Good morning. So we are, uh, this weekend, uh, finishing or, um, formally ending this, uh, practice period we've been doing, uh, focused on the sutra of, um, sanskrit, mountains and waters or, uh, landscape, the landscape sutra, the landscape of mountains and rivers, but also the landscape of air, of prairies and lakes, of skyscrapers and avenues. Um, in, uh, transcribing the, this sutra from the landscape, Dogen, uh, refers to the teacher

[01:09]

Furong Daokai from our, uh, lineage in China who said, the blue mountains are constantly walking. A stone woman gives birth to a child at night. So I want to talk, uh, today, this morning, about giving birth at night, but, uh, first I'll review a little bit, uh, about the mountains constantly walking. We talked about yesterday and, uh, some people are here who weren't here yesterday and, uh, just to review for all of us, uh, this, uh, mountains constantly walking. So again, um, on some, in some sense, it's just, the mountains are constantly walking. It's just the reality of the world, that everything is shifting, uh, in geological time, but also

[02:12]

right now as spring arises and, uh, the snow has melted from many mountains, uh, and, uh, this, one of the Chinese characters for walking also means to practice the gyo and shugyo or to, or conduct or to, uh, or I would interpret it as how landscape conducts itself, to perform. So I was talking yesterday about Zazen as performing Buddha. As we sit upright, we are, uh, each of us in our own way performing the Buddha on our cushion or chair. So this isn't a practice about figuring something out or reaching some particular state of being or mind or, but, uh, as Dogen emphasizes expression, how do we express Buddha in our body mind

[03:19]

right now and over time as we continuously, constantly continue to walk and practice and perform? How do we see or see how, realize how we are expressions of the landscape of our lives? The mountains and waters, you're not somewhere out there, out West in the Rockies or back East in West Virginia or New Hampshire or wherever, the mountains and waters are performing themselves on your cushion or chair and the landscape of our karma and of our dharma position. We each are in a dharma position that's constantly walking, constantly shifting. We each have our position in the zendo, our place in the various sanghas of our life.

[04:21]

We each are expressing many things and all of this multitude is the many Buddhas and ancestors. They are right here as we do that. And this walking is particularly kind of poignant event. So I was reading yesterday from Wanderlust, A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit. I want to just repeat a few of the things that I mentioned from a wonderful book about walking. She talks about at one point about doing nothing and her own experience of walking. And I kept coming back to this route that she was walking for, she says it was about six miles, for rest for my work and for my work too because thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing

[05:28]

in a production oriented culture. And doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something. And the subject closest to doing nothing is walking. So she talks about walking as being an intentional act that connects the rhythms of the body, breathing and the heartbeat and so forth. And of course walking as we do it, walking meditation, well the formal walking meditation that we do very slowly, but even walking meditation that you might do when you are aware of the soles of your feet kissing the ground as you take another step and you're breathing, even when you're walking at a regular pace or even briskly out in the world, the landscape of Chicago or wherever. It's a kind of doing nothing and this is also like parasitting. So Zazen is about doing nothing. Usually we are busy doing things as she talks about.

[06:30]

We're busy manipulating the world to get what we want or we're busy producing things or destroying things as the case may be. But parasitting is not about arranging or accomplishing anything. We're just sitting. It's not about reaching some destination. So there are various kinds of walking which she talks about, walking to get some place and that's a kind of fine walking. But there's also strolling and just meandering and just going out for a walk like we come here for a sit or you can even in your own home sit down and do nothing. And this is an unusual activity, very radical activity in our consumerist society. We're always supposed to be manipulating and producing. So these blue mountains constantly walking, well, are they accomplishing anything?

[07:31]

Well, sometimes they are. Or sometimes as the tectonic plates come together, they are accomplishing the Himalayas or whatever. Or sometimes as they're worn down, they're accomplishing the Smoky Mountains or the Appalachians or whatever. Anyway, our walking is an activity that is about just appreciating the next breath. Just like our sitting. So just a couple of other quotes I referred to yesterday about how the blue mountains are constantly walking and how we are constantly walking as we sit. Even as we're sitting, there's movement. Even if you sit very upright, very still, don't move a tiny bit, there's blood flowing, there's thoughts flowing, there's henzymes and kinds of stuff flowing around on your cushion. So she talks about walking.

