Good morning everyone. Welcome. So some of us have been sitting here for three days and some of us have been, many of us have been doing a practice period for the last couple of months or so, focusing on some stories from the Lotus Sutra, one of the main scriptures in East Asian Buddhism. So just to review a little bit from the last couple of days, I talked about skillful means. How do we find our way to be helpful rather than harmful? And how do we find our way to balance within all the various different needs of all the various different kinds of situations that we see? And how the Bodhisattva of Compassion

[01:05]

has a thousand different hands and eyes to look at all the differences and respond appropriately from the single great purpose of trying to help relieve suffering and provide joy. And in our zazen, the starting point for this is just to find our balance of settling our focus, calming, breathing, many different techniques to find our settledness. And then also openness and spaciousness, how to find our flexibility and openness to, from which to respond helpfully. So this is an ongoing lifelong practice, how to find our balance in this. And then I talked yesterday and we'll talk more today about how our zazen and our

[02:09]

practice on and off the cushion is a matter of, well, we could say celebrating just the possibility of being present here, responding, seeing the depths and settling further and further into the depths of this amazing reality of this world and multiple worlds that are present right here. And the Lotus Sutra and the founder of this tradition, Dogen, emphasized just proclaiming this, expressing this, being present. Not about, this isn't about explaining something or figuring out something, but just how can we be present in this deep reality and share it with others and see this as a way of expressing the possibility of joyfulness.

[03:15]

But again, using this to help relieve suffering. So today I want to talk more about this, how we can uncover the depths of these realities, use these stories, how we can allow the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to be present in our bodies and minds, how we can share this. So one of the stories we've looked at is this very strange story about the fertility of the earth itself as a resource for awakening and caring and

[04:28]

helpfulness. In the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha, Shakyamuni, who lived 2,500 years ago, more or less, in what's now northeastern India, keeps asking the Bodhisattvas and disciples and various strange beings gathered around, who will come back in the future evil age and share this teaching, share this dharma? And eventually some of the Bodhisattvas who've come from some distant Buddha field, or maybe it's a distant Buddha field from another solar system or galaxy, or maybe it's a distant Buddha field from some dimension, some other dimension of reality that's actually in this room, but we don't know it anyway, they say, oh, okay, we'll be here. We'll come back in the distant future evil age. And the Buddha says, no, you know, you don't need to do that. And suddenly, from out of the open space under the earth,

[05:29]

spring forth thousands and millions and gajillions of great ancient, quiet, peaceful Bodhisattvas who are always there, available to help us. So this is, you know, one of these wild stories that, you know, if you want to take it literally, fine, but it's about something very deep. It's about the earth itself as a resource. And we know the earth itself is in deep trouble now, as well as, you know, all of us and each of us, some of us have deep troubles anyway. What does this have to say about the earth and space and time itself also as a resource for us? So this obviously is something that's not something we can figure out or manage or control.

[06:31]

And this is just like our zazen, you know, we can't control this reality. So, you know, one of the things I want to try and say today is that reality is beyond our control. You know, some things we can control. The Dowan, if she's really paying attention to the clock, can hit the bell on time, according to, you know, clock time. Maybe she can manage to control that. But, you know, Bodhisattvas coming from under the ground, and then the story that comes after that just to, you know, leap ahead. We've already, many of us have already heard the story, so there's no spoiler alert needed. The Buddha eventually reveals that actually he is the teacher of all these great ancient Bodhisattvas and is actually, you know, when his regular

[07:37]

disciples say, well, how could you have, you know, taught all of them? We know your story, and when you left the palace and so forth. And the Buddha says, well, actually, since I first started teaching, since I first started sharing the practice, since I first became a Bodhisattva, it's a long, long, long, long time. And there's this, you know, amazing astronomical description of how long a time it's been anyway. And he says, and then I'll be around as the Buddha for twice that long in the future. So we have this strange story about the vastness and depths of the earth and space and time. Okay, what does this have to do with supporting our practice? What are all these aliens coming from distant space or time have to do with, you know, the practical stuff of our life,

[08:38]

the everyday stuff of how to be helpful in this life? So I want to share some perspectives on that today. And reference some of what Dogen says about this. So Dogen says, you should know that it is not that the lifespan of the Bodhisattva has continued without end only until now, and not that the lifespan of the Buddha has prevailed only in the past, but that what is called the vast numbers of years he's been practicing is a total inclusive attainment. What is called still now where he's practicing is the total lifespan. Even when he says, in the past I practiced, that in the past I practiced is a solid piece of iron,

