Good morning. We are in the middle of this practice period in which we're looking at the stories about practicing suchness from Dong Shan, the Chinese founder of our lineage, 800s. The story I want to talk about today is one of those stories about how to express the unconditioned or the ultimate right in the middle of this conditioned phenomenal world, how that happens. So there's a couple of other stories that relate to that, about finding space with no grass or no weeds for 10,000 miles The story about going beyond hot and cold. The one I want to talk about today, very short, simple story.

[01:04]

Case 98 in the Book of Serenity. A monk asked Dongshan, which of the three bodies of Buddhas does not fall into any category? And Dongshan responded, I am always close to this. So that's the whole story. But there's a lot to say about it. So first of all, the three bodies of Buddha, some of you know that. Originally in Buddhism they just talked about Buddha Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha who lived in what's now northeastern India 2,500 years ago, especially as the Mahayana Bodhisattva practices developed. They talked about, saw that there were many Buddhas, or the possibility of various Buddhas, or questioned what is this Buddha anyway, and they talked about three different bodies of Buddha, three kinds of Buddha.

[02:10]

I'll say the Sanskrit name, too. Don't worry about remembering that. There's no test. But nirmanakaya is the historical incarnated body of the Buddha. So that would be like Shakyamuni Buddha. And according to some stories, there are particular people, beings, who become Buddha in different ages. And the next future one will be Maitreya Buddha. Sometimes we talk about various historical people as being Buddha, like Zhaozhou, don't we refer to him, Joshu, as the old Buddha, and in the last century, the Tibetan teacher, Yoko Kenji Rinpoche, I would say was a Buddha. Anyway, we can talk about historical beings as Buddha. That's called the nirmanakaya, the incarnation body of Buddha. That's one. The second, the dharmakaya Buddha, is the Well, the whole universe, and anything you can imagine outside the universe, everything, as Buddha, as imbued with this awareness and kindness.

[03:24]

And this is depicted in various ways. So in Japan, sometimes there's images of Vairocana, we say, and we will say later in the meal, a chant, is one of these kinds of Dharmakaya Buddhas. Buddha as the whole of everything. And sometimes he's depicted sitting there with stars and planets and stuff all over his body. And Dale has seen the Daibutsu at Todai-ji in Nara. Has anybody else here been to Nara? Well, anyway, there's this huge, huge statue. It's the largest bronze statue in the world. Actually, it's smaller than the original one, which was built in the 800s, because it was destroyed in civil wars. late 1100s and they had to rebuild it. But it's still, it's the ears are eight feet long, just the ears. And it's a nice statue of Huntdale. It's an amazing statue. Anyway, but that's just an image of everything as Buddha.

[04:26]

So that's the second category, the second type of Buddha, second body of Buddha. Third is called the Sambhogakaya in Sanskrit. We can say, sometimes they define that as result body. This is the bodies of Buddhas who have practiced a lot, and these are kind of spirit Buddhas in meditative heavens. So Amida Buddha is the basis of Pure Land Buddhism, and the Medicine Buddha, and many other Buddhas. In Tibetan Buddhism, there's whole galleries of them, and in some of the Mahayana sutras, too. So anyway, that's another That's one of the three bodies of Buddhas, these Buddhas who are around as spirits, kind of abiding in meditation heavens and are around. Anyway, so this monk asked this strange question. Among the three Buddha bodies, which one does not fall into any category?

[05:28]

Dongshan said, I'm always close to this. And there's various ways of hearing it. Maybe he's always close to this question of which body of Buddha does not fall into categories. Or maybe he's just close to the issue of not falling into categories, or of seeing the unconditioned beyond the various discriminations of Buddha. So he said, I'm always close to this. I'm always close with this. And we might hear it as, I'm always intimate with this. So this is a story about closeness and intimacy. And there are many aspects of this. And, of course, the question itself is kind of ironic.

