Good evening. A few weeks ago, I started talking about the heritage of early Japanese Buddhism before the founder of our Soto Zen practice, Dogen, in Japan. And I want to continue tonight talking about this background of our practice, So yesterday we did our annual Sagaki ceremony for feeding the hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts being one of the six paths or six destinies in Buddhist cosmology. And I wanted to talk about these six destinies as a new paradigm for understanding reality medieval Japanese Buddhism, a little before Dogen.

[01:04]

So I'm talking from this book from a fine American Buddhist scholar, William O'Flor, who's now passed. But he talks about how this transmigration between these six destinies became a way of understanding reality in medieval Japanese Buddhism before Dogen, actually going back to the Nara period in the 700s. And Dogen lived 1200 to 1253. I talk about Dogen a lot. He's important in our practice. But these ideas, which, well, came from India and China, but really took on independent meaning in Japan, are still important in our practice. So I'll start with a poem by an early Japanese poet, Otomo Tabito, from the very early collection, Manyoshu.

[02:12]

Getting my pleasures this way in my present life may make me turn into an insect or a bird in the life to come. This poem is included in a section of 13 of his poems, celebrating the pleasures of drinking. Getting my pleasures this way in my present life may make me turn into an insect or a bird in the life to come. So this was an understanding of transmigration. So there's six in actually in Buddhist cosmology, there's six realms. in which we can pass from lifetime to lifetime. And this is understood in various ways. So these are the gods, heavenly beings. And this fits into the Japanese idea of kami, or Japanese spirits, that are venerated in Japanese Shinto.

[03:17]

Humans. Ashuras, or powerful fighting titans, sometimes they're called. Animals. Hungry ghosts, who we talked about yesterday, these insatiable beings who we tried to, well, we did appease yesterday. We called them forth in this room and fed them with dharanis or spells and many food offerings on the altar. And then hell creatures who are very miserable. Now these are not, these different realms are not eternal realms. So hell is not eternal like eternal damnation in the West. Heaven is not eternal. One can pass from one to the other. The point that William Wilfur emphasizes is that this way of thinking became a new way of understanding and making sense of reality in medieval Japanese Buddhism.

[04:21]

And he attributes this to a fellow named Kyokai, who was a monk, not an especially learned monk, but a monk who collected folk tales. So there's a very rich heritage of folk stories in Japan and in China, actually, and in many cultures. But he put these together in a text, the new Nihon-ryōi-ki in Japanese. But it's basically miraculous tales. And Will Flores says this is a watershed work in arguing, as it does for the Buddhist idea of karma and transmigration, it reflects a time when these ideas were still novel, unacceptable, or unintelligible to large portions of the populace in Japan.

[05:24]

So a little later on, even in the tale of Genji in the Heian period, this was accepted. But this was in the 700s or early 800s that Kiyokai was talking about this. And it was new for Japan. And it provided a way of thinking. So Kiyokai talks about himself in the introduction to this work. Here at the temple called Yakushiji in Nara, I, Kiyokai, am a monk. I see human society very clearly and notice able people who are doing evil things. Some have a greed and eagerness for profit that is mightier than the magnet that pulls iron out of the mountain. So Yakushiji is an interesting temple in Nara. I have visited it. It means the medicine temple.

[06:27]

I think it's from the Yogachara school, technically. Anyway, he says a little further, good or evil deeds make their own reward. or retribution, the way a shape in the sunlight makes its own shadow. Pain and pleasure are produced by such actions in the same way that a sound in the valley produces its own echo. Those who see and hear such things immediately think of them as marvels, but forget that they are real events in our own world. He also says, I cannot, having with my own eyes seen such things happen right here, I cannot be indolent and indifferent. I have spent a good deal of time sitting and thinking about this, but now it is time for me to break my silence." So he wrote this text, which is basically just a collection of these strange stories miraculous stories. Lafleur says they are just anomalous stories.

[07:30]

He contrasts Kyokai with one of his contemporaries, the great Kukai, or Kobo Daishi, the founder of Shingon. who was a brilliant scholar and is highly venerated in Japan as the founder of the Shingon School, the Japanese Vajrayana or esoteric or tantric school. Dave Dirksen, who's on our board, recently came back from a trip to Mount Koya, which is one of the centers of Shingon. Mountain high up, you have to take a cable car to get there. In the old days, it was a long hike. It's still a beautiful place. But he was also a very sophisticated, highly literary prose writer and verse writer. But his writing wasn't particularly read or important.

