Good morning. A few weeks ago a student was giving a Monday morning talk and he was talking about the Platform Sutra. and it was well organized and he had read it carefully and he was narrating it in a clear way and he was beginning to explain it talking about form and emptiness and all of a sudden he just stopped and there was a long silence and he just sat looking down and he really let go And then he said, it's just nothing but words.

[01:04]

It's just nothing but words. I don't know why we give student talks at all. So it's not so easy just to let go, just to let the fumble happen. And we're grateful to each other when we can do that. So the next week, the next Monday morning, we had a discussion and we talked about the whole problem of words and how we need to use them talking about the Dharma because we have minds and we need to use our minds. But on the other hand, When we use words, they're always limited. Just to relegate it to literary form is to relegate it to defilement.

[02:09]

And when we use words, we miss it again and again and again. So somebody observed during that discussion that when we speak, there's more than words also. that when we speak behind the words there's a kind of presence and when we listen to each other we listen to the words but we also watch very carefully we watch for each other's balance and we watch to see when when we're fumbling and when we're right there. All those things where our hearts are. We're very, very observant behind the words. So today I want to talk about music.

[03:25]

about the music of our words, but specifically about music. I came across a Sufi story in this Parabola magazine, which is filled with good materials for talks. There is a story of Tansen, the great musician at the court of Akbar. The emperor asked him, tell me, oh great musician, who was your teacher?

[04:32]

He replied, your majesty, my teacher is a very great musician, but more than that, I cannot call him musician, I must call him music." The emperor asked, can I hear him sing? Tan Sen answered, perhaps, I may try, but you cannot think of calling him here to court. The emperor said, can I go where he is? The musician said, his pride may revolt even there, thinking that he is to sing before a king. Akbar said, shall I go as your servant? Tansen answered, yes, there is hope then. So both of them went up into the Himalayas, into the high mountains where the sage had his temple of music in a cave, living with nature in tune with the infinite. When they arrived, the musician was on horseback and Akbar was walking. The sage saw that the emperor had humbled himself to come to hear his music, and he was willing to sing for him.

[05:41]

And when he felt in the mood for singing, he sang. And then his singing was great. It was a psychic phenomenon and nothing else. It seemed as if all the trees and plants of the forest were vibrating. It was a song of the universe. The deep impression made upon Akbar and Tansen was more than they could stand. They went into a state of trance, of rest, of peace. And while they were in that state, the master left the cave. When they opened their eyes, he was not there. The emperor said, oh, what a strange phenomenon. But where has the master gone? Tansen said, you will never see him in this cave again. For once a man has got a taste of this, he will pursue it, even if it costs him his life. It is greater than anything in life. When they were home again, the emperor asked the musician one day, tell me what raga, what mode did your master sing in?

[06:44]

Tansen told him the name of the raga and sang it for him. But the emperor was not content, saying, yes, it is the same music, but it is not the same spirit. Why is this? The musician replied, the reason is this, that while I sing before you, the emperor of this country, my master sings before God. That is the difference. So, how do we all sing before God? We all do it. And we all listen for each other. And we all have a taste for it. We all have a wonderful appetite for it. And the reason that we come here

[07:49]

to the Berkeley Zen Center is because we want to cultivate that ability and to practice it. And so we come here and usually usually when we come we're looking for a teacher. We hope that there will be somebody who can tell us more about how to do it. And so we come and we look around. And some of us find somebody who looks like a teacher. And then we get into some kind of relationship with that teacher. And it's often a very complicated one. There's often a kind of romantic element in it that that person's that person becomes for a while often very important in our life.

[08:53]

And that person's presence is very important and everything about them is important and we kind of just give our heart. And then the time comes usually when we begin to see that that person is also a person and that person has his or her own personality, some of which we like and some of it we don't like. And so we realize that we have in some way to find the teaching that we need which is beyond the personality. So it's a bit like Tansen coming and the sage, knowing that the sage will not teach if the emperor is there as an emperor, and knowing that the sage, and Tansen describing his teacher as not a musician but as music itself.

