I want to speak to this evening about an old koan, or teaching story, involving Dongshan Liangjie, the founder of Soto Zen in China in the 9th century, Saodong in Chinese, who wrote the Song of the Zhongmei Samadhi that we just chanted. This is a very simple story in a lot of ways, but it's also Well, there are a lot of overtones. And I'm working on a book on Dongshan now, and I just today finished the chapter on the story, although there's lots more to say. The basic story is simple. A monk asked the teacher Dongshan, how does one escape hot and cold? Dongshan replied, why not go where there is neither hot nor cold? The monk asked, where is that place?

[01:07]

And Dongshan said, when it's cold, you freeze to death. When it's hot, you swelter to death. So that's the story. And it feels relevant to our situation in various ways. And sometimes when it's hot, ban yourself. And we use air conditioning in the summer here. And when it's cold in Chicago, please wear a warm coat. And yet, Dongshan says, when it's hot, when it's cold, freeze to death, when it's hot, burn to death, basically. And probably, you know, this monk was concerned because maybe it was very hot and very cold at different times up in Dongshan's monastery up in the mountains. But part of what Dongshan says, so there's lots of ways to look at this, part of what Dongshan says is that the monk has to just give up his life.

[02:08]

And this can be understood in a lot of ways, not literally please, but letting go of self can be seen, letting go of our idea of self can be seen as letting go of some illusion of life. That relates to the bodhisattva practice of generosity or giving. So in his new book on the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, my teacher, Rev. Anderson, says, give away everything. The bodhisattvas give away everything before they can lose it. They give away their livelihood, their mind, their reputation, and their life. They can't lose them because they're constantly giving them away. Therefore, they're not afraid. So, you know, we can wonder about this monk talking to Dongshan who was told to just give away his life, sit there in the middle of hot and cold.

[03:14]

So there are many ways in which this is very relevant for us now. Of course, we, you know, we have a very narrow span of temperature in which we can survive, and even more limited is the range of climate and temperature where we're comfortable. So we only have a narrow range of temperature in which we can function and survive and even more be comfortable. We don't see the wider range. So, you know, I'm reminded of dogs who can't hear, you know, a much different range of what we can hear or sniff a much greater range of smells. We're limited beings, conditioned beings. But part of connecting with suchness, as Dongshan suggests in the Jalamera Samadhi, this dharma of suchness that's intimately transmitted, means letting go or going beyond our familiar habitual comfort zone.

[04:33]

What's difficult about practice is not getting your legs into some funny position, but being willing to confront your comfort zone, being willing to be uncomfortable sometimes, sitting in the middle of it. How do we do that? What do we do when it's really hot? What do we do when it's really cold? And even among us, you know, some people have a greater tolerance. Some people are very sensitive to hot or to cold. It's somewhat individual. But, you know, Dongshan seems to be calling to renounce personal comfort, even to let go of life. So there's some We need to go beyond our attachment to our personal survival, our self-grasping. But when we let go of ourself, we realize also that our practice is not just about us. This isn't just about the weather.

[05:37]

When we give up our personal comfort, somehow there's a possibility of deeper connection with the wider breadth of all beings. or just realizing that actually we are interconnected with all beings. So I want to bring up the story I talked about yesterday. A few of you were here, and I read the whole story about it. I'm just going to summarize it briefly today. This is something that happened in the last couple of years in Oakland, California, the story of this Oakland Buddha. And this happened on 11th Avenue in Oakland. The person describing it talks about how his neighborhood had become kind of a dumping ground. There were old mattresses and graffiti. It was just a mess.

[06:41]

People started coming and urinating there, and there were drug dealings. Thinking about what to do, he went to a hardware store and picked up a garden Buddha, a concrete Buddha. You know, they're not that expensive, those concrete Buddha's garden statues that you see. And he spent time figuring out how to put it down on the divider in a way that it couldn't be stolen or removed, figured that out, and he just put it there. And over some time, something happened. So he says within the first year, the graffiti was reduced by about 50%. The drug and urination problem lessens. People started dumping, still dumping, but they started dumping it on the other side of the divider, away from where the Buddha was. And the Buddha was just sitting there, this concrete Buddha. About a year into the second year, somebody came and painted the Buddha just a soft, white color, and then soon after that, offerings started to appear.

