good morning everyone yes repeat for the offering at my altar behind me that you most of you saw I do nine bows I bow three times to the Buddha image which is right above my head I bow to my parents there and then I bow to my Dharma teachers Bernie and Sojin or Tetsugan and Mel. We stand on the shoulders of Giants as the saying goes it's been

[01:07]

purported to say that Suzuki Roshi said that I have to spend a long time on preparing my lectures because English is not my first language and this morning when I was preparing while I was preparing for this talk I realized that English is not my first language either it's the only language that I have to share my thoughts and feelings with you but it's not my first language it's actually not any of our first languages our first language is experience and the manifestation of those experiences are brought out by talking and speaking so I hope that today's talk is clear and helpful and encouraging to you all and I

[02:12]

invite you to ask questions of me of Hosan Sensei or Abbott here at Berkeley as a senator and the Sangha the teachers that are here practicing and people who are yet to be formal teachers who are practicing here because everyone has their own experience that can be shared and expressed and helpful to others today is my day to share with you today I want to talk about Buddha nature it's a word that is often spoken about but it's hard to understand or grasp simply

[03:14]

put it's a capacity to become a Buddha to become awake in fact it's our birth right we're born with it there's an expression nature or nurture is it nature that's driving or is it nurture that's driving so I like us to think about nurturing our nature nurturing our Buddha nature I believe that's what we do here on the cushion and in our practice we're nurturing this nature of Buddha to come forth we we don't get Buddha nature we don't have Buddha

[04:16]

nature we are Buddha nature in the first couple centuries of the last millennium there was a sutra called the Maha Parinirvana Sutra and in it there's a description of a being called an Enchantika and Enchantika is someone who will never attain Buddhahood or doesn't wish to become a Buddha some years later there were remnants of this sutra that were found in a cave presumably and they read that all beings have Buddha nature this is a little different you

[05:19]

don't we have or do we have I think most importantly this speaks to the tenets of Buddhism which didn't come down from a mountain in tablet form carried by an old man with it in a beard with a beard okay kitty cat the practice comes to us from our experience and shared experience and unpacking that experience and exploring and understanding what it means to be Buddha so it's a living dynamic practice it's not something old that we're just kind of parenting so the original authors of this Maha Parinirvana Sutra originally were focused

[06:19]

on stupa worship stupas are these burial mounts that you will come across in East Asia India and such and there's a veneration for these spaces these places holy places not to it like in our country going to a graveyard look back out here outside my apartment the memorial garden they're not stupas as in mounds but they're the relics of the ancestors that came before us some of us have the privilege to practice with these ancestors in this lifetime so the end these early compilers of the sutra were focused on the external focusing on the relics and stupas of the ancestors and then at some point it started their

[07:22]

orientation and thinking started turning inward to the Buddha inside of us the Buddha that's in here not out there there's a Buddhist term called to talk it to garba which translates as womb or hidden treasury within so that's our Buddha nature to talk it to garba Buddha nature so we've gone from some beings don't have Buddha nature to all beings have Buddha nature and then in the 13th century in Japan

[08:24]

Dogen said Dogen Zenji said all beings are Buddha nature which is quite a shift of thinking so it's not something you have it's something that you are that you embody you don't have to get it but only to realize it so having it or not having this is the point and I know from my own experience that if I lose faith in having Buddha nature or questioning another's ability to manifest Buddha thinking they don't have Buddha nature this is one source of discomfort and

[09:28]

suffering I believe that Suzuki Roshi encouraged his students to think of others as Buddha to undercut this tendency that we can judge others or judge ourselves as not having Buddha nature so we start seeing others as Buddha are thinking about them changes and are thinking about us changes ourselves so he would say you're okay as you are and you can use some improvement so Suzuki Roshi was encouraging us to see that we're okay as we are that we are Buddha and as important is you can use some improvement however using

[10:39]

needing or using some improvement does not mean that you're less of a Buddha just means you can refine your life a bit you can be reminded of things and improve so to speak the key to that is that in the moment of practice and so-called improving you are Buddha manifesting in that moment we're not practicing to become Buddha or Buddha in this moment you know the Buddha did not want depictions of him after he died because well why I wasn't there but I'm imagining that he didn't want to be idealized so for some years after his death there were no images of him and slowly people began wanting some orientation or

