Good evening. Good evening. Welcome and thanks for coming out through the snow tonight to be here. Yesterday evening we finished our five day rohatsu seshin in honor of Buddha's enlightenment. I want to briefly say a little about what we talked about and Let me say a little bit about this teaching's current relevance. So I spoke about the Dharmakaya Buddha and some of its teachings about that from the Parinirvana Sutra. The Dharmakaya is the aspect of Buddha that is all things, the Buddha, the awakened one, the awakenedness of everything, of the fabric of reality, of the universe, of everything, everywhere, everything that you can imagine and everything that you can't imagine, the whole universe and everything that's outside the universe, everything since the Big Bang and everything before it, the Buddhadhatu, it could be called, the Buddha realm,

[01:18]

So there's also, of course, what's sometimes called the Nirmanakaya Buddha, the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni. And there could be other historical incarnated Buddhas. But when we take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, we're actually taking refuge in the reality of awakening and wisdom and compassion that is present in everything. And we talked about that in terms of the Nirvana Sutra, Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the Mahayana Sutra that is the version of what the Buddha taught just before he passed away into parinirvana, into full nirvana, free of conditioning and birth and death.

[02:25]

This is a very important sutra in, well, in East Asian Buddhism and in Actually, in our Soto Zen tradition, it's not the only, but the primary source of the teaching of Buddha nature. This was important to Dogen. He quotes it at the very beginning of his Buddha Nature essay in Shobo Genzo where he quotes the saying that all sentient beings without exception have the Buddha Nature and clarifies it, and it clarifies the Chinese characters that it's translated into as all sentient beings are all beings completely in their wholeness or completely. buddha nature so uh... this is uh... related to a buddha nature teaching that evolved in china before dogen too uh... and i was particularly interested in studying i've been i've been trying to study this sutra it just recently was translated into english by mark blum who i want to talk about a little bit twenty thirteen so it's been a few years

[03:46]

but it hasn't been available in English. There's another translation, it's not so good, that's been available, but this is a good translation. And I particularly wanted to study another teaching that is part of our tradition, that we just chanted about in the Enmei Juku Ken'ongyo, the short sutra for protecting life of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, which has the line, Jo Raku Gajo. So I was talking about the Dharmakaya and this teaching of Jo Raku Gajo during Sesshin. Sesshin is a wonderful opportunity to settle more deeply into communion with such deep teachings. Of course, this is available in our zazen generally, but some of you were there for some or all of the sasheen. But joraku gajo means constancy, blisser joy, self, and that's the meaning.

[04:55]

cleanliness or purity. And the Buddha, in the section of the sutra that I was talking about in this sashing, was talking about these as the teachings, the ultimate teachings, his ultimate teachings, going beyond the fundamental teachings of impermanence as opposed to constancy or permanence, suffering or dukkha as opposed to bliss or joy, non-self as opposed to what he says is the true self. impurity as opposed to purity so uh... Dogen says to study the way is to study the self and of course we in terms of our usual conventional idea of self we need the teaching of non-self so I'm giving a very quick review of what we spent five days going over uh... in some at some length uh... but uh...

[06:05]

And there was, rightly so I would say, some resistance to this teaching of Joe Rakugajo, that we chant and we just chanted, because people have been studying the self, as Dogen says, to study the way it is, to study the self, and to see through the self that we usually think of as the self separate from others, the self that is our usual idea of ego our usual story about our self our limited self and what the Buddha is teaching in this Mahaparinirvana Sutra is true self, ultimate self as Suzuki Roshi says, the background of perfect balance against which we are constantly losing our balance.

[07:09]

So this is ultimate universal consciousness, the dharmakaya, the Buddha body, the reality body, the truth body, universal ultimate consciousness, which is part of everything. And this is something we can't, it's inconceivable, we can't get a hold of it. And yet, in our zazen, sitting upright, performing Buddha on our seats, upright and relaxed, maybe it's easier to do it in a I'm caught in a residential monastic context or in a sasheen where we have many periods to do it, but even in regular sitting throughout the week, we have some chance, we have some glimpse, we have some communion with this deeper reality that the Dharmakaya is about and that the Nirvana Sutra teaches.