[07:46]

Fruit, and then flowers, and candy, and somebody came along and... asked if they could build a little house over the Buddha. And as this was happening, people stopped by and started, you know, noticing it and talked, and it became a friendlier neighborhood. And the drug and urination problem stopped, and dumping stopped. And then there was one person who complained to the city about this Buddha there. And somebody from the Public Works Department came and talked to the person who put the Buddha there and said, You know, you can't have that Buddha there. We're going to take it away. Unless you remove it yourself. And then he immediately contacted the internet neighbors. And there was a large response. And anyways, thanks to a city councilwoman in Oakland, the Buddha's still there. But this is a simple story of something that actually happened, where some little thing changed the whole feeling of a place.

[08:56]

And Laurel sent me an article from Mother Jones about how planting tomatoes reduced neighborhood crime. Was that in Chicago? Yeah. And somebody here yesterday was talking about guerrilla gardening. Just planting flowers or vegetables into the space changes the feeling. So again, this Oakland Buddha was just sitting there not doing anything. Something changed significantly. So I want to come back to that. It's very interesting. How do we face hot and cold? So there's many levels of this question. One level is just that it's not just about the temperature, it's also our, and this may be what troubled that monk who spoke to Dongshan, our inner passions and heat and rage and frustration. can be very difficult. How do we go to a place without that?

[09:58]

And cold, as a response to that, feeling just aloof and chilly and frozen and deadening our emotions, that's not really a solution either. From the bodhisattva perspective, the point is to remain right in the middle of hot and cold, right in the middle of suffering. And then I want to say a little bit about how this affects us now, given the drought. It's the worst drought since the 1950s in this country now. About 60% of the country is affected. About 1,300 counties have been called drought disaster areas. So we're facing global warming. This is another kind of sitting in the middle of heat. So just to say a little bit about that, James Hansen is one of the leading climate scientists, an important scientist at NASA, has said recently this year, global warming isn't a prediction.

[11:07]

It's happening. That's kind of obvious. He talks about the dirtiest and most environmentally damaging of fuels, the Canadian tar sands and the American tar shale that's being used for fracking. Terrible practice. They're being actively promoted. And Hansen says, if this goes forward, which it is right now, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually will reach levels higher than that in the Pliocene era. More than 2 and 1 half million years ago, sea level was at least 50 feet higher then. The disintegration of the ice sheets will accelerate out of control. Global temperatures will become intolerable. 20% to 50% of the planet's species would be driven to extinction. a real possibility. And I heard about this journalist who studies climate issues, Mark Hertzgaard, has started an organization called Climate Parents, climateparents.org, because he says he's trying to organize parents, because who will be affected most by all of this is the children.

[12:28]

So whether you have parent children or not, if you're concerned about children, this is something that's really happening. And the heat that's happening now is going to be continuing and worsening. And yet, it can be lessened. It can be mitigated. But again, right now, although the worst forest fires in Colorado history, Deadly mid-Atlantic storm left 23 dead, 4 million without power, record-shattering heat waves across the East Coast and the Midwest. Just a few things anecdotally. We interviewed a plant biologist at the University of Illinois who, looking at the drought and the heat and the farm belt, which is around us, said that this is like farming in hell. Corn and soybean prices are already going to be shooting up. And Hertzgaard says, so what is the place of the stone Buddha sitting there in the middle of this heat?

[13:36]

What do we do? Hertzgaard says, most people's response say, OK, well, what can I do? Maybe I can bicycle to work, or I'll take the kids on mass transit instead. And those are good first steps, he says. because they make you think about how your own individual actions do affect the collective future. But those things alone aren't going to be enough. He says we know how to solve this problem, and many of the solutions will actually make money and create jobs. For example, in more than a dozen states now, you can lease a rooftop solar energy system at no money down with guaranteed savings on your monthly electric bill. I don't know if that's true in Illinois. I just don't know. You should know. You should know. So things like eating less meat, taking mass transit, switching to solar energy are valuable steps. But nothing is more urgent than changing the strongest drivers of climate change, the government policies, and corporate practices that push greenhouse gas emissions ever higher.

