Good morning, everyone, and welcome. And for new people, I'm Taigen Leighton, the teacher here at Ancient Dragons Zen Game. And we're, many of us, in the middle of a two-month practice period, period of intensified practice, and we're using as inspiration four stories from the Lotus Sutra, one of the, perhaps the most important Buddha scripture in East Asia. And I want to introduce one of them more fully, one of these stories more fully today. This is the strange story from Chapter 11 about the appearance of the treasure stupa. So first I just want to say that this Lotus Sutra has all these interesting, strange,

[01:01]

fantastic stories that are intended as inspiration for bodhisattva practice, for our practice of relieving suffering and helping all beings. So this practice we do of sitting upright and being present, of course, is beneficial for ourselves. We can find some inner calm and settledness and openness. But also, if doing this regularly, and I encourage doing this at least several times a week or daily, you don't have to do it 30 or 40 minutes like we do here, but even 20 minutes, 15 minutes just to have a space in our life to be present and upright. But when we do this regularly, we also begin or deepen our feeling of interconnectedness, that we're deeply connected with all beings, that we're not alone sitting here on our cushion or chair.

[02:02]

Many, many beings contribute to this. So the idea of the bodhisattva is that we are practicing for everyone and that everyone is practicing for us in some ways, sometimes that we don't understand. This particular story shares with a lot of the other stories in the Lotus Sutra and in other bodhisattva sutras a kind of colorful rhetoric. In the Indian imagination, there were vast numbers and vast scales of size and dimension. So this is a kind of aid in going beyond our usual conventional sense of reality. It also has, in the beginning of this chapter and some of the others, talks about many valuable things and this colorful display when the Buddha spoke of jeweled bells and banners and flags and fragrances and gold, silver, lapis lazuli, seashell, agate, pearl, carnelian.

[03:08]

And somebody came to me and said, this sounds like a kind of materialist encouragement to a consumerist, from a consumerist context, we should try and find all this gold and silver and stuff. Well, really this isn't about that. This is, again, this is a story to support our practice. And part of what these ornaments and these vast numbers of Buddhas and bodhisattvas that appear are just to encourage a kind of sense of wonder, a sense of awe, a sense of that which goes beyond our usual way of seeing the world. So I want to just go through the basics of this story in chapter 11, and then some other things I want to talk about related to it somewhat today. But in this story, there's the Buddha and there's all these beings.

[04:10]

And suddenly appears a stupa with all these fancy ornaments. A stupa is a relic of a Buddha, a relic of, so inside, I think they have them in Catholicism too, relics of saints and things like that. The stupa is, so in East Asia, pagodas, you may have seen, are a kind of stupa. There are other forms of that in India and Tibet, but these are where the remains of an ancient Buddha are. And when I lived in Kyoto, I lived right next to a temple that had this big pagoda. There was a stupa for Manjushri, the bodhisattva of compassion, who's sitting in front of the Buddha on our altar and is a kind of archetypal figure. But somehow they had his remains inside this pagoda. Anyway, this great stupa appears and springs up from the earth in front of where the Buddha is speaking the Lotus Sutra, one of his last talks before he passed away.

[05:14]

And it stood up in the air, this stupa. And then, from the midst of this treasure stupa, came a loud voice of praise saying, well done, well done, world-honored Shakyamuni Buddha. For the sake of the great assembly, you are able to teach the wonderful Dharma Flower Sutra, which is the full name of the Lotus Sutra, of great impartial wisdom, the Dharma by which the bodhisattvas are taught and which Buddhas protect and keep in mind. It is just as you say, world-honored Shakyamuni, all that you say is true. So this is 11 chapters into the sutra, and there's this strange stupa that appears and this voice comes from it. And all the assembly, seeing this glorious stupa floating in mid-air and hearing this voice coming from it, it says, we're filled with joy in the Dharma and with wonder at these unprecedented things. So again, the point of all these exalted stories is not to try and have some literal understanding

[06:18]

of them, but to incite this sense of wonder and even joy. So when that had happened, one of the bodhisattvas, whose name is great delight in preaching, said to Shakyamuni Buddha, what is this? Where did this stupa come from, this springing out from the ground, from the earth? And Shakyamuni Buddha, who's the person who lived about 2,500 years ago in what's now northeastern India, said, in this treasure stupa, there is the whole body of a Tathagata. Once in the past, innumerable tens of millions of billions of countless worlds to the east. And in a land named Treasure Purity, there was a Buddha named Abundant Treasures.