[08:15]

As Dogen also says in one of his first teachings, the Self-Fulfillment Samadhi, when one person sits upright, even for a little while, displaying buddha mudra, buddha posture, with their whole body and mind, all of space awakens, all of space is enlightened. So all of reality. And this has something to do with us. This is not some objective, you know, philosophy out there. This is about our practice. So what I tried to talk about in Sashini, what I want to talk about, try and talk about more tonight, is how this teaching of universal consciousness, to put it that way, of ultimate awareness that is part of the fabric of reality, this dharmakaya, this reality body that is the Buddha in everything. Having some sense of that is a resource for us, and I want to talk about that in terms of the difficulties we face in our world today, and just that I think that having some awareness of that is

[09:39]

having some sense of this ultimate universal level of aspect of reality that we are also part of, or we are also, not just part of, we also express. Having some sense of that is a resource for us in facing the suffering of the world, which also exists. So hearing about Dharmakaya, communing with Dharmakaya, does not mean that we should ignore. Hearing about the true self does not mean that we should forget non-self of our conventional self. It does not mean that we should ignore suffering beings. So this is the Bodhisattva. I want to talk about the bodhisattva approach to this. But first, I want to say a little bit about Mark Blum, who translated this Nirvana Sutra. Actually, this is just volume one from the Numata Center from Busho.

[10:47]

What's the official publication? Publication is Bukyo Dendo Kyokai. in the Numata Center. And so he called the Nirvana Sutra. And this is volume one. I'm not sure if it's going to be three or four volumes for the whole thing. So it's a long sutra. And it's important to us. It's important to all of East Asian Buddhism in the Tiantai or Tendai system of organizing the sutras. They consider it equally the most important sutra, along with the Lotus Sutra, which Dogen also very much appreciated. I first met Mark Blum 16 years ago at a conference that I helped organize, sponsored by the Institute of Buddhist Studies, where I still teach at the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union. I started teaching there in 1994, and since I moved here in 2007, I've continued to teach there online.

[11:52]

But the dean at the time, Richard Payne, and I organized this conference about medieval Japanese Buddhism. And there were various very fine scholars who were going to give papers there, and it was to be held at Green Gulch in September 2001. It happened to be the weekend after 9-11, so a number of the people who were supposed to get there could not. People were coming from all over the country, and actually from outside the country. Jan Natia, one of the finest American Buddhist scholars, and her late husband John McCrae were supposed to be the commentators. commenters on the papers and they could not arrive because all the airplanes were all grounded. Fabio Rambelli is a very fine Buddhist scholar who lives in Japan.

[12:54]

He was actually in the air when 9-11 happened. So his plane got diverted from San Francisco to Canada and he rented a car and drove down the coast and managed to get there. One of his recent books is called Zen Anarchy or Zen Anarchism, it's about Gudo Uchiyama, who was a Soto Zen priest who was also a Marxist and an anarchist. and was working to support peasants in the early 20th century and was executed in, I think, 1911 for opposing the emperor and the growth of fascism in Japan before World War II. Anyway, that's one of Fabio's. Maybe it's his most recent book. Anyway, he managed to get here all the way from Japan to that conference. Mark Blum, who now teaches at University of California, Berkeley, was teaching at the time at State University of New York in Albany.

[14:05]

Mark originally was mainly a Pure Land Buddhist scholar, but he's done obviously quite a range of scholarship on Japanese Buddhism. He was giving a paper on Kyonen, who wrote an important early history of all of Buddhism from a Japanese Buddhistic perspective. Anyway, Mark drove all the way from New York to get to the conference because he couldn't get an airplane because it's 9-11. And talking to him, I found out that he was working on this translation of the Mahaparinirvana Sutra. So I spent years at academic conferences nagging him, when are you going to get that done? So anyway, we have the first volume. He's a nice fellow. Anyway, so I could say a lot more about, and I talked a lot about this teaching of Joe Rakugajo and the Dharmakaya.