[06:39]

As soon as you start talking about different bodies of Buddha, you've got categories. So maybe the monk was really asking, how can I get unstuck from thinking about categories and discriminating and calculating and deliberating like that? So it's a strange question. But Dong Shun says, I'm always close to this. And a lot of his stories also have to do with not being caught in stages of the path, stages of progress on some program of development. So in the... There's various other, in the Koan case, there's various other questions that kind of echo that. So one of Dongshan's disciples, Susha, a man who's a strange character, but anyway, he asked Dongshan once, please teach me a word which does not yet exist.

[07:50]

Dongshan said, no, no one would agree. Sushan then said, then can it be approached or not? And Dongshan said, can you approach it right now? Sushan said, if not, still, there's no way to avoid it. So there's no way to avoid it. Part of our practice is that we see our mind going round and round and trying to accomplish things and planning things and calculating and trying to figure things out. What is it that goes beyond this, that does not fall into this kind of thinking? And another one of Dongshan's disciples was named Xiaoshan. And a monk asked later, asked Xiaoshan, what is the meaning of or the late master saying, I'm always close to this. And Sao Chun said, if you want my head, cut it off and take it.

[08:56]

And some stories say he leaned over to allow him to cut off his head. And another monk asked Xue Feng, who had been a student of Dong Chun early in his career, You know, what is the meaning of this? I'm always close to this. And Srivam hit the monk with a staff and said, I too have been to Dongsheng. So this has to do with this idea of this part of our tradition. And they talk about it in terms of the nation's taboo. Although there's other stories about this. A monk asked, Shih-Chuan was another teacher in the tradition about this, about Bodhidharma's coming from the West, and Shih-Chuan gnashed his teeth together to show him. Anyway, oh, and then another student asked Jin Feng about it, and Jin Feng said, I'd rather bite off my tongue than violate the nation's taboo.

[10:03]

So this idea of the nation's taboo, I just want to say a little bit about it. This has to do with the Chinese thing where you weren't supposed to say the name of the emperor. So Chinese people have various different names, regular names. And as priests or ordained people, we also have various names. So I've been trying to call Laurel Gyoshin, but she's both. Anyway. this idea of the nation's taboo, that was a way of talking about something in the Sarodong Soto tradition, which is to not... Dongshan once said about his teacher, when asked why he took Yonyan as his teacher, because Yonyan was not so well known, and he studied with a number of other very famous teachers, and Dongshan said, only because he never explained anything to or he never explained everything to me.

[11:06]

So this nation's taboo is kind of used as a, in the sadhana sattva tradition as a way of talking about this, this taboo is maybe too strong, but this direction to not explain things. So some of you get very frustrated sometimes, I know, by all these strange old stories and What are they talking about? They're trying to figure it out. That's okay. But really, the point isn't for you to figure out anything. The point is, how does that story speak to you? How does this teaching speak to you? How do you find it for yourself? I cannot tell you how to be a Buddha. I can't be Buddha for you. Nobody can do that. And yet, there's... There's this quality of, we call it Buddha nature sometimes, this awareness of this taste of suchness, this sense of suchness, this inner kindness, this call towards living intentionally and consciously.

[12:23]

It's somewhere right around your seat. And in some sense, this includes all of Buddhahood. But of course, developing that Buddha quality, that Buddha nature, letting it blossom, letting it express itself in your life is a lifetime work. So, Buddha is always going beyond Buddha. Anyway, so there's this story and You know, this not being caught in categories, not being caught by stages of progress on some path of spiritual achievement, not dividing just this suchness into some classifications of suchness, this kind of suchness and that kind of suchness. And when I was talking about suchness last week, I did that a little bit, but really there's no such thing as suchness.

[13:24]

But okay, what's going on in this story? So, in the Book of Serenity, it also appears in Dongshan's record, but in the Book of Serenity, the cases, the stories themselves, and the verses are selected by Hongzhe, who was a great teacher in China a century before Dogen. And then there's commentary by a contemporary of Dogen in China named Wansong. And there's an introduction, and he talks about some of these people I mentioned. Jifeng, cutting off his tongue, made a sequel to Xishuang. Caoshan, cutting off his head, didn't turn away from Dongshan. Caoshan's the one that leaned over and says, take my head if you want. The ancient sayings were so subtle, Honsang says. Then he says, where is the technique to help you? I think for us it's easy to feel like these stories are sort of some kind of word game or puzzle or something like that.