[07:22]

When that Buddha was originally practicing the bodhisattva way, he made a great vow saying, after I become a Buddha and then extinct, if there is a place in any land in the universe where the Dharma Flower Sutra is taught, in order that I may listen to it, my stupa will appear there, bearing testimony to the sutra and praising it, saying, well done. So this is really strange. Well, first I want to mention this, in this treasure stupa, there is the whole body of a Tathagata. Tathagata is another name for Buddha. It means one who comes and goes in thusness or suchness. So there's the whole body of a Tathagata. And part of why I like this sutra is it's important in our suttas and tradition that a Japanese 13th century monk, Dogen, who founded this branch of Zen, Soto Zen, that we practice here, loved the Loda Sutra and talked about it a lot. But he had a whole essay in one of his masterworks, Shobo Genzo, where he talked about this whole

[08:27]

body of the Tathagata. And Dogen talks about this in an interesting way. He says that this sutra is the whole body of the Tathagata. The mark of reality of all things in the present time is this sutra. So that's not how we usually think of Zen maybe in America, but this is what Dogen said. And then Dogen relates the sutra and the whole of reality itself to the long-lived Shakyamuni Buddha, which we'll get to, we've mentioned, but that's in chapter 16, who has this very long lifespan. But the point is that, and he talks about how that resulted from the merits of the original bodhisattva practices, but he goes on about this whole body of the Tathagata as the sutra itself and what we are doing by our practice, how we are keeping that alive.

[09:31]

So again, there's a side of Zen that's just kind of very down-to-earth and plain and simple, but in the background is this wondrous, wondrous, strange stuff. So now going back to the part I just read, this Buddha, Abundant Treasures, says that, the Buddha says about him that when he was practicing he made this vow that said, after I become a Buddha and then extinct, and now he's extinct, he's in this stupa, if there's any place in any land in the whole universe where the Dharma Flower Sutra, the Lotus Sutra is being taught, my stupa appears there bearing testimony to the sutra and praising it, saying, well done. So it says this right inside the Lotus Sutra, the text called the Lotus Sutra. So there's lots of really strange things about the Lotus Sutra, and this is one of the more interesting, that right in the middle of the Lotus Sutra they talk about the Lotus

[10:33]

Sutra a lot. So this happens in some of the other, sutra means scripture in Buddhism, so this happens in some of the other Buddhist sutras too, but in the Lotus Sutra it's just kind of way over the top. And here's this ancient Buddha who appears whenever the Lotus Sutra is taught, and he's been doing this for a long time, and he's in this mummy in the stupa. And then the Buddha said, so Shakyamuni is telling the story, he says when that Buddha had finished the Buddha way, and his extinction approaching, he said to his whole assembly of many beings, after my extinction if anyone wants to make offerings to my whole body, again the whole body of the Buddha, they should put up a great stupa, thus throughout all

[11:35]

the whole worlds of the universe and any place at all where someone teaches the Dharma Flower Sutra by his divine powers and the power of his vow, that Buddha has his treasure stupa containing his whole body. And so one of the bodhisattvas said to Shakyamuni Buddha, hey, World Honored One, we want to see this Buddha's body. So at that point the stupa, this reliquary is floating in mid-air with all these jewels around it and it's closed, and then Shakyamuni said this Buddha abundant treasures has taken a vow that whenever his stupa appears in the presence of a Buddha speaking the Dharma Flower or Lotus Sutra, if someone wants me to show my body, I'll let the Buddhas who are embodiments of that Buddha and are preaching the Dharma and the world to the ten directions return together and assemble in one place and my body will appear.

[12:36]

So this keeps getting stranger. So here he's saying that Shakyamuni Buddha, who we know lived around 2,500 years ago in what's now northeastern India, has embodiments of Shakyamuni in many lands and many worlds and they all need to come and appear in order for the Buddha abundant treasures to show himself. So this bodhisattva says to the Buddha, please, we'd like to see the Buddhas who embody you in worship and make offerings to them and pay our respects. So then the Buddha emitted a beam of light from his tuft of white hair, that's kind of what they call the third eye, and in the very beginning of the whole Dharma Flower Sutra this happened and one of the great bodhisattvas said, oh, I know what that is, I've seen that before, he's going to teach the Lotus Sutra now. So this is kind of like a Mobius strip or something, there's all kinds of weird things going on.