[08:38]

You talked yesterday about babies learning to walk and how we learned to walk once. She wrote someone saying, that human walking is a unique activity during which the body, step by step, teeters on the edge of catastrophe. So we know this in our chin-hanging, this very slow walking meditation where we're drifting from one leg to the other, kind of teetering. We trust that the floor or the ground will be there for our foot to meet, but we can see how fragile it is walking. So slow walking or slow chanting, like we'll do tonight, is much more difficult than a normal pace. We learn to keep our balance. Babies learn to walk and to keep going, not from just taking one step, but from finding a rhythm of taking a number of steps. And she says, children begin to walk to chase desires.

[09:43]

No one will fulfill for that, to get to the thing across the room. The desire for that which is out of reach of freedom, for independence, from the secure confines of eternal Eden, the wonderful womb we come from. And so walking begins as delayed following. The fall meets the fall. We fall out of the womb. So this walking is maybe delayed following. We take a step and move forward, and we might just fall over, but somehow we learn to put our foot down. And then again, and so anyway, this is like the mountains constantly walking. How do we perform our life activity, our practice? And the last quote from Rebecca Solner that I'll mention again, talking about, she talks about many, about walking and literature, but she mentions James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who developed a style called stream of consciousness from their novels

[10:48]

in which the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfold best during walks. It's a point for walkers, and I spoke to walks as that, or to allow the thoughts to illuminate or meander. This kind of unstructured associative thinking, which is also a description of arsaza, is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical, but an improvisational act. So Laurel was expressing appreciation for Imphal as a way of seeing our practice. We are improvising Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha here this morning, folks. We're making this up. Well, not exactly. We have a tradition. It's a wonderful tradition. We have models of practice from many beings, and yet we're improvising this. Tonight we'll improvise a shuso ceremony for the first time here.

[11:50]

So we're developing Buddha in Chicago in this time and place. So all of this is just the reroute of constantly walking, and the constancy is important. How do we continue? Just to continue. So how do we sustain our improvisation? Because this practice of walking, of sitting, of breathing, of allowing the mind to unravel a little bit, associative thinking, or sometimes concentrated thinking, focusing on each exhale. But all of this unfolds and deepens and flowers through our sustaining this, through this constant and continuous practice.

[12:53]

And through this ongoing sitting, walking, Buddha-ing, improvisation, something happens. A stone woman gives birth at night. So we will chant the end of the morning the harmony of difference and sameness, which talks about night, day, or light, dark, as a way of talking about the two truths in all Buddhist teaching. There's the conventional, provisional, particular reality or truth of our world, which we all know. And most of us are here because we saw how the conventional version of conventional truth of phenomenal reality

[14:06]

is a catastrophe that's already befalling us, that we are in some sense escaping from to come and take refuge in our upright, constant walking. Just sitting. So that's what we might call that conventional relative truth is the world of the day, daylight. We can see our mind is very good at making distinctions. We can notice the differences. This is the conventional reality. And it is a kind of truth, even though it may be a delusion. It is from the point of view of the ultimate truth, and the ultimate truth is what we see at night. Blackness. No difference.

[15:09]

Eyes horizontal, nose vertical. For the human species, anyway. And part of what we taste in this practice of constantly sitting or ongoing sitting or facing the wall is this world of night, this second truth, this ultimate truth, the universal truth. So the Zen founder in China, Bodhidharma, when he came to China and met the emperor, Emperor Wu, who was a Buddhist patron and also studied Buddhism the way he was available then, Bodhidharma, the emperor asked Bodhidharma,

[16:13]

what's it all about? What's the highest meaning, sacred reality, sacred truth? Bodhidharma just said, vast emptiness, nothing holy. Or Suzuki Roshi said, nothing special. So this is the night, the world of ultimate truth, the world of, well, anything you say about it, anything I say about it is wrong. We can't talk about it. As soon as we use words, we're caught in subjects and predicates and objects and we tear apart the world, separate the world and make distinctions. We need to do that in the conventional world. We need to know to stop when the light turns red or go when the light turns green. But where does this life come from?

