Good evening, everyone. Welcome. So for new folks, I'm Taigen Dan Layton, the teacher here at Ancient Dragon Zen Gate. And yesterday morning, I returned from a six-month sabbatical thanks to the board and to everyone who kept Ancient Dragon going for those six months. I'm happy to be back. Grateful for, well, this wonderful development and maturity of the Sangha that allowed that. And also, in the middle of the sabbatical, we had Dharma transmission ceremonies for two new teachers, Nyozan Eric Schutt, who's not here tonight, but was here yesterday, and Aishan Nancy Easton. Hi, Aishan. So also another indication of our maturity as a Sangha.

[01:04]

So returning now. I want to start by focusing on Dogen's basic teachings of practice. Dogen was the 13th century founder of our tradition of Soto Zen. So I'm going to be talking about him next Sunday. And during the three-day sitting, three-day seshin, the following weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I'll talk more about that in the announcements. But also, over the next months, we'll be talking at least some of the time about some of the Japanese Buddhist roots and just Japanese cultural roots before Dogen, which I think are important parts of our practice, not so much spoken of in American Zen. So I started talking about that yesterday.

[02:08]

So this has to do with the Buddhist schools in Japan before Zen and before the other schools that started in the 1200s when Zen started, the Nichiren school and the Pure Land schools, but before that there were The Kagon, or Flower Ornament School, the Shingon, or Vajrayana School, the Tendai School, these all came from China, but also the Japanese poetic and aesthetic background, which I think is very important as a background to our practice and teaching tradition. So I want to talk about some of that. Because I think it's, and not about the history or philosophy of that, but how it informs our practice kind of physically, poetically. So I started this yesterday, and I talked yesterday about dreams in Japanese Buddhism.

[03:13]

And I'll just review that a little bit. Most of you weren't here. So I started by talking about a Japanese monk named Saigyo who was He lived 1118 to 1190. Dogen was born in 1200. So he was from the previous period, a Tendai monk, very famous for his poetry. He wandered around Japan, wrote lots of poems about the moon, a favorite subject in Japan. People go out and stare at the moon. The full moon, but all of the moon. How many of you know when was the last full moon? Maybe a couple, few of you, but everybody in Japan knows when the full moon is. So still, anyway. So I'm not going to go over everything I talked about yesterday, but there was one poem where Saigyo talks about a dream that he had where

[04:16]

A priest, he'd been asked to submit a poem to a poetry collection, and he had felt some reluctance. And he had a dream in which a priest, an old teacher of his, and a current poet had a discussion. In the dream, they had encouraged him to submit his poem, so he did. And he wrote a poem about that. Part of the understanding in medieval Japanese culture and in Japanese Buddhism was that dreams are part of our consciousness, and they respected dreams as not just something to interpret, but as part of our awareness. So I'm citing this from a wonderful book by a scholar named William LaFleur, who's now passed away, but a book called The Karma of Words.

[05:30]

So just to read a little bit of what he says about some of this. Let's see, which parts did I want to look at? Yeah, he talks about... Yeah, that... that in the opinion of large numbers of Buddhists, people's capacity for dreaming pose serious questions about the nature of reality. questions that were more philosophical than psychological. Dreams raised questions about the stability and reliability of what we ordinarily regard as quote-unquote reality of the world we experience when we awake. So they didn't see dreams as, you know, we sometimes think of dreams as delusions and awakening as reality.

[06:39]

And we try to get rid of the world of delusion and get to the world of awakening. And I'll talk about that more next Sunday in terms of Dogen's teaching of Genjo Koan. But in Japanese Buddhism in general, and particularly in Japanese poetry and aesthetics, there's this awareness, and this goes back to Buddhist philosophy, but there's this awareness of this continuum of consciousness. So the reality status of ordinary waking consciousness was radically lowered by placing it on a continuum with dreaming consciousness. This was emphasized through language describing the fact that contrary to our hopes and projections, all phenomena and relationships we experience in our daily lives are bound to disappear with time. So this is one of the things we learn doing practice, that everything changes, everything is impermanent.

[07:46]

Things change. I'm sure you've noticed that if you're paying attention. and any acquaintance with the prose and poetry of the Heian period, the long period before Dogen, reveals that it is replete with references to all things of this world as in reality as, quote, fleeting as a dream. So this sense of the dream as actually an opening to reality. So what is reality? becomes a question. So there's another poem by Saegyo that I'll read. This is in the traditional form of five-line poetry. Since the real world seems to be less than really real, why need I suppose the world of dreams is nothing other than a world of dreams?

