I'm going to try and put together two very different systems of thinking or practice. We'll see how this goes. One is Soto Zen, or, well, the expression of it in the chant we did tonight, Dogen's verse for arousing the vow. Heikosuhutsugan, we haven't chanted that in quite a while. And the other is a Roman pre-Christian Western way of thinking that influenced the Renaissance, which I'll come back to. part of the context for this as a talk that Nyozan gave yesterday morning, very fine talk, in which he started with a quote from the Lankavatara Sutra, things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise.

[01:13]

And he went on to talk about his mother's imminent passing on the West Coast and how that relates to questions and challenges from, in terms of the precepts. And it happens that last week I was, I said goodbye to my mom on the West Coast. She's on her deathbed and is rather peaceful and calm, and if she lasts a couple more weeks or so, we'll be 94, so she's had a very full life. But one of the questions I want to look at is, in comparing these two ways of seeing things, is what happens after death. So in the chant we just did, Ehekosa Hotsuganman from Dogen, which I'm not sure exactly where this, I guess it was something that Dogen put together, but I'm not sure where exactly it comes from in his writings.

[02:25]

He talks a lot about karma, and he talks about Well, the focus of it is arousing a vow, arousing commitment to follow the Buddha Dharma, to commit to the way of awakening, to saving all beings, to complete enlightenment. That's the focus of it. And the name of it, Hotsuganmon, means arousing the vow, which means the vow to awaken. And we will chant the Bodhisattva vows at the end. but it talks a lot about karma and past lives. He says, we vow together with all beings from this life on throughout numerous lifetimes not to fail to hear the true Dharma. So in some sense, this is just the way that this was seen in East Asian cultures. This was India, China, Japan.

[03:29]

It was just accepted that there were many lifetimes. It was the usual way of seeing things. And he does talk about our previous evil karma greatly accumulated and calling on Buddhas and ancestors to And he talks about repentance, so we chant after the beginning of our service now, all my ancient twisted karma, from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. So we acknowledge our ancient twisted karma. And the way it's been often understood, and it seems to be the flavor in this chant as well, is that it's talking about our individual karma from past lives. I think in our current context, and as Buddhism enters the West, we have to see this also as collective karma.

[04:38]

And from the teaching of non-self, of course, it means that it's not just personal karma. And when we look at past lives, we can understand past lives literally, or metaphorically, we can look at all of the past influences. And I've talked about this, and we talk about ancestors, and we have a specific list of Zen Buddha ancestors, going back to Shakyamuni, including Dogen, who brought this lineage to Japan, and Suzuki Roshi, who brought it to California. But we can look at cultural ancestors and we can look at cultural karma and the way in which we are all influenced by the cultural karma in our country of having Europeans having destroyed many of the native cultures and the cultural karma of

[05:53]

slavery and racism and so forth, and the individual and common cultural karma that we all are affected by. So, past lives we can understand in various ways. Again, this is just the common cultural way of seeing things in Asian cultures. And I kind of like, you know, talking about what happens after death. I like the Japanese version of that because they have five different things that will happen after death. First of all, so I don't know if you can convey this to any of your patients, your clients, but one thing that happens after somebody dies in Japan is they become a hotoke, which means Buddha.

[06:55]

So automatically everybody who dies is Buddha. There's cremation, and some of the ashes go in an urn in the cemetery, and that's where the person is. And people go to the cemeteries. When I was living in Kyoto, I lived right next to the cemetery, and I could look out the window, and people would gather on the weekends, but other times, too, a sort of picnic, and go to their family cemetery, and leave flowers and candy, and, you know, it was, you know, an honored place. Also, some of the ashes are in the family altar. So traditional Japanese families have an altar with pictures and ashes of family members. So that's three. Also, the, behind the, in the family temple, the traditional temple of that family, behind the altar there's a, There's a room where there are plaques of family members of that temple, and that's where the person goes.

[08:06]

And so there's services that are done there. And fifth is that after 49 days, just like in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in Japanese Buddhism, it's understood that after 49 days, the person is reborn. Now, it's not that that person becomes somebody else. But my understanding of it anyway is that the spirit of a person is taken on by some other person. It's not like the 13th Dalai Lama was up there in space and sort of invaded the body of the 14th Dalai Lama. It's like that spirit and energy and disposition, and so forth, is taken on by somebody else. So all five of those things simultaneously are what are believed to be what happens after death. So I like it that there's all five of those and that they would seem to be mutually contradictory, which that's kind of nice.