[10:07]

And that's what we have to find in our teacher. when we meet our teacher, we have to find our teacher's music. And sometimes that music is in the content of what the teacher says, and sometimes the music is in the way the teacher walks, or just the way the teacher is with us, or the way the teacher encourages us or limits us, or whatever it is. Maybe in words, maybe not in words. But that's what we need. And then we have to come to the teacher in a position where we can be taught. So the emperor knew right away that to come as an emperor wouldn't work. When we come to our teacher, we have to give up what we are. We have to give up what we are and we have to give up the idea of any kind of performance.

[11:18]

give up the idea of the teacher performing, give up the idea of our performing, but just be there. So when they got to the cave, it looked as if the emperor was the servant, and the sage was then willing to teach. But of course the sage knew who everybody was as the teacher in the position of teaching knows exactly where you are. And then the teacher had to wait for the right moment, to wait until he was in the right mood.

[12:24]

Because the teaching doesn't come exactly on demand. The teaching is bigger than that, and the teaching depends on the circumstances around it. And it's always moving. Like moonlight reflected in the ocean waves. Here, here, here, here. So, when the mood was right, the sage sang. And when we really hear the teaching, it takes us somewhere into this restful, peaceful place.

[13:30]

Akbar and Tansen, it said, couldn't be themselves in the face of this music and they went into this trance. So we all have a sense of balance, a sense of natural balance. We have it as children and we keep it as we grow up and it's our Buddha nature. And it's the most restful place we can be. It's a place of real balance like the crux of the cross where The time meets the timeless or however you say it. There are many ways to say it. But that place where our body is well balanced and we've just given up everything without being lost and without being troubled by the issue of meaning.

[14:40]

So we're just there in that very restful place. And it feels wonderful. And then, of course, we want more. We want to know how to keep it. So when they open their eyes, the sage is gone. And he's not going to be found there again. And that's the tease. and what to do with that appetite for wanting more, which itself is both delicious and a problem. I remember the first time I sat a seven-day session. It was out in Green Gulch in Beppu Roshi. It was officiating, and I had Doka-san, and he questioned me about what I was doing.

[15:51]

And my life was very busy then. I had a job and three children and I was married. And he said, well, what on earth are you coming here and spending seven days in a Sashin for? And I guess I'd had some little ups, as one does, when one is pretty excited and hoping for much. And so I said something like, I don't know, I described them or something, and I said, I want more in a very greedy way. And he just shut his eyes. And that was a very good teaching for me. So we have to keep this appetite for wanting more. and yet drop the ambition and just go on and use the appetite for kind of steady fuel.

[16:58]

And then it's obviously for the emperor a kind of puzzle. What happened? And so he tries asking his servant to sing the song again. What will happen? And so the servant sings the song and it's not the same. because he's singing a song in front of the emperor. So how do we sing in front of God? How do we sing before God? How do we lead our lives that way? How can we just step back and not be in the way? and accept what comes up on each moment, just accept it as an offering.

[18:31]

Receiving this offering, we said this morning when we ate, receiving this offering we should consider whether our virtue and practice deserve it. So this sense of life coming to us as a series of offerings. And when tea comes, we just drink it It's so easy and it's so difficult And we're always watching each other to see how we're doing it and how we're not doing it How we're reflecting this big, big story in everything we do. Shortly after I read this story in Parabola, I had the opportunity to go and hear Yo-Yo Ma, cellist, playing unaccompanied Bach sonatas for the cello at Herbst Hall.

[19:46]

And I took my son, who's in his early twenties, who's something of a musician himself, but he plays, I don't know, New Wave or whatever it's called, and he's not a classical musician, and I took him with some trepidation, feeling as if he didn't like it, I'd probably kill him. But as soon as the concert had begun, just after the first few phrases, it was clear it was going to be all right. And it was one of those marvelous concerts that everybody just listens. There's nothing else to do. No coughing, no squirming. And somehow every single note was valuable. And you just didn't want to miss anything. And I could quickly see that he was feeling that.