[14:44]

Under the current rules, polluters can emit greenhouse gases for free. In fact, they're subsidized with billions of tax dollars. Until that stops, the search card says, individual lifestyle choices won't make much of a difference. And yet, we can put pressure on politicians to do something. There's a bill now in Congress to end subsidies to oil companies who are making the climate change worse, the global warming worse. So even though things are already affected, and the planet already is going to be affected, it still can be better or worse. And we can make a difference. So going back to the Oakland Buddha, how do we face this heat? So it's a question for us individually, but also as a nation, as a species.

[15:54]

How do we sit and watch this? So I would suggest that sitting and watching, like the Oakland Buddha, also may involve responses on Congress people or planted tomatoes, that what we do makes a difference. And how do we change awareness? I want to go back to, Joanna Macy was here a couple of weeks ago, talked about three aspects of the sustainability revolution. Under the surface of all of this, there are many, [...] many people all over the world working to change, to develop a sustainable approach to our species and our energy and our economies. And I think her talking about three aspects of that is useful as a way of thinking about it. I've talked about this since she was here, and I will again.

[16:57]

So she talks about one aspect being kind of new structures, new structures of organization that can be built underneath or outside or alongside the structure of our society as it is. So things like urban agriculture, planting tomatoes, or sunflowers, or developing regional systems of economy and agriculture, farmers' markets and co-ops and so forth. That's one area where we start to develop alternative, sustainable social structures. The second area, holding actions, is what she calls it, which includes writing to congresspeople, trying to Stop the damage or the suffering as much as possible. Working to stop corporate pollution. I think things like Occupy are part of that.

[18:01]

And then the third part that Joanna talks about is changing awareness. So that's what we're here, what we're doing here tonight and in general, although many of you are involved in the other two aspects as well. part of what will make the change to a sustainable world is just to be aware. So the Oakland Buddha sitting in this neighborhood was there and present and in some sense witnessing what people felt that they were witnessing. And that's something we all do, to continue to pay attention to what's going on in the world, to pay attention to our own responses, intensity of heat or cold or any other suffering, this upright sitting over time does transform our awareness, and it affects, and our transformed awareness affects all the people around us, or can, in ways we don't necessarily see.

[19:08]

So, there are things that we can do. So again, going back to the story of Dongchang saying, go to the place where there's no heat or cold. Again, this is what this monk was asking for. He wanted to escape heat and cold. And again, part of this is the emotional heat of craving or anger or hatred or frustration. part of the human condition, so it's not that we can escape that completely at all. And the alternative of emotional frozenness also doesn't work. How do we find a place to sit like the Inuklein Buddha in the middle of our internal heat and cold? So again,

[20:13]

Just talking a little bit about the story, but there's so many aspects of it. Dogen has a whole essay in Shobogenzo, Shonju, Spring and Autumn, where he talks about the story and comments and other comments about it. It's interesting he calls it Autumn and Spring, which are the seasons with the least intense heat and cold. He also has in his, Koan collection in his extensive record. He takes this as one case and has a verse comment. He says, when hot or cold and cold come, let go and proceed. How can we just be present and let go of our resistance in the middle of heat, in the middle of cold? and then proceed.

[21:18]

How do we get on with it? How do we continue to witness our life and the world around us? Letting go of heat and cold and all the different forms of that. Letting go doesn't mean ignoring it. Of course, it may be that, again, that we use the air conditioner or that we put on a warm coat in the winter. Anyway, he says, let go and proceed. And then he says, great peace is basically caused by warriors, but don't allow the warriors to see great peace. So he's talking about bodhisattva practice, which is what we're here for. We'll be chanting the Four Bodhisattva Vows. Our practice is based on realizing that what we're doing is not just about us individually, that we're doing this together, and that we're connected with many people. And again, as I said, that our willingness to face suffering has an impact on the world, and our willingness to respond in various ways.

