rebirth and continuous suffering that Buddhist theology tells us we're at risk of being born into again and again and again.
It doesn't matter if you believe that. It could be a metaphor also for how we could fall into that even in our own lives, again and again and again.
So here we'll go back to the devil. Now he's got this necklace on him with these three stinking corpses that are metaphors for impermanence and the cycle of death and rebirth and suffering.
So he's really desperate. He doesn't know how to get them off. Everything he tries, it's not working.
So he actually broke down and he ascended to the heavenly realms because he's like, all right, Uppagupta is a good guy. I need to go to the gods.
So he goes to the heavenly realms, and he asks the gods there what he could do to remove it.
They told him they also did not have the power to remove the necklace for him.
Distraught, the devil asked them, well, what could he possibly do?
The gods told him the necklace could be removed if he became Uppagupta's disciple.
And they also sent him back down to earth with a little bit of a verse.
So Upta Gupta goes back down to Earth. The verse is ringing in his ears, and it's filling his heart, and he descends back down. He finds Upta Gupta. He prostrates himself at Utagupta's feet three times.
He repents, and he verbally takes refuge in Buddha. He takes refuge in Dharma, and he takes refuge in Sangha.
Now, he had to do this two more times. He couldn't just do it once.
So after he does it the third time, the necklace falls off his neck.
Now, I know you're wondering, what was the verse that he was sent back down to Earth with?
Here it is. Different translations, but essentially they're all telling us the same thing.
If you fall over because of the ground, reverse that by using the ground to get back up.
If you try to get up apart from the ground, in the end, there is no way that will work.
Okay, so I'll say it again, because Sometimes it's hard to wrap the mind around it after just one reading. And I will say it again. Again. Again. Okay.
If you fall over because of the ground, reverse that by using the ground to get back up.
If you try to get up apart from the ground, in the end, there is no way that will work.
Now, there's three components at work here within that verse.
Dogen Zenji, who is the Japanese founder of this Soto Zen lineage, who lived in the mid-1200s, brought this lineage from China to Japan, and then it came from Japan via Shunya Suzuki to us.
Dogenzenji has a whole fascicle on this verse.
It's sometimes translated as thusness.
It's sometimes translated as suchness.
In Japanese, it's called imo.
So now, here are some of Dogenzenji's words about what verse means.
When he says you, he's talking to all of us.
You are an accoutrement or an ornament that exists in the entire world of the ten directions.
How do you know it to be such?
You know it because your body and mind are not you.
They are something that appears in the entire world of the ten directions and then disappears.
So we know the ten directions are the cardinal directions. North, south, east, west, and then the angles in between, and then also up and down. So this covers everything.
Now, remember, in the beginning, Upa Gupta's complete, unsurpassed enlightenment was when he realized he was not body, he was not mind. Those things didn't leave home. It was actually empty of those things.
So Dun is telling us that because we are empty of those things, the suchness exists because our body and mind are not us.
So the suchness exists because our body and mind is not us.
Our body and mind is something that appears and will soon be gone, leaving no trace.
Such. So again, what is this suchness? So I'm using the word suchness instead of thusness. But they can be translated both ways. But I'm using suchness.
Our senior dharma teacher, Teigen, has translated this word as suchness quite often. And other people in our lineage also do.
So I'm using that word. But you might hear thusness in other places.
So what is this suchness that is there? Even though it is not our body, it is not our mind, it is not anything manifesting right now, concretely.
So Dlgin goes on to tell us that it is something that appears across time, something that always just is.
He tells us it's experienced in unsurpassed, complete enlightenment.
And though experienced in unsurpassed complete enlightenment.
Not only us, but our entire world is but a very, very, very small fragment of it.
So this world that we're in the 10 directions that we're inhabiting, that extends into our universe, is only an extremely, very small fragment of this suchness.
So now the second component of this verse, if you fall over because of the ground, reverse that by using the ground to get back up.