[08:31]

It didn't make that great an impact in Japan. It's now, we can read it now and it's wonderful. Buddhist and spiritual literature, but he was more celebrated as a founder. In fact, there's a mausoleum there up on Koyasan and on Koya where he is still said to be sitting. I mean, he died in 835, but his body is said to be sitting in meditation there still. But at any rate, what Lefleur is saying is that this fellow, Kyokai, made a much greater impact. established a new way of seeing the world, of seeing reality in Japan. And so that's what I want to talk about today and how that impacts even our practice now, even though it's not how we think about reality. But it impacts the background for our practice, including the chant we just did.

[09:31]

And so So just to read what LaFleur says about this, Kiyokai's paradigm has its problems, but this work he wrote became a fascinating document if we think of its author as a man excited by the prospect of offering his contemporaries on every stratum of society a new way of explaining the world and its experiences. Kiyokai's basic strategy as a writer was to begin with accounts of strange, bizarre, believe it or not, events. He tried to be precise in telling their geographical and temporal locations, and his accounts have an unusual amount of detail that enhances their verisimilitude. So these stories which, you know, are very strange.

[10:32]

He often gives a name, or he tells the exact place or the time when these stories happened. It is true that both there, that Both these miracles refer to highly unusual and atypical events. There is an important difference between them, however. In the religious and intellectual history of the West, miracles have usually been understood as suspensions of the laws of nature or the eruptions of divine will into the normal patterns of the cosmos. Traditional understanding has been that such interruptions revealed the existence of a concerned deity. So a miracle in the West is something that happens that's not part of our rational world. This is intervention of the deity. who as a creator of the cosmos has the capacity to suspend its laws at will. The complete cosmology of medieval Europe thus included not only the world and its laws, but also the creator, who having made the world now providentially sustained it through law and occasionally intervened in the world and its laws through miracle.

[11:47]

By contrast, the cosmos in Kyokai's view has neither a functional role for a creator deity nor any real suspension of basic law, that is, the law of karma and transmigration. This does not mean that suspensions of karma were not present within Buddhist thinking, but merely that they were not conceptually important for Kyokai. Kiyokai introduced was a way of thinking about these anomalous events as part of the laws of transmigration. So Lafleur proceeds to offer to in this new way of explaining, he tells examples from six stories that come from this text, from this text of what we would call miracle stories, or he would call anomalous stories. And I'm not going to read the text, but I'll just paraphrase and give descriptions of them.

[12:52]

One of them is a story about a melon merchant who would pack melons on a horse. to such an extent that the horse was overburdened and really weighed down with this huge burden far in excess of what the horse should carry. And he would beat the horse and force it to take the melons to market, after which he would kill the horse. And he did this over and over again. And the story goes that one time he was looking down into a kettle of boiling water and his eyes fell out. the merchant. So this showed the karmic retribution for what he did to the horses. And this was understood as a part of the law of karma. And the remark is made that, after all, these animals might have been

[13:52]

his parents or our parents in a past life. So this was a reasonable result of his actions. Part of the point of this way of seeing the world, of transmigrating through these different realms, is that there is individual responsibility. What happens is your responsibility. You can become an animal. You can move from animal to, for animals who are very good, they can become humans. You can move from being a human in a good situation to a bad situation, all because of your individual responsibility. So this was a way of understanding reality and society and the world around them that made sense in a certain way. that was a basis for seeing a reasonableness of the world for medieval Japan. So the story of that merchant is the story of karmic falling.

[14:57]

There's another story. These stories are very strange in lots of ways. But another story tells of a man who made a vow to build a pagoda in honor of the Buddha. the East Asian version of a reliquary where Buddha's relics are. But he failed to actually fulfill his vow and build a pagoda. When he was 70 and his wife was 62, somehow they gave birth to a girl who was healthy and fine, except that her left hand was in a fist and they couldn't open it. When she was seven years old, suddenly it opened, and they saw two particles which they recognized. It doesn't say how they recognized, but they recognized these as relics of the Buddha, as particles of the original Buddha. So they built a pagoda for it and enshrined these particles of the Buddha in the pagoda after which the girl immediately died. And which was OK, because she died having fulfilled this deed of the Buddha.

[16:05]

So this is considered a positive. The girl and the parents both fulfilled this vow. Anyway, there are a variety of these strange stories. of events that can be explained, strange events, anomalous events, that can be explained by these laws of transmigration. He also talks about particularly powerful beings, great beings. So one of the things that this way of seeing, this way of explaining this new paradigm does is that it integrates Buddhism with native Japanese, we say Shinto, but Japanese lore. Or actually, the other way around, it integrates Shinto ways of seeing things into Buddhist context.