[11:46]

reference to the Buddha's teaching and so they started creating images some of them were not anthropomorphic they were it was a deer the Dharma wheel footprints but eventually images started coming into focus and being made and propagated so with those images came an image of this man sitting upright in a particular posture with a patrific smile on his face something like that apparently calm and at ease and that's something that we tend to want in our lives calmness and easefulness so what happens when we don't have calm or ease what happens when we don't look like that either by virtue of skin color by gender by comportment are we still

[12:58]

Buddha so the images that we have on our altars or in our mind are ideals and something to orient but also we have to find the Buddha in here and accept the Buddha that's in there I heard a story of a student speaking with Soja Roshi and Soja asked him how are you doing and he said wobbly we've all felt wildly at times the surgeon simply responded wobbly Buddha accept your wobble and be Buddha

[14:02]

W. Zenji has a fascicle in Shobo Genzo called Busho which is translated as Buddha nature and it opens thus Shakyamuni Buddha said living beings all are Buddha nature the Tathagata is continuously abiding and not subject to change Tathagata is another name or the thus come thus gone one so what is it that does comes and thus go and thus goes that's the essence it's the essence that is inside that doesn't change the phenomenal changes but the essence doesn't change at our ordination ceremony here at Berkeley Zen Center it opens invoking the

[15:29]

presence and compassion of our ancestors in faith that we are Buddha we enter Buddha's way so this brings up that okay kitty cat I know this brings up the topic of faith and everything exists because of an opposite so it also brings up doubt do we have faith that we are Buddha or do we doubt that we are Buddha so we people tend to fall on one side or the other of this line being either faith types or doubt types it's okay to have doubt and to question but if it falls into skeptical doubt and cynicism then we don't get very far in our practice it's good to have faith

[16:33]

and optimism and a belief but if we have too much faith we can be naive and not question things so what's the balance between the faith and the doubt we can become very arrogant and cocky if we have experiences that seem to be uplifting and validating of oh yeah I'm a Buddha we can be very downtrodden and not so upright when we've had experiences that have either physically or emotionally beat us down and they live in our body in our practice we are able to see these causing conditions and temper them and have equanimity for ourselves and for others from time to time I make a mistake and once I was in Sojan's office and I forgot what the mistake

[17:58]

was and I apologized and he just said don't apologize just do better and I thought about that you know apologies are useful tools to acknowledge our mistakes to ourselves and more importantly to others as well as to express or manifest humbleness but we're humble we're more open and receptive and we grow with that so it's okay to apologize and with it keep going forward a little later on in the show Dogen writes the Buddha said if you want to understand Buddha

[19:18]

nature you should intimately observe cause and effect over time when the time is right Buddha nature manifests the sixth answer the sixth ancestor said impermanence itself is Buddha nature so these two sayings or teachers what they said go together so cause and effect is volitional action things that we intend to do either through body speech in mind and they manifest and because these actions are continually unfolding we see impermanence nothing is fixed or stable so it's

[20:31]

cause and effect so what is it like so Buddha nature I want to see Buddha nature study cause and effect well the other day I heard a talk and there was a reference to a exchange between a student a teacher in the Sufi tradition the student asked the teacher what is wisdom teacher responds wisdom comes from making good choices well how do you make good choices teacher says from experience well how do you gain experience making bad choices so Buddha nature is revealed

[21:43]

by seeing the choices that we make and the cause and conditions that precipitated them this has been really helpful for me to understand this subject because making so-called good choices gives me a feeling of uprightness and support in practice and if I make so-called bad choices the oh what a schmuck so stupid that doesn't have the same feeling of uprightness and being Buddha it seems very far away from being Buddha but if I look closely and learn about the mistake

[22:48]

so-called mistake I've made and continue to make and learning from that the causing conditions that will unfold will be different it takes a long time to turn our karma of making poor choices into more wholesome choices so I think it is continuous practice a koans are collections of stories from Tong and some China another place in time

