What Sukeroshi always hoped there would be of a lay non-priest Roshi. His teacher, in fact, is a hospital administrator, Yamada Roshi. And for those among our students who are studying to be doctors, that's a good example. Also, Eiken Roshi is, I think, The teacher, maybe the teacher I, anyway, one of the teachers, maybe the teacher I enjoy sharing students with the most. Many students have started with him and come to live here in the mainland. They'll call it mainland. What do you call this, mainland? Come to mainland. I find they can continue practice here very well. And sometimes students have left here and lived in Hawaii. And then after a few years, come back.

[01:01]

And it seems to me their practice has continued uninterrupted and developed considerably in Hawaii with . And also, his group had the distinction, I think, of being developed the most consciousness of women role in practice. And they publish a magazine called some Hawaiian word. Kahawai. What? Kahawai. Kahawai. Yeah. It means little stream. And this little stream may become a big stream. The magazine is characteristic, anyway, for a very good magazine. And I think one of the most innovative things that's happened in Western Buddhism. So I feel very proud. I'm grateful for all of us that Akin Roshi is here staying for a little while and can give talk this morning. I'm delighted to be back at Zen Center again to renew friendships with Baker Roshi and Virginia and Dan

[02:22]

and many others. I'm always impressed when I come not only with the quality of practice here, but the quantity. In Marxism, you know, And it is often said quantitative addition brings qualitative change. And with the wise guidance of Vicar Oshii and his leaders, we see that qualitative change as a deepening and a spreading of true Dharma.

[03:28]

I thought I would take up with you this morning the subject of the self, which has rather preoccupied me in the last year or so, how to present the truth of the self. What is the self? In the Enmei Jikku Kanon-gyo, you read, With the Buddha we have direct affinity.

[04:35]

With the Buddha we have indirect affinity. Affinity with Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. eternity, comfort, self, and purity. Perhaps it would suit our purposes to take up that word, self, at the outset, at any rate, in the context of this sutra. But first, let's examine the context a little. We have direct affinity with the Buddha as the tree has direct affinity with its former seed. And we have indirect affinity as the tree with rain, soil, air,

[05:49]

and fertilizer. So we have that affinity with the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, fundamental treasures of our time. And with that affinity, Realizing that affinity, we find eternity, comfort, self and purity. Eternity is not endless time, but rather the great timeless void of which we are formed. It is the we may say, nirvana, not something to be attained, but, as Hakurei Genji said, this very place is the lotus land.

[07:07]

Right here now. And comfort, rakhu, is a word that may also be translated joy or ease. And purity is not the opposite of impurity. It is not a word reflecting moral condition in this context, but rather the expression of the internal realization of that great timeless void. So what is that self doing in there? That's the question. D.T. Suzuki translates that word, self, in this sutra, as autonomy.

[08:20]

And this is not incorrect, but it might be one-sided. With realization, I stand resolute and alone in the universe. But I am also with, one with the universe, autonomy is true as a translation of self here, but it doesn't reflect the aspect of interpenetration, which is also true We turn to Dogen Zenji to help us to understand this autonomous self that is also one with all things and all beings.

[09:47]

He wrote in Kenjo Koan, To study the Buddha Tao is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be confirmed by the myriad things. Quite a lot of information is packed into these three lines. First of all, it is commonly supposed by beginning students of religion, whether Christianity or Buddhism or whatever, that it is important to get rid of the self. I used to suppose that when I was a younger Zen student. I remember once I was in correspondence with a woman roshi in Japan.

[11:11]

Anyway, in the stream of Harada Roshi, and one of our friends was studying at her abbey at this time, And through correspondence with our friend, I got in correspondence with Roshi. And once I wrote, I am trying to get rid of my stubborn ego. And she wrote back saying, don't worry about getting rid of your ego. Nobody gets rid of the ego anyway. I sometimes say to my students, no. Shakyamuni Buddha had a big ego. He knew precisely who he was, where he came from, where he was going, and what he had to do. That is to say, he had a very clear self-image. And what is ego but self-image? That's really how we use our ego.