[17:09]

He mentions, for example, Gyogi Bodhisattva, who was an historical monk from the Nara period who did great works, but also was said to have the heavenly eye and could see people's past lives and see people's karmic doings. And also another historical, semi-historical person, Enno Gyoja, who was pre-Buddhist but a great native ascetic sage who lived in the mountains and is a great Shinto or pre-Buddhist Japanese hero. So Lefleur talks about how this shows the shamanic side of this worldview. This is the Buddhist fusion with a primitive shamanism and divination, the creative impulse which was elicited in the Heian period, that's like from 800 to 1200, as well as in the subsequent history of Japanese religion.

[18:22]

By presenting Gyogi Bodhisattva as it does, this work reinterprets the unusual capacities of a shaman such as Gyoge as having all along been in the possession of the heavenly eye. The shamans and seers of archaic religion are thus revalorized as exceptional beings able to see the whole six realm system and the procession of individuals through it. Even archaic shamans are thus interpreted as having been seers not only of individual faiths and fortunes, but of an entire system understood to be basically Buddhist. So it's including this early Japanese way of seeing into a Buddhist philosophical paradigm that then became a way of seeing reality in a Buddhist way. in medieval Japanese Buddhism up until a more modern period, up until the Tokugawa period in 1600.

[19:24]

So the chant we did tonight, which is part of our regular Soto liturgy, is influenced by this. And the way that Dogen talks is influenced by this. All of classic Japanese Buddhism is part of this. This was very powerful for Japanese culture and Japanese Buddhism and Japanese aesthetics, too. So I'm going to talk more about that. But there was also a way in which this way of thinking in which people, beings, could move, could transmigrate between different states in these six realms based on their individual responsibility and actions. People also felt trapped by that. So what developed were ways of relief or escape from this kind of inexorable movement.

[20:30]

So Lefleur, he says this is slightly simplified, but he talks about four types of relief or escape from this round of transmigration. I think it's very interesting. First, he calls infiltration. So this is devotion. For example, devotion to Kanon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, or to Jizo, the Earth Storehouse Bodhisattva. And there were six Kanons for the six realms, and that was more in China. We don't have that really from our Japanese heritage. But there were also six Jizo, so this was in Japan, and this is very much in the United States. So, in our practice, so often in Japan, you'll see by the roadside six different Jizo figures. Jizo is depicted as a shaved head monk. And Jizo is important in American Zen practice. Jizo is also considered very much a bodhisattva who helps children and women.

[21:32]

And there are services now that are done in American Zen for children who've died and for fetuses after abortion. So Jizo is important in Japan and in American Zen. Lefleur makes the point, though, that in terms of escape from or relief from this round of transmigration, which was the paradigm in Japanese Buddhism, there's two kinds. There's the Buddha who liberates beings from the whole thing. So Buddha, you're liberated from inter-nirvana. You're liberated from samsara. And then there's the bodhisattvas, like Kannon and Jizo, who help people move up in this six realms, so within these six destinies. So that's interesting. So Jizo goes into the hell realms, for example, especially, and helps beings get relieved from there.

[22:34]

So that's the first kind. Second kind of the four reliefs is transcendence. So the prime example of this, and there are others, is the Western paradise, so the pure land. So in Japanese Buddhism, This almost becomes a seventh realm in Pure Land Buddhism in Japan. People chant Namamida Buddha, the Nambutsu chant. They chant to Amida to enter Amida's Western Pure Land. After they die, it becomes a better realm. And there's a traditional deathbed practice chanting Namo Amida Butsu on your deathbed, and even holding a string connected to a picture of Amida Buddha that will draw you up into the Western paradise. So that's the second one. The third and fourth are very interesting.

[23:35]

The third comes from the Tendai school. which is a basis for Zen and Nichiren Buddhism and Pure Land Buddhism in Japan, and Lefleur calls it co-penetration, and it has two parts. The first is, adds four more realms to the six realms we talked about, the six realms. And this is common in Buddhist sutras. So some of you may have heard of this. These four other realms are Sravakas, or students of the Buddha, Pratyekabuddhas, independent Buddhas who awaken on their own, then Bodhisattvas, and Buddhas. So there's 10 altogether, not just the hell realms, hungry ghost realms, animals, humans, asuras, titans, and heavenly realms. The second part of this goes back to a great Chinese Buddhist figure named Zhu Yi, who lived 538 to 597.