[14:28]

But really all of them are about how do we help people, how do we help ourselves and each other to allow Buddha to express itself, herself, himself, on your Krishna chair. So this is the background question for all of these stories, for all of this Zen talk, this strange language of these Zen poems. The background is, how do we help? How do we help people? This is part of the Bodhisattva way, committed to not just practicing for ourselves, this is not a self-help program, but how do we see our connectedness to everything? how do we see how our practice helps those around us? Or maybe we don't even see it, but how does it happen? So, this is a background question.

[15:30]

And this story brings up all kinds of issues of, you know, Dong Shong says, I'm always close to this. What does it mean to be close? What does it mean to be familiar and intimate with others and with ourselves? So this story works, as all of these stories do, on a variety of levels. Yeah, so in this commentary, once I'll quote another teacher's verse. which goes like this, this closeness is heart-rending if you search outside. Why does the ultimate familiarity seem like enmity? From beginning to end, the whole face has no color or shape. Still, your head is asked for by Cao Shao. I just want to lead his head over. So take my head instead of answering directly.

[16:33]

So this closeness is heart-rending if you search outside. So remember in the story of Dongshan, looking into the stream after he left his teacher, Yunyan, after Yunyan said, just this is it, don't shun, looked into the stream and saw his reflection and said, just don't seek from others, you'll be far estranged from self. I now go on alone, everywhere I meet it. It now is me, I now am not it. So this line is, also about just don't seek from others or you'll be far estranged from self. This line from Baumik says, this closeness is heart-rending if you search outside. How do we be close to our own experience? I mean, that's what we're doing here today, sitting all day. We start to see we at some point can't help but see, we can distract ourselves in all kinds of ways, but basically sitting upright, breathing, being present, and then the bell rings and we get up and do it as we're walking, we start to become more and more familiar with this, just this.

[17:53]

So this closeness is heart-rending if you search outside. Why does ultimate familiarity seem like enmity? Or maybe it's why does familiarity with the ultimate seem like enmity? So this is pointing to a kind of intimacy, or perhaps various kinds of intimacy, where we are vulnerable to having our heart broken. One scripture of the Bodhisattva is that she's willing to have her heart broken again and again. How do we stay open to the reality and pain and strangeness of this world and the world on your seat, on your cushion or chair? Staying close, remaining present in the middle of uncertainty, discomfort and vulnerability requires a patience, and a capacity that can be empowering if it is sustained.

[18:59]

So this is why I encourage you to sit many times a week, to have regular time, to just be there, to give yourself a chance to become intimate with yourself and with everything else in your world. But this question, why does the ultimate familiarity seem like enmity? So when we're truly close to someone, whether it's a spouse, a romantic partner, a child, a parent, a brother or sister, a spiritual teacher or a disciple, teacher or student, there's this tension. in any intimate relationship. The other may feel closer to you than yourself. Yet right in that intimacy, we may feel this enmity, this ultimate... Why does the ultimate familiarity seem like enmity?

[20:03]

This is maybe a little bit more polite than saying hostility or animosity. Maybe it's a little less than that. But there's this tension, there's this challenge. This love-hate tension is very human. Staying close, as Dongson says, I'm always close to this. It's not easy. So, various levels of this, being always close to this. In the context of Dongson's teaching, the challenge of conveying this practice of suchness, one focus of ultimate familiarity And this tender and trouble and closeness can be engagement between a teacher and a student. So there's sometimes testing, it can be uncomfortable. And in these stories, these encounter dialogues of Dongshan, we see this. These instructions and examinations, it's challenging.

[21:09]

You know, we have to risk something as teacher or student. It might be a failure to communicate right now, or even the relationship could end. But sometimes, sometimes it happens that student and teacher just meet. Sometimes this closeness fits together. And this is true of all of our relationships. The people you're close to, the people you work with. to develop this always-close that Dogon says. How do we stay present with that? How can we stand it? How can we stand to be close to someone? And it applies to ourselves too. This is also what we're doing here today. You know, Dogon says to study the way is to study the self. And a lot of people don't stay, they might come in to sit once or twice, but sitting all day, one of the challenges is how do you stay close to this, to this, to the person sitting on your cushion or chair right now?