[13:37]

Anyway, again the Buddha emits this light from this tuft of white hair and immediately he makes visible all the Buddhas in five million billion myriads of lands to the east, again that way, and all those lands had crystal for their ground and so forth. Anyway, each of these Buddhas in all those lands spoke to their multitudes of bodhisattvas saying let's go to Shakyamuni Buddha's world and make offerings to the treasure stupa of the Buddha Abundant Treasures, so that happens. So again, this is, you know, sometimes people want to hear like practical down to earth instructions about how to practice, and we do that too. But this is something else, this is, again, these are inspirations for how to bring forth this sense of wonder in our practice.

[14:39]

And for the people who are doing the practice period, there are four chapters, four stories we're talking about, and I've asked them all to pick one to focus on, so you don't have to focus on this if this is too wild for you, but I just wanted to let you know about it. So all of these other Shakyamuni Buddhas appear below this treasure stupa, and they assemble together and they're each seated on a lion's seat, and they all want the treasure stupa to open so they can see this ancient Buddha Abundant Treasures. So Shakyamuni Buddha gets up from the seat and goes up into the air, and they all are watching and it says, Shakyamuni Buddha opened the door of the stupa of the Seven Precious Materials with the fingers of his right hand, so I guess he like, like that or something,

[15:41]

and then there came a great sound like the withdrawing of the bar when the gate to a great city is opened, and suddenly the whole congregation saw this ancient Buddha Abundant Treasures on a lion's seat in the treasure stupa, this mummified body, but all in one piece, sitting as though he were in meditation, it says. And they heard him saying, well done, well done, Shakyamuni Buddha, you have preached the Dharma Flower Sutra gladly, which is what I have come to this place to hear. So then what happens in this story is that, so this Abundant Treasures Buddha, this ancient ancient Buddha from, I don't know, some big, from some previous Big Bang or something, you know, it's from a really long time ago, he says to Shakyamuni, he offers his seat, he offers his seat, half a seat to him, and he says, Shakyamuni Buddha, take this seat.

[16:48]

So Shakyamuni Buddha enters the stupa, and he takes half the seat, and they sit together with folded legs, cross-legged. So sometimes you'll see Buddhist images of two Buddhas sitting next to each other. That's always a reference to this story, and what goes on for a long time after, because this is the beginning of, in the Sutra, of what's called the Ceremony in Mid-Air, and it goes through Chapter 22. So most, a large part of the Sutra happens in mid-air. So what happens next is that Shakyamuni Buddha uses his divine powers to bring all of the Great Assembly, humans and heavenly beings and all kinds of beings who've been listening to him talk, tell the Lotus Sutra, he brings them up into the air too, and in a loud voice he addresses them all, saying, Who is able to teach the wonderful Dharma Flower Sutra everywhere throughout this world? Now indeed is the time. Before long, the Tathagata, the Buddha, meaning himself, will enter nirvana.

[17:51]

So that it will last forever, the Buddha wants to entrust this wondrous Dharma Flower Sutra to someone. Okay, so that's the basic story in this chapter, that they're all up in mid-air, and Buddha and Shakyamuni Buddha are Buddha, and Abundant Treasures Buddha are sitting next to each other, and in a way that's the model for what happens during practice period. So in practice period, Douglas, our head student, isn't here today, he'll be back tomorrow morning, tomorrow evening, but in practice period we have the teacher and the head student or Shuso sitting next to each other, and it's a little bit like this scene from the Lotus Sutra, and we have a couple former Shusos here with us. So this is the story, and it's really strange, and what is, so there are many different aspects to talk about about this.

[18:53]

First of all, just the idea that there have been Buddhas before. So we know that Shakyamuni Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, was a human guy who, the story that we have, and there are various stories, we don't know exactly, really, what he said, but he lived in northeast India, he was the son of some kind of king, and had this very sheltered life, and then he realized that people suffer out there, outside his palace, and he left the palace and wandered around, and eventually, you know, he wanted to help relieve suffering, and that's the point of all of this. And we talked about a previous chapter in the Sutra, in Chapter 2, Chapter on Skillful Means, which talks about the single great cause for Buddhas appearing in the world, which is simply to help beings into the path of awakening, to help relieve suffering.