[08:51]

I'll read it again. Since the real world seems to be less than really real, why need I suppose the world of dreams is nothing other than a world of dreams? So this questions our whole sense of reality. And I think this is valuable in terms of our zazen, in terms of our practice. Our zazen, you know, formal zazen as we're doing, sitting in zendo, but also sitting upright, walking upright, our zazen mind and heart as we walk into our life in the world. in Chicago, in our everyday activity. What is reality? And what does that mean? And how do we know reality? How do we see what is real? And is there something that is reality? Is there some ultimate reality, actually? So when we're sitting, as you all just experienced, sometimes,

[10:01]

You know, there's thoughts. So maybe some of you didn't have any thoughts in the last period of Zazen, I don't know. But thoughts come and go. And sometimes we have sleepy or dreamy thoughts. And part of the practice of paying attention is to pay attention even when we're sleepy. Even in the middle of dreams, can you be upright and present and aware? And it's not that there's some right awareness, some true mindfulness, that's the supreme ultimate reality, but actually to be present. And again, in Dogen's Genjo Koan that I'll talk about next Sunday, he talks about this, to be present right through delusion, to be present right through awakening. How do we be upright and present in all of that? So this dream practice that's part of Japanese Buddhism before Dogen, And I'll just say a little bit more about that.

[11:07]

Again, I talked about it much more yesterday. But William LaFleur says, Sagya's trusting the contents of his dreams as genuine reality was a way of drawing practical benefit from a long tradition in Asian Buddhism and from fairly sophisticated discussions in contemporary Buddhist circles concerning the relationship of illusion to reality. So there is a continuum of awareness that includes what we might call illusion, that includes what we might call reality, that is not judging of some ultimate reality necessarily. So there were great Buddhist figures in that period who kept dream journals for long periods. And Keizan, the second founder of Soto Zen after Dogen, a few generations after, actually made decisions based on his dreams.

[12:12]

He built temples based on dreams. He found the sites of temples based on dreams. He ordained priests based on dreams. So anyway, this was the first aspect that I want to talk about, about this quality of Japanese, I could say Japanese Buddhism, but also Japanese aesthetics and Japanese culture and Japanese awareness before Dogen that informed Dogen. So this is also part of Dogen. But the second thing I want to talk about that I'll go into more now tonight, and I hope we have some time for discussion, the whole idea of poetry and literary qualities as opposed to monastic values. This may seem strange to us, especially since we're practicing in this non-residential lay context. But all the forms we use come from this monastic tradition. And there was this idea that one should focus on strict monastic meditative practice, and that poetry and all literary activities were

[13:22]

a distraction from that and really took away from that. So just a couple of references about that. And this was something that bothered Dogen, too, even though even his prose writings are very poetic and beautiful, and he wrote lots of poetry. He worried about, was his poetry a distraction from his true practice? But this goes back before him. So Lafleur talks about this. Once having left life as a householder and taken on monkhood, monks and nuns in the medieval Japan often feared that the whole purpose of that decision would be compromised, perhaps even totally lost, if they were to become deeply involved in writing lyrics and start hankering after the praise, prizes, and prestige lavished on good poets in that era. Poetry was very highly prized in the Heian period before Dogen.

[14:26]

So there were great poets and court poets and everybody wrote poetry, all the literate people. It was part of the culture. So was that a problem for people who really wanted to seriously do spiritual practice? Still, in what is here defined as the medieval period, scholarship and learning were largely carried on in Buddhist monasteries. It was then an era in which the Buddhist works had an edge and importance that we usually refer to as the inside work. And then the literary was outside. That's maybe not relevant to our current situation where we value spiritual literature, and we don't see that necessarily as a conflict.

[15:29]

But just to say that that's part of what was the background of Japanese culture. A couple of other aspects. One of them, more relevant to us maybe, that was very important in the period before Dogen was what could be called syncretism. And this was very interesting in Japanese Buddhism. This is the way in which, well, for Japan, Buddhism was combined with Confucianism, which came from China but was the basic Chinese culture and was part of Japanese culture too. It was combined with Taoism, which was also part of Japanese culture, and it was also very much combined with what we now call Shinto, which was the native Japanese spirituality. And one of the ways in which that was done formally was through what's called Honji Suijaku, in which they associated particular Buddhas and Bodhisattvas with native spirits.

[16:46]

So this actually continued up until modern times, and still in many Buddhist temples in Japan and Shinto shrines in Japan. It was actually outlawed during the Meiji Restoration when Western ideas came in. They wanted to separate Buddhism from Shinto, but there was a way in which major Japanese native spirits were associated with particular Buddhist bodhisattvas. So, for example, Hachiman, who is an important Japanese spirit, or Inari, were seen as exemplars of particular bodhisattvas or Buddhas, and they were combined. And this had to do with not just nature spirits, but places too. So famous spiritual sites, there were many Japanese mountains that have been considered sacred sites in Japan going way back before Buddhism.