If you try to get up apart from the ground, in the end, there is no way that will work.
The second aspect of this is because of suchness, because it's always there, we arouse the aspiration for enlightenment. Because it's there, we have this aspiration to become enlightened.
Dogen explains.
We come forward to hear what we have never heard, and we come forward to realize what is not yet realized.
He tells us this is not at all our self doing it, is not our small ego doing this.
It is because we are each a person of suchness.
Because we are a person of suchness, the aspiration arises in us to experience unsurpassed complete enlightenment.
So how do you know Dagan says this to us, questions us. How do you know that we are a people of suchness? We know it because we want to attain suchness.
So we're here practicing. So how do we know we're these people? We're here because we know. Because we're here and we're practicing.
We have a practice where we're exploring this.
So for Dogen, that says it off.
But remember, everyone, of course, if you want to attain it, you have to stop wanting to attain it.
And why?
Because it's already there.
So the minute you start wanting it, you're interfering with what is already there.
With this in mind, okay, now we can look at the third component of this, and we can look at. We can look more closely at the verse itself.
If you fall over because of the ground, reverse that by using the ground to get back up.
If you try to get up apart from the ground, in the end, there is no way that will work.
So the third component is knowing Suchness is here.
We have to embrace all of it.
All of it. We can't pick and choose because it's suchness.
So we cannot wish to discard something of ourselves or change something of ourselves. In order to experience the suchness of Enlightenment, we must accept all of it through to experience it.
So for clarity, or for trying to understand what this means, I'm going to replace the word ground with suchness.
If you follow, because of the suchness reverse, that by using the suchness to get back up, if you try to get up apart from the suchness, in the end, there is no way that will work.
The devil was taught by this verse that he must be who he is completely, completely. When he goes to Upagupta and asked to be a disciple.
And that is the only way, if he could go and completely offer himself.
And mind you, he's the devil.
So he had to embrace the fact that him, his devilry was part of the suchness that was manifesting. And if he could embrace that, he could be relieved of the necklace that was around his neck.
He needed to exist in his devil's suchness completely. Only then was he freed of the suffering of old age, sickness and death, and the cycle of Samsara.
That's the story.
Thank you, everyone.
So I'll open it up for questions and comments.
Anything you have that might help us make more sense of this.
Paul?
[00:16:38] Speaker C: I guess my first, my response to that is, I mean, okay, the devil could do that.
[00:16:41] Speaker D: He's not so bad.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Me, yeah. Because he almost has like his own mojo, you know what I mean? And his charisma and his celebrity.
[00:16:54] Speaker C: Since we are on the Devil, I mean, that's a word that doesn't get said said a lot. A name that doesn't get said a lot in, in these parts. And so the world that, that, that's described there. Right. Sound. I don't know, sounds like traditional, I guess, maybe indic. Right. Because there are gods, maybe. Presumably this devil is like, like a Rakshasa and one of many.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:17:17] Speaker C: But like, what, what, what to think about it. What. I'm sure I'm not the only person who, you know, who, who was taken aback. But wait, that's. That belongs to another language. That belongs to another, you know, but you know, my language, my Chinese language partner grew up Buddhist in Taiwan and we were talking about, you know, attitudes to food and he said, he said to me, just as very matter of fact, my mother said to me, if you waste food, you go to hell. And I thought, wow, how, how amazing. I mean, and he, she said that in a Buddhist context. So how, how to think about that, how to think about this hell realm and devil and that.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Well, that's the. Like, even you notice I don't have the book with me today because I even just kind of stripped down a lot of the language because for a talk and we're listening, it could be too much, you know, to make sense of.
But the devil itself in this story, not in the Translation I was looking at, but other translation translations has an actual name. And if I remember correctly, it's like Papillon. And we know another devil is Mara, who tempted Buddha before his enlightenment.
So, you know, and it's more the theravedin aspect of Buddhism, where the heaven realms and the human realms and the hell realms are spoken about more in Zen.