[09:10]

So we can understand rebirth. Some people would understand it literally. And I'm kind of agnostic about this. Sometimes I could believe it literally, or we could understand it metaphorically. And my favorite teaching about this is, I heard from a friend who was actually a disciple of Suzuki Roshi, but he heard it from a non-Buddhist teacher, that your past lives in your next life may be different from your past lives in this life. So try and get your head around that for a minute. Anyway, so that's a little bit about what happens after death in Japanese Buddhism. And as Dogen is saying here, he's encouraging, again, the point of this chant is this commitment, this vow, this determination to continue practicing, to become Buddha.

[10:25]

And this is actually the spirit of Arzazan. We practice as Buddha in this body, sitting upright, relaxed. You know, this talks about lifetime after lifetime. We could talk about breath after breath, or period after period, or Sashin after Sashin, or whatever. Anyway, so that's the Japanese way of understanding, Japanese Buddhist way of understanding. But I want to talk about a different system of understanding all of this. And this is from, as I said, a pre-Christian European This is from a book called The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt, and some of you may know more than I about European Renaissance history, but this is about a poem by a man named Lucretius from about 500 BC.

[11:26]

And it's a poem that was lost. And so this is about a recovery of an ancient text. So in some sense, we're recovering. And there's these translations of these 13th century Zen texts. This was a text from around 50 BC called On the Nature of Things. And it was a beautiful Latin. poem, I have to take the translator's word for it, that it was a beautiful poem. It was from a philosophy of Epicurus, who's been described as a hedonist, but really, that's kind of slander. Apparently, it was a coherent philosophy of enjoying life. And one of the key parts of it was that there is no afterlife. So I thought I would compare this to what Japanese Buddhism says. And the point of the book is that in 1417, there was this Italian guy who had been on the staff of

[12:37]

a number of popes and the pope he had been working for had been disgraced and he had his time to wander around and he was part of a movement of humanists who were trying to recover the ancient Greek and Roman literature, which had been, a lot of which had been lost, but some of which was sitting around in old monastery libraries, and he went around to monasteries in Germany and elsewhere, but he found this old text and copied it out, and that's how it came into the modern world, and it influenced a lot of people in the Renaissance, Mantegna, and a lot of artists, and anyway. I wanted to just talk about how, again, as it's described in this book, the main beliefs implied in this, in terms of the way things are in this text from pre-Christian Hellenic world.

[13:51]

And what Lucretia said. And some of them seem very complementary to Buddhism, and some of them clearly aren't or are different. But it's just interesting, because the author claims that this is how the world became modern, is the subtitle of the text. And I've seen a number of books that claim to be the origins of the modern world. But this is pretty interesting. So one of the things that Lucretius again deriving it from this philosophy of Epicurus, and some of you may know, I don't know that much, I may get some of this wrong, but that everything is made of invisible particles. So this idea of atoms, going back to the Greeks, he didn't call it atoms, he just said that there were these little particles that were seeds of things, the bodies of matters, So these were the elementary particles of matter, and that they were infinite in number, and also that they were

[15:08]

that they existed in an infinite space, an infinite space. So that strikes a chord for me in that, oh, also that they're eternal, that they exist forever, and they combine and recombine. So this is this philosophy of Lucretius that became influential in the Renaissance, that these elementary particles are eternal, and that they exist in infinite space. And that strikes a chord for me personally. It seems somewhat similar to Dogen's idea of being time in terms of time being flexible and being the nature of being and being eternal or infinite. But personally, my first Maybe I could say religious or spiritual conversion happened when I was 14 and looking up at the stars one night lying on a lawn and it just seemed to me obvious that it was all infinite.

[16:27]

I just had this realization, you know. I just felt that. And then if it was infinite in space, it had to be infinite in time. And so at that point, I decided that the idea of the Old Testament deity, creator deity, it just didn't make sense to me. And it hasn't since. This is just my own experience. With all due respect to any of you here who are theists, But anyway, that's what Lucretius is saying too here. that the world is made of these bits of elementary particles, and they're eternal and infinite in space and time. And then he says, so he says specifically that there was no first cause, and he talks about everything coming into being as a result of what he calls a swerve, which is the title of the book. It's not that somebody, it's not that there was some, according to Lucretius, it's not that there was some first cause, that there was some design to it.

[17:41]

And I think this, Buddha refused to talk about such things. But this is basically congenial with what I understand Buddhist cosmology to be. But he says, everything comes into being as a result of a swerve. If all the individual particles in their infinite numbers fell through the void in straight lines, pulled down by their own weight like raindrops, nothing would ever exist. But the particles do not move lockstep in a preordained single direction. Instead, quote, at absolutely unpredictable times and places, they deflect slightly from their straight course to a degree that could be described as no more than a shift of movement. And then this swerve, which Lucretius had various names for, causes collisions. And then these combinations and recombinations result in stuff, which is us, eventually. So anyway, this is this idea. And he says this swerve is the source of free will.