[09:41]

10,000 miles long. It hurls away hundreds of years vertically and horizontally. Therefore, this practice realization is neither existence nor beyond existence. Practice realization is not defiled. Even if there were hundreds and thousands and myriads of practice realizations, where there is no Buddha and no person, practice realization does not defile actual active Buddhas. So this inconceivable lifespan for Dogen, who was the founder of this tradition in the 13th century, this represents our ongoing present time of practice. It's not an abstract time frame, not some esoteric realm of Buddhas. There's some way to see this long time span as the reality of this active practice in our concrete present context.

[10:43]

How is this vast time dimension here in our zazen today, in our walking today, in our activity? Dogen also says, although everyday activities of actual active Buddhas always allow Buddhas to practice, active Buddhas allow everyday activities to practice. This is to abandon your body for dharma and to abandon dharma for your body. This is to give up holding back your life to hold on fully to your life. So these stories about the resources of the earth, right under your seat now, and the vastness of time right in the next breath, are just to encourage you to give up holding back your life. How do we let go from holding back our life? How do we allow ourselves

[11:55]

to hold on fully to your life, to give your life to your life, your life to your life, to give up trying to control your life and just give your life to your life. Give your life to Buddha. Give Buddha to your life. This practice is not about figuring out something or getting some explanation or understanding or having some special experience even. Those experiences happen, but that's not the point. How do you allow your life to express Buddha without trying to control it, without trying to have some description or explanation of it? Just Buddha. So what does it mean that Buddha has this long lifespan? Well, you know, one way to see it,

[12:57]

and there are many, many, many, many, many and so forth ways to see it, is that somehow since Shakyamuni Buddha, 2,500 years ago, in every generation, people have been sitting around like this, doing this practice of sitting upright and breathing and trying to talk about, how do we do this? What is it? And how do we share this? And how do we help people? How do we share this? And how do we help people? How do we take care of the world? And showing others how to do this. And don't forget to breathe. And in each generation, people have been doing this. And somehow, you know, here we are, a long way from India, a long way from China, a long way from Japan, a long way from California here in Chicago. So Dogen says about this, although this moment is distant from the sages,

[14:00]

you have encountered the transforming guidance of the spreading sky that can still be heard. So somehow, the spreading sky, we still have heard this through the spreading sky. So there's a place in the sutra that where it talks about the Tathagata's whole body. Tathagata is a way of talking about Buddha. It just means the one who comes and goes in suchness. It's a way to translate that right in reality. This is one description of a Buddha. Dogen says that the sutra is the whole body of the Tathagata,

[15:01]

the mark of reality of all things in the present time is the sutra, is this teaching, which, you know, we don't really even know what it is. It's not about something else. It's just here we are sitting. And in this essay about this, Dogen says, for countless eons, oh, he quotes from a chapter in the sutra, for countless eons, Shakyamuni has practiced difficult and painful practices, accumulated merits, and sought the way of the Bodhisattva. And thus, even though he is now a Buddha, he still practices diligently. So, you know, the Buddha woke up, became the Buddha, he sat under the Bodhi tree, the story goes, and he saw the morning star, and then everybody said, oh yeah, that's the Buddha. And he touched the earth, and the earth witnessed to it. Some version said the earth goddess appeared and said, oh yeah, hey, Buddha. And Dogen says about this, the long eons of difficult and painful practices

[16:06]

are the activity of the womb of Buddha. So the point is that after Shakyamuni became the Buddha, he kept practicing every day. He kept awakening every day. He didn't stop. That wasn't the end of the story. It was just the beginning of the story. And we're continuing it today. But Dogen says the long eons of difficult and painful practices are the activity of the womb of the Buddha. You know, this isn't easy. I think yesterday, the people sitting had a hard time. You feel a lot of effort. Maybe not everyone. Some of you, you know, maybe you just breezed through it, I don't know. But, you know, it takes a lot of effort to just, to do something as simple as just being here. And being here all day, you know, it's work in a way. So Dogen says the long eons of difficult and painful practice are the activity of the womb of the Buddha. When it is said that these practices have not ceased even for a second,