[19:53]

That's the point of all this. How do we enter into the path to, Buddha just means the awakened one, how do we see our own awakening, how do we see this possibility of being present and awake, and I know some of you, when you're sitting Zazen, you know, might be sleepy at times, and your mind might be, your thoughts might be rattling around, but still, to just sit and be present and upright, and pay attention, whatever's going on, lots of thinking, or sleepiness, or some ache in your knee, or your back, or whatever, just to be present and upright, and settle into that. So we each have our own way to be Buddha, we each have our own way to be awake. I can't tell you how to be Buddha, but this is available, and there have been Buddhas,

[20:54]

you know, going way back, and this is one of them, this is this ancient Buddha who always appears whenever the Lotus Sutra is taught. So he's somewhere here. So this is, so part of what's really strange about this sutra, again, is this self-referential aspect that is referring to itself all the time. Right in the Lotus Sutra, it talks about this Buddha who comes to listen to the Lotus Sutra whenever it is preached, and it's been preached long in the past, and it will be preached in the future, and Buddha is asking, who will come back, you know, he asks, who will come back in the future evil age and preach the Lotus Sutra? So we'll be talking more about that, and our responsibility for keeping alive the practice and the teaching.

[21:57]

So there's this, again, this quality of the sutra talking about itself, and especially to the many references to the Lotus Sutra as something expounded many ages ago, or as about to be expounded, or even as hopefully to be expounded in the distant future. So the Lotus Sutra functions within itself, both as a sacred text or scripture, and as a kind of commentary or guidebook to its own use, beyond the literal confines of the written words. How do we appreciate the Lotus Sutra? And in some traditions it becomes a devotional object, but in our tradition, for Dogen, the self-proclamation of the Dharma, of the teaching in the Lotus Sutra, is an aspect of a kind of rhetorical style or style of teaching, rather than some external object. So there are many examples of that. One of Dogen's teachings, so he was in the 13th century in Japan, one of his teachings

[23:02]

in his extensive record, Ehikoroku, which is very short talks, he said, this is the whole talk, he said, this mountain monk has not lectured for the sake of the assembly for a long time. Why is this? On my behalf, the Buddha hall, the monk's hall, the valley streams, the pine and bamboo, every moment endlessly speaks fully for the sake of all people. Have you heard it or not? If you say you heard it, what did you hear? If you say you have not heard it, you are not keeping the precepts. So something about this way of talking about something that is present in ways we don't usually think of, something about this is referred to in this, is brought up in this sense of this self-referential aspect of the sutra, and we can say that it demonstrates

[24:08]

the non-separation of the goals of liberation from the skillful modes of the Buddha. There's this non-duality of purpose and context of the Lotus Sutra as a text that itself represents an enacts veneration of the potential of the world for liberation. So the Lotus Sutra, talking about itself, is in many ways like our Sasana practice. In our tradition from the San Francisco Zen Center and Suki Roshi lineage, we talk about non-gaining mind a lot. It doesn't mean that there are not benefits to the practice, but it means that, well, one way to say it is that the benefits of the practice are not some goals that we have in mind, not what we think they are.

[25:10]

This is not merely another self-help technique, that when we practice, something is happening much deeper, and when people first encounter the Lotus Sutra or other texts like it, it's kind of bizarre, and some of you have had negative reactions to it, and that's understandable. But we're still talking about it. But in some ways, the Lotus Sutra talking about itself is like Sazen. We don't sit Sazen for the sake of something else. We don't do this meditation practice in order to get something somewhere else. We actually are present and feel what it feels like to be here, this body-mind, this morning. So we sit, and whatever's happening, if we have lots of thoughts, if we're troubled by some problem in our life this week, if we have some ache and pain, if we are sleepy

[26:11]

or whatever, just to pay attention to what is actually going on here in each breath, beyond our ideas of who we are, beyond our stories about ourselves and the world and so forth, just to be present. So in some ways, this is like this Lotus Sutra talking about itself. We don't sit Sazen for the sake of something else. We sit Sazen because this meditation, because of this meditation. So there's much more to say about this, but part of this is to actually appreciate this world, even though there's all this highfalutin stuff about these ancient Buddhas and all these colorful jewels and so forth, it's about seeing this concrete stuff in our world as itself the expression of awakening.

