Can you hear me? High above the arena. On a tightrope, on a unicycle, and on his shoulders is this long bar, of course. And on the bar, as I recall, there's all sorts of creatures. I think cats, actually. And the caption is something like, high above the arena, suddenly Roscoe remembered that he was an old dog. And this was a new trick. I resonate with that when I sit there. Recently, in the past couple, three weeks, I've been hosting, so to speak, I think of that word more than teaching, a class on Zen poetry or Zen question mark poetry.

[01:18]

And the question mark has, points out a problem that we have a somewhat elaborate epistemological problem that we have as Zen students in that this is a particular teaching, Zen teaching, that early in its tradition was pointed out as having one of its salient features being no reliance upon words or phrases. no reliance upon words or phrases. And ever since that, we have been filling up volumes of commentary on what Zen practice is. And the conundrum that comes forth in this no reliance on words is an interesting one, I think, because poetry

[02:25]

whether it's East or West, or whether it's ecstatic poetry as you find in Rumi, or whether it's very pared down poetic expression as you find in Asian models, particularly in China and Japan, or whether it's the more full galloping cadences of our own traditions such as Whitman and so on, poetry language itself particularly in our postmodern world, is seen not only as something that embellishes experience, something that clothes experience, words, language as an instrument for describing and explaining phenomena, but is in fact integral or interdependent or co-arising with perception and experience itself and cannot be separated.

[03:31]

And as such, it is particularly important to remember that because language is dependently co-arisen with our experiences, with our perceptions, That within a culture, there's a whole way of describing ourselves. And within cultures in the greater paradigm, there's ways of describing ourselves, such as Zen students or Buddhists. And that within that model, there's even down our own individual interpretations or feelings about what a word or a sentence means. And this was not lost, this particular... stress on putting on the integral or the inseparable nature of language and experience in all cultures. This is not lost on some of the poets that we have been reading, nor has it been lost on those poets to get caught by what is called concepts or concept designation, by being caught by our concepts

[04:49]

the words that we have to describe the force of our experience by reifying concepts and turning them into things that we grasp onto and become attached to. To the extent that we do that, we build a jail for ourselves. We imprison ourselves within our views. So there's always this tension between not saying anything And that not saying anything goes all the way back in Buddhist history to the legend of Shakyamuni Buddha when he's finally pressed to express the co-arising or the interdependence of things. It's said to have, as you remember, and I've seen depicted in art and so on, picked a flower, held it up, and one of the, only one of the students smiled. And to that student, Mahakasyapa, he passed on the lineage or the true eye of the Dharma, the treasury of the Dharma.

[05:51]

To you I give this transmission. It came out of that silent moment, that realization that where language stops and we can only finally be silent in the face of the enormous mystery and power of our life, that there's an opening. This does not mean, however, that there is beyond language necessarily some open space, some realization possible, some ground in which we can discover ourselves beyond the pale of language. But at least we point to the possibility of that intuitive realization. When we say that all things are empty and all things finally reach silence, that is still a linguistic way of depicting that particular mode of being.

[06:53]

I bring this up because what's interesting is that since the beginning, monks have been trying to describe something called enlightenment or realization. and not only describe it in linguistic forms, but as exemplars in their own life. So we're really fortunate in the Zen tradition to have huge collections, a huge literature over the millennia of individuals meeting with their teachers and leaving diagrams, dialogues, and poems. And I think in particular of those poems that have been included in collections of Buddhist, Zen Buddhist literature, which are, you know, the Blue Cliff Record, one of them is called, and the Gateless Gate is another one, the Transmission of Light.

[07:59]

All of which there is this encounter between student and master in which question and answer passes forth. That is a linguistic encounter, a rhetorical encounter in which the student has to demonstrate his or her freedom from being caught in conceptual modes, either because the student may be enlightened to the extent that all things are dependently co-arisen and there's a sense of shunyata or emptiness, the ungraspability of experience ultimately, and try to demonstrate that aspect. And the teacher in turn would have to then demonstrate to the student by grabbing him by the beard or the ear that if all things are empty, who's feeling this? Whack. And in this encounter, language itself became turned up on end.