[22:26]

And you may feel enmity towards yourself. You may feel all these qualities of yourself that you don't like. This happens. You may see your own selfishness, your own self-centeredness, your own impatience or anger or frustration. This is very difficult. How do we stay always close to ourselves? How do we be willing to be present in the middle of this? What is true intimacy? It has its own value and its own helpfulness. What can arise when we're willing to stay close to a teacher, to a student, to a friend, to a spouse, to ourselves?

[23:28]

How do we just be friends? So, in the book I mentioned, Dylan's song, All I Really Want to Do, where he's anxious, locking, looking to lock you up, shock or knock or lock you up, analyze you, categorize you, finalize you or advertise you. All I really want to do is maybe be friends with you. How do we be real friends? So one model of the teacher, there's kind of the guru model, who was, you know, and I don't know, but I somehow managed to avoid that, I think, most of the time. But, you know, people can put teachers on pedestals. Another way, another model of that is, in Sanskrit, is called kāyānamitra, the good spiritual friend. How do we, and in Sangha too, how do we be close with each other as friends? So all of you, each one of you here sitting today is supporting everybody else in this room to sit here today. How can we be close?

[24:35]

in this simple friendship, and with our own deepest self, and even with Buddha. So, again, this is a question of how do we find this closeness, even when sometimes it feels like enemy. So there's a, Hongjo wrote verse commentaries. The verse commentary to this story is one of my favorite poems. And I'll read it, but I'm going to just comment on a couple of lines. He says, not entering the world, not following conditions. Well, this is one of those stories about how do we not be caught in conditions? Here, not see categories of Buddha. Or how do we embrace all of the different ways we could be a Buddha? In the emptiness of the pot of ages, there's a family tradition. white duckweeds, breeze gentle, evening on an otter river, an ancient embankment.

[25:38]

The boat returns, a single stretch of haze." Well, I want to focus mostly on this line, in the emptiness of the pot of ages, there's a family tradition. It's a strange line. Literally, this pot of ages, pot as a food pot, you know, like in some cultures they have this pot that's in the center of the kitchen. I'll keep adding more things to it, but it's this pot of ages. And how can you find nourishment from an empty pot? What's going on here? In the emptiness of the pot of ages, there's a family tradition. So, given our emptiness teaching, maybe this is a pot that's full of emptiness.

[26:41]

Maybe that's what nourishes us, this teaching of emptiness. That's one way to hear it. Hongzhe might be implying that what sustains this transmission of the teaching over the ages is the teaching of emptiness, clearly seeing the non-separation, interconnectedness of all entities. Emptiness and suchness are kind of flip sides of the same coin. Dongshan tends to focus more on the side of suchness. But the Chinese character for empty also means space. also means the sky. So this is the same character that we use in the Heart Sutra. Form is exactly emptiness. Emptiness is exactly form. It's that character. But we could read this line as, in the spaciousness of the pot of kalpas, there's a family tradition, a legacy. So this family tradition, celebrated by Hongzhe, and in some sense initiated by Dongsheng, whom he had predecessors to,

[27:50]

carried over to Japan by Dogan, and carried here by Suzuki Roshi, and that we're all involved with here. Maybe this is about some spaciousness opened up by our engagement with suchness. Maybe we, in this tradition, are encouraged by the willingness to simply stay close to the question of going beyond categories. So, you know, a lot of us, you know, and part of the nature of our discriminating thinking is to make discernments, to have categories, to calculate and figure out, how do these fit together? We want to do that. And maybe that's natural and a basic human thing. But what is it that goes beyond? What is it that's not caught by categories? So, Dogen talks about this in various ways.