[27:15]

So I'm just going to read a little bit I've read before from a wonderful book by a scholar named William LaFleur called The Karma of Words. He says, the narratives of the Lotus Sutra are not a means to an end beyond themselves. Their concrete modes of expression is not chaff to be dispensed with in order to attain a more abstract, rational, or spiritual truth. The Lotus is unequivocal on this point. It says, one may seek in every one of the ten directions, but will find no skillful modes other than the Buddha's. So part of the Lotus Sutra is this very inclusiveness, this very inclusive sense of everything's included. Everyone's included. We sit facing the wall not as a way of hiding from the world or keeping the world out. In this practice, we don't build walls to keep people out who we don't like, foreigners or whomever. We face the wall because it shows us ourselves. It's a window to how we are connected with everyone.

[28:17]

So LaFleur says, this accounts for what may seem to be an inordinate amount of praise directed by the Sutra toward itself, which is a strange thing, you know, this book talking about itself and how wonderful it is. It also implies that within the Sutra there's an unmistakable philosophical move opposite to that in Plato's Republic and Western philosophy, a move to affirm the complete reality of the world of concrete phenomena in spite of the fact that they are impermanent. So this tradition and, you know, going back to India, but even more as it came to Japan, appreciates impermanence, appreciates the beauty of things as they're fading. So I can say more about all of this. And again, the point of the Bodhisattva activity that the Lotus Sutra is encouraging is exactly the relief of suffering.

[29:18]

But I wanted to shift, and today's one of those days I'm going to talk about too much, and sometimes I try and get too much into one talk, and I'm going to do that today, because it's May Day. So I want to mention May Day in the context of Bodhisattva activity. May 1st is known as May Day around the world. We don't know it so much in this country, so I want to talk about that. And this is from an interview by an historian named Peter Leinbaugh, who wrote a book called The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day. And I'll try and bring this back to Bodhisattva activity. But May Day was created as a worker's holiday, and there's actually two different aspects of May Day. Do they have May Day in Sweden? Oh, good. Yeah, well, we don't really celebrate it here so much, but I'm going to talk about that. One aspect of—well, you know, this author, Peter Leinbaugh, is bringing this up, and

[30:21]

he says there's two different stories about May Day, and it's important on this May Day in particular, he says, because on this May Day, people all over the United States are thinking about what is a political revolution, and they're thinking about what is socialism, because one of the presidential candidates has talked about that and talked about the ways in which our ordinary world is not serving people so well. And again, the idea of the Bodhisattva is to be helpful and to relieve suffering for all beings, not just some particular kinds of beings or people from some particular country. So he talks about the first meaning of May Day, which goes back, he says, to agriculture. And this is—May Day goes back to the sun in springtime. So in many cultures, and traditionally in Europe, maybe more in pre-Christian Europe, but throughout Europe also, it's remained that this is—because of springtime, this

[31:25]

is the beginning. The Earth has turned in its relationship to solar energy. Great, thank you. So this is a story of fertility. Winter's over. It's still a little chilly, you know, this morning and yesterday, but the leaves, even in Chicago, the leaves are out in the trees and flowers are out. Winter's over. Summer's upon us. It's the time of fruition and dancing and happiness. So traditionally on May Day, in the earlier form of May Day, there were maypoles, and in America, in 1627, there was one in the Boston Bay, in the colony there, and people danced around the maypole, and the Puritans got very upset and kind of shut it down. But there's this traditional, you know, I want to say pagan, but that has such negative connotations. There's this context of the Earth is alive, and we're going to see that in the Bodhisattva

[32:28]

springing from the Earth in that story. So that's one aspect of May Day. The second aspect of May Day has a lot to do with Chicago. So May Day was also a workers' holiday. And after the American Civil War, workers, women, disabled people felt empowered and thrilled at the victory. Also there was this huge freedom struggle in the Civil War, and then that connected with the ancient May Day story. And people started to agitate for, you know, for income, well, not quite income equality, but for rights for workers. And this began the eight-hour workday movement, and this all centered around Chicago. There were things happening in California, and there were things happening in my hometown