[09:01]

In other words, the usual reference points that language had, has, or has, culturally speaking, in our acculturation, no longer had those same, was undermined. Language was undermined in some sense. That's one thing I wanted to bring up today, and then when we come back to reading a couple of these poems by A couple of men, monks who were aware of this heritage of emptiness, silence in the midst of phenomena and how to deal with that as a expression of their understanding of freedom from being restricted to cultural manifestations and modes of being. I bring it up because the questions that are set forth in these poems are, what do we do with the world the way it is right now?

[10:04]

It's really screwed up. What do we do? How do we get free? How do we make it better? All these questions are arising. So they'll address these questions. But before I say anything more on that, I want to say something about why monastic practice might have started or monk practice or individual motivation for liberation in the first place. And it seems evident to me, and it must be to you, that if one didn't have anything to defend, not a family, no children, a business, a rooted way of being in the social milieu or structure. If one didn't have to defend something, maybe one didn't even have to ultimately defend one's life. And if there was a culture that permitted that way of being in the world, in other words, the culture

[11:14]

the dominant paradigm, as they say, for example, in India, that could support those individuals who wanted to drop out from the established way, become wandering mendicants without home, without a regular means of sustaining themselves. If there was a form, a social form by which that could happen, then it would be possible to leave home, to become a home leaver, to become unbound to the usual traditional ways of being because there was a society at large who could take care of you on your begging rounds, who would take care of you because it was part of the culture in India that by recognizing the holy one, the one who was looking for the ultimate truth, the one who was following a path toward the light, that that person was doing it for all of us.

[12:21]

And that person who did that, who gave up the world, in a sense, was worthy of being supported in that endeavor. And by supporting that person in that endeavor, one gained merit. Big thing in the old tradition, to gain merit. And merit meant to gain spiritual power. And what did you need spiritual power for? Well, in the old societies you needed it because the worldview was that although you were only born once, you were born once millions of times. Over and over and over again until finally you could transcend this world of suffering. That was the idea in those days. that one could transcend. So there was a way to drop out of the world and leave the establishment until, of course, you formed up your own establishment, which eventually would become the dominant paradigm, and then someone would have to drop out from that. There's always, what I'm trying to suggest, that there's always a splitting away from whatever the dominant establishment is so that we can become unencumbered or untrapped

[13:32]

by the conceptual modus operandi under which all society has to operate, the so-called conventional world. Now, in China, because monks wandered about from monastery to monastery and because the written word, the realization that the word is enormously powerful, And the fact that words are enormously powerful was already part of our precepts. That is to say, the precept of having right speech. How we use language in the world is a delicate matter. So the monks, as they wandered about from monastery to monastery and from teacher to teacher, And because it was a highly literate society, at least with those classes of people that were literate, there was a model of how to express oneself. It was not unusual for monks to write poems expressing the feeling of the transiency, the impermanence of both their journey and the phenomena itself, including mental phenomena.

[14:43]

and not only in their enlightenment poems where language was turned up on end, but just poetry in general, so that there were certain dominant themes that got passed on to Japan, one of them being impermanence became a great model or object of poetic expression. And so, you know, we're all kind of familiar with haiku, those very short forms in which certain seasons of the year and their transients. In springtime, for example, the cherry blossoms that bloom for only a few days or a week or so and then are blown away by the wind became a symbol of that kind of change. The maple leaves turning in the fall and Everything in nature began to have a kind of symbolic, or we could say intensified or even poetic meaning. And there were those poets, there were those monks who not only...

[15:55]

were monks, but were poets on top of their study, who took these forms a little bit further and conflated them with Buddhist practice, with didactic practices. And in the midst of all of these wanderings, there was a kind of myth, there was a kind of, what should I say, not a myth, a kind of legendary figure that grew up, had already become part of the practice of a particular kind of monk, particular kind of holy man or woman in China and Japan that was different from India. Because in China and Japan, the monasteries had to support themselves. The monks didn't just wander around and beg. They had to be self-supporting, so growing your own crops. establishing a monastery, a place where you settle down to study as a group, and eventually having, you know, sharing power with the secular forces, the government forces.