[17:28]

Where does this practice come from? How are Buddhas born into the world? A stone woman gives birth at night. So all of us are here because somehow in our zazen or that which brought us to zazen, we taste it. You may not realize it. You may think, oh no, everybody else but me knows about this. But no, all of you have some sense, some taste of this light, this, sometimes it's a dark night, sometimes it's a discouraging night, but it's the world of vast emptiness, nothing holy, nothing sacred, or everything's sacred. Also we could call it the world of suchness. Those are just names.

[18:33]

And this is, as the Buddha says, at the beginning of the Mountains and Waters Sutra. The mountains and waters of the immediate presence of the manifestation of the ancient Buddha's way, together abiding in their dharma positions, they consummate the qualities of realized completeness. They are the self before the emergence of science, before we have names, before we make distinctions. They are the penetrating liberation of immediate actuality. So this is invoking this ultimate reality. But again, I would say we have some taste there. But then there's how do we re-enter? So, you know, we can come here for a day or two or three

[19:37]

and just sit. We can go for a long walk. We can go to places like Tassajara, Green Gulch, and immerse ourselves in practice for a couple months or a few months or whatever. And yet, Dogen says, the stone woman gives birth to a child in the night. This means that the time when a stone woman gives birth to a child is night. There are male stones, female stones, and stones neither male nor female. They repair heaven. They repair earth. How is it that all of these stones, all of these rocks in the mountains mend the earth? Some of them are in the mountains. Some of them are maybe in the prairies. Some of them are in the sky, Dogen says. He continues, though this was said in the secular world,

[20:38]

quoting Phuranga Upadhyaya, it is really understood. We should understand the reason behind this giving birth to a child. At the time of birth, are parent and child transformed together? We should not only study that birth is realized in the child becoming the parent. We should also study and fully understand the practice and verification of birth is realized when the parent becomes the child. So a parent with a child, well, has a new teacher, but also becomes a parent thanks to the child, but also can become a child thanks to the child. This is also about teachers and students. Something happens at night. Something happens in that immersion in, you know, sometimes people think that there's always good or bad, you know.

[21:42]

Oh, that was, I was very distracted, or I was very sleepy, or that's all foggy today, or, you know, I hear that a lot. Sometimes I hear, oh, the sun is wonderful, I'm so happy to be here. That happens too. And somehow can the middle, whether we think that we are concentrated or whether we think we are distracted, just sitting upright facing the wall or just walking while we breathe and allow our feet to receive the ground, something happens. So we don't stay in this world of immersion, this world of night. We can taste it, and it's important, and it, you know, sometimes it happens just in one period of zazen, sometimes, you know, in a day or two or three, but anyway, you get tastes of it,

[22:42]

you get glimmers of it. You may not even realize it. It doesn't matter what you think about it. And then we go back out into the world and express this ultimate reality in the particularities of the Dharma position and the karma of your life and your landscape. And each of us, everybody in this room, has their own way of sharing and expressing that and shining that dark light, that black light into the world. So, a poem I mentioned yesterday by Sudoku Sotobaba, this is Japanese pronunciation, that Dogen refers to in one of his Shobokanzu essays.

[23:46]

Sudoku had some realization, and he said, the sounds of the valley stream are the Buddha's long tongue, long, eloquent tongue. The shape of the mountains is the Buddha's body. And sometimes when you're in the mountains, you can feel that. You feel a little outline of the mountains, or if you're high enough up to look, to see the other mountains in the distance, gathering around the mountain you're occupying. Oh yeah, this is the Dharmakaya, this is the Dharma body in this world. Maybe we can see that in the prairies too. Can you look down and see a field of leaves or grasses or whatever is growing? And maybe we can even see it going for a walk in Chicago. Look down an avenue, we're walking along the lake shore.

[24:50]

So maybe the form of Lake Michigan is also the Buddha's body. Anyway, there's more to Sudoku's poem though. He says, the sounds of the valley stream are the Buddha's long, eloquent tongue. The forms of the mountain are the Buddha's body. At night, I heard all of the verses from the sutras proclaimed. How can I tell that to others? This is our practice. So at night, stone woman gives birth. At night, Buddha's come forth. We turn the light within, we take the backward step to turn the light inwardly to face ourselves. To study the way is to study yourself.