[15:09]

And I'll just read a little bit. of what the sutra says. And then I want to talk about our world, you know, the world after Sashin, the world, you know, beyond the Dharmakaya or, anyway, here we are. So part of what this teaching of the dharmakaya is, is that the Buddha the aspect of the Buddha. He talks about the Tathagata, which means in Sanskrit literally, thus come one or thus gone one. That's another word for Buddha. And here he's talking about Buddha or the Tathagata as the Dharmakaya, as the ultimate Buddha, not just the person in northeastern India 2,500 years ago who became the awakened one as an incarnate Buddha.

[16:17]

So he says, when I say that the Tathagata is permanent and immutable, which is not the permanent dharma meant when a common, ordinary, or ignorant person refers to Brahma or other deities, when someone invokes permanent dharma in the way I am speaking of here, it calls forth the Tathagata and not any other dharma. You should understand the Tathagata body in this way. So this is talking about the dharmakaya, the true body, the reality body of Buddha. good men and good women should always focus their thoughts on cultivating understanding of these words. The Buddha permanently abides. So like in the Lotus Sutra teaching of the inconceivable lifespan, this sutra is talking about Buddha as something that is, that abides, that is always available. So this is why we take refuge in Buddha, how we take refuge in Buddha. Buddha is here.

[17:19]

Buddha is somehow in ways that we can't calculate or deliberate. It's on our seats. It's present. It's available. Buddha is here. When a good man or good woman cultivates these words, know that such a person is following that which I have practiced and will reach the same place that I have reached. If one's practice of these words comes to an end, understand that for that person, the Tathagata enters Parinirvana." So he's explaining to his disciples who keep asking, keep begging him, please don't go. He's about to enter power nirvana, which means his body, that Shakyamuni's body is dying. Actually, in the whole long sutra, that never happens. This is all the words that he says before that. The meaning of my nirvana is none other than the dharma nature or natural condition of all Buddhas, dharmata.

[18:20]

You should cultivate a notion of the Buddha, dharma, and sangha as all being permanent. These three dharmas which we take refuge in, Buddha, the awakened one dharma, reality, and sangha, community, are not different notions. They are not impermanent notions, and they are not notions that change. One should incorporate this inconceivability into their cultivation of this notion of permanence. Then that person's refuge will be genuine. So this is something we can't wrap our heads around. It's not about something that we should try to conceptualize or understand. We can't really. So just a little bit more by way of offering you some of the words from the sutra.

[19:26]

It's also not just some teaching about something that happens objectively somewhere else. There is no exhausting it, it cannot be exhausted, and it is totally separate from all ways of being exhausted. It is empty and yet dissociated from emptiness. Although it does not permanently reside anywhere, there is no cessation of its thought stream." So, you know, when you're sitting in zazen and the thoughts keep coming, he says this is part of the way this ultimate Buddha body is. the body of a Tathagata accomplishes merit that is thus beyond measure. There is no one who fully understands this, yet there is no one who does not understand this. There is no one who sees it, yet there is no one who does not see it. It is neither created nor uncreated. It is neither worldly nor unworldly. So, we can't completely understand it, and yet, and, you know, talking about it in Sashin, it feels

[20:41]

like most appropriate, but there's some way in which we have access to this. There's some way in which this Buddha we take refuge in, and Dharma and Sangha, this sense of this ultimate, universal reality. even though we can't completely understand it. What does it mean when Dogen says, all space is enlightened or all space awakens? Thanks to our practice. Or, in some ways, the fact of all space being awakened supports our practice. It works both ways. He says that there's mutual guidance between the person doing zazen and grasses and trees, fences and walls, tiles and pebbles, the whole of the material world.