[17:09]

it means that even though he is perfectly enlightened, he still practices vigorously, and he continues forever. Even though he converts the whole universe, this activity is the whole body of the Tathagata. I want to talk about this activity of the womb of the Buddha. This is a phrase that's really kind of important in terms of thinking about what all this means. In Sanskrit, it's Tathagata Garbha. Tathagata is Buddha. Garbha is this really strange word in Sanskrit. There's nothing like it in English. It means womb. So it's saying here that this activity is the womb of Buddha. So out of this activity, out of this practice, Buddhas arise. But it's also that out of this, this word also means embryo. So it means both womb and embryo. I mean, that's a weird concept. It's something

[18:17]

that is both the womb and the embryo, and it applies to the earth. So just like out of the earth the Bodhisattvas come, and just like the Buddha touched the earth to confirm that he was the Buddha, part of what the story of the Bodhisattvas coming out of the earth is about is that basic early Buddhist teaching is that when a Buddha awakens, they constellate, they create a Buddha land, a Buddha field, sometimes we could say, Buddha kshetra in Sanskrit. This is the basic basis of pure land Buddhism, which is the most popular form of Buddhism in East Asia, actually, more than Zen. And we're in Shakyamuni Buddha's Buddha field, you know, one way to say it. But, so the Buddha is an embryo, a womb, I'm sorry, the Buddha is a womb for the embryo of the land.

[19:26]

So this space, by our practice, becomes a Buddha field. But also, the land, the field, is a womb for the embryo of Buddhas. So a Buddha field gives rise to embryonic Buddhas. So people coming into a space like this, and I don't know, is the space just, you know, this storefront temple, or is the space, you know, does it reach out to Lake Michigan? I don't know. If you go to a place like Green Gulch Farm or Tassajara, where there's a wider space, you know, you can feel the energy. I don't know how, you know, I don't know what the physics of this is, but anyway, there's this womb and embryo, and the field, the land, gives birth to embryonic Buddhas.

[20:32]

And so, the space itself is conducive to Buddhas arising. And part of what Zen priests are trained to do is to create a space that is conducive to Buddha practice, to Buddhas arising. So, you know, while you're sitting there, struggling with the pain in your knees or your back, or all the problems in your life, and just sitting and breathing, and anyway, this, this word Garbha is puzzling. Are you creating, are you the womb creating the field of Buddha energy in this room? Or is the room, the womb creating the embryo of Buddhaness in the body-mind on your cushion? Hard to say. Or maybe both at the same time, or I don't know.

[21:38]

I don't know how this works. Nobody knows how this works. Nobody can say how this works. Something's happening and we don't know what it is. And yet, here we are. So, the other aspect of this is this time span. This long, long, long, long time of the Buddha's life. And again, the Buddha says that in that chapter in the Lotus Sutra that he, which we've been chanting in our midday service that, that for some people, he was born and he left the palace. He supposedly, you know, was, had this very, very, very fancy upbringing and affluent life, and didn't even know that

[22:44]

there was such a thing as death and sickness. And, you know, and he had to leave the palace, this protected upbringing, to even imagine that there was such a thing as suffering. And then he found that out, and then he went and wandered around and did all these strenuous practices. And finally, he just sat down and said, I'm going to sit until I figure this, until I see how this suffering comes about and resolve it. And he did. He saw the morning star, he awoken, he became the Buddha. And then he taught for 40 years, and then he taught the Lotus Sutra, and he was going to pass away. And then he told them, well, actually, you know, it's been this really long time, and it's this really, really, really long time. And so, you know, we all have problems. So we can see things in terms of this long dimension, you know,

[23:48]

2,500 years, that's a long time. Or just going back to, you know, Bodhidharma in China in the 5600s, or Dogen in the 1200s in Japan, or Suzuki Roshi back in the 60s, long time ago, in California. Part of our practice and our teaching is to see this range of time. This is kind of helpful when we look at the problems in our life. So some of the people sitting here this weekend have particular personal problems, facing particular life decisions. They have to choose between one path and another. So Dr. King talked about the fierce urgency of now. So there's also that.