[24:43]

There will not be a test. But he is the founder of Tiantai in China, which is the basis for Tendai. And he said, and this is really interesting and really important for us, each of these 10 has all the others in it. So this is a way of seeing Mahayana non-dualism. All the realms include all the other realms. So this was true in all the later Japanese Buddhist schools. There's a non-separation of the six and the 10. So in some ways, Hell being, there are hell beings in the heavenly realms, there are animals in the human realms, there are hungry ghosts in the surer realms. This is a way of seeing the modern Western perspective on these six realms, which is that as human beings,

[25:51]

So taking it out of the realm of transmigration, you don't have to literally believe in rebirth. You might be an animal in the next life. Most Westerners, even Western Buddhists, don't literally believe in rebirth into other realms. But as human beings, Some of you may have experienced Heavenly Realms. Some of you, if you've ever watched television and paid attention to the commercials and thought you had to own all those things in the commercials, you experienced Hungry Ghost Realm, just never being satisfied. You need more and more and more. So anyway, this idea from this third, aspect of relief is this sense of these realms being within each other. So it's pretty interesting, I think. OK, the fourth realm, which is even more interesting, I think, is the, and Lefleur has a kind of religious studies kind of name for it, but basically that these six realms

[27:04]

are an arena of play. All six of them. And we can see this in a lot of the sutras. The Vimalakirti Sutra, for example, where the goddess transforms Shariputra. There are many of the sutras, there's this kind of playfulness with the status of beings as one realm or another. The fox koan's an example in Zen. But this is really important to Japanese aesthetics and art and poetry. There's one example, a little example, is there's a scroll I saw in a temple in Kyoto of animals as monks, and they're dressed in monk's robes. frogs and monkeys. And it's maybe intended to be a satire on the status of the monks. But there's a way in which there's a play with all this stuff, with these different realms.

[28:10]

So Le Fleur has some interesting quotes about this. This one is from an important Japanese scholar named Kojima. And this is about bodhisattva work as play. So this bodhisattva idea that is what we talk about here. He says, a bodhisattva is not one who pursues the perfection of wisdom while all the time thinking of his activity as painful austerities. He will never be able to do anything good for sentient beings while having the idea that he is an ascetic. On the contrary, it is only when he begins to enjoy what he is doing that he will be successful. The reason for this is that because there is to be no self whatsoever, even that of the bodhisattva is emptiness. And then Lefleur refers to a quote from the

[29:17]

Ten Stages Sutra, which is part of the Flower Ornament, or Kegon Sutra, Kegon in Japanese. So it says, then all the bodhisattva's activities are performed freely, not with the notion that some kind of effort must be expended. This means that his actions or her actions are not things she intends in order to realize her own definite goals. They are therefore not conditioned by such attention. This implies that salvation is by easy practice, something equivalent to play. Even compassion is not thought of as compassion, but becomes, so to speak, unconcerned compassion. Because in it, there is no attachment to goals. This is why the actions of the bodhisattva are empty and pure. So then Lefleur refers to a great modern scholar of Zen, Yanagida, talking about Zen places emphasis upon

[30:33]

explanation of transmigration in terms of going right into other species, which is to say, shouldering the karma of earlier lives and going to play in and through the six courses and four modes of being born. The idea is extremely valuable because it collates and connotes at least three things simultaneously. And he goes on, anyway. So this is, So this idea, you know, I referred to this yesterday when we were doing, when I was talking about the different realms and going to the different realms and the great master, Joshu or Zhaozhou, when he was asked by a monk, well, where are you going to go when you die? And he said, oh, straight to hell. And the monk said, well, why are you going to hell? You're a great master. And he said, well, if I don't, who will welcome you when you go there?

[31:35]

So this was true. The sense of play with these realms was not only in Zen. So there were lots of forms. In all the different Japanese Buddhist forms, there was this sense of play. So for example, in the Pure Land, there was this dancing Nambutsu, where there were branches of the Pure Land where they would chant Nambutsu while they were dancing wildly. So that was one of the medieval pure land schools. In Shingon, which is the school, the Vajrayana school that Kukai started, there was an understanding of their very arcane and esoteric rituals as play. They were playing with the forms. And actually, that's important to us because a lot of the forms and ritual forms in Soto Zen come from Shingon.