[17:12]

powers that be, by offering prayers and propitiating the gods of harvest and war and so on, becoming an instrument of the power of government, the government would serve the establishment of the Buddhist monasteries by giving them lands, tax-free lands that, in China at least, the monasteries could rent out and have indentured people So there became a kind of counter response to the established ways the Buddhist churches, the Zen church, the Zen establishment, Buddhist establishments in both China and Japan began to spawn a kind of person who after having their formal training, came to the conclusion that living within the confines of the established monastic way was corrupt, was binding.

[18:23]

that one no longer lived on the edge like the early Indian monks had. One needed to leave and become like the holy wanderer, the holy fool. One who drifted about depending on the compassion and understanding and reception of the populace at large, the working populace that supported this whole affair. Now, one such famous monk, and I'm finally going to get to the poem. Thank you for being patient. But one such monk that is revered in Japan today and has had a huge following in this country and almost anybody who's ever come to Zen practice has encountered this particular monk, whose poems have been translated a number of times into English and many other languages. is a kind of exemplar of the holy fool, the holy wanderer, the one who's somewhat naive in his dealings with the world, the one who's free from the usual bindings, secular and religious, the one who seems not only to teach with words and write wonderfully, but whose very lifestyle itself is an example of the

[19:51]

well, in this case, of the Buddhist way of being free in the midst of experience. And that person's name is Ryokan. And Ryokan was a monk, was a man who was born into a wealthy family in northwestern Japan in about 1758, fairly recent. And his father was a prominent person. He had several brothers and sisters, and Ryokan was to inherit his father's post as being to have this particular clan that administers the affairs of the community in which they grew up in. But for some reason we don't understand, at some early age, Ryokan decided that the world was not his cup of tea and was sent to a monastery where for a number of years he studied in the Soto sect all of the things that we study today about Buddhism.

[20:56]

There's a lot of sitting meditation. There was a lot of studying of the text, particularly the Lotus Sutra, in which the universal Buddha and the one teaching of the one mind of all beings being promulgated at that time from the basis of his study. And he even became the shusso and head student, we know, and was given a poem by his teacher with a wisteria branch when he graduated, so to speak, when he received transmission from his teacher of understanding. The teacher gave him the name Taigu, Great Fool. And with that name, this man began to wander about northeastern Japan for the rest of his life, settling down in various places, huts. One of the romantic, we would call it romantic notions that went along with the wandering, mendicant monk was the idea of the grass hut.

[22:00]

a place rustically situated where one could escape from the trials and terrors of ordinary life and contemplate being and non-being, birth and death and liberation. And that was already a model in his time. He had been a thousand years old by that time, having come through China. So here we find this person who wanders about and is the delight of village children and of the farmers because here, instead of being an uptight, rather grumpy-looking old Zen priest belonging to an establishment with lots of thou shalt's and thou shalt not's, he never preached Zen to people. When the farmers offered him a drink of sake, he took it. When the children came up to play with him, he played ball all day long with them, hide and go seek. In fact, he was so naive, or they called him such a simpleton, that the children's games when they played with him was to go and hide, and Ryokan would stay.

[23:09]

They'd just abandon him, and he would sometimes stay for a day, half a day, still hiding his head, waiting to be called. These are probably part of the legend of him. Whether these were true exactly or not, we don't know. But what comes across to us is that this man was at once a kind of simple Simon and a deeply profound student of the way. Now, here's a poem that... And the thing about Ryokan that is complex is that although he seemed to be this wandering simpleton, this great fool... who went with the flow, as it were. He was always floating between, you could say, the pride in what he did, in some sense, exalting this kind of life, and the shame that he felt having left his station in the world, which eventually fell apart. His family fell apart. His father committed suicide. And we think of a liberated person as someone who no longer suffers depression, who no longer suffers the usual psychological ups and downs or roller coaster rides that most of us ordinary mortals seem to experience, however much we practice, and give great depth of meaning to this moodiness, up and down-ness.

[24:34]

So many people have said, well, I don't think Ryokan was a liberated person. because he suffered this kind of thing. And if he was liberated, he wouldn't have been suffering depression or dejection and so on. Here's a poem. Now, these are poems from his meditations. Troubled and confused is life in the three worlds. I'll come back to discuss that. Troubled and confused is life in the three worlds. It's not just the way things are today. Things have always been like this. Because you fail to realize the truth, you spend a lifetime chasing about. Reading the Buddhist scriptures, you become caught up in names and forms and never return. Practicing Zen, you become attached to nirvana and end by becoming mired there.