[12:18]

How clearly we see the self, that is important. Self itself is a given. There you are, lots of selves. Here too. There's a big difference between forgetting the self and getting rid of the self. Getting rid of the self is really a denial of the Buddha Tao, or the effort, rather, is a denial. But as Yamada Roshi, my teacher, Yamada Ko Onyoshi, has said, the Buddha Tao is a matter of forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something.

[13:21]

How do you forget the self? In a task, in an act. So the Dharma may be seen as a verb. This is a key to what Dogen Zenji meant when he said that zazen is itself realization. And it's also true, of course, in the act of fixing the roof or drying a cup or whatever. Now, what is the intention of the last line of the three lines that I quoted to you from Genjo Koan?

[14:35]

To forget the self is to be confirmed by the myriad things. This is just as important a line as the other two. Please examine the meaning of this line. To forget the self is to be confirmed by the myriad things. The original says 10,000 things, and if you look up the word myriad, in the dictionary, you'll find the first meaning is 10,000. We have exactly the same metaphor in English, meaning all things, but with emphasis not upon the all, but upon the things. So in your Zen practice,

[15:49]

It is fragrant incense that sits upon the cushion. The birdsong makes bows before the altar. And one, two, three in your breath counting. goes to bed at last at nine o'clock. When the old-timer, Rei On, Tang period teacher, was a middle-aged monk.

[16:53]

He was on pilgrimage. And in the distance, he saw peach flowers. Now, if he had done a pilgrimage to that orchard of peach flowers, with the fixed idea, I am coming to see the most famous peach flowers in all of China, he would have dominated those peach blossoms. And there would have been no real experience of them. So this reveals the second important point about the self, which Dogen Zenji takes up in the Genjo koan, that the self advances and confirms the 10,000 things is called delusion.

[18:21]

That the myriad things advance and confirm the self is enlightenment. Because Réun's mind was empty at that time, the subtle dominance of those blossoms could move him, truly move him. Once I took a visitor from Japan to see Waikiki Beach at his request. And we strolled along the sidewalk next to this narrow little crowded strip of sand.

[19:26]

And he said, Ah, Waikiki, the most famous beach in the world. He couldn't see that this was a crummy beach. So he was, you see, advancing and confirming that beach out of his own conceptual frame of mind. Recently, in the past couple of years, I've been doing sessions for Catholics in Tacoma. So I've been doing much more reading in Eckhart and Blake and other writers in Western tradition.

[20:41]

And I found on page one of the Blakely translation of Eckhart his little homily on obedience. Eckhart stresses obedience as the first and foremost motive of a student of religion. And when we translate that into our own frame of reference, we can see that Reiun was truly obedient to those peach blossoms. And the word confirm used by Dogen Zenji is very interesting.

[21:52]

that the myriad things advance and confirm the Self is enlightenment, because it is the same word that is used in the term inkashome. Sho is the word that means confirm. Inkashome is the formal confirmation by the teacher that his a senior disciple is ready to teach. And it's the expression of transmission, unbroken from the Buddha himself down to this disciple. We may say, those peach blossoms confirmed, pray on, He needed, of course, his own teacher's confirmation in order to move in the world formally as a Zen teacher.

[23:07]

But the act of transmission had already taken place. Once One of my Japanese teachers told me about his opinion of Western art critics. He said, when a Western art critic looks at a good painting, he will explicate form and line and perspective and color. And so on. But when a Japanese art critic looks at a good painting, he will say, meaning, oh, that's good, isn't it? I don't know whether this is a fair comparison of, say, American and Japanese art critics.

[24:18]

But it does present two different ways of appreciation. One is projection and the other is acceptance. It is this obedience by the empty self of the sound of a stone striking a stalk of bamboo on the part of Kyogen, of words spoken in his dream by Yamadryas. If I may speak personally, once in the old days

[25:20]

of the Kokon Zendo. Before we were at our present site near the university, back in 1961, Soen Roshi shouted, Ka! in the dojo. He didn't shout it like that either. And I found my own voice joining his. Ah! almost perfect obedience. I didn't get the k in there, or the ts at the end, but the middle part was perfect obedience. You know, we read in the Hoi An Sutra, and incidentally, Baker Roshi said, I have been studying Buddhism for a long time.