It's there because it's part of our practice. But we tend not to look at that as closely, at least in the way we're practicing it here in America and by extension here in Chicago and in this lineage that we're part of.
But I think it's, you know, David, you bring up a good point. Because in a way it could feel. There's a closed mindedness to it, right? Like this is good, this is bad, this is God, this is devil. But the story is telling us even though that is so, because we have to experience the world kind of in this way in order to experience the suchness. We can have these words, but we have to have them join hands in suchness, so we can't dismiss one or the other and gravitate toward one or the other.
They almost. The way I'm hearing this and taking it in is they almost coexist on a lateral plane.
And our open mindedness lets them go up or down or become a God or become a devil or fall or elevate.
You know, anything could happen in that openness, but they have to exist as one in the suchness.
So I don't know if that helps, but I understand what you're saying, Irene.
Yes, of course.
Oh, okay. Oh, you got here. This one.
Oh, well, all right.
[00:20:09] Speaker C: We have this one just for this purpose.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: I think you guys were okay so far, right? Because David Ray is close to the computer. Okay, we're okay.
[00:20:17] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:20:18] Speaker F: That passage that IU translated as if you run aground on, you know, suchness, then kind of lean into that to, you know, use it to pick yourself up as a kind of relative beginner. That's really real for me because there are lots of things that kind of pull me back to my small self, like itching or pain that suddenly, like, I don't know, you'd think that I had actually injured myself during sazen.
And I've kind of found that the only thing to do in those moments is to kind of try to relax and be like, this is reality right now.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: This is.
[00:20:52] Speaker F: This is my world. I can hear the squirrels out there. But this is what it is. And if I do anything else, it just kind of gets bigger and more distracting.
And so if I allow that to be the reality, I can kind of pick myself up out of it. But you kind of can't want it, right? Like it's really easy to make it coercive or intellectual or to use it as a stick and then it sticks around. So it's a hard moment. But I feel like that little passage is a lot of what I'm working with right now. So thank you.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Thank you.
Oh, Yannis, I'm sorry.
[00:21:28] Speaker A: Maybe silly, but what caught off me, caught me off guard. Not off guard, but started to get me thinking when you started with the story is why is there the somebody obtaining the greatest enlightenment that nobody else has ever obtained since then or, or before then? And comparison of the enlightenment of being the greatest. Like why, like why is that being used in the stories themselves?
[00:21:55] Speaker B: Right?
[00:21:56] Speaker A: Because, like, we're not not trying to achieve it, but we are, but we don't want to have to want it.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Right?
[00:22:02] Speaker A: But, but then there's a story that's being told that there's a person out there who had the greatest enlightenment. And I'm like, so now I'm like, so there's levels of him, like, to which, you know, like, am I supposed to reach level one? Not supposed to, but like, like, am I level one now or am I level five now? Like what, why is there, why is that in Buddhist texts?
[00:22:25] Speaker B: So we all right now have complete, unsurpassed, perfect enlightenment.
So it wasn't so much that for him, it was what he was skillful enough.
You know, it's hard to get the language around it, but to do what he did with it, meaning that person was skillful enough. And I picture it like this, but of course I wasn't there that when he met someone, just looked at them and caught them in their, in his gaze and the person experienced enlightenment.
So I saw it as for whatever reason the variables of Upagupta came together for that kind of stuff to happen. Not that his enlightenment was somehow better than anybody else's and that the only other person who had that kind of skillfulness, okay, that skillfulness was the Buddha himself.
But that doesn't mean that you yourself might not have that or have that skillfulness already inside of you. That's the promise the Buddha gave us. It's there.
Is it going to manifest? We don't know.
[00:23:39] Speaker G: Well, I have a follow up to the comment about pain and that's anyway, so if you have pain and you're sitting on your cushion, it's not Going to bother anybody else. Right. But, like, what if you burp? I mean, I don't know what the hell's going on with the. And how sentient the beings are in my belly, but they seem to be acting up slightly.