[23:53]

another culture and people but they really are stories about us not you and me it's important to remember that the players in these stories on this stage are you and me they have other names but they're you and me in case two of the Moomin Khan Hucka Joe's Fox I won't comment on the whole on the whole koan but the gist of the story is that the the former abbot of a temple was reborn as a fox because he gave the mistaken answer when asked does enlightened person is an enlightened person subject to cause and effect he said no and he was reborn as a fox and in the culture

[25:05]

over there foxes are considered crafty being possessed maybe tricky something of the occult nothing that's particularly something that we would want to have in us but he was he was born reborn as a fox for 500 lifetimes by saying that enlightened person is not subject to cause and effect and this fox spirit as the present Abbott of the same temple that he had been Abbott at long before please give me a turning word so I can understand what this teaching is about and let go of this fox spirit that I've been inhabiting and the teacher asked him well ask me the question he says there's an enlightened person is an enlightened person subject to cause and effect

[26:11]

and the teacher said the Abbott said an enlightened person does not ignore cause and effect so here's a thousand-year-old story that speaks to us today not ignoring cause and effect we see the effects of our life we can look and examine them more closely and see well what are the causing conditions that prompted that effect it's impossible to know all the causing conditions but we can home in on some of them some of the more obvious ones in case nine of the Mubangkhan Daitsu Chishu Chishu's non-attaining Buddha speaks to I think many of our laments I've been

[27:22]

sitting so long why can't I wake up I feel so deluded I've been sitting for 40 years and I'm ordained and I still make these mistakes why can't I turn this around so here's the case a monk asked the priest Daitsu Chishu the Buddha of supremely pervading surpassing wisdom did zazen on the Bodhi seat for ten kalpas but the Dharma of the Buddha did not manifest itself and he could not attain Buddhahood why was this Daitsu Chishu said your question is exactly to the point the monk said but he did zazen on the Bodhi seat why couldn't he attain Buddhahood Daitsu Chishu said because he is a non-attained Buddha so when I first came across this koan years ago I thought

[28:34]

well okay he just didn't get it he didn't attain it and then in subsequent study realizing that we don't attain anything and we are it my thinking shifted around this my shifting shifted from that the Buddha didn't manifest because it's not something that's born it's something that's already there and present as I read earlier the Chittagata is continuously abiding and not subject to change so there's no birth and there's no death it's just what is that's the essence that we get caught in the phenomenal of duality I have it or I don't have it and you can't attain what you

[29:42]

already have this speaks to Doga's teaching of practice enlightenment we don't practice again enlightenment we practice because we are enlightened already so a cow but is it any incalculable amount of time it's thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years that's one kelpa so ten kelpas is even longer so someone sitting for a very long time be it ten kelpas

[30:45]

be it ten minutes it's all the same because it ten doesn't refer to time it refers to practice thanks for your reference to the ten parameters we typically talk about the parameters or perfection of practices as six ten ways of perfecting ourselves so to speak the six parameters that people are most familiar with our generosity morality patience zeal meditation and wisdom so the prashna paramita is the paramita of wisdom dana paramita is the paramita of generosity so we

[31:47]

practice these expressions in order to cross over to the other shore which is this shore the other four parameters that are on this list of ten our conduct and speech appropriate to the truth resolve or will straight and spiritual knowledge so we're practicing for kelpas however long that is on the cushion and off the cushion of these ten parameters the thrust of the koan is an encouragement to get off the cushion and practice those parameters and in that practice

[32:58]

we attain so-called a realization that we are Buddha I'd like to end with a little sharing of Suzuki Roshi from an old windbell that speaks to this my mind was wandering about I couldn't make my mind pure and I was at a loss for what to do I suffered a little bit and I thought and thought and thought about what I should do one day when I was listening to a

[34:06]

psychology lecture the teacher said it is impossible to catch our mind exactly it is especially impossible to know exactly what we have done the mind which acted some time ago the mind which belongs to the past is impossible to catch and even the mind which is acting right now is impossible to catch so I thought no wonder it is so difficult for me to understand my mind and I gave up trying to be sure of my way seeking mind since then I have done good I have done things without thinking that I did them just because they were good so when you want to see or be sure of your mind you should realize that you cannot catch it but when you just do something