[22:28]

And Jomana's idea of these three ways is one way to look at that. Great peace is basically caused by warriors or generals. This is here the warrior idea of the Bodhisattva. It takes some fierceness or some courage or some determination and conviction to actually sit still in the middle of intense climate, extreme weather, as the euphemism for climate change is now used in the media. or in the intensity of our own inner life. How do we sit in the middle of that and just witness this? Our doing this ourselves helps It helps us individually, but also it's about others. It affects the whole situation. So he says, great peace is basically caused by warriors.

[23:29]

This great peace is a reference to the Buddhist idea of nirvana. In early Buddhism, this was about escaping suffering, leaving the world of conditions, phenomena like hot and cold, and escaping to some nirvana side of that. But here, Dogen says that this nirvana is actually created by bodhisattvas. And he says, but don't allow the warriors of the bodhisattvas to see great peace. So the bodhisattva practice, where we are here in the middle of hot and cold, is to be able to just sit and witness hot and cold. We don't try to gain some great peace or nirvana outside of that. Can we see, can we feel some joy in, and that's an extreme way to put it, but really, can we feel some satisfaction, some contentment in being, in developing the ability, to put it that way, of being able to just sit in the middle of the intensity of the heat and cold of our world and our lives?

[24:47]

And what's going on on your own cushion or chair? in any period of zazen. So, one way to see Dongshan's instruction to the monk to avoid heat and cold, or to let them to be burnt up or frozen by it, is just instructions in Bodhisattva life. Immerse yourself in extreme heat or cold. That's maybe a little extreme, but the point is that we don't try and escape the world's suffering. And we see that right in the middle of our efforts to be present in the reality of our lives, including hot and cold, including all kinds of extremes, is itself like fanning ourselves in the heat.

[25:52]

or like putting on a warm coat in the winter. So I found a, thanks to David Chadwick's archives of Suzuki Roshi, I found a couple of comments that Suzuki Roshi made about this story, about Dongshan Satin Cold. These were both in 1969 and in Tassajara in the summer. It can be very hot. And that summer, Suzuki Roshi said in a talk, when it's hot, you should be hot Buddha. When it's cold, you should be cold Buddha. Hot Buddhas, get them while they're hot. So how do we be hot Buddha in the middle of global warming? How do we be like the Oakland Buddha? This isn't about answers. This is a question. This is a koan.

[26:55]

This is a teaching story. To consider, for each of you, what is your way to be willing to be present, to face the reality of suffering in the middle of whatever comes? Later that same year, Back at City Center in San Francisco, she said, we just say it's cold because we're so accustomed to warm weather. That's why it's cold. There's no climate that is just cold or just warm. Cold and hot are simultaneous. Because you know how cold it is in winter, in summer you say it's hot. So that's another perspective on it. We see Suffering, we see hot and cold and extreme weather in relationship to our experience of something else. So I would add to Suzuki Roshi's comment that when we see that, we feel hot outside now.

[28:08]

It was pretty hot today out there in the sun. But we feel that because we know what it's like in winter in Chicago, too. So if you lived in, I don't know, Tahiti or someplace in the South Seas, you would just be used to being hot all the time. If you were an Eskimo, you would just be used to it being cold all the time. But, you know, take an Eskimo to Tahiti and they would suffer a lot, or vice versa. There is... So this contrast is interesting. I don't know. It seems like there's a way there to help us with hot Buddha and cold Buddha. But when it's hot, it's hot. When it's cold, it's cold. So again, these teaching stories are not, sometimes they're called riddles, and I don't like that way of talking about them. These are guidelines to us to how to be upright in the world.

[29:08]

how to be hot Buddha, cold Buddha. So I was afraid I would speak the whole time and not have any time for responses, but here we are. Any hot or cold Buddhas here in responses, comments, questions, feel free. I feel like when considering or when seeing suchness or embodying suchness, that sometimes it's time to take action. Paralysis can occur. And I wonder if the purpose of the Bodhisattva precepts is to give guidance in that paralysis, if that is the purpose of it. Well, that's one part, yeah. And the bodhisattva precepts are guidelines for how, what not to do often, but they're also guidelines, you know, they're also the positive side.