[18:44]

Anyway, it goes on. And that nature ceaselessly experiments There's no single moment of origin, no mythic scene of creation. All living beings, from plants and insects to the higher mammals and man, have evolved through a long, complex process of trial and error. The process involves many false starts and dead ends, monsters, prodigies, mistakes, creatures that were not endowed with all the features that they needed to compete for resources and to create offspring. That sort of sounds like Darwin, right? Another part of what this philosophy says, and again, I just found this really interesting, and it's not exactly Buddhism, but it's interesting. He says, the universe was not created for or about human beings. The earth, with its seas and deserts, harsh climates, wild beast diseases, was obviously not purpose-built to make our species feel at home.

[19:45]

So this is very much the spirit of Buddhism, which is not anthropocentric. We emphasize You know, since we are humans practicing this way, we emphasize how it is for us as humans to practice. But we talk about all beings and all sentient beings and are aware of the possibility of all beings being Buddha and are aware of the world of nature as a space. Another part of it was that there's no afterlife. So Lucretius was very much opposed to superstition and organized religion. There's no afterlife. Religions feed on, he said, and he was talking about Western religions, because that's what, well, I guess Lucretius himself was pre-Christian, but he said that all

[20:51]

I guess pagan religions, but this Lucretius was suppressed by the church because it was very much against the, very much was counter to the way the church saw things. He said the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. But he wasn't talking just about hedonistic pleasure, although he included that, but well-being in the greatest sense. The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain, it is delusion. And then one of the parts that I like most, understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder. And that also, you know, struck a chord that studying the way things are from Lucretius' point of view, knowing the way things are awakens the deepest wonder.

[21:54]

The realization of the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else from their point of view. The world is not made for us by a providential creator. We are not the center of the universe. Our emotional lives are no more distinct than our physical lives. But this has the capacity to create this sense of appreciation and wonder for our lives. So anyway, it struck me that this is a very different way of seeing that there's no afterlife. We're just here. And it's a different way, it's a very interesting, and the way he describes the process by which this came into and influenced the Renaissance was very interesting. And just the history of reading and Bibles, and libraries, excuse me, and how, and how reading and libraries were suppressed at different times in early European history was interesting.

[23:00]

So, okay, that's a different system than Buddhism and Zen and what Dogen's talking about, but there are interesting parallels. Again, the question of what happens after death, we don't really know. And part of what Lucretius is saying is that people can spend a lot of time and energy agonizing over that. And a lot of our, a lot of traditional Western religions You know, talking about heaven and hell and the pains of the afterlife can cause a lot of torments about that. But it's possible to die calmly and peacefully.

[24:05]

Now, Vijayakosa Hatsuganman talks about seeing, mastering causes and conditions, seeing, being fully informed by Buddhas and committing to awakening and awakening all beings. But in terms of understanding how all of this works, one can take on various particular understandings. And it's not that we should not try or not think about the nature of reality. In fact, well, Lucretia says that this can be a source of wonder. And I think in our context, studying what is the nature of reality, you know, how is it that we are here on our cushions?

[25:15]

How is it that we are taking the next breath? We can wonder. But I think the point, and the point that Dogen is making, is not that we should have one particular correct dogma or view of reality. And that's partly what Lucretius is saying, I think, too. But the emphasis always for Dogen is, well, how is our practice? How are we expressing compassion? For ourselves and for others, how are we forgiving ourselves for the particular karmic complications and conditions that we have been involved with, and forgiving the world, and how do we become complete?

[26:16]

So the verse, what in past lives was not yet complete now must be complete. How do we take on completeness, you know, in this situation? So, again, something about looking at these two ways of seeing the great matter of life and death. So I was talking during Sashina about Sankhya. the whole works and how that works in terms of life and death. Maybe it's not necessary to have some correct story and make sure that that's it. How do we take it on?

[27:19]

How do we accept it? How do we be present and not hold on too tightly to any particular view? In some ways, wisdom is about listening to many views. Anyway, I'll stop there and invite your questions, comments. I'm not sure that I completely conveyed or understood everything about Lucretius and his viewpoint, but anyway, it's a little bit. So comments, questions, responses. about any of it, feel free. Yes, Sajjan.

[28:20]

I think that's, it's not, you know, this is in Tibet too, so it goes way back. The Tibetan Book of the Dead has the same, And part of Japanese Buddhist ceremony is to honor seven weeks, their ceremonies, for seven weeks after someone passes away. I think that's just the way, the people who, so, People who, yogis who went through some of that, that's the report. But I don't know why that is. But that's accepted as the usual. But there are exceptions to that. even in their records. And in the records of highly developed lamas and tulkus, it's in Tibetan Buddhism where they take this most literally with the reincarnated lamas.