[35:12]

and your mind is acting as it is that is how you catch your mind in the true sense in other words practice enlightenment practicing waking up mind and body merged anyway it is rather difficult to see things as it is is because seeing things as it is is not the activity of our sight or our eyes this is why we put emphasis on practice to do something without thinking is the most important point in understanding ourselves since it is difficult to see things as it is we should just practice our way thank you so much Hiroshi and thank you you all if you have any questions or comments I would invite you to ask them and also like to take a

[36:32]

moment to encourage you to converse and study together by reaching out to boson sensei our Abbott here at Berkeley Zen Center any of the speakers who come on Saturday for lecture they've all been vetted as well as the sangha members that we who we practice with a little hard online it's not like being in this endo and on the grounds where we see each other bump into each other and then we can share our thoughts and ideas around practice and encourage encourage each other but if you want to do that you'll find a way I'm sure because in order for the teachings to come alive and to transform us they have to be engaged and there's engagement alone and there's

[37:35]

engagement and community so as I said earlier we stand on the shoulders of Giants and a little sweet pea little cat that some of you saw maybe in the screen here when she was walking around me she doesn't appear to be a giant but I learned a lot from her because when I look at her I recall the causing conditions of my life that either have expressed impatience with her or love for her and the numerous other feelings that come up when we're around others and I practice with that and so she's a really good teacher for me thank you thank you Ross for your talk and inspiration we have questions now we'll start with Peter Felser would you unmute

[38:40]

and ask your question good morning Ross I want to you know you use the term and it's I run into it regularly in my years of practice cause and effect cause and conditions for me those are those are very esoteric concepts and I feel like I have little if any real mastery of the understanding let's forget about mastery just understanding those terms how they affect me how to practice with them would you be willing to give me an answer to that question those questions

[39:41]

well I'll give you a response on the one there's a because of your smile the effect of warmth fills my heart could you repeat this sort of middle phrase I say I heard because because of your smile the effect warms my heart I'll have to ponder that a bit cross it still seems I don't know

[40:47]

whether it's my engineering mind or not but you know that's that still seems esoteric okay I'm observing a knitted brow on you trying to understand me I'm familiar with that because I knit my brow myself when I don't understand things if things aren't aren't clicking for me so there's two people here there's infinite numbers of people here but now there's two people here having a conversation and the cause and effect of each we affect causes and cause back and forth endlessly let's go for a walk and explore this

[41:53]

okay thank you Peter we have a question from Linda go ahead Linda hi good morning Ross and everybody morning a deep worry when you say that the target that does not change what are you talking about something does not change please help if we forget the essence we get caught in the phenomenal I don't know about the essence I thought phenomenal you know this thing that I'm doing with my hands it's very hard to do it better than that but you know I thought form and

[43:09]

emptiness and emptiness and form and you can't talk about one without the other that's right so we make it we make a mistake talking about them and that's why Suzuki Roshi said just sit but the bell rings and then we start talking about it do you really experience that something doesn't change I don't in the moment it doesn't when we look at it we start examining it and we see changes in this moment no change in this moment there's no change so the so-called Ross maybe it's meaningful giving me that response I got a message that my internet

[44:23]

is unstable and it got garbled so they get to talk to good garbled anyway Ross this is a very serious matter for me sorry to be serious I understand it's a serious matter for you it's for me as well and I can't explain it and I'm not trying to be fancy or condescending I am I'm helpless in explaining it in trying to explain it to you and continue to stand on the shoulders of sleeping I thought you know I speak I was speaking with surgeon some time ago about some

[45:24]

heartbreak and he said well now you get to practice alone for me that was a step into the essence if it was a step into the ever-changing phenomenal then he would have been talking to me about all the things I could or couldn't do to feel happier to get through my Michigan but practicing alone is what I got from that is practice in stillness practice in the place that doesn't change because getting caught in the world of change was causing me a great deal of suffering and it continues to because I get caught and if I forget about the essence it's a target to Garba that doesn't change then I lose faith and then I go into doubt okay thank you