[33:30]

in Pittsburgh. And, you know, the labor movement happened in a lot of places, but Chicago is really a big center of it. So there was an agitation for eight-hour workday, and they said that there should be eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of play. That was the slogan in every day. And this started in Chicago because the McCormick Reaper was created in Chicago by iron molders. So May Day became the celebration of workers' rights. And in 1886, on the first of May, there was a large demonstration at the McCormick factory, and the police, who seemed to always represent the 1% or whatever, shot four workers dead. In response to this police violence, just as we now have the Black Lives Matter movement responding to police violence, there was a meeting in Haymarket Square in Chicago a few

[34:31]

days later on the 4th of May. It was a large demonstration. And sometime later, after most of it had broken up, there was a stick of dynamite thrown. And there was one policeman killed and seven casualties among the workers. And we don't know, historians don't know who threw the dynamite to this day. The police said it was the demonstrators. The demonstrators said it was police provocateur. There's a really wonderful book about this that Niazan lent me after I had escaped California and moved to Chicago nine years ago. It's a book by a man named James Green, who called Death in the Haymarket, and I highly recommend it. It talks all about this. And I'm just mentioning a little bit of this now. But again, this trade union movement was very active in the early 1880s. It developed in the late 1870s in Chicago.

[35:33]

And this book has maps of different parts of Chicago and where all of these things happened. It's a really wonderful book. But as a result of this dynamite at this rally protesting the police violence, they rounded up not people who were even there, but eight people who were leaders of the labor movement. And they were charged with murder and found guilty. And four of them were hanged in November 11, 1887. And not to go into too much detail, but I felt like I should say something on May Day. How many of you know who Albert Parsons was? More or less that... Anyway, so I wanted to say something about Albert Parsons, because I think he was a great bodhisattva and he lived in Chicago. And he was one of the four that was hanged. And he was a very eloquent guy.

[36:36]

He actually was from Texas and he'd fought in the Confederacy. But after the Civil War, he worked in Texas against the Ku Klux Klan on behalf, during Reconstruction, on behalf of newly freed African Americans. And he got into a lot of trouble and they forced him to leave and he came to Chicago. And if you look at that book or if you look him up in Google, he's a very eloquent guy talking about how he didn't belong to one country, that his country was the whole world, that he spoke on behalf of working people. He actually, he was arrested, but then escaped and was in hiding successfully in Wisconsin. But he decided to just return for the trial, so he walked into the trial the first day and anyway, ended up being hanged. And his speeches are really eloquent. Some of the speakers at the trial said, the day will come when our silence will be more

[37:53]

powerful than the voices you throttle. And throughout the world, especially in Mexico, but in England and Ireland and France and Italy, that event of them, of these guys being killed, became part of May Day and the eight-hour workday movement and the 40-hour week and the weekend we owe to these guys. So I wanted to mention him because I just think he was a great guy. And what happened later is that May Day, well, Peter Lindbaugh says, the rulers of the United States, the 1%, the slavocrats, the Gilded Age capitalists back then, the billionaires and police forces behind them, at the end of the 19th century got together and separated May Day from that workers' struggle. So President Grover Cleveland in 1894 was forced by labor unions to have some kind of

[38:55]

labor day, so they moved it to September 1st, which is Labor Day, and we have that in America now. And then May 1st, President Eisenhower decided May 1st he would call Law Day. So anyway, a little bit of history, a little bit of Chicago history. The point of bringing this up, though, also in terms of the Lotus Sutra and these bodhisattva activities is that we have bodhisattva precepts or ethics that have to do with benefiting all beings, and the Lotus Sutra is very much about that, including all beings, not just the very wealthy, not just Americans, not just people with certain skin color, not just people of certain ethnicity, that we're about benefiting all beings. And to see this sense of the possibility and the reality of awakening happening in many, many different times, in many different places, even in, I don't know if it's accurate

[40:00]

technically to call it previous Big Bangs, but that's how I think of it, it's previous cycles of world history before Shakyamuni Buddha, there were Buddhas, and here's one of them who appears in the Lotus Sutra and appears whenever these stories about bodhisattvas are spoken, it says right inside the Lotus Sutra. So this is the background of this practice, of just being present and sitting and enjoying our breath, our inhale and exhale, and being upright and seeing what it is like to be the person on your cushion or chair here this morning. And we do this together with everyone. So each of you, each of us is a product of many, many, many beings, many beings we don't even know. Of course we can remember parents and siblings and teachers and friends, but there are many beings we don't even know who contributed.