[29:42]

But it's in part, it's in East Asian and Japanese. folklore as well as Buddhism too. There's lots of stories about that. But I'm not sure why it's 49 days. But also, again, the thing about you may have, and again, this is from a non-Buddhist teacher, but the thing about you may have different past lives and your next life is a way of kind of undercutting any way of seeing it very literally. But there are cases in Tibetan Buddhism where a Lama gets reborn as five different people. So, Dilgo Khense Rinpoche was one of the great Buddhas of last centuries. I think he was one of five reincarnated tolkus from the previous one. So, you know, it doesn't work in a mechanical way.

[30:44]

Even in the, you know, for those who believe it, somewhat literally. And it's not necessary to believe in rebirth. There was a while ago a very strong, very vigorous debate between Robert Thurman, who's a great Tibetan Buddhist scholar and translator of the Dalai Lama and is now better known as being Uma's father. Between him and Stephen Batchelor, who's also a well-known Buddhist scholar, and Western Buddhist scholar, and Stephen Batchelor says, throw out all of that, that you don't have to believe, we should look at Buddhism in the West in a more scientific way, and not believe in rebirth. Whereas Thurman said, from the point of view of Bodhisattva,

[31:50]

idea, it doesn't make sense unless there's rebirth, because how can you free all living beings in one lifetime? So, you know, I can understand either position. I said that to Stephen Batchelor once at a conference, and he got very upset, because he said, you know, if you think you can come back and do it later, then you're going to just cop out now. So, I don't know. Again, I'm agnostic about the whole thing, and you don't need to believe in rebirth to do bodhisattva work. I do not agree with Dharman in that sense. We can see the tradition of bodhisattvas in lots of different ways, not metaphorically as well as literally. But the question from the perspective of what Dogen is saying and what we chanted is, how do we sustain and arouse the commitment, the vow, the bodhisattva vow that we will be chanting?

[32:57]

How do we take care of the practice? That's really the question. How do we not get overwhelmed? responses. Yeah, Bob. Thank you for the talk. I guess I just want to kind of appreciate that idea of the world, you know, you feel awe, you know, like I feel like maybe sometimes despair or casualness about the knowledge. But I really appreciate that idea. I relate to it. Maintain your curiosity and continue to kind of go and you will feel surprised.

[34:09]

So, yeah, that's a very inspiring idea. Yeah, and then also the vastness of what we don't know. And there can be an encouragement. We can see that as encouraging, that there are possibilities that we haven't seen, that as bad as things sometimes look, we don't see all of the possibilities. There was another hand back there somewhere. Yes, Michael. I heard something about that, yeah. or like the crisis of sorts, I was only like seven years old, but I was raised in a Catholic, and it was the idea of eternity, and infinity, I bet that couldn't take it.

[36:09]

That also is what, Yeah, right. Don't think of a pink elephant. So I think it's helpful, and the only thing that I can think of now that makes it a little bit easier is, well, I think it's in and of, in a way, the eternity and infinity. sort of knowing less, and being more than just a marker of time, and not thinking of time.

[37:34]

Because I couldn't stand the idea, and I'm not aware of it, the last time I tried to die, it was just like, it's like some kind of stasis that never ended. So it was living in time, Yeah, no, how we feel about infinity and boundlessness of space and time, to put it that way. I think that's a really interesting and maybe even useful question, and we could feel terrified by it, or I think there's a way to feel encouraged by it, but I don't think it's just about it's boundless.

[38:43]

It's also, well, the way Dogen talks about it and the way modern physics talks about it also, it's also interfolding so that it's not just, it's not just one thing. So it's, and yeah. So yeah, it's, we can't quite understand it with our linear But yeah, I don't think it has to be terrifying. Other reflections? Yes, Matt.

[39:46]

Yeah, actually, you reminded me of something else I was going to say, that that Lucretius thing about there being no first cause or creator and the particles moving around in the swerve reminded me, sort of analogous to Buddhist idea of dependent co-arising, that everything is just, that creation is not something that happened at one point in the past, but is something that's happening all the time, right now, due to all the causes and conditions everywhere, which is a, you know, a traditional Buddhist way of thinking. Right. Yeah, and I think I kind of get the feeling that that's there on Lucretius too. So that was one of the places where I sort of felt a kind of relationship.

[41:45]

So it's interesting the way people in different times and places come up with not the same idea, but related ideas about how things is. Well, thank you all for partaking of this. We'll close with the four bodhisattva vows related to what Dogon is talking about.

[42:19]

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