I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. This morning is the first day of our three-day labor day sasheen. So it's, I think, rather appropriate to sit us in on Labor Day. It's hard to say whether it's work or not. Labor Day is to celebrate the common person's So... And Sashin is to touch reality.

[01:18]

So there's an appropriate koan that I want to comment on for the Sashin. This koan, number 40 in the booklet record, is familiar to many of you, and I've talked about it before. It's called Nonsense Flower, Mr. Nonsense Peony. So in the introduction, Master Engo introduces the subject, and he says, when the action of the mind is stopped and swept away, the iron tree will bloom.

[02:25]

Can you demonstrate it? Even a crafty fellow will become a cropper here. Even if he excels in every way, he will have his nostrils pierced. Where are the complications? See the following. And that leads to the main subject. And the main subject, Master Satchel says, Riku Taifu, while talking with Nansen, said, Joe Hoshi said, Heaven and Earth and I are of the same root. All things and I are of one substance. Isn't that absolutely fantastic? Nansen pointed to a flower in the garden and called Taifu to him and said, people these days see this flower as though they were in a dream.

[03:29]

Then Setso has a verse, and in his verse he says, hearing, seeing, touching and knowing are not one and one. Mountains and rivers should not be viewed in the mirror. The frosty sky and the setting moon at midnight, with whom will the serene waters of the lake reflect the shadows in the cold? So in Ngo's introduction, First he says, when the action of the mind is stopped and swept away, the iron tree will bloom. The iron tree is a kind of metaphor for absolute reality. The sun. The dark side of dark and light.

[04:39]

there are no distinguishing marks. So this is the symbol for Absolute Reality, where you don't see the distinguishing marks of phenomena. It's the black pool from which everything sprouts, but has no distinguishing characteristics. So he says, when the action of the mind is stopped and swept away, the iron tree will bloom. In other words, the actions of the mind, meaning no attachment to views or ideas about reality.

[05:54]

In other words, when we stop dreaming, then we come to this place. Then he says, can you demonstrate it? This is the place of Zazen. So when we sit Zazen correctly, we are in that place. When the iron tree blooms, it means when things come to life. The iron tree's blooming is the world's coming to life. When you get up from Zazen, the whole world comes to life.

[07:05]

And you see a blade of grass, and the blade of grass really comes to life. There's no separation. between seeing and grasp. Because in tsazin, we presume our root nature, which is the same as the root nature of the grasp. So when we see the blade of grass after zazen, we see the grass from the inside out, and the grass sees us from the inside out, because we eat at the root. So he says when the action of the mind is stopped, when the action of

[08:16]

attachment to views and partiality are cut off, then everything appears in its true form. And the iron tree will bloom. Can you demonstrate it? He says, even a crafty fellow which means someone who takes care of other people's crops. In other words, someone who doesn't have their own plot. Someone who follows others around and doesn't have their own sense of reality. And even a crafty fellow will become a cropper here. Even someone who is very advanced at this point will lose their nostrils.

[09:25]

Even if he excels in every way, he will have his nostrils pierced. That means if you have your nostrils pierced, then you can put a ring in and someone can lead you around. So these two sentences go together. is someone who still has to be under the domination of someone else. Someone who is not really free yet. Who doesn't have their own authority. So the purpose of Zen practice is to see with your own eyes and understand with your own mind and have your own authority, so that no one can take that away from you. So this is what he's talking about here.

[10:27]

Seeing reality with your own eyes. Having your own authority, which no one can dispute. So he says, Where are the complications? See the following. So this leads us into the main case. In the main subject, he says, Riku, Riku was, I'll call him by the name Riku. Riku Taifu, while talking with Nansen, said, Joho, she said, Heaven and Earth and I are of the same root. All things and I are of one substance. Isn't that absolutely fantastic? And Mount Sinai said, well, come over here. Take a look at this flower. He said, people of these days see this flower as if they were in a dream.

[11:35]

That's the end of the case. Riku was a government official. He actually was a quite famous government official in China. This is around the 8th century. And he had the job of overseeing many principalities. He was the governor of many states. And Nansen was his teacher. And he was quite an advanced student of Zen, actually. In the story, they make him Joe Hoshi.

[12:46]

Joe Hoshi's Chinese name is Seng Chao. He's more known as Seng Chao. And Seng Chao was a disciple of Kumarajiva. And Kumarajiva was the Indian scholar who made translating from Sanskrit into Chinese possible. And Kumarajiva And his crew translated the Indian sutras and texts into Chinese in about the 5th century, or maybe the 6th century, I don't know, quite early. And Kumarji was a very famous scholar. And Tseng Chau was one of his disciples. He had four disciples who were called the Four Sages of China. And Tseng Chau, interestingly, two stories about him.