[20:56]

And it was also very clear that there was something extremely spiritual about this concert. It was hard to say just what, but it felt, it felt as if we were being instructed, felt as if we were being instructed without words. And it was very, very profoundly comforting. So, I watched the newspaper the next couple of days and sure enough there was a review the concert. And it was a review by Robert Comande. And it was called Spiritual Exercises. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma Reinvents Bach Suites. And it begins, Bach can be a truth mirror. Well, it just so happens that Robert Comande is Liz Horowitz Weizmann's first cousin.

[22:09]

So maybe he knows something about Zen. Or maybe he doesn't. But one doesn't need to be a Zen Buddhist to know when one is in the company of Great Spirit. Bach can be a truth mirror. Cellists... So, reading... I read this and it seemed a kind of... How do you sing for God?

[23:15]

It seemed as if it was a further explanation, exploration of that question. Bach can be a truth mirror. Cellists know this from their constant re-journeying through his six unaccompanied suites for their instrument. The set serves them as a bible, book of prayer, constant companion, and much else. Pablo Casals used to begin each day playing them. They form the core of the cellist's musical existence. For the past two evenings, cellist Yo-Yo Ma looked deeply into them and into himself in a one-man, two-evening Bach festival. It is music conceived with repeated performing in mind, inviting, even provoking the player to test a different way each time. Ma probed the almost infinite options, guided by a powerful intellect, he became a composing performer, taken over by the mind of the composer.

[24:21]

In a word, he was possessed, not in the irrational sense, but in the way that intensity of concentration transformed him to another state of consciousness. A slight tempo variance, whether hesitating or urging, would throw a familiar contour into a different relief. That, in turn, would affect the rhythmic stresses so that the melody unfolded new. In lively music, in lively movements, such as the gavotte, the gui, and so on, expected accents were moved to adjacent notes, yet the changed phrase and continuity would seem to come out perfectly right all the time. He would have been making at the minute interval adjustments necessary to that new reading. In going back and observing the repeats, Ma heard it differently, and the new succession of causes and effects brought it out as almost another sequence of musical thought. Ma's philosophical reading had the quality of a contemplation.

[25:26]

In the fifth suite, the Sarabande was more personalized and engrossing a meditation. In the third suite, it was something mystical, a transport, a suspended state as Ma discovered it. There was, of course, relief, change of pace, but of many kinds, directly following that ethereal Fifth Suite Sarabande, the first gavotte was sprightly. But such an impression of sequence and relationship was just one that was specific to his performance in Wednesday. The very quality of creative performance that made the interpretation so distinctive Wednesday carried with it the assurance that the next time he would do it another way. The experience is partly but not completely an engagement of intellect as when the listener will follow joyfully a fugue carried out in one melodic line holding one passage in parenthesis. With Ma as guide, we find in Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello music that is the ideal metaphor for the dynamic of the life process of human thought and feeling in constant change.

[26:43]

It is not art as fixed creation that is viewed variously by different and changing individuals. The suites themselves are in continual transformation, the composer's mind living actively in the thinking of the performer. So, our lives are music and our situations are coming to us. always new, always new, and also slightly familiar, like kind of familiar music. And we move from one situation to the next, to the next, and there's something fresh and there's something old. And how can we move as this kind of performing composer? Composing performer.

[27:50]

Now, often as we move, our right hand is playing some jingle up here, and our left hand is doing goodness knows what down here. And we're moving along, but not very mindfully. But there are times when we're playing two hands together. And we're very grateful when we hear somebody playing two hands together. There are lots of ways that we help each other. kind of technical ways and all kinds of ways. But maybe the biggest way, the most fundamental way that we help each other is by playing two hands together.

[29:03]

Sekito, who has compiled a collection of the Blue Cliff Records and the Empty Gate, talks about positive and absolute samadhi. Zen has a lot of different ways of talking about playing with two hands together. So absolute and positive samadhi are kind of the two sides. Absolute samadhi is where there's no distinction and everything is united and peaceful and inexpressible. It's that sense of quiet and rest, that still point. And positive samadhi is that clean activity where everything is just concentrated in the moment of the doing.