[21:53]

So, hearing such teachings, you know, as happened at Sashin, people say, well, what about all the horrible things happening in, well, in our own lives, all of the situations of difficulty, of loss, of sickness, of death and destruction. and coming out of Sesshin and looking at, you know, the situations, current events in our world, it's pretty dreadful. What does this have to do with this ultimate universal consciousness in which everything is joyful? Well, the First Noble Truth is that there is sadness and suffering in the world, and it's a noble truth because we can face it.

[23:02]

So I think that taking refuge in this, having some sense of this background, purity and joy and true self, is a resource for facing the reality. And the reality is, Now there are massive fires in Southern California in December. This hasn't happened in recorded memory. There were massive fires in the Bay Area, Northern California, when I was out there last month. And part of the horror of that is that even with the fires and the hurricanes in Houston and New Orleans and Florida and the other massive climate breakdown events around the world, in South Asia and Africa, that our mass media,

[24:10]

never mentions the word climate damage, climate or global warming. It's bizarre. That's as horrible as the effects of climate damage itself, that there is this such denial and that the fossil fuel companies, ExxonMobil, did really good studies of what was happening thanks to fossil fuels back in the mid-70s and knew the effects of climate damage. And instead of doing something to change what it was doing, Spent millions and millions and millions of dollars covering it up and denying it and sponsoring pretend scientists to say it was not true. And now the CEO of ExxonMobil is the Secretary of State. So this is, you know, one of the current events.

[25:12]

And I've mentioned before truthout.org. So I'm talking about this stuff and sometimes that I talk about this stuff, but I feel it's my responsibility to Bodhisattva precepts to talk about this, that this is also the reality, along with the reality of Dharmakaya. Both realities. Truthout.org, there's a reporter named Dar Jamal, D-A-R-G-A-M-A-I-L, who has a monthly report on the science of climate damage, and the last one talked about how the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is the greatest in 800,000 years. I mean, what's happening is not just part of some normal cycle. And this is all due to fossil fuels. This is scientific reality. And that's one thing. There's also our government's, well, there's the endless wars that our government sponsors and the exporting of massive weapons

[26:24]

supported by both political parties. It's happening all around the world. And a huge amount of our federal government budget that's going to that. Then there's the Republican-sponsored tax bill, which the Democrats aren't really, they're voting against, but not really talking about much. And it's giving huge tax breaks I don't know, 1%, 0.1% and will impoverish many people for decades and end health care for many people and end probably Medicare and Social Security and do huge damage to science because it's going to make graduate school It's going to harm the possibility of students' tuition. It's just a horrible, horrible bill. They should just shut down the government.

[27:27]

I mean, it's heinous. So I'm just, you know, this is a little bit of what's happening. And then there's somebody running for Senate tomorrow who's repeated predator of young teenage girls and he's also has called for repealing the right for women to vote and says that we should go back to when America was great, which he says was when we had slavery. So, you know, this is the kind of thing that's happening in this country. And, you know, the fact that you might not have known some of that is also a testimony to what is happening in this country where there's just huge misinformation. Okay.

[28:30]

And there's lots more that we could say about what's happening in this country and the world that is just horrible. And I'm saying this not from a political perspective, but from the perspective of reasonable values that are enshrined in Bodhisattva precepts. and the values of helping rather than harming, and the values of including and benefiting beings. We're sponsoring wars all over the world, and we're sponsoring climate damage all over the world, and then we're trying to build walls to keep out the refugees from that. Okay, so all of that, And how do we respond to that? And there's not one right way. I call senators and congresspeople.

[29:32]

I sometimes go to demonstrations. I'm not telling anybody here how you should respond. I'm talking about it because I think it's important to be aware of what's happening in the world. But I'm also talking about it in the context of dharmakaya, and that we have some sense of this deeper reality, and this deeper reality is a reality, and we don't know the outcome of all these difficulties. And again, there's also the difficulties in our own lives. people we know and loss and illness, people in our Sangha, our own personal, all of the difficulties we face in session on our own cushion of our own personal grasping and anger and confusion. So there's many levels of all of this.

