Good evening, everyone. Can you hear me at Ebenezer? OK, so I want to talk tonight about a selection of Dogen's poetry, Dogen being the 13th century Zen teacher who brought what we now call Soto Zen from China to Japan. And these are selections from Ehikōroku, Dōgen's extensive record, from the last volume or section of that, which includes all of Dōgen's Chinese poetry, going back to when he was a student in China, but then all the way through till his last teachings. I want to focus on mostly later teachings and the teachings, well, I could say environmental or nature, but really, in terms of Japanese, it would be the landscape poetry. So his, Dogen's very well known Sansui Kyo Sutra of Mountains and Water Sutra, sometimes translated as, but Sansui means landscape.

[01:10]

So in the Self-Fulfilling Samadhi we just chanted, Dogen talks about relationship and the relationship of practitioners and all people to the world around us. He talks about earth, grasses and trees, fences, walls, tiles and pebbles, and how when one person sits us and for a little while the whole environment awakens and all space becomes enlightenment. So our relationship with the world with the landscape around us is central to Zen, to our branch of Dogen Zen. So I'm going to read just a selection of, these are all Chinese poems in Chinese. They're an original and they're all And actually all of Dogen's extensive record is in Chinese as opposed to Dogen's Shobo Genzo in Japanese.

[02:11]

These are all four-line poems. So rather than read a bunch of them and then have discussion, after two or three of them, I'll ask for anybody's responses. So if you have questions or responses or just reflections on what Dogen's saying, please share that. The first two I want to read are from a selection of six verses from the time of leisurely seclusion. So this means a time of retreat, monastic retreat, but informal retreat. This is in between times when he was at a particular temple. So I'll just read the first two. In birth and death, we sympathize with ceasing then arising. Both deluded and awakened paths proceed within a dream.

[03:14]

And yet there's something difficult to forget. in leisurely seclusion at Fukakusa, sound of evening rain." So Fukakusa was the place where Dogen was residing before he founded his first temple, Koshoji, that he was the teacher at after he left the Keninji Monastery, where he had been before he went into China and for a little while just after coming back from China. So let me read this again. In birth and death we sympathize with ceasing then arising. Both deluded and awakened paths proceed within a dream. And yet there's something difficult to forget. In leisurely seclusion at Fukakusa, sound of evening rain. So he's celebrating here the sound of the rain on the roof, as it were, the sound of the evening rain as he's sitting.

[04:16]

Vukoxa, which is the name of the place where this temple was, literally means deep grasses. So in birth and death we sympathize with ceasing then arising. Usually we might think of arising then ceasing, but he says the ceasing first, ceasing then arising, both diluted and awakened. paths proceed within a dream. So there's a essay by Dogan about expressing the dream within a dream. So you've probably all heard the old Zen poem, row, row, row your boat deeply down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. So he's forecasting that in this line, yet there's something difficult to forget. Something that goes beyond ceasing and arising, everything proceeding within a dream.

[05:19]

In leisurely seclusion at Foucault's Sound of Evening Rain. So I'll read another one in this series. Cool wind just blew through, awakening echoes of autumn. The weather, refreshing and clear, bears new fruit. Bearing new fruit, fragrance fills the world. Where we cannot escape, we intimately hear. Where we cannot escape, we intimately hear. So in some ways, all of these verses are about our intimate relationship with nature. landscape around us. I'll read that one again. Cool wind just blew through, awakening echoes of autumn. The weather, refreshing and clear, bear new fruit. Bearing new fruit, fragrance fills the world. Where we cannot escape, we intimately hear.

[06:20]

I'll read one more and then we can have comments or any discussions. And this is, I think, shortly after he moved from his temple, Koshoji, in Kyoto, he moved his whole assembly in 1243 to what was then called Echizen, now Fukui, that's where he founded A. Heiji. the monastery he founded. It's still one of the headquarter temples. So, and this is, it says the 15th night of the eighth month. So this 15th night is the night of the full moon in the lunar calendar. And the eighth month, you know, would be, I think what we would call September or October maybe. So here's the poem. Echizen Moon over Echizen Mountains. How bright. In the whole cloudless sky, its spreading radiance is clear.