[25:53]

We sit facing the wall and we allow the wall to face us. And we focus. And something can be born. Another version of that, another version of that poem is from the great Soto Zen Monk Ryokan who lived a lot later in Sudoku. Into the early 1800s. He was sort of a strange guy. He had a little hermitage outside his home village and lived based on begging food and used to go and play with the children. But anyway, this is a poem about being old. Some of us are feeling that. Not all of us, fortunately. This is sort of the story here.

[26:56]

He says, Old and sick, I woke up and couldn't sleep. Late at night, the floor walls were somber and heavy. No light in the lamp, no charcoal for fire. Only a miserable chill piled up on the bed. Not knowing how to divert my mind in darkness, I walked with a cane to the garden's edge. All the stars spread out, blossoms of a bald tree. So it was night, I still have the stars on this bald tree. All the stars spread out, blossoms of a bald tree. The distant valley stream flows, a lute with no strings. That night with that feeling, I had some understanding. Sometime, some morning, for whom shall I sing? So when the still woman gives birth to a child, that child wants to sing and laugh and play.

[28:01]

How do we allow our... the child within us to come forth from the dark of night and sing for others, share for others the joy or wonder or sparingness of night? How does practice come alive? How do we give birth to the Buddha lurking on your cushion or chair right now? How do we help that Buddha express herself in the situations of our everyday activity? So often during sessions, I like to turn back to

[29:15]

my old friend, Hongshu Zhongzhui. Hongshu was a predecessor of Dogen back in China in the 1100s. Just a little section of something. Here. People of the way, that's us, journey through the world responding to conditions, carefree and without restraint. Like clouds finally raining, like moonlight following the current, like orchids growing in the shade, like spring arising and everything, they act without mind, they respond with certainty. This is how perfected people behave. Then they must resume their travels and follow the ancestors, walking ahead with steadiness

[30:15]

and letting go of themselves through innocence. So, this may seem like a high ideal, to journey through the world responding to conditions, carefree and without restraint. But this is what the way, the Tao, our practice teaches us, to just respond to the situation in front of us, without holding ourselves in, without worrying. How do we respond? So, Hongshu is speaking from this very deep immersion in the night, but also he comes forth in the day and sings to us. He says, like clouds finally raining, like moonlight following the current, like orchids growing in the shade. Very natural. Like spring arising and everything, they act without mind, they respond with certainty. So, act without mind means not being caught up in calculations.

[31:20]

That's one way to understand that. But just to respond. Responding theory. Like spring arising and everything. So, after this past ferocious winter we had here in Chicago, spring is arising and everything. Maybe spring is already passing into summer. Spring arising and everything. There's still some spring. There's still some spring arising. In this room. Spring arising and everything. So, we can see it, you know, the leaves, the flowers, but we can also feel it. Somewhere on our fushionic chair. He says this is how perfected people behave. I don't know, I have to go back and look at it. I translated this myself. I don't know if I translated it the same way.

[32:21]

But anyway, maybe that's what he says. That's one way of saying what he says. But, you know, it's not about being perfect. It's about people who've walked the walk. It's about people who've practiced. People who are willing to keep coming back and face themselves. Take the next step. Next breath. But then they must resume their travels. Resume their walkings. They must resume their meandering. And follow the ancestors. Follow the teachings. Walk ahead of the steadiness. And let it go of themselves with innocence. So, you know, the art of all of this is letting go. So, in the complexity of the daylight and all the distinctions and all the categories and all the deliberations. You know, so many things.

[33:23]

How do we just let go? So this is, we have three days here of letting go. Of just allowing Buddha to express herself on your Krishna Chakra. And thoughts come. And feelings come. And we give them names. And sometimes we give them names like frustration or ambivalence or confusion or sleepiness or mind too busy or whatever. You know, we give them these names. But how do we just let go and come back to taking the next step? Taking the next breath. So, that's a little bit about how it is that the stone only gives birth at night.

[34:32]

And I could keep babbling, but I guess a few of you will have time for discussion in the afternoon. And we'll have time for, you know, to ask. You know, there's a lot of questions and you can give us responses. But since a few people won't be here this afternoon, I thought I would just allow if anyone has a comment or a response at this point, you can take a couple. They're saving all the questions for you. Good luck with that.

[35:29]

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