[46:34]

Ross these are heartfelt matters for you and for me yes let's talk about them again sometime thank you Linda and Ross we have a question from Ron go ahead run hi Ross in the classical on Buddha nature boot show that you mentioned from Dogen which I've been able to make my way partway through but give up usually there's a whole section where he when he mentions Buddha nature he says mu Buddha nature he goes on for page after page saying mu Buddha nature he won't say one without the other what do you make out of that no I mean for real that was real and mu which for those who have studied Joshu's dog does the dog have Buddha

[47:46]

nature mu literally means no we all know that the dog does have Buddha nature so no he's taking our concepts revealing yes that all is accepted all is included so I make out of that that Buddha nature is this yes that's what do you mean by this all is included okay talk about it we get into discrimination which is okay is it's important to discriminate and discern but

[48:48]

then and then we find where things line up who has deeper Buddha nature or realization who's higher up and who's lower down what's right what's wrong and all of that so it's ongoing practice for pretend Kalpas you think it's possible to talk without falling into that bias yeah I I sincerely believe Joshu's response mu doesn't so Dogen can talk about it well he did talk about it Sojin talked about it hey as Suzuki Roshi said and Sojin reminded us don't think don't take things literally you have to look in between the lines or I think Suzuki Roshi said you have to you know

[49:51]

read the other side of the page because the page is empty and has words we focus on the words but our practice and our conditioning is focusing on words that's what we grow up with but if we orient and bring in the other side of the page the empty side of the page then we get a broader picture yeah okay let's do it thank you Ron Susan Marvin go ahead please um so listening to you and Linda here's where where I went I what I really liked in the

[50:53]

Dogen reading uh are those words continuously abiding which somehow when Suzuki Roshi said you need you also need a little improvement I'm guessing there was a little translation problem there because I think in Japanese that word improvement really includes this idea of continuously and I think what he might have been meaning was more like continuously abiding because it's tricky in English for us that word improvement has to do with the some attachment to a goal or to becoming better or it even includes in the dictionary it has this idea better than which is um you know that's the wrong direction for us as Zen students and so and so then when we think about the word change change is fine but it's not final

[51:56]

there's included in change is this idea that we're always in the same place and we have to continually abide in this place that brings the kind of wholesome activity you're talking about and I wonder if you could say something about that well I'm really glad that you brought that up it speaks to the my opening words about uh English not being uh or uh or my own uh I really appreciate everybody's questions and and uh challenging in a good way challenging me uh so we can kind of unpack this um improve when I asked Sojin uh that question at public docus on uh some months ago you know I said what what's your what's your take on me you said well you're okay as you are and elapsed vision you can use some improvement but improvement is not a like uh like a self

[53:04]

improvement program it's like improving by being reminded and working on this continuous practice uh we do have to continually abide and that is the vow that we take when we're ordained you know you will you even after alignment will you continue to practice yes I will so it's a it's a continual practice and continuing to abide um um the dude abides from um that uh Coen brothers movie um the big Lebowski and so I think it's hard for us to understand abiding we understand improvement and I think that's where we can get caught also because we start beating ourselves up that we have to improve more and do better and do better

[54:05]

when in fact what is it that is with us during the improving process it's abiding buddha nature is abiding while we are so-called improving yeah well and it includes a lot of repetition so really when we abide we do improve but we should just not be attached to it as a fixed point yes thank you so much thank you so much we have another question from Kabir go ahead Kabir hello thank you for the great talk thank you um while back uh Sojourner Roshi talked about um our human nature and then buddha nature so how one can find balance between the two

[55:11]

if you have faith in buddha if you have faith in your own buddha nature your human nature will take care of itself if you don't have faith in your buddha nature it will be very difficult Dogen said that the rock that you trip on is the same rock that you get up off the earth and continue on in your life and practice so is it the human that trips or is it the buddha that trips this is really important like so told this student wobbly buddha