[30:14]

How do you be generous rather than taking what's not given? How do you speak truth even to power? How do you cultivate awareness rather than intoxication? So yeah, all of these, the libraries of Buddha's teachings are to help us. And all these, you know, these funny stories too are just ways to, help us dig into what does it mean to face the heat of our life or our changing climate? How do we do that? And then, you know, again, the starting point is just Oakland Buddha. Stop, sit, watch it, pay attention, be patient. But then how do we respond? And there's not one right way to respond. There are whole constellations of possible responses that will contribute to God bless. So in some ways, you know, burning in the heat and freezing in the cold feels grim.

[31:43]

But again, in being willing to just sit and face the situation we're in, really there's this possibility of some deep satisfaction. And in knowing that there are ways to respond, There can be even joy. This is the nirvana in samsara. But you have to be willing to sit and feel the heat. Adam. In my years of reading and hearing Zen stories, I've not heard much about thunder and lightning. And I wonder how you feel It fits in, or where it fits in. Well, one of the reasons I'm glad, one of the many reasons I'm glad I moved to Chicago is there's more thunder and lightning than there is in California. It's kind of, you know, in this heat when you start to hear the thunder, oh, maybe there'll be rain and we can use it.

[32:50]

But yeah. There's these Thunder and Lightning are strong images in the Book of Changes. They refer to change. So what's happening in the world now and with the warming that's happening and the drought that's happening in this country, it's like Thunder and Lightning. And people can wake up. Thunder and Lightning help us wake up. So even though the mainstream media keeps calling it extreme weather, as if there was no, you know, it has nothing to do with our use of fossil fuels, people aren't fooled. People all over the country know what's going on and are starting to find ways to respond. So I like this. this fellow Markerscar's idea of climate parents. But we should, even if we don't have children, maybe we can think about the children in our life. Nieces and nephews or whatever.

[33:58]

That we have a responsibility to the future as Joanna talks about a lot. So Thunder and Lightning is there to wake us up. I could give a Zen shout, but I'll forego it. OK. So thank you very much for speaking about this wonderful koan. It's something that I've been enjoying a lot lately, and it's on. I need to make a little confession. I have been noticing, I've been doing more Dalai Lama talks lately, and I've noticed that I have some resistance to a couple aspects of them. And so I always think, it's like resistance gets more and more refined. But I've really enjoyed, I've been contemplating that koan in terms of this resistance, and tonight I was really settling into that, and getting really intimate with the resistance, and I found I didn't feel it anymore, just towards one thing.

[35:02]

I probably felt it towards others, for sure. But it's just, it's kind of interesting to actually work with that process of the forms, you know, provide this like great vehicle for, you know, it'll snuff out any kind of resistance that's rolling around in this. Yeah, Satsang's really good for that. And there's no end to the subtleties of resistance, right? So when you see resistance to heat or cold coming up, the point and part of what Dongshan is saying here is study that. Look into that. What's going on? And so we all, you know, part of being a human being is we have resistance and this, you know, all of the forms of just sitting upright in the form of the sitting posture, but all the forms of how we move around here and the forms of service, you know, give us opportunities to see resistance, to see our resistance. So study that. Right in the middle of that suffering is where we can awaken.

[36:02]

Like I didn't like getting up 10 minutes before to get the charcoal ready. You didn't. You did it very well. I was admiring the way you got up right at 10 minutes before and went and did it. It was very nice. I was counting. But speaking of which, we're about two minutes past the time I'm supposed to stop. So thank you all for listening to this, but even more, thank you all for considering, you know, how do we live in this new climate? How do we face hot or cold? And again, I'm not saying that you should, please don't, I talk about it in chapters, self-immolation in Vietnam and in Tibet.

[37:05]

That's not what this is about. So be sensible. Find a way to sustain a practice of paying attention to heat or cold. And if you need to do special things to take care of your own heat or cold, that's fine. Pay attention to it.

[37:24]

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