[07:27]

Traces are ended of recognizing reflections but missing the real. Late at night, The higher it gets, the brighter. Of course referring to the moon. I'll read it again. Echizen moon, and this is the full moon, autumn full moon. Echizen moon over Echizen mountains. How bright. And in this area that Dogen moved to, it's very mountainous, very steep mountains. In the whole cloudless sky, its spreading radiance is clear. Traces are ended of recognizing reflections, but missing the real. Late at night, the higher it gets, the brighter. So does anyone have any responses or questions or comments on any of those verses? Or any that you want repeated or in particular lines? Hi, Tyga.

[08:29]

Hello? Yeah, this is Dylan. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Hi, Dylan. Hi, so for the first poem, can you read again the line right before the line about the dream, and the line about the dream again? Sure, these are the first two lines in the first poem. In birth and death, we sympathize with ceasing then arising. And first he says birth and death, and then he says ceasing then arising, so dying and being born. In birth and death, we sympathize with ceasing then arising. Interesting, he says sympathize. Both deluded and awakened paths proceed within a dream. Is that the part you? Yeah. Okay, because that's that. I don't know what to make of that. Because I didn't quite when you first started, I didn't quite hear the awakened and deluded paths both happen within a dream. So I thought that within a dream, referred to like being amongst delusion, but if both paths are within a dream, I don't know, I think of a dream as being particular to each person or not universal, I guess.

[09:50]

So I guess I'm really curious about what the dream is. Is it a shared dream, or are each of us dreaming different dreams? Yes. I would say both. So some of us are dreaming that we're on Zoom. Some of you are dreaming that you're at Ebenezer, and we can share that dream. But each one of us has our own seat, whether on Zoom or at Ebenezer. So this idea of dreaming as part of the continuum of awakening is interesting and it's characteristic of medieval Japanese thought in Buddhism and just in the culture. That in some sense, so we, you know, we tend to think of dreaming as opposed to awakening.

[10:54]

In dreaming, there's obviously consciousness, images, maybe even speech is there. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, so thank you. Yes, the, the idea of dreaming was particularly rich. And that's not just in medieval Japan. So in Tibetan Buddhism, they have dream yoga. If any of you have read the Carlos Castaneda, Don Juan books, there's a whole practice of waking dreaming or conscious dreaming. So it's interesting. He says both deluded and awakened paths proceed within a dream. something is proceeding and the whole thing. So he's talking in the next poem or in the third poem, he's talking about the full moon, but somehow everything, delusion, awakening, dreams, all of awareness is part of that wholeness of the full moon.

[12:08]

I don't know if that, so that's just a riff about the dreaming line, but did you have other comments Dylan? No, not yet. Thank you, though. Yes, I can't see who that is. Douglas, hi. Yeah. I've always tended to think of that sort of thing of delusion and awakening occurring with the dream, referring to the fact that within delusion and even after awakening, our senses and even our conceptual thinking make it appear to us that the world is composed of stable, separate things. The difference is that the deluded mind grasps them and takes that appearance as reality. The awakened mind is not caught by that appearance.

[13:13]

Yes, good, so in awakening, yeah, so one of the things about dream awareness is that it's sort of more fluid, right? There's things move around in strange ways. It defies our usual sense of logic. So, and in awakening, so the question is, As you were saying, how do we see the world as dead objects that are separate from each other? Or do we see connectedness? Do we see... trees and mountains, grasses and fences and walls as alive or as static dead objects? Do we see the other people in the room as dead objects? Do we see ourselves as a dead object? So how do we see... So invoking dreams kind of gives a different feeling, more fluidity, maybe a greater intimacy to the sense of delusion and awakening.

[14:18]

So I can go on to some others unless anybody has other comments. The next series, so I have a bunch of poems here. I'm not going to get to all of them tonight, but I'm sorry, I missed you. Tygan? David Ray? Yes, thank you. Thank you, Tygan. I'm interested in that line, What does it say? When you can't escape, there is intimate hearing. I'm really interested in that. I'm wondering if, you know, whether to take that as something like a practice instruction, or I say that because sound feels really important and meaningful to me in my sitting practice. I'm almost always hearing either birdsong or other sounds outside the window, and I'm aware of the ways that suddenly I've become aware that I wasn't aware of birdsong and things like that.