[56:28]

wow i tripped buddha tripped i'm crying i'm so sad buddha cries what do you think i like that it's funny that that falling uh story i've heard it first time years ago from a tibetan nun and the person who said it was changed but the the message is is very powerful and uh i really appreciate that thank you also uh when you when linda was asking about the not no change or what have you i heard alan watts talk about something like that and said the unshakable shaker so is that the witnessing i or the the emptiness of it that sort of doesn't really change but changes everything around it is that i'm not sure so that came to my mind when when i was asked

[57:37]

one of the things that i i discovered in my uh study of this is that there's there's many different ways of saying the same thing and there's no right way it's just the way that happens you know click for us uh and help us that's those tend to be the ones that we remember um it's not one and it's not two if we get attached to one we just become bumps on a log when the bell rings we have an opportunity to go from so-called oneness or essence to duality but if it becomes a mechanical thing where okay now i'm gonna go sit and become one and then now i'm going to go out and take care of my kids that's going to be duality in order for the practice to actually transform us there's a transformation that the one becomes many and the

[58:49]

becomes one so cutting a carrot the classic story i'm cutting my carry be careful not to cut my finger and at some point there's just emerging yeah still being cut but there's a there's an experience of the essence also and if we step back and start examining it the soup won't get made so we just continue practicing uh cutting and and know that when you take up one corner the rest of the uh cloth comes with it just you just can't take one corner you know the um back when these teachers were coming over to uh bring Buddhism to America people were looking for experiences and practicing samadhi and all these sort of

[59:52]

special states of mind it's much harder to just have an ordinary state of mind and see the extraordinariness of that it's kind of boring but uh it is transformative in a really um curious way because we get to look at the cause and conditions of our life that have moved us along and continue to move us along really important to look at that it's not just about having special transcendent experiences so going back to the the ordinary mind and right thank you kabir uh ross if we have time uh we have one more question from yoni yoni go ahead thank you kabir sorry thank you yoni thanks for your talk um something

[60:59]

early on in your talk uh had an effect on me when you were telling uh mentioned how sojin said don't apologize do do better and to me the the apology seems important because it expresses a shared reality and that's sort of the importance of of language in a lot of sentences allows us to share reality and you talking with ron about the word mu um it seemed like this is a word where it was a hard hard we had a hard time sharing our experience of the word mu and um and i wonder why that is why is it so hard to to agree on mu well to your thank you yoni uh to your first point uh i agree apologies are important uh i think some people apologize too much and beat themselves up for it and it's possible that sojin

[62:04]

uh has been kind of conditioned around that and trying to get people not to do that so much that's a thought that i have uh with the shoe on the other foot i would go into soju's office and uh talk about um my cooking with him after a meal uh during retreats and he would start um uh being uh apologetic when he criticized something that i cooked and i said you don't have to apologize i'm here to learn and we're having a conversation but he felt bad because he has criticized people in the past and uh they reacted and so that kind of drove them apart so how do we get uh intimate how do we practice intimacy with our apologies

[63:06]

and that's allowing and making room for people to apologize so it's a good point uh as far as uh mu the experience i had with my first teacher uh test again bernie glassman in new york this was a koan that i worked on with him and i had uh the experience that we talk about of this oneness and all inclusivity there and this happens uh privately it's ordinary and it's extraordinary we don't talk about enlightenment experiences and waking up but it's just one of those moments but then you know he rings the bell and then i got to go out and and manifest that in my day and uh i didn't do so well and then i would do well and then i didn't do so well and it was continuous practice ongoing but having the experience of does a dog have buddha nature mu cannot be shared by anybody else

[64:10]

but the two interlocutors in the uh in the conversation um so uh as the saying goes there is i didn't say there's no zen teacher um i'm sorry i didn't say there's no zen there's just no zen teacher because we actually are learning for ourselves something that's already there so it's often said that students will either come back to their teacher thanking them for not telling me the answer so i can figure it out for myself and sometimes we do uh memorial services and remembrance of services for people who shared something with us but didn't reveal the secret then we actually find the secret ourself and that's this continuous practice

[65:13]

it can be frustrating but uh that's why we continue to practice together because we get little glimpses

[65:21]

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