[24:49]

It might be helpful to see things in a wide time frame, but there's also these, you know, immediate decisions, life decisions that people have to make sometimes. And sometimes we need to make choices. I was telling Haksho from Sweden about Yogi Berra. Is there anybody else here who doesn't know who Yogi Berra was? And Haksho never heard of him. So I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of what Yogi Berra is. He's a great yogi. [...] Does anybody else here know who Yogi Berra is? And Haksho never heard of him, because he's from Sweden, and they don't have baseball in Sweden. But anyway, Yogi Berra said, if you come to a fork in the road, take it. And you know, if you have to choose between A and B, you know, sometimes we feel like we have to make the right choice. Oh my gosh, what if I choose wrong, you know, and usually there's

[25:56]

also choices, C, D, E, F, Q, Z, Y, anyway. Sometimes you could choose, whichever one you choose might be right. Whichever one you choose, there'll be good things, there'll be bad things. It's okay. Flip a coin, or flip a coin and you get one answer and you say, no, I don't want to do that. Anyway, you come to a fork in the road, take it. And there's so many Catholics or ex-Catholics here. Sometimes people think, people come to me wondering, asking me to tell them what to do, or they think that there's somebody up in a, sitting up there in a cloud with a white robe who knows the right answer. Anyway. There's the fierce urgency of now. I think it helps that we have this sense of a wide

[27:02]

time span, a very wide time span. And that all those times in some ways are right now. And of course, for all of us, for humanity, for America, there's the fierce urgency of now. We have choices to make this year. It's a very difficult year. It's a very difficult time. It's a wild time. And I'm thinking of Muhammad Ali. We'll do a memorial service, a midday service. And I'm going to do a Dharma talk next Sunday just about Muhammad Ali. Well, not just about him, but many things related to him. So, you know, there are lots of decisions to make. There are lots of encouragements towards

[28:06]

fear and hatred on many sides. I do think that having some sense of the depths and range of time right now is helpful at the same time as we see the fierce urgency of now. And I like to give pep talks that, you know, despair and hopelessness is not helpful. It's not realistic even. We don't know the outcomes. I like what Joanna Macy says about hope, that hope is not about having some, you know,

[29:11]

hope for some right solution. It's just that to act on our best hopes and along with the fear-mongering on many sides and all the, you know, terrible things that are happening in lots of ways. There's lots of, there are lots of positive things happening. There are lots of, you know, I don't know. Change happens. It's clearly happening. This is maybe as tumultuous a time in its own ways as, you know, when Muhammad Ali was really the first major public figure to come out against the Vietnam War. Great man. And we don't know how things will go, but, you know, I don't think that changes happen because of, you know, elected political leaders or, you know, economic leaders or whatever.

[30:13]

But there are lots of movements of people. And I think that's a good thing. [...] Movements of people that are making changes. And I've talked about this and, you know, some of you have heard me, but Black Lives Matter movement has made lots of changes in our discourse. Climate change movement, you know, there's so much to do and our political leaders are blocking it, but it's made changes. The gay rights movement has made huge changes. There's more to do. So there's the fierce urgency of now on many levels for many of us individually, for our world.

[31:22]

And yet we don't understand how deep and complex reality is. Sitting's us and gives us a sense of that. We can't even control our own minds. You know, you can do that. I mean, you can really focus. You can do yogic exercises to push away all the thoughts. That's not the point of our practice. Our practice is to learn to settle and to be present and open and responsive in the middle of the chaos of our own hearts and minds of all the things going on around us. It's not to create some perfect idyllic space, you know. So Yogi Berra also said, if the world were perfect, it wouldn't be. Here we are. And this practice, doing this practice regularly gives us tremendous power to just be here

[32:24]

and be present and pay attention. And we can respond. We have the ability to respond and try and be helpful. Skillful means isn't about knowing exactly what to do. It's using whatever tools we have at hand, extending a hand so we can be helpful and try not to do harm. So song goes about, we all do this together, each in our own way. And it makes a difference. And this Zazen practice and all the other things we do, walking meditation, the way we try and be mindful about eating our meals in the Zendo and so forth and serving meals and chanting and bowing, you know, it just, there are ways of expressing our respect

[33:28]

for this body-mind in our life, in our world together. So I want to close again with Togen's expression of the purpose of all this. He says, the family style of all Buddhas and ancestors is to first arouse the vow to save all living beings by removing suffering and providing joy. Only this family style is inexhaustibly bright and clear. So this is our custom, our tradition.

[34:33]

And amidst the fierce urgency of now and this ancient, ancient practice that we're renewing here, each in our own way and together, how do we relieve suffering and provide joy? And this is our challenge and puzzle and effort together. So thank you all.

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