[13:53]

One is that he was so pious that when the emperor asked him to marry one of the court ladies, he refused. And the emperor said, well, if you refuse the emperor's orders, you have to be beheaded. So he said, OK, I'll be beheaded, but just give me a few weeks to finish my writing. And the other story is that he was rather neglectful of the precepts and he had ten concubines. Sometimes it's kind of interesting to hear this other story.

[14:56]

I thought he was neglectful of the precepts. Sometimes the ancients will change a story in order to cover up some problem. And then people read it that way in history. So we don't know. But it's nice to see both of these stories and wonder which one is true. So, but we do have Seng Cho's writings and they're very profoundly deep and very influential in the history of Chinese Buddhism. And Seng Cho was had a sudden awakening when he was reading Vimalakirti's sutra, where it comes to the place where Vimalakirti is... I have a quote here.

[16:04]

Vimalakirti says, the ultimate person is empty and hollow, without form. None of the myriad things are not his own doing. Who can understand that myriad things are his own self? And this is where Sancho was awakened. And Sekito Kisen was awakened when he read Sancho's All Things and I Are of the Same Root. So there's this relationship. And then Sekito wrote the Sango Kari, based on this understanding. So you begin to see how all these things are somewhat connected. So anyway, to get back to the story, this was Riku, and this was Sengchow, or Joe Hoshi.

[17:12]

And Joe Hoshi said, in his treatise, Heaven and Earth and I are of the same root. All things and I are of one substance. Isn't that fantastic? Isn't it? Fantastic means kind of unbelievable or crazy. So it has the feeling that Nonsen is kind of criticizing Riku for his intellectual understanding. He's saying, you seem to understand Riku's statement, but do you understand the reality of this flower? Do you understand the reality of this flower and you having the same root?

[18:18]

So, it looks like Riku is dreaming and Nansen is seeing reality. So, it's saying, seems to be saying, we have dreaming on one side and reality, seeing reality on the other side. as if dreaming and reality are two different things. There are all kinds of dreaming. There's dreaming in sleep, and there's dreaming in wakefulness. We have night dreams, and we have day dreams. And we have dreams, as a matter of fact, we live in a dream. This is called the world of dreams, the world of floating clouds, actually, where everything is constantly changing and we're dreaming our life.

[19:36]

So actually this world is called the world, the floating world, or the world of dreams. And where is the reality within the dreams? So Nansen is putting out the dream aspect of his understanding. But Nansen and Riku are both dreaming. I'm not saying he's dreaming the dream of reality. His friend is just dreaming. So, within the dream is reality, and with reality, within reality is the dream.

[20:48]

Strictly speaking, in a dualistic sense, we can separate reality from the dream. We can say that reality is the absolute sense of withdrawal from dreaming. When you withdraw from dreaming, you enter absolute reality. when you're asleep and you can't get out of your dream, but somebody comes and wakes you up and says, wake up. So this is Nansen and Riku. Nansen saying, wake up, wake up, it's just a dream. But what does Riku wake up to as reality? How does he see this flower? as real.

[21:53]

What is the reality of the flower? And what is the reality of Riku? What is the reality of Nansen? How is it different to see the flower as a real flower than as a dream? or an idea or a concept. So Nansen or Rikku, perhaps Rikku is just not aware. If we really want to see something in its reality, we have to be the reality ourself.

[23:04]

To see something as real, we have to be real. Because when we see the flower, what do we see? When we see the post or the pillar, what do we see? When we look at each other, what do we see? When we bow in this direction, what do we bow to? So to withdraw from our dream is to wake up.

[24:24]

When we siddhasan, we sit with the intention of waking up. So waking up means to wake up from what? A dream. But while we sit, we start to dream. You notice that when you sit, even though you sit to wake up, you dream. So then when you realize that you're dreaming, then you're waking up. The moment you realize you're dreaming, you're waking up. So waking up and dreaming are two sides of our life. But some of us, are always dreaming and never waking up. When you wake up, you realize, I was dreaming. I am dreaming.

[25:27]

Even though I was dreaming, I'm waking up from this dream that I was dreaming and now I am dreaming another dream. This is enlightenment. Enlightenment, or waking up, is to realize the dream. But to just be in the dream and not realize that it's a dream is called delusion. In this world of dreams, it's very hard to wake up from the dream or to sustain an awakening from the dream. In Zazen, there's nothing else to do but wake up from the dream. So these are the two sides. Either we can continue to dream, or we can continually wake ourself up from the dream, and dream the enlightened dream instead of the deluded dream.