So, you know, I'm sitting here, like, burping and, thank God, not farting.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: But what happens?
[00:24:11] Speaker G: But I'm asking as a practical question, but I think it also does connect to that. Maybe that idea about falling down and using the ground. But.
Excuse me, but what. Yeah, so what are you supposed to do? I mean, if you're sitting there meditating and you're burping and.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: Yeah, anyway.
Or something else.
So I need the mic. Oh, I do have a mic. You have a mic. See, I don't know. Okay.
[00:24:39] Speaker C: You have the power.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: I don't know if you guys heard that, but I did. I forgot I had a mic on me. So. So I'm reaching for the mic, and then I go, oh, I forgot I had it. And Mike in the room says, you've had it all the time.
They're laughing.
Well, my first thought was, you don't know if your pain isn't bothering someone else in the room, right? Because you might be fidgeting or something, or the burping or the farting or whatever, but you do have to be completely who you are.
And the second thing I thought of is speaking of Theravada practice, you know, even the Buddha, there's things taught by the Buddha about the wind as an element in your body and getting acquainted with the ability that we burp and we fart, and we do all these things as a way actually to understand that we are not our body.
It's my understanding, is that somewhat symbiotic, that if you could completely embrace those aspects of our body, we. Which some people find unappealing.
But to embrace those aspects, once you can embrace those aspects, then you can look at it more closely. And when you look at it more closely, you come to realize that it's a very transient thing, you know? But, you know, I'm going to stick with the lesson of this story, Eve, is to be who you are, which you generally are every time you make a comment. And we love you for it.
[00:26:12] Speaker H: Thank you, Paul, for your talk.
[00:26:13] Speaker B: Hi, Chris. So nice to see you.
[00:26:15] Speaker H: It's wonderful to be here. So this question related to David's, I think, which is the notion of heaven and hell or this realm, that they're somehow separate, is itself delusion and the separation of myself from the ground, or thus is Also delusion. Yes.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, anytime ground is mentioned in our practice, and this is me coming to this lineage, and many of you who are older might have experienced this as you're trying to find a group or sangha that might feel comfortable for you. A lot of it was too much in the clouds for me. And one of the first things, when I came here to Ancient Dragon and I mentioned it to Tigan, he said, yeah, but remember, the Buddha touched the ground when he became enlightened. So the ground is part of what we understand as our Soto Zen practice. And this just reinforces that. I like the idea of our feet being on the ground so that we don't get lost in the spaciousness of all of it, the ethereal parts of all of it.
But at the same time, no matter how stable the ground feels, we can't get attached to it, you know? So I don't know if this points to what you're expressing, Jake.
[00:27:41] Speaker H: I actually still have it, so.
[00:27:43] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:27:44] Speaker H: First of all, thank you for the talk. I like a lot of the themes that we're seeing here. The thing that struck me through the story is that this devil set out to accomplish something and ended up accomplishing the exact opposite, and that was that just always his suchness. Was that what was, I hesitate to say, destined to happen, but, like, by just being himself, was this the path that was going to be walked?
[00:28:17] Speaker B: Maybe. I mean, I.
For me, that goes back to, like, possibly karma.
And the Buddha warned us that try to understand karma, because he said he can't even understand it.
You know, the other side of that, though, is there's different variables manifesting all the time that create whoever we are in a given moment, you know, and that's what I mean. Like, it's so easy for the mind to go off in a million directions about this, but it's just like saying different timelines of the same individual.
Supposedly different timelines of Pala are happening right now based on different decisions I made at crossroads in my life.
And, you know, I don't get too wrapped up in that.
So I believe.
And I also believe that's another reason the Buddha warned us about soothsayers, fortune tellers, all this kind of stuff, because your path isn't written in stone and whether there is a karmic factor at play in this moment right now that could change like that, when the conditions themselves change like that.