[25:38]

It reminds me of Master Dung Shan's apt words, quote, "'The moment you set foot outside the gate, grasses are sprouting everywhere.'" Now, who is he talking to? You, he says, you know. Sounds like he's talking to people who are interested in Zen or interested in liberation, kind of like the people who gather here together. But maybe he's talking to himself. We don't know. Troubled and confused is life in the three worlds, the world of form, the world of formlessness, mental formations, conceptualization, and the world of desire, with which those two are brought together. In the Buddhist model of the three worlds, it's that form and the formless and desire provide the impetus for the world of transmigration from lifetime to lifetime.

[26:45]

The world of desire, of desiring and grasping on some aspect of existence prolongation of our life or conversely grasping at the desire for extinction of those things that we don't like and want to change or even sometimes our own life when it becomes unbearable. Desire for pleasure, desire for any sense gratification that we will hold on to and so on becomes the, in Buddhist psychology, becomes the ground together with our conceptualizations around those things, our ground of suffering, our ground of attachment. So he says, troubled and confused is life in the three worlds, form, formlessness, and desire. But he says that's not just the way they are today. It's always been like that. That's his point of view, that this is the way the world is. Because you fail to realize the truth. He didn't say this truth.

[27:47]

He said, fail to realize the truth. you spend a lifetime chasing about. Now what is that truth he might be talking about? We know that in the Mahayana teaching what we call or point to as the ultimate truth is the truth of the non-arising or the non-graspability, the non-essentialism of any phenomena whatsoever. If we don't realize that even the language in which we base our understanding is dependently co-arisen and has no final, ultimate basis in anything that can be graspable. If we fail to realize that truth, then we're always chasing after something, whether it's on the gross plane or on the subtle plane of religious practices. And he immediately goes to the, not the subtle, or to the gross plane in the next line, but he talks about the more subtle plane. He says he spent a lifetime chasing about. Reading the Buddhist scriptures, you become caught up in names and forms, and you never return.

[28:52]

Never return to what? That's a good question. What is he talking about, and never return? There's this question in Buddhism about our original nature. That's a conventional designation or a sentence of words strung together pointing to something that is always there. Or is it? What is our original nature you cannot return to? This could be a whole dialectical discussion in and of itself and should be in this day and age because if we think that what Buddha experienced, somebody called Buddha experienced as enlightenment 2,500 years ago, is the same thing that was experienced by the various enlightened beings ever since, exactly the same. then what does that do to our idea of all things are dependently co-arisen?

[29:56]

That sounds like that exists over and apart from all the context in which our experience arises. I think, I think we have to return to the place that he's saying, we have to return to that place where we realize that we are contextual beings. We arise within the context of our society, of our belief systems. And then understanding that and not being attached to any aspect of that is where our freedom lies. And that alone, as I explain it, sets up a new context for understanding, that contexts are constantly being enlarged by new information systems. He was not caught up in the names and forms of those established ways of, this is what the truth is and this isn't. With Ryokan, ultimately, there was no duality between good and bad, right and wrong.

[30:58]

He says, practicing Zen, you become attached to nirvana. You become attached to the sense of being free. You've got this idea in your head that you're going to be free, that you are free. and you get mired there. You get stuck. Well, that's of course what the Mahayana teaching, the greater vehicle teaches, is that in the early teaching the individual who got free through various practices from the usual encroaching destiny of being caught up in the world of form, three worlds, got free of that, was not enough. Nirvana is not enough. Becoming individually happy is not enough. And he said, it reminds me of Master Dungsan's apt words, quote, the moment you set foot outside the gate, grasses are sprouting everywhere.