[28:52]

He talks about the same image of the emptiness of the pot of ages in terms of a kind of spaciousness of the pot. He mentions it, there's one poem in the Zik censored record where he says, outside the window, plum blossoms open. in secret, encompassing spring. So spring has burst upon us here, even in Chicago. But at the beginning of spring, outside the window, plum blossoms open in secret, encompassing spring. So plums are the first... Duggan talks about plum blossoms a lot, because they're the first sign of spring. And they're white, and they open against the wet snow. He says, you can catch the moon in a pot of ages in the sky, talking about this springtime. So this is the pot of ages in the sky instead of the empty pot. You can see it in your mind. So perhaps it's a pot of ages in the sky.

[29:55]

We could read the Hongshou line, in the pot of ages in the sky, there's a family tradition. Maybe this tradition springs forth again and again. from the stillness of the unconditioned and the immersion in suchness, becoming a container for the very moon in the sky. How do we see this question that Dongshan is always close to? What goes beyond these categories of Buddha? Another time, Dogen also used this phrase in a different way. He says, a single plum flower in the cold was fragrant heart blossoming. calls for the arising of spring and the emptiness of the pot of ages. So this is about renewal. This is about how do we, you know, when our practice feels stale or when our life feels stuck or when, you know, we're bored or when we're sad or, you know, how do we encourage ourselves to open up, to be close, to be willing to be close?

[31:00]

Part of, again, the difficulty of this practice is not to get your legs in some funny position or maintain stillness or quiet, but how do we see this closeness? When we feel close to ourselves and to our reality, how do we not cringe? That's so easy. How do we stay in this difficult world where there's so many problems and so much that's wrong, so much corruption and so much cruelty and violence and so forth and so on? How do we face the reality of this life and stay upright and take another breath and look at how we can respond, how we can allow spring to blossom in this situation? Dongshan says he's always close with this question.

[32:04]

And I would invite you to consider, what is it that you are willing to be always close to? What is it that you feel intimacy with, even if it's heart-rending at times? How can, what is it that you are willing to, what aspect of your practice, what aspect of your life are you willing to stay close with? To keep paying attention to? So Dong Shan, he doesn't say this is the only thing he's always close to, but he's always close to this question of not falling into categories. It sounds strange and abstract, but he's really, he wants to be wholeheartedly present. not dividing himself up. And we do that. We have this aspect of our life and that aspect of our work and our family and our practice over here.

[33:13]

But actually, how do we see it all fitting together? How can we be always close with the person sitting on your seat here today? I'll say a little more about the last line of this. An ancient embankment, the boat returns, a single stretch of haze. This invokes the idea of nirvana. In early Buddhism, they saw the suffering of the world and they called that samsara, the rat race that we're all in. And they wanted to escape from it. So nirvana literally means cessation, to snuff out the candle of life. And in early Buddhism, nirvana meant to never be reborn into this world again. So that's what they said a Buddha did. This is a different approach to samsara and nirvana that's invoked here in this last line.

[34:14]

An ancient embankment, the Buddha returns. So I imagine this And this guy, maybe pulling his barge across the river with a bunch of people who were sailing to the other shore. But he says, the boat returns. So again and again, you know, it's not about reaching some particular, having some flashy experience and reaching some altered state or some higher state of being or getting high at all. You had some glimpse of that, or else you wouldn't be here in the first place. You had some sense of that. You can't articulate it, because anything you say about it isn't it. But still, this ancient embankment, we come back to it. The boat returns. We come back to it again and again. And this is a single stretch of haze.

[35:16]

It's like what it's called in your exhale. It's hazy. We've been there. We've seen that it's actually possible to live wholly, to be this person with all of our foibles and greed and frustration and so forth. Anyway, here we are. How can we become intimate with ourselves, how can we be friends with ourselves, and be friends with each other? How can we stay close to all of it? And take another breath, and the bell rings, and we get up and walk. And then the clapper's hit, and we go sit down again. So a single stretch of haze, perhaps, I wrote in the book, refers to the hazy lineage of transmission, the ephemeral family tradition, sometimes barely surviving in other generations, historically.