[32:39]

They were adopted by Shingon. So all the forms I did up there when I was offering incense, and the way we bow, and the way the altar is organized, even, all of that comes from Shingon. And it's a kind of play. We're playing with the forms of how we venerate the Buddha. So anyway, this way of playing with the movement within the six realms is another way of escaping from the kind of rigidity of feeling like you're caught by the six realms. This is obviously, this sense of transmigrating through these six realms is not how we see reality. But it's part of the background of Japanese Buddhism that is the background of this practice that we're doing. Now, of course, we have to look at this through, I don't know, can we actually play with how we see reality?

[33:45]

And what are the paradigms we have You know, we have our way of seeing reality in terms of science, in terms of, well, you know, we have to look and see. What is it? How is it that we think reality is constructed? And how can we play with that? And how can we use the forms of awakening practice that we do? So I'll stop. There's a little bit of time for comments, questions, responses. Please feel free. Yes, Jen. It made me think of many, many, many things. But the first thing is at the Last Supper where Jesus says, I go to prepare a place for you. And it reminded me of this guy saying, well, if I'm not, who's going to bring you when you go to hell?

[34:46]

And for some reason, those two things were textbooks. And then I thought about when OJ was on trial, and there was the judge, and the prosecutor, and the plaintiffs, and the respondent, and the children would construct their claim. OK, you're going to be judged. You're going to be OJ. And they would take the forms of these things that were in the news. The thing that really struck me is the saying that I like is, if you're going through hell, keep going. And I thought that was appropriate for people who are in hell. Keep going because there's another ground. Yeah, so that's the way of thinking in this model, that hell is not permanent, that keep going.

[35:51]

So Jizo is in the hell realm. The Buddha is in all these realms, or the bodhisattvas are in all these realms. And they are models of just stay calm. This too will change. Are there other comments or reflections or responses? A lot of these types of equipment are no longer there, but you had a choice. Monkey bars. Monkey bars, yeah. Seesaws. Those are the four top choices. And when you were a kid, you would just throw yourself into the ground and jump from one to the next. They're all exactly the same.

[37:08]

I'm not sure if I extract any different emotional experience from the monkey bars as I do from the seesaws. They're just different forms of the same activity. And I think some of this is a fascinating work because it Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, and I've talked about zazen as a performance art or a mode of, kind of mode of play, we could say, rather than some thing that we have to do perfectly.

[38:29]

Yes? How do animals get into a higher realm, like human realm? Maybe I'm thinking too literally, but I have a lot of squirrels in my yard. I'm thinking like, all right, are there good squirrels and bad squirrels? Like, you know? There are bad squirrels in my yard. I know there's bad chipmunks. Because chipmunks are, they're no good. But maybe there are one or two, you know, better chipmunks. I don't know. Maybe some of the better chipmunks become squirrels, and then the better squirrels. I don't know. That's not how we usually think, right? So just because we're doing Zen doesn't mean we have to adopt this worldview.

[39:36]

But it's interesting to see that that's in the background of some of what we study. Yes? Well, that's great. Well, there is a mass extinction going on.

[41:17]

And that doesn't mean that life on Earth will end. But we don't know. And I think we still can. Things are going to get bad. And depending on what we do, it will be less bad, maybe. So it doesn't mean that we should just give up. But, you know, we did a well-being service tonight for people in California, and I have been emailing and trying to call friends in Sonoma, where most of the county has been evacuated, and there are many, many, I have many Zen teacher friends in Sonoma, and so I don't know how many Zen temples have burned down. Yeah, so that's just, you know, but all over the planet there are people in facing danger. So yeah, and people and other beings. It's not just the people who are threatened by the fire. So yeah, it's serious.

[42:19]

So how do we, you know, so I think, I take your question is, well, how do we, we can feel overwhelmed and despairing about this situation, or how do we find a way to Play with these horrible realities. I'm tempted to quote that sign I saw down at Trump Towers today. I went down to greet Mr. Trump on behalf of Chicago, and there was one sign that says Trump puts ketchup on his hot dogs. It's just not something you do in Chicago. And there was another sign that says, all in all, excuse me for this vulgarity, but the sign said, all in all, you're just another prick with no wall.

[43:23]

Anyway, I don't know. I don't know what we do that combats You know, it's serious, and how do we find a way to play with this and respond to it? And so I appreciate your question. And I don't have an answer, but I think just feeling overwhelmed and despairing is not a response. And how do we contribute something? You know, what he says about the bodhisattva acting with Positive spirits, I think, is another way to say it. I don't know. Any other responses after that? Yes, you sure can.

[44:31]

Well, may we continue, and maybe on that note, we'll chant the four Bodhisattva vows, which we chant three times.

[45:27]

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