[17:50]

But then they were associated with particular Buddhist bodhisattvas or even with sutras. There are mountain ranges where they have mapped on the Lotus Sutra, for example. So this combination of local Japanese spirits with these traditional Buddhas and Bodhisattvas that came from India is an interesting thing. I'll read some more, and I think I'll come back to how it's relevant to us, but just to read a little bit about that. The temper of the times was to be as synthetic and syncretic as possible. Great effort was expended in harmonizing Shinto, Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist perspectives. The ancient practices of indigenous Shinto and the supported doctrines of Buddhism especially were seen as fully compatible. And deities of ancient Japan were understood to have been local manifestations

[18:55]

underlying Buddhist reality. So this was how Buddhism had existed, the underlying reality of Buddhism had existed in Japan. And they looked at various, well, so some of the Buddhist leaders in early Japan tried to combine them, but then gave Buddhism the highest value. So there were various versions of this. But I would say that this kind of combination is relevant to how Buddhism is in American Buddhism. because we're also involved in combining these Buddhist teachings about the nature of reality with Western teaching, Western psychology, Christian ethics, engaged spirituality, socially engaged spirituality in the West, and that's a very much part of how American Buddhism is taking form.

[20:03]

So that's that kind of similar process. And Buddhism, as it's traveled through different cultures, from India to Tibet to China to Korea and Vietnam to Japan, and now in America, is always kind of combined with what's going on in the culture it comes to. So that was what was happening in Japan in the period before Dōgen, and it influenced Zen in lots of ways. What I'm talking about is not that Japanese culture is what we're practicing, but that these underlying roots of Japanese culture in our practice are part of what we can see as informing how we can practice Zen as Americans. The last thing I wanted to mention is the traditional teaching that goes back again before Dogen,

[21:05]

But it's very important in Dogen's teaching called in Japanese, hongaku, which could be translated as fundamental awakening. And this has to do with Buddha nature. So this is the, Dogen talks about this a lot in his teaching and in the teaching we study here. But this is that we assume that part of the nature of reality is this awakening. It's not that that we are trying to find some new reality, or some new, or that Buddha is something new that we have to discover. But that actually, awakening is the way things is. That Buddha is already here, and we need to open, and that our practice is about opening ourselves to that. And Dogen talks about Buddha going beyond Buddha. that this is an ongoing process.

[22:08]

It's not about reaching some great state of Enlightenment as a goal, and that's it, and then we're finished. It's this ongoing process just because everything is changing. So how do we do this practice of ongoing awakening? This was part of Japanese Buddhism and Japanese culture even before Dogen. So one of the texts that's important in East Asian Buddhism, and this is particular to East Asia, actually, a text called The Awakening of Faith. which was actually created in China and all of this stuff came from China but then it was transformed in Japan in a Japanese way. But just to talk a little bit about this and then I want to have some discussion questions. Hangaku, this fundamental awakening, expressed the insight that the nature of awakening or satori, usually translated as enlightenment or realization, is of something already in existence rather than envisioned as a future possibility.

[23:23]

It's not something that we will figure out in the future. It's not something we have to, you know, spend time thinking about or figuring out. So he references here the awakening of faith, this important text from early Chinese Buddhism. It was important in East Asia, along with many other texts. It begins with the assumption that it is of fundamental importance to move from the state of ignorance about reality to that of enlightened knowledge of it, just to awaken to this reality. And again, as I was saying before, this reality is, it's not that there's one ultimate reality, it's a fluid process of reality. Since one of the principal characteristics of the enlightened mind is that it sees reality without two-ness, that is, free of the lens of our usual differentiating consciousness. The very distinction between ignorant mind and enlightened mind is itself problematic and needs to be overcome.

[24:31]

Since it postulates an enlightened mind somewhere in a place or time completely removed from where I am at present, this distinction must be a total projection. So to think that there's some enlightened mind somewhere else, that's a delusion. Of course, we have to awaken to that delusion. So he mentions the founder of Shringam Buddhism, Kukai, who talked about his emphasis on Sokushin Buddhsu, the enlightenment with this very body. And Dogen talks about something similar. And he goes into more particulars about it. Well, let me talk, let me just read one little bit more. Well, part of this is also, Dogen talks about this very much, the awakening that's part of the nature of everything, that even plants and trees are in possession of the Buddha nature.