[36:31]

From Dongshan's efforts to remain close to what flows beyond categories emerges a way of seeing suchness with the ears, or perhaps with the soft touch on the skin of the cool haze of an autumn evening. How do we stay close? How do we stay close to ourselves? So this has to be renewed in each generation. It's not enough to just read about how Dongshak did it, or Dogen did it, or Bodhidharma, or Buddha, or whatever. Even Suzuki Roshi. Suzuki Roshi was just a guy. We make him into some kind of mythic legend sometimes, but he was a simple little Japanese guy. Way cool, but, you know. His son, his wife, used to tell stories. So how do we stay close to this, which goes beyond categories and conditions, yet not running away from the world of conditions, not trying to escape from this shore to find some other shore?

[37:44]

Here we are. And we're all connected. How do we take care of ourselves and each other? So for people in the all-day sitting, we'll have some time for discussion. Joshi, thank you for joining us this morning. But I wanted to have, you know, if one or two people have some comment or response to this story now. Please feel free. Here's some questions. It was striking, it never struck me before when you, as you've been talking about these stories, during the practice for you, but also in general, but it struck me today that sort of the way that you, and I've heard this before, when people are working with Khans or these stories, When you first hear it, it sounds impenetrable.

[38:46]

And then the way that you penetrate it is with questions, it feels like. You pull out a phrase or a word. What is that? What does that mean? But of course, not just seeking one answer. It's the question. It's just sitting with the question. And so as you were talking, there were so many times that you just you know, what does it mean to, or how do we, you know, without answers. So, it just, it struck me that it felt like this is a way that these, this is kind of the mode that these stories work in, I guess, for us, is not, it's not, you know, I think, well, I don't put myself out there looking for answers, hold the complexity of life or the discomfort and juxtaposition of things and kind of wanting to bring them together in a way that I can hold and it provides an anchor.

[39:56]

And sometimes there is that moment of insight that arrives sometimes and then there's a desire to hold on to it and then the next moment comes along and then that insight no longer applies and it starts becoming like an aphorism that doesn't ring true anymore. when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail cutting, but you're not actually attuned anymore. So, anyway, so it just made me think, it felt like, in general, this tradition that is offering the possibility of living in questions. Yes. Living in that mode rather than answers. Yeah, because, you know, when people have answers, And when people feel good about their answers and believe in their answers, often it's a strange thing, but they seem to want to tell everybody else that they should believe in the answers that they have, and they'll go off to war to convince everybody of their answers. To actually be always close is to... He doesn't say he's there.

[41:03]

He's close. He doesn't have the answer. He's just close. He's close to this question. And he stays close. So the Bodhisattva practice is to almost be Buddha. Maybe you get to Buddha and come back, but, you know, almost Buddha. Waiting for everybody else to do it together. So thank you. Other comments or questions or responses? Yes, John. and at the same time realizing you may be completely wrong, and how you keep those in some kind of tension or... Yeah, the various tensions. It's not that... It's not a... Well, sometimes we're completely wrong.

[42:04]

Sometimes we're just a little bit off. You know, Duncan was talking about being always being close. So, we almost see it. So we don't have to make it into, you know, it's kind of melodramatic to put it in those extremes. But there's a tension there, yeah. There's an edge. How do we live with that edge? You know, it's called life, but, you know, we can pretend that everything is settled, we can pretend that we have all the answers, or we can pretend that, you know, you can look in some book and that'll tell you all the answers, or whatever. Any last comment or response? Yes, Ben. It seems to me that there's something really similar happening in this story to the Just This Is It story, in that the questions are questions that are really based on the sort of discriminating type of thought, and also kind of pointing to the limitations of that.

[43:12]

Right. And the answer is to sidestep it completely. And the answers sort of say, well, no, it's not that there is the most important teaching because then that would assume lesser teaching, or it's not that there's some category that goes beyond category. The answers are all phrased in a sort of different way of pointing to interaction and experience and engagement. rather than sort of objectifying things. Right. So I don't like the word answer. The responses point to some process of engagement, and they point to more questions. So to keep... Or maybe you have... At some point you might have all the answers. You might solve all your problems. It's possible. That could happen sometime. give you their problems.

[44:14]

And new situations arise. And then what does it mean to stay close to them? So yeah, it's about being alive. If we have all the answers, that's called death.

[44:26]

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