[15:29]

But the thought of suddenly realizing not being able to escape or not being able to escape. That's a new thought to me. That's a new way of thinking about mind and practice and consciousness. Good, yeah, he says, and actually that's after a line that's not about sound, but a phrase. So it's about all of our senses. In the previous line, it says, bearing you fruit, fragrance fills the world. Then he says, where we cannot escape, we intimately hear. So when we are fully present, when we are right here in Zazen, and, you know, this is one of the advantages also of, Gershon was talking yesterday morning about being in retreat or in sesshin or in practice period, where we cannot escape, where we actually stay present on our seat, we,

[16:37]

We intimately hear. So I think all of these have a commentary on intimacy in a way. How we are related to the world. And we intimately hear sounds. So the world is fragrance, it's sounds, it's visuals, it's all the landscape around us. How do we develop intimacy with our surroundings. So that's just a riff on what you were saying. So let me do some more. The next series of six verses, I'm not going to read all of them, six is on snow. So up in the mountains in Vukui, that's what they call it. It was very snowy. So there's all of these, I have a whole bunch of them, and they're all really rich. Let me read two or three.

[17:39]

First one, in our lifetime, false and true, good and bad are confused. While playing with the moon, scorning the wind, and listening to birds. For many years, I merely saw that mountains had snow, or it could be read as there was snow on the mountains. This winter, suddenly I realized that snow makes the mountains, or snow fulfills the mountains. I love this poem. Let me read it again. In our lifetime, false and true, good and bad are confused. He could have been talking about our lifetime. While playing with the moon, with wholeness, scorning the wind, and listening to birds for many years, I merely saw that mountains had snow on them. This winter, suddenly, I realized that snow makes the mountain." Interesting, huh?

[18:43]

Let me read a couple more of these verses on snow. The ancestral way come from the West, I transmit to the East, polishing the moon and cultivating clouds. I long for the ancient wind. How could red dusts from the mundane world fly up to here? Snowy night in the deep mountains in my grass hut. I'll read that one again. The ancestral way come from the West. I transmit to the East. So from India to China, now to Japan, he says, polishing the moon and cultivating clouds. I long for the ancestral wind, polishing the moon. Moon is an image of wholeness and cultivating clouds. Clouds is an image for, for monks, or we could say just for Zen students. I long for the ancient wind, the ancient style or way.

[19:47]

How could red dusts from the mundane world fly up to here? Snowy night in the deep mountains in my grass hut. One more of these. Grasping the source of clouds and passing through water barriers, my face opens in reverence as the mountain face displays flowers. Clearly realizing the promise from beginningless Kalpas or ages, mountains love the master and I enter the mountains. So this is about his relationship with the mountains. Grasping the source of clouds and passing through water barriers, my face opens in reverence as the mountain face displays flowers. And that character for displaying flowers is the same characters as used for Shakyamuni holding up the flower that Mahakasyapa smiled at.

[20:56]

Clearly realizing the promise from beginningless Kalpas, mountains love the master, and I enter the mountains. One more of these six verses in snow. Sitting as the night gets late, sleep not yet arrived. Evermore I realize engaging the way is best in mountain forests. Sound of valley streams enters my ears. Moonlight pierces my eyes. Other than this, not a thought in my mind. So any comments on any of those or any particular lines that stood out? Let me read that last one again.

[21:58]

Sitting as the night gets late, sleep not yet arrived, ever more I realize engaging the way is best in mountain forests. Sound of valley streams enters my ears, moonlight pierces my eyes. Other than this, not a thought in my mind. So he's just being present with the sounds and the wind around him, the moonlight. If not comments, I'll read. Who does? Alex. Who is that? Oh, Alex. Hi. I was just thinking about if Dogen lived in Chicago these days, I wonder maybe if he had an apartment or something and he was doing solitary practice in an apartment, maybe he would have written a poem about the distant sound traffic and looking out over the skyline or something.

[23:15]

Do you think that that would be compatible with what we're hearing here? Yes, well, Dogen lived in, especially in the last part of his life at Eheji, in the deep mountains. But I've talked about this some before. In Chicago, he might have written poems about the berries. or the interaction of the prairies and skyscrapers or the streams. So yes, you know, sansui, mountains and waters or landscape, you know, especially evokes mountains and streams, which are prominent throughout Japan. For us in Chicago, and I believe you're down in Australia? Is that right, Alex? Yeah. So I don't know if you have mountains and streams where you are or more prairies like here, but... So, as I said, he's becoming intimate with his environment, with everything around him.