[30:25]

And it's the manifestation of that big quietness. So, children know a lot about positive samadhi. They're always in it. They don't carry any extra stuff around. If they're little enough. They just bob along from one bright moment to the next bright moment to the next terrible moment and so on. But they also have no stability. So our stability comes from being able to go into that restful place and to know that rest and to be in that rest. And when we come out of that rest, we're clean again. And as our practice matures, we're able to keep that sense of rest even in the midst of the busiest activity.

[31:49]

So we can be very busy and very quick and yet peaceful at the same time. And that's how, why we come to practice. Knowing these things are true and knowing that we have to work and work and work and work at finding our balance. And so we watch each other and we listen to each other. And we watch the way we lose our balance.

[32:52]

And that's very important. The other day Mel came in and he was going to give a lecture and he had a glass of water and as he was sitting down he spilled the water and that was a tremendous grand spill. And for a second, he and everybody kind of stood there looking sort of helpless and awkward. And then little by little, the situation was organized. And he ended up wiping most of it up in a sort of very deliberate, careful way. And when he'd done it, he said, of course, this was the real taste show. What comes is just extra. So we watch each other. fumbling. And we watch each other being bodhisattvas and both are important. And we're just always going up and down, whole range. I can read one more thing.

[34:06]

This is Maizumi Roshi. No, no, Tetsugan. Tetsugan Roshi? The co-authors. I don't know. All right. So I'm not quite sure who's writing this particular paragraph. But it's a nice description of the different levels of Samadhi. In our daily life, we frequently experience samadhi, the state of concentration, of becoming one. We can observe samadhi in our work, in our study, in watching TV, or in thinking. There is even the samadhi of gambling. It is rather easy to get into the kind of samadhi where we are absorbed in whatever we are doing. We call that samadhi in the realm of desire. We speak of three worlds, the realms of desire, form, and no form. These worlds are not geographically or spatially located, all exist in our mind.

[35:25]

That is, the state of our mind can be described in terms of the three worlds. In the Diamond Sutra, it says that the three worlds are created by the mind. Theoretically speaking, what kinds of states of mind are these? The realm of desire is the normal state of mind in which we live. We have senses and consciousness and we relate ourselves to the external world under the influence of conditioning created by our senses and consciousness. When we see something, we are conditioned by what we see. Our hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and consciousness are the same. We are very easily conditioned by thinking and so create all kinds of problems and frustrations. Strictly speaking, we don't call these conditioned states samadhi, even though they are concentrated states. For example, forgetting ourselves while we go to a movie. So that's the first. In the second stage, the realm of form, strong attachment to the discriminative senses and consciousness disappears.

[36:29]

I don't know whether it's correct to explain it in this way, but you become more genuinely spiritual, yet you are attached to the existence of certain objects, though in a much more refined way. Maybe we could say that the emperor, when he wanted to hear the music, was in that second state. The third realm, the realm of no form, is still more refined. and even further divided into four different stages. The samadhi in these two realms, the realm of form and the realm of no form, is called fundamental samadhi. This is the samadhi we are in when we are genuinely involved in practicing, when we can sit and concentrate well. Beyond that, there is one more state of samadhi which is called the samadhi of no leaking. In other words, not even the slightest attachment to any thought remains.

[37:36]

These are very technical descriptions and so on and so on. So I think when one hears a great concert, it's that there are no leaks. One is hearing a performer, this composing performer who is just exactly there all the time. And that's what gives us so much. And this fundamental samadhi, the third one, the samadhi we are in when we are genuinely involved in practicing, we can sit and concentrate well. Somebody else talked about that or I think of that as sometimes we get into quite a quiet zazen state and it's like a large container of water that's very still and very lucid and a little fish can just move around in that container and not disturb the water.

[38:47]

So your consciousness can kind of explore without disturbing the peaceful sense. Well, I think that's enough. So, um, the music of our lives. We can have a little discussion or else just go. It's a nice day. Thank you.

[39:26]

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