[25:42]

In this way of thinking, the hierarchy implicit in dualism is wiped away and imbalanced value judgments are erased. There's no such thing as mere instrumentalism. So we don't practice as a means to some future end. Our practice is we sit to express Buddha. We sit as Buddha, like Buddha. We walk like Buddha. We try to sit as a way of expressing something that is already here. So philosophically speaking, all phenomena are on an equal footing. There's an absolute equality among all phenomena is another way of expressing this. So I've touched on a lot of different ideas, but this is all part of what was in Japanese Buddhism

[26:47]

before Dogen even, in this period before Dogen and Shinran and Pure Land Buddhism and Nichiren, who started the Lotus Sutra schools in that period. So part of what I wanted, and I'll talk more about all of this, but I want to talk about how this kind of aesthetic sensibility in Japanese Buddhism, in earlier Japanese Buddhism, Buddhism is part of our practice. So that's a lot of stuff. Comments, questions, reflections, responses, please feel free. And a lot of this was expressed in poetry rather than in philosophical discourse, that the way people expressed this was through looking at reality around them and talking about it.

[27:52]

Yes, Jan? or whatever it is that I don't understand why you can't describe a piece of music, or you can't, you really shouldn't try to describe a poem, or I don't know, a painting, except a painting would be easier to describe than a piece of music to me. It's a statue that is, a sculpture that is in the Art Institute. And that was a really interesting discussion because it was a piece of art that you could talk about it, not like an impressionistic

[29:07]

I was thinking of the ancient religion of Ironman. And I don't really know anything about it. But there's a play called Dancing at the Moon Gospel. And in this play, the Catholic priest goes to some foreign country. I don't know. It seemed like it was Africa, someplace in Africa. And what happened was he went to this quote-unquote primitive place and it touched such a heart of him because he was from, you know, he was from the earth of Ireland and he was converted to Catholicism. Yes.

[30:23]

Yes, yes. Yeah, I think that in many native ancient traditions, indigenous traditions, indigenous also meaning in all cultures, there are, I don't know, I could say earth roots or, there's this ancient wisdom. And part of what, so I did this yesterday too. I forgot the closing that I wanted to add, so I'll add this. The point of all this is, what does all this mean today for us? So to look at these roots of this practice that we're doing here, that we got from Suzuki Roshi, bringing it from Japan to California.

[31:36]

How do we face our world? How do we bring our lives alive, how do we use this practice of sitting upright and sitting like Buddha to face the things that are happening in our world, the mass extinctions, the climate breakdown, and so forth, and all the things that various governments are doing. How do we face all that? This practice is not an escape from the reality of our world, the various realities of our world, the mixed realities of our world. How do we each use this practice, not as an escape, but to really face ourselves and the world? So, you know, whether it's from Ireland or from Native American sources or from Japan or China or India or, you know, all of the resources from the earth and and from the traditions of music, and I liked what you were saying about paintings and music.

[32:41]

There are here experts in poetry and music, and maybe there are experts here in painting, I don't know, but I can't say why I love Bach, but something happens. something happens when we see a painting that moves us or listen to music that does something. And we could try and analyze it, but how do we use it to recreate something? So yeah, thank you for that. Write essays on that. You can find out all there is to know about it. Goodbye. Yes, right. You never understand it until you follow along.

[33:47]

Yeah, right. Then you know what it is. Yeah, so anybody else? Comments, questions, responses? Yes, wait. critical theory classes, you wouldn't think of that, but to use them to analyze poetry, especially their concepts of condensation and displacement, where you take what you're talking about and you condense it So how do you approach it?

[35:25]

Yeah, there's a whole, I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned symbols, because the chapter in Lefleur's book that I'm citing has a whole section on symbols, and I'm tempted to look it up, but I won't. But I think part of what he's saying is, basically what he's saying is that in this aspect of Buddhism, symbols are not symbols of something else. They're just what they are. It's like we're not sitting to get to somewhere else, or to be somewhere else, or to find something else. It's just this. But at the same time, we can see things as symbols. So anyway, that's just to throw that in there. So other responses to any of this? We have a little bit more time. Yes, Chris. It's still somehow the experiences before.

[37:41]

Yeah, and then there's like the Zen koans which are, you know, share that quality as does poetry, and yet there are libraries full of commentaries on the koans. Yes, David? A little louder, please. I usually go for teaching. There's a little talk about dreams being similar to passing away. To? Passing away. Passing away being very similar to awareness.

[39:18]

There is there. So I think that I speak to those shared about creating the left-handed and print Japanese culture. Thank you, yeah. Just the point that rather than dismissing non-linear kind of awarenesses, like in dreams, that that's part of our awareness and how do we, without, you know, we don't have to get ahold of it and figure it out and

[40:49]

analyze it necessarily, but just how do we open to a wider, part of Zazen is, and part of our practice is to open to a wider sense of the possibilities of our awareness, new options, anyway. Thank you all for listening to this. I want to continue in the next few months to talk a little more about some of this kind of awareness and cultural expression of early Buddhism and how it might be relevant for us in our practice. So why don't we close formally with four announcements with the four Bodhisattva vows.

[41:37]

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