[32:04]

The moment you turn away from your zafu, cushion, as we all know, we've sat very much, put your fist foot down on the floor, regardless of the experience you just had, you're back in the world, the ordinary world of the interaction of sentient beings. And the moment you set your foot outside the gate, grasses, meaning phenomena in this case, are sprouting everywhere, those things that are going to grab you in the three worlds. And you're going to reify and make into something. And that something is going to be your prison. Watch out. That goes back to the saying earlier in the Chinese collection, Kuan collection, where it was said, go to where for 10,000 miles not an inch of grass is to be found and there you will be liberated. Go to where for 10,000 miles not an inch of grass is to be found. Now, where in the world is that? Where in the world can no words finally, no way of being finally

[33:13]

No understanding finally entrapped you. Troubled and confused is life in the three worlds is not just the way things are today. Now today, you know, it's one thing to talk about, you know, the passing of cherry blossoms and a very kind of gentle kind of thing. but to watching the world go up in flames and to watching on television nightly scores kept on who's one up on who else in terms of body counts and so forth. I mean, how can one just sit back and watch all of that go on in this kind of world of change, in this world of communication where the communication itself is becoming a mode of understanding, to begin to understand language through our communication in a new way, and brings the world into our front room, into our computers, into our life from moment to moment in a way unprecedented.

[34:15]

We can say the world has always been this way, but does he mean that we can't do anything about it? I don't think so. His way was the way of non-duality. He did not mean that we should not take some kind of social action. But his way was to wander about and play the part of the fool. This incidentally is very interesting. I don't want to forget this while it comes as a footnote. This model of the holy fool, the holy wanderer, of course, gets mixed up with our own romantic tradition ever since the Enlightenment. There's been this romantic tradition of one that goes back to nature and so on. It comes down to our time and day with... the likes of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, the Beat Generation, on the road, free from the established ways, get out there and open up your life and go with the flow, baby. Used to call it, what did they call it, what did Alan Watts call that?

[35:18]

Beat Zen. A kind of romantic idea of what these guys went through. But I don't think that they had this particular romantic tradition. What Ryokan suffered was not probably exactly the same thing that Jack Kerouac went through. So we have to be careful how we interpret these poems because we don't really know what he really meant and what that life was like at his time. He says, delusion and enlightenment, two sides of a coin. Delusion and enlightenment are two sides of a coin, universal in particular, just parts of a whole. All day I read the wordless scriptures. All day I read the wordless scriptures. All night I practice no practice meditation. On the riverbank, a brush warbler sings in the weeping willow. In the sleeping village, a dog bays at the moon.

[36:18]

Nothing troubles the free flow of my feelings. But how can this mind be passed on? Now, there's a lot of kind of terms in this. For example, how can I... Nothing troubles the free flow of my feelings except, how can this mind be passed on? A little bit troublesome right there. How do I pass on the ungraspable free flow of being so free that... I've been like the willows. And notice also, he starts out with delusion and enlightenment, two sides of the coin. If you're going to have a God, you're going to have a devil. If you're going to have enlightenment, this is built into our language. This is built into our concept structure. We're going to go chasing after one and the other. And of course, the first of those two pairs, good, enlightenment, up, male, at least in some of the old ways, you know, you name it, plus, minus. The first of those two in the dialectic is always the positive.

[37:22]

We just infer as being positive and the other negative. But Ryokan led a life in which delusion and enlightenment was one and the same. One in the same place. Two sides of the coin. Universal, in particular, just parts of one whole. Then he says, all day I read the wordless scriptures. Now, what are the wordless scriptures? All day we read each other. I can look around and try to read the expressions on your face, try to read the text of the room, as it were, thinking as this is concurrently going on, am I getting it across? That one looks bored. That one is sleepy. Listening to a brush warbler that simply expresses itself without any intellectual context particular to its warbling, or to a dog that bays at the moon, just bays because that's what a dog does, is bay at the moon, a full moon. Whether we're baying or whether we're warbling, whether we're crying out or whether we're singing,

[38:28]

Ultimately, what's the difference? Well, I was going to talk some more, but I have a couple other things I want to say about all this, because I don't really know what I'm driving at here. What am I driving at? I'm driving at the fact that we're in a new ballgame in our understanding of what language means, for one thing. We're all poets and we all need to use language in a very particular way and not get caught by the language as we use it. How do we use language and at the same time see the transparency of language? That's partly the task of all of us in this day and age, this day and age when huge concepts like democracy or totalitarian and so on limits the way we function in the world. How can we best serve the world? How can we best step out of the gate into the many thousand grasses?