[24:26]

And sure, that would include sitting in your apartment, hearing the sounds of traffic or birds or whatever. So, you know, hearing these poems about living in the deep mountains, and he says, you know, he says in one of the mountains are best for following away, something like that. But really, the sound of the evening rain is everywhere. So, there would be a different terrain of intimacy within different terrains. But the principle is the same, I would say. But it's a good question. Any other thoughts on that? Somebody has his hands up in the room. Yes, this is Wade. As one of those people who is in Chicago trying to meditate in the middle of all of the traffic and everything, I think it's easy to get a very idealized picture of, oh, if I were just in the mountains, in the woods, listening to a babbling brook, then I could really do Zazen.

[25:44]

Then I could really sit and it would be good Zazen, as opposed to whatever distracted nonsense I'm doing right now. So I guess that's a good reminder to me that it's neither here nor there, but that's the point for me to practice with, is to not cling to some sort of idyllic landscape picture of Zen as something best practiced, not in the modern world, in the middle of the city. I'm gonna just... Right, wherever we... Go ahead. I was just gonna play Devil's Advocate. Yeah. I just, I'm not so sure. I think that there are ways that our modern life brings so much distraction and so much separation from our environment. And I just feel very challenged by that.

[26:48]

And I know what you mean, because on the one hand, it just is what it is. And I'm sure I would find distraction in the evening in medieval Japan. But I think there is some way in which all of our modern conveniences do create some distance from our life. Yeah, I think that's... subjectively feel that and you know I work on a computer all day it's really fast-paced I mean I'm not I'm not staring at anything for longer than a few seconds at a time and by Every part of your your psyche in the way that if you live a slower life or a calmer life, even if it's not you know meditation necessarily it's that seeps in and You can have a little bit longer focus.

[27:53]

So Yeah, I sometimes mourn for my my loss of focus I feel like I used to be better at that I used to be able to sit down and read for two hours and I find that increasingly more difficult Yeah, me too Well, I resonate with what you're saying completely. I think that's true. And actually these last verses I read are from, there were two verses on from the breeze on snow. These are verses on dwelling in the mountains. So yeah, he's invoking the mountains. And this is a kind of a reminder to us that, you know, especially as a non-residential urban sangha where we're practicing in the city. somebody said it's so hard to be a saint in the city. Anyway, it is more challenging.

[28:53]

And that's why doing sesshin, doing daily zazen, going on retreats at times is even maybe more important because we do need to touch base with this sense of this deep relationship with sounds, the stream, the birds, the moon. And yeah, in some ways it's easier to practice someplace like Tassajara up in the mountains. But there's a rhythm to our practice. One goes into seclusion in the mountains for a limited period. One goes to do a retreat for you know, a few days and comes out or one goes into a three week practice period or a three year practice period anyway, and then we come out.

[29:56]

So, um, I, you know, all of everyone who's practicing in Chicago, I congratulate you. You're doing the most challenging, difficult practice to actually somehow keeps some sense of that deeper awareness in the dream of living in the city. I would like this. Oh, I would just like to follow up because, um, since you are saying what you just said, I'm thinking about how maybe it really is the deliberate setting aside of time. And Um, the, I think that maybe in my modern life, I think that I'm setting aside time, but I allow things to creep into that time, like thinking about, you know, that email that I saw that I have to do something about, or, um, you know, the thing that I have to go do next.

[31:07]

And maybe that's. Maybe that's what gets in the way is that I don't actually set aside the time, even when I, you know, set aside some time when I'm gonna go practice. There's not a whole part of setting aside of the time. Good, yes, that's the challenge. And, you know, I can testify that even practicing in a practice period up in the mountains, our mind will bring up distractions. things that happened during, in the course of rubbing against all the other people in the practice period or dealing with, you know, what's for lunch or what, you know, the various material aspects. But yeah, in a place that's more constructed for, this is about, you know, how we arranged endos and how we arranged temples too, to have a space that's,

[32:10]

in tune with some deeper harmony supports that. And then the challenge is how do we not think about it, but how does that enter our practice body so that some of it is still there when we're engaged in emails and cities and so forth? Don? So, you know, just to say, you know, I don't know if hearing these poems about mountains by Dogen, it might be, might make you feel worse about your practice, but it's a kind of example of something that is also part of our life. Yeah, somebody who had something else. Yeah, Dylan. Hi, Dogen, I got two comments. First about, you know, living in the city, practice in the city and work.