So.
But I like the idea of trying to be completely who you are. And I think as the older I get, I think that's actually very difficult to do.
It's really scary to do that.
So I like that idea about this.
[00:29:46] Speaker E: Thank you, Jerry. Oh.
What struck me was this idea of when you think about. When I think about the devil going and accepting that he's the devil, which I imagine is what I would consider is not desirable traits or evil traits or traits that I would personally, if I had certain traits, I'd like to get rid of them. And so it brings up for me this question about if you say, okay, I'm going to take in all the traits that I have that are not healthy, not helpful, not beneficial, how does that play against trying to lessen them, trying to soften them, trying to change some traits so that I'm more helpful or kinder or.
And I have fewer traits that are annoying and harmful and not beneficial. The life in general. Yeah.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: Yeah. What came up for me right away is another of our great teachers in our lineage, Reb Anderson, will always say this because this comes up a lot for people.
The first person you practice compassion for is yourself.
And so with the things like you're saying that you want to work, let's say, quote, unquote, work on, so that you could be more helpful to other people in the practice of practicing compassion for yourself, for those things that you might find to be annoyances or not great or whatever your perspective on them is.
Allows us to practice compassion in real time and then apply it to the people we meet around us.
If we could be compassionate to ourselves and our foibles and faults, think how much more compassionate we could be to the people we meet with their foils, foibles, faults.
So if not sure how to bring it forward, you always bring it back to yourself and practice with that with yourself until you're ready to bring it forward.
Okay.
Thought we might have Dharma combat for a minute there, Terry.
[00:32:03] Speaker E: I guess I was thinking thank you. When the devil becomes a disciple of Upta Gupta.
So Upta Gupta now has an. Okay, I'm going to say it. Evil student.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: Part of the promise, though, was that, and this is I took out for brevity. But Upagupta asked the devil to promise not to interfere with the Dharma anymore if he was going to accept him as a student.
[00:32:30] Speaker E: Okay, so he's still who he is. He just has to curtail what he does.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: But he's got to work. He's got to practice compassion on himself if he feels that he really wants to interfere with the Dharma.
And I don't know if he's the person who's going to be in the next story because I didn't look ahead.
So whenever I look ahead to chapter six, we'll see. There's a little more to this one, but I think everyone could explore it on their own, and then I'll move on. But there's actually another aspect of this story that could be fleshed out.
So I'm looking at the time.
It's like two minutes after 11.
So we are in the middle of a half day sitting and welcome to the people who came to join us today. We're so happy to see you. But if there's anyone who has a final comment or feels there's something they want to add, we might move forward to the three Bodhisattva vows.
[00:33:23] Speaker D: I would just like to say something quickly.
Hi. And. And that is that, you know, for me, you know, these. I. I don't really take these stories literally. I. I see them as a mythology and that, you know, they are speaking to aspects of the psyche, aspects of my internal world.
You know, like the promise of the enlightened enlightenment being here inside, right here, right now, you know, is.
[00:33:54] Speaker C: Is.
[00:33:54] Speaker D: Is true, as the devil is also in here somewhere. Right here, right now, as are all the gods, are all the aspects of, you know, that. That humans can express. Right?
And so, like the devil becoming a student of. Of UTA Gupta, you know, speaks to integration, you know, speaks to acceptance of, you know, our desire, our anger, our greed, my greed, my desire, my anger.
So, yeah, for me, it's just important to, you know, it's fun to look at it literally, but also it's. For me, it's much more meaningful to look at it symbolically and what it represents about my internal world.
[00:34:39] Speaker B: Thank you.
Thank you, Nicholas. And thank you for reminding us to do that so that we don't get too caught up, because we want to let it go once we move on, we want to let the teaching go.
Now, I believe I'll go up to the altar and make the prostrations first, and then we'll do some announcements after we recite the three Bodhisattva vows.
[00:35:04] Speaker C: Okay, I'll stop the recording.