[41:01]

So if you have an eight-hour workday, you can thank Albert Parsons and those other guys. So okay, that was too much to fit into one talk, but oh well. We have time for one or two comments or questions, if anyone has one. Yes, Bo? I just wanted to mention Albert Parsons' wife, Lucy Parsons, who survived him, I think she was African-American too. I think she lived for many years in Chicago, then continuing the labor activism, social activism. So she was like a big part of his life, and then I think lived maybe into her 70s or 80s. Thank you for mentioning, I meant to mention Lucy Parsons. She was also a great bodhisattva, and yeah, for decades after he was executed.

[42:03]

And I think she was part African-American, part Native American, and they got married in Texas, but she came with him to Chicago. Thank you. Other comments or responses or questions about anything? Hey, Alex. I was just going to share, in this chapter, it looks as if it's early. I think, you know, my initial reaction to reading it was probably one, which was, I don't know. But having got past that, you know, part of my motivation for reading is actually the idea that this challenged my notion of Buddhism. Good, good. A dialogue, which is I guess, emotionally, a quick, easy explanation of a thing, or

[43:08]

a reading about what the lesson is, and this kind of challenges that notion, which I like. I like the challenge. Good. For me, it's like, I mean, it's like anime, but it's serious. Yes. Yeah, I've been waiting for George Lucas or Spielberg or somebody to do a movie of the Lotus Sutra, but I think it's too far out. The special effects haven't caught up yet. So thank you. Yeah. Yes? Oh, yes. Good. And your name is Ashley? Hi, I'm Tykin. I'm new to this, from what I guess I'm understanding from what you're saying, is this easily reconciled with the universe theory that you're talking about, all these infinite creatures in the

[44:10]

future and the past, these kind of infinite creatures. Cheesy. I mean, this is the most serious possible way, but are we talking about like alien Buddhas or, you know? Bring it on. Yeah. So we have a physicist here and I'm interested in modern physics, but I don't really understand it. But yeah, I think all of modern science is catching up in some ways with Mahayana Buddhism and this sense of parallel universes and different contexts and different dimensions and who knows where these Buddhas and Bodhisattvas come from. It's maybe not just a distant solar system or galaxy, but maybe, anyway, yeah. So part of what these texts do is to, as Alice was saying, get us out of our usual sense of Buddhism or anything else as just something that we do to get something else.

[45:13]

If you come, you know, it's true that if you do this practice, you know, that it develops some sense of calm and some sense of settledness and openness and, you know, this kind of text also appeals to the imagination and a sense of spaciousness. And it's not that we should get rid of our rational, discriminating, scientific mind. That can be very useful and helpful for all kinds of good purposes. But this is about a deeper reality that goes beyond what we think we know. So yes, whatever you bring in from, you know, anywhere. Yeah. Thank you. Good. Yeah, you're in the right place. Yes. Go ahead. There's an earlier part in Lotus Sutra, and I've heard variations of this from other, not as mystical, interpretations of that. There's nothing harder to do than to sit under a cushion.

[46:16]

You know, try to move around, and that's not going to work nearly as difficult as what you're doing right now. And I find the Oquan treasures come in every time he hears Lotus Sutra being preached. What makes me think of the Heart Sutra, you know, beyond, like, you know, no life, no birth, no death. This guy is coming beyond the consequences of death. Sure. Whenever he hears it, beyond spacing, I come and listen to this, and show up, sit down. He's already sitting, always sitting for all this time. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. They come and listen to Lotus Sutra. And he has an amazing inspirational image to use for my own practice. Good. Well, that's the point of this, is, you know, these weird stories, the only point, the only reason to look at them is inasmuch as they help us support our own practice. Yeah, and in some ways, just, so the Lotus Sutra talks about the value of just reading

[47:17]

or reciting a line of the Lotus Sutra, and our sitting is the same way. And Dogen talks about it that way, just to sit and be present and not try and get something else from it, but to actually enjoy the next breath is like the Lotus Sutra. And we'll talk more about that during, as we proceed in the practice period. For those who were in it formerly or not, just, you're welcome to come and listen.

[47:44]

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