Greg's been sitting for about 14 years now, and he was SHUSO, or head student, just a few years back, so he's part of the senior student cadre, and has the opportunity to give a Dharma talk today at Kishendo. Greg is married to Marie, and they have their lovely child, Sam, which is part of this whole new generation of practitioners. And he's a computer programmer as a livelihood, and his main spirit or inspiration of practice is communication and sangha and relationships. So, please give him your undivided attention. Good morning. So, as is obvious, we have kids in the zendo today. Once a month we have kids zendo and the kids come. And the first portion of the talk is oriented to speaking with them.

[01:01]

But maybe you can apply it to all of us. So hey, guys. That's Sam, my son, by the way. So I'm going to talk about a Buddhist idea and a word called interdependence. Interdependence, right? So you guys have probably heard the word independence, right? And maybe you've heard the word dependence, right? And you kind of know what those mean? Like I was thinking about maybe you can illustrate the meaning of those words with your hands or I can do it with my hands.

[02:07]

So like independence, my hands right now are completely independent, right? They're doing their own thing separate, right? Independence. Now dependence, how could I do that? Let's say, hold this hand and I'll put this hand on top. And so my left hand is holding up my right hand, right? And so my right hand is kind of dependent on my left hand. Now interdependence is kind of depending on each other. So I could do that like this, right? Hold my hands together where all the fingers are interlaced. And sometimes when you do that and you look at your hands, you can't even tell which finger is for which hand. Well, sometimes. Yeah, you hold them tight and then you really... Okay, so that's interdependence.

[03:12]

Alright, so let's see, how else can I describe interdependence? Interdependence also means that everything, that nothing is what it is by itself. Everything is what it is depending on the things around it. Does that make sense? Now I can maybe try to demonstrate that... I'm going to take this off for a second. With these objects here. Okay? So what's this? It's a ladder. Right? But is it really a ladder? Maybe it depends on the things around it. Maybe right now it could depend on me. So... What if instead of a ladder I could see this? What is it now? It's a chair.

[04:19]

It's a chair. It's a chair. Okay. Alright. So what about this thing? What's this? A chair. A chair. But is it really a chair? Is it only a chair? No. What if I go up here like this and I step on it to reach up here? What is it then? A ladder. So, these things, they're really not, by itself, it's nothing. Well, not nothing, but by itself, it's open to the things around it to become what it becomes in a particular moment. And actually, you know what? This is kind of true for people, too. Right? Because let's say you're with your mom and dad.

[05:19]

Then you guys are what? You're either a... that's right, you're a family. And you yourself, David, you're a son, right? But when you're with me, are you a son? Well, you're a friend. And if you're in school, you're a student. So who you are in a particular moment is also depending on the things around you and where you are. So this is the one meaning of interdependence. Does that kind of make sense? Alright. Alright, I got one more little story about interdependence. And it has to do with how interdependence also means that everything is related and everything is important.

[06:23]

Everything is equally important. And also, what you think things are aren't necessarily what they are. So, do you guys know what, ever heard the word or the term cave? men, or cave women, cave people? Yeah, what is that about? That's right, that's right. So, a long time, a long time ago, when there were cave men and cave women, and before, well you know, today, when you, you guys eat your vegetables, right? So where do your vegetables come from? Plants. Plants. And where are those plants grown? On a farm. On a farm, right? The vegetables come from a farm. So that means that people intentionally plant seeds and grow plants and grow vegetables so that you guys can eat them, right?

[07:31]

But did the cavemen do that? No. No. How did they get their food? That's right, they hunted, but they also mostly probably got their food from what's called gathering, right? So they would just go out into the woods, and they just pick berries, or they'd pick apples, whatever was wild, right? And they'd get it, and they'd eat that. They didn't grow it intentionally. But sometime in human history, I think, people say maybe 10 or 12,000 years ago, people started growing plants intentionally. So you gotta wonder, how did this suddenly start happening? Before that, everybody, if they wanted an apple, they'd go into the woods, they'd find an apple tree, they'd pick an apple, and they'd eat it. But at some point they decided, well, or they figured out, not decided, they figured out, well, they can grow apple trees, and then they can grow apple trees. So nobody really knows how human beings discovered how to do that, but there are theories.