[26:34]

The enlightened dream is realization of dreaming, to know what is it that we're doing? So, to see the flower as it really is, to see our mind as it really is, our mind flower as it really is. People today see this mind flower, this mind flower. So, Setso in his verse says, Hearing, seeing, touching, and knowing are not one and one.

[27:52]

Seeing, hearing, touching, and knowing. These are the ways that we feel the world. Seeing, hearing, touching and knowing are not one and one, meaning the objects that we see, hear, feel and touch are not one and distinct from the one who touches, sees, feels. The dream, dreaming, an act of separation, in this sense. To dream, in this sense, is to cut ourself off from or to separate from the reality of ourself.

[29:01]

Because the reality of ourself is everything is myself. The true self of everything is myself. So to see a flower in its reality is to realize that at the root, the flower and myself are not different. Yet the flower is the flower and myself is the flower. And myself is myself. This is me. That's the flower. At bottom, we come from the same root. We grow from the same place. When the flower is expressed as a flower, and this person is expressed as this person, So when we meet, we meet at the root.

[30:15]

This is to see the flower as reality, not as a dream. The dream is to see the flower as an object, just dreaming about what it is. If we take a flower apart and analyze it, Even though we analyze all the parts and classify them and see how they work together, still, you can't dissect it and find the root. No matter what you take apart, you can't find the root. But we can meet through our intuition. Intuition means directly meeting.

[31:18]

And in order to really meet, we have to take all the unnecessary stuff away, which clouds our vision. So that's why he says we have to go beyond thinking and attachment to partial beings. As soon as we name it a flower, then it becomes a dream, a thought. So, it's possible to touch things.

[32:27]

In reality, in zazen, it allows us to do this. But even in zazen, Zazen is a kind of dream, dreaming. But dreaming and waking, you know, when we retreat into Zazen, body and mind fall away and it's just direct intuition. And then when we enter the world, activity, we enter the world of dreaming. But the difficult part is to know this is dreaming.

[33:34]

We have to enter the world of dreams. We have to continually enter the world of dreams. without being pulled around by the nose, as he says. Without the ring in the nose, if you can enter the world of dreams without the ring in the nose, I will be that kind of person. To enter the world of dreams without being caught by the dreams, not being deluded by the dream. So in his poem, Setcho says, hearing, seeing, touching and knowing are not one and one.

[34:39]

Mountains and rivers should be viewed in the mirror, should not be viewed in the mirror. Viewed in the mirror means to have an idea about reality. When you see something in the mirror, it's a second-hand look. It's not directly seeing. It means the subject is a subject, and the object is an object for the subject. That's second-hand. view, which we do so much. Even though we say, I'm looking with my own eyes, we're really seeing it secondhand. Because we have veils over our eyes, veils of words and ideas, concepts, prejudices, notions.

[35:48]

It's hard to see clearly. And then he says, the frosty sky and the setting moon at midnight. This is like a view, a picture of unity. When everything is unified, when our mind is unified, it has this refreshed feeling. The frosty sky and the setting moon at midnight. Cool. With whom will the serene waters of the lake reflect the shadows of the cold? Who will be able to see in this way? He said, you should be able to. Seeing.

[37:03]

Seeing is, there are various levels of seeing. There's seeing which is just directly seeing without any thinking. And then there's seeing which, after directly Perceiving makes a picture, makes a comment, makes a category, puts it into place. And then there's seeing, or consciousness, which elaborates. categorizing, and the name, and the recognition.

[38:08]

And pretty soon, as each consciousness elaborates, you get further and further away from direct and touching. But this kind of analysis If you just stop doing that, it's very hard to operate in the world with people and with things. So it's necessary to have this kind of complex consciousness. But the problem is we get so enmeshed in the complexity of consciousness that we forget about Directed touching. Directly perceiving that moment of just pure reality without any separation.

[39:21]

So we set up and invent the world according to the necessity for separation. We take a whole piece of cloth. This is actually the way clothes are made. We take a whole piece of cloth, and then we cut it up into little pieces, and shape them, and sew them all back together again, according to our idea. And originally, you have a whole piece of cloth. And then, moment by moment, we cut it into shapes and patterns, and sew it back together as clothes. All kinds of material world can do this, and we do it with our mind. And that's necessary, but it's also necessary to see that it's all one whole piece of cloth.

[40:27]

So St. Joe says, Heaven and Earth and I are the same root. All things and I are of one substance. How do you realize that? Incarcerous.

[41:42]

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