[26:42]

Actually, I resonate to what Soen Roshi once said to me, and that is, he said, if I were to be given an examination subject of traditional and conventional Buddhism, I would flunk. I'm that way, too. I've done almost all of my study of Buddhism in this position. Like this. But anyway, I've heard that in the Hawaiian subject... The net of Indra is taken up as a model of the universe. This is the multidimensional net. And at each knot, so to speak, of the net, there is a jewel.

[27:50]

And each jewel perfectly reflects and echoes each other jewel. And this is not a static model, but dynamic. In time and through time, an expression of the essential nature at each moment, the absolute nature at each moment of the dynamic process of the universe. And we find the Varyansutra expressed so concretely in Zen.

[28:55]

always echoing and re-echoed. In the Munkan, what case is it? Around 17 or so, we find the monk Tangyan Oshin perfectly reflecting Chūkokushi. Shukoku-shi called his attendant three times, and three times the attendant responded. That's the first sentence in the case. There's only two sentences in the case. But so much can be said about that. And I can remember Senzaki, Yogen-sensei's Keisho on this case, dramatizing it. Chūkokushi, of course, was very old. He didn't begin teaching until he was in his eighties.

[30:02]

Ōshin he called. And Ōshin came up from below to the teacher's quarters and said, yes. And Chūkokushi said, oh, I don't need you now. You may go back. And later he called, ,, and came again. Yes. Oh, thank you for coming, but I would like you to go back now. And then again, ,, came again. Yes. a national teacher, she said, I thought I was standing with my back to you, but I find you are standing with your back to me. There are many translations for this last line. That's Yahada Rashi's translation. That's the koan portion of the case.

[31:08]

But generally, you can understand that Chukokshi was praising and confirming this student. In what must have been a teisho on this case, R.H. Blythe tells a story of what must have been a teisho on this case. In his Zen and English literature, the Roshi saying, when someone calls you, oy, you should respond, hi. Boy means hello. And hi means yes. Hello. Yes. Hello. Yes. Hello.

[32:10]

Yes. When I first went to Ryutakuchi, the temple where I trained for a while back in 1950 and 51. There was no telephone there, and all communication with the outside world came by letter or by telegram or by messenger. Then in 1957, Ann and I visited there, and they had a gorgeous telephone in a booth right outside the office where the senior monks sat around, drinking tea and discussing weighty matters. When that telephone, it had a particularly penetrating ring, and when that telephone would go off, all the senior monks would shout with one voice, Halt!

[33:19]

The whole monastery would shout, hoi! Really, the whole universe. Hoi! Perfect echoing. Perfect reflection. And this is the nature of our dojo, isn't it? By the way, dojo is a very interesting word. Probably you know about it. It is used to mean place of zazen, place of practice. And in the martial arts, it's used even to mean gymnasium. But you notice that the kendo or judo players, well, gassho and ba when they enter.

[34:24]

So there is that residue of devotional feeling in connection with dojo. Dojo is a translation of the Sanskrit bodhimanda, which means place of the bodhi, place of enlightenment. And it's the name for the spot under the Bodhi tree where the Buddha had his great Kensho. And Bodhi is translated into Tao, the Tao of the Tao Te Ching. When Kumarajiva and his colleagues sought translation of Bodhi, they did two things. One, they transliterated. And we have the word boji or bodai in Japanese today, meaning bodhi. Bodai sakwa, you know, in Hanyashikyo.

[35:27]

And they also use the word dao. Dao meaning way and way to. Practice in its two senses. You have the doctor practicing medicine, that is, doing medicine. And we have the practice which makes perfect. Anyway, what is the nature of our dojo but empty selves echoing and reflecting each other in the fulfillment of the task to make this place a better place to do zazen. OK? Even better place. We love you so much.

[36:43]

We love you so much. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, [...] yes. Boy, I swear to God, I don't know what you're thinking, but I don't know what I'm going to say.

[37:50]

I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know what I'm going to say. I love the fact that I am living in a country quite good. I think I'm getting a lot of other people's attention. I love the fact that I'm living in a country where it is very accessible. I like getting involved in other people's things. Thank you very much.

[39:26]

Thank you.

[39:54]

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