[33:12]

It feels to me more about a question of appropriate technology than it does about pace to me. Like when I'm at the coffee shop, it feels like there's times when you have to be working very fast, but it feels like a very rich practice time, like because you have to have a very precise amount of focus in order to do it calmly. I personally don't believe that the pace means that it can't be a practice area, but I do agree if I'm understanding folks' comments right, that how technology evolves does influence our relationship with nature or how we use technology influences our

[34:16]

estrangement, sense of estrangement or not from the earth. But that's a question that goes back at least to Marx, if not earlier than that, about alienation of labor. But I think we're at a point of human development that's where that you know, the acceleration of artificial intelligence or highly specialized electronic technology is just getting exponentially quicker, which does, I think, pose a very real existential question before, like, about what human relationship to nature is or how it's going to change. or how artificial intelligence, our relationship to that is and what AI's relationship to nature is going to be. So that's one comment.

[35:30]

And then the other one is I'm thinking about, this is a change of focus. Dogen's bringing up lines about light, sunlight penetrating his eyes and him entering the mountain So I'm seeing this continued theme of liminality of selfhood, fluidity of selfhood, which is reminding me of just the breadth of everyday life, the breadth of ninzazen. And I think that's a really foundational practice question for me that I think before I started studying Zen, before I thought of myself as somebody who is trying to study Zen, that question of when does breath become me and when is it, where exactly is that line, was a deep question for me and I think still is.

[36:45]

I think it's a really rich one. And I think that's, it sounds like And I'd be curious for your comments on this, Taigan, that that kind of fluidity is what Dogen is expressing with those lines about sunlight and the mountain, that the process of breathing is the functioning of the fluidity between self and non-self. Great, wonderful comments. So just a couple of responses to your responses. Yeah, I agree that the pace of technology and the complexity of technology can be distracting from our intimacy with our environment. But I'll just point out that in the Self-Fulfilling Samadhi, he talks about the earth, grasses and trees, fences and walls, tiles and pebbles. So even the technology, there's a way of saying it, that it's not other than nature.

[37:53]

We are nature. We grow from the earth as human beings. with our particular funky human consciousness. And as an outgrowth of that, we have and everything else. They're saying that all of it is nature, part of what Dogen is talking about. Of course, he didn't have the difficulties of a world after the Industrial Revolution, but can we see how all of it is part of this deeper sense of the landscape that there aren't challenges in that. And then the other, one of the other things you said, Dylan, was about the liminality of self or the, I would call it the fluidity of self and how, and that's exactly what Dogen's talking about, how our dream consciousnesses is it too.

[39:09]

And, um, So yeah, part of studying the self as Dogen talks about in Genjo Koan is to see, you know, how we are deeply connected, this sense of intimacy with you know, mountains and rivers and the moonlight, and maybe even with computers, I don't know. But that means that our sense of our ordinary, our sense of self, our sense of a fixed self is actually not in line with reality in this way. So anyway, this is that those reflections come forth from Doggett. I want to close with just a couple more of these poems, and maybe we won't have time to comment much on them, because we're almost out of time.

[40:12]

But I'll just read two more. Staying in mountains, I gradually awaken to mountains' sounds and colors. and maybe we could say that about city sounds and colors. Fruit growing and flowers open, I question release from this emptiness. For a while I've wondered, what is the original color? Blue, yellow, red, and white are all in the painting. So if we are wondering what is the original color, what is the pure color, All the colors are there. They're all in the painting. One more. Grasshopper thinking and insect chirping. How earnest. Soft breeze and hazy moon are both calm. Clouds envelop pines and cedars around the old hall by the pond.

[41:16]

Raindrops fall on the arboristry by the mountain temple in autumn. just like those images. So all of these, you know, we could say nature images, landscape images, mountains and waters images, but they're the images of, he starts with grasshopper thinking and insect chirping. So sometimes we, even in the city can hear the insects chirping, the birds chirping. So I think the questions that were raised are really useful. How do we see our landscape, our world as the natural world and how do we become intimate with it? And this is in some ways the heart of our practice.

[42:19]

So thank you for listening. And there are many more of these Olsen poems to provoke us.

[42:33]

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