[39:33]

Because that's where the bodhisattva goes. In this practice, we leave the gate. We go out into the world. We don't live in some pristine place. We go like real con. We wander all of us in the world and do what we can. But we're most effective when those concepts no longer bind us and we see through them, which itself is a context I'm presenting to you. We're always presenting ourselves into new contexts and always adapting according to those new ways of being. If we don't do that, the tradition of being free dies. And as we notice over the years, Buddhism and Zen Buddhism has died in different countries because it gets stuck in some idea about what Zen Buddhism is ultimately. Once we do that, this place will close down. Once we do that, the idea of Buddhist practice in this country and other places will also die. So we're constantly feeding new ideas into the hopper.

[40:35]

expanding our understanding. Now, here's a contemporary Korean poet who was a monk for many years, an abbot for many years, dropped out, became a political dissident, spent many years in prison, came here, in fact, and sat in the middle of this room one time. And he says, try sitting not for just one kalpa, Kalpa is the time it takes for a whole universe to rise and fall, I think, something like that. Not just for one kalpa, but for ten kalpas. No enlightenment will come. Simply play for a while with troubles, illusions, then stand up. I think Ryoka would have gone along with that. I think they had kind of the same mind. Simply play for a while with troubles, illusions, then stand up. But then he says... If you sit, Buddha dies, mother dies. You know, we have that saying in Buddhism, if you meet the Buddha, kill him.

[41:38]

Meaning if you're attached to Buddha's ideas, cut that off. It's a hang-up. If you're attached to your family in some way that it's really holding, cut those bonds. He says, if you sit, Buddha dies, mother dies. Don't sit, don't stand. All five oceans, six continents even, that cinnamon tree in the bright moonlight, here and there, are all a boiling cauldron with nowhere to put your foot down. What's to be done? Don't sit, don't stand, all five oceans, six continents, even that cinnamon tree in the bright moonlight. Here and there are all nothing but a boiling cauldron with nowhere to put your feet down. What's to be done? That is Zen. If you open your mouth and say something and reify it, 30 blows. If you don't say anything, dirty blow. You're in a cauldron, do something, say something, act now. So to learn spontaneity, to learn immediacy, to learn how to respond immediately to the force of our experiences without reifying those experiences, in other words, without a big ax to grind, to flow, go with the flow.

[42:58]

I think that's what this training is about. That's what these poets were about. Finally, I'll leave you with this one. Who was it that said, quote, names are the guests of reality? Who was it that said names are the guests of reality? Maybe we'd even say, who said that names are the hosts of reality? These words have come down to us from ancient times. But even if people know that names aren't real, they don't see that reality itself has no root. Names, reality, both are beside the point. Just naturally find joy in the ever-changing flow. Now, the interesting word is just naturally, because when that's translated naturally, we get this kind of romantic flavor again. It goes back to Rousseau and our own tradition. A lot of us go to Tassajara. A lot of us come to Gringos. A lot of us go out in the country to get away from it all, get back to nature where we can kind of cool it out.

[44:04]

It seems easier to kind of cool it out in the country, but pretty soon you have to get in your automobile, put gasoline in it. We know what that entails. Drive it on our road down roads. either to the monastery or from, and we know what those roads entail, there's no place, in other words, that we can look these days particularly, I think, where we can not feel that we're in the boiling cauldron. So what do we do? How do you find joy in life when you look at the TV at night? Or when you designate meaning in your life according to how it is presented in the morning paper? Or for that matter, do we just run to scripture, to poetry and so on as another way of consoling ourselves in the midst of it all? We probably do all of those things. But these poets were poets who met their life square on, who wandered and depended on the world and understood that we're all depending on one another and we're ready to give up, to let it all go at a moment's notice.

[45:17]

Ryokan died at the age of 73 or 74, and I think that, he died in 1831, and I think that the poet Ko Eun, a Korean poet, is alive and well today, traveling about. He reads his poems like that. He came and sat down in the middle of this room and said, right here is the edge of the universe. I don't know what he meant, but were you with him when he did that? Who? What did he say? There? Right in the edge of the room, right in this room. Well, whatever that's worth, that's the dog on the ... So maybe it dropped all the ... maybe, you know, he spilled it all over. Took a big plunge again. But that's what ... we make a big mess of the Dharma here. And then we have to clean it up again and make a new definition for a little while and get back on the tightrope, just as you go back on your tightrope.

[46:23]

Okay, thank you very much. I think that's it.

[46:28]

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