[30:34]

And yet, I would offer that taking refuge in Buddha, which means taking refuge in this ultimate quality of the Buddhaness in everything, can be a comfort and a resource and a support for responding to the difficulties in our own lives and the difficulties in the world. And to know that, to sense that there is this deeper reality in which there is joy, in which there is something clean, in which there is a true self can give us some resilience to find our own way. Again, there are many ways to respond. Just being kind in our own context, in our own situation.

[31:40]

Being creative, expressing, creating art or music, creating many ways to express something other than the cruelty of our government. And how, and you know, I think, we don't know if human-type Buddhas and human species will survive all of this. I didn't even mention the dangers of nuclear war with unstable people having control of nuclear weapons. But there is some possibility of goodness in the world as well.

[32:45]

And there are many, many, many, many people acting from that. So, this is a challenge to us and yet I want to also encourage everyone to take refuge in this deeper reality So I'll stop and welcome responses and comments and questions. That was a lot for one talk. Yes, Joe. As you were talking just now, I remember someone, I can't remember who it was, but someone that I had heard talking about Thich Nhat Hanh and was recounting him looking at a photo in his village in Vietnam.

[34:14]

for a long time and the person was assuming that he was remembering all horrors, war, atrocity, murder that happened in the village. And he just makes a comment and points out a road and says that's the road where Trump's a sense of joy and kind of a lighthearted remembrance of that place. when you're faced with memory loss.

[35:31]

My second question is, I know you said we can understand this, the concept, but it's really strange to hear about this. Yes, thank you for that good question. Two good questions. So, first about Joy amid the suffering, to put it that way. Somebody yesterday mentioned a book by, or about, or a meeting of Thich Nhat Hanh and Desmond Tutu. Two people who have seen great, both seen great suffering and destruction in their countries.

[36:41]

What's that? What did I say? Oh no, yeah, the Dalai Lama and, I'm sorry, thank you, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. But it could also be said about Thich Nhat Hanh that the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu was a book about joy, she didn't know the title, but they were And in the book they were both expressing, just both joyful together and expressing joy and happiness. And the Dalai Lama is, you know, he laughs a lot, but he's seen so much. horror in terms of friends and family and countrymen in this country, devastated. Thich Nhat Hanh as well. I think maintaining some sense of...

[37:43]

So, meditation and communion with this deeper reality can offer that, some sense of joyfulness right amid facing those realities. Yeah, it is possible and is not just possible. something we can kind of protect, can kind of take care of, that we should all appreciate and those things that we can enjoy and find that. And there's plenty to be grateful for, even as we don't deny or ignore the difficulties.

[38:51]

So there's a lot more to say about that, but to try and enjoy. and our world and the people around us as we also face all the realities. And then permanence and impermanence is maybe similar. Of course everything is shifting and changing, but there is something in the middle of that maybe, that, and this is what the Nirvana Sutra is talking about, there is something that we can take refuge in, and that is this quality of, I guess the quality of joy, and it's also the quality of caring and awakeness and kindness that is what Buddhas express, what Buddha expresses. And that, that abides.

[39:55]

Any other comments or responses? Yes, Douglas. You're clinging to views and you're caught up in notions and views. What's the experience then when you have started on the board? It's the opposite of that, it's not, boy, it's all great.

[41:09]

It's knocking off this cling to the way you want things to be so that you don't experience anything in terms of dissatisfaction. I would say that the same thing is true for permanence. and it's not separate from us

[42:11]

Thank you, yes, good. So, Dale, final comment. What character did you think became the decider for the universe? The trilogy, as Mark spoke about, which was what character? I pay homage to all the universes of the universe.

[43:57]

Namaste. Let's close the formal part of this with the four bodhisattva vows, which we'll chant three times.

[44:28]

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