[08:37]

And here's one theory. Did they have bathrooms and toilets back then? No. So when they had to pee or poop, what did they do? They'd pee wherever they wanted. That's right, they probably went out in the woods or somewhere out there and they'd pee or poop. They probably didn't do it anywhere. Maybe if they had a little family or tribe that lived together in a certain area, They probably designated some area out there to pee and poop area. And they would just go out there and pee and poop. Well, okay. Maybe they did that sometime. Well, one theory about how people figured out that they could grow their own food is that one day a person was walking out in the woods near where people peed and pooped and they saw an apple tree growing. in the poop.

[09:39]

In the poop? What about that? I mean, why would that be? A seed you throw in? That's right. Have you ever accidentally eaten a seed? Like a watermelon seed or an apple seed? I ate a black seed before I ate a watermelon. You did? You ate one of those black seeds? Yeah. A white seed? Yeah. My mom used to tell me that if you ate a seed, you'd get a tree growing in your stomach. Well, sometimes you digest it quickly. Well, that's the thing. Do you really digest it? Actually, seeds are really hard to digest because they're really hard, right? So they don't digest so well. So you know what happens is when you poop, they just stay there in the poop. The seed. It doesn't get digested and metabolized like all the other food you eat. It's in the poop. Yeah, isn't that weird? So you know what happens, is that if the poop just sits out there in the woods, and it gets rained on, and it's got seed in it, sometimes a tree will grow out of it.

[10:48]

Out of the poop. So somebody figured out, they'd say, you know, there's a lot more apple trees growing in the poop. How can that be? And they figure out, oh, maybe that's because there's seeds in our poop. And they figured out that they could grow trees, apple trees and other plants, intentionally. They figured out that the seed is the cause. And they figured that out because poo is really important. It's equally, it's just as important as everything else. I pooped it gross. What's that? I pooped it gross. It's gross, but it's important too. So you know, today, We don't, we do, we just think, get rid of the poop, right? We go to the toilet, it gets flushed down there in the pipes, and it goes who knows where, because we don't want it. But poop is important. I mean, you guys know, right, at farms, right, they use fertilizer and manure, right, to help the plants grow.

[11:59]

And that comes from poop, too. So this is the last little point about interdependence. Is that you don't know what things are until you start seeing them with other things. Just like food. And that everything is important. Everything is important. Equally important. Isn't the grossest thing in the world? Isn't the grossest thing in the world? The thing in the world. Until the day you figure out that apple trees brought it.

[13:09]

And then it's not important anymore, right? It's important. All right, guys. So you're going to go away now. Thanks for listening to me. Well, that was fun. I figured if I can talk about poop, I have their attention, right?

[14:13]

Mine too. So what time is it? 10.35. 10.35. So it took more time than I had intended with that. The rest of my talk, actually, I had originally planned this sort of segue into similar material. But it was hard for me to make it work, so I'm going to switch directions a little bit. and talk about something I've been thinking about lately, thanks to my Dharma group. I'm in a Dharma group and we've been reading the Mumonkan, which is a collection of koans from China, and we're going through them sequentially. The last one, we just started more or less, we're only on case number three, which is the last one that we talked about.

[15:15]

And first of all, my group is really great, and I don't know if anybody is here who's a friend of the group. The discussions have been great and I've been really thinking about the last koan that we've been working on, which is case three, which is Gutei's One Finger. I'm going to talk about that. I know that Sojin's talked about it frequently as well. Let me read the case first. Before I do that, for anyone and there might not be anyone in here who this applies to, doesn't know what a koan is. Koans were developed in China in the Zen tradition and maybe they started being used in the 10th century as teaching tools. And they're basically little stories or little riddles or parables or fables that are intended to

[16:18]

be kind of paradoxes or riddles that if a student works on them, and they work on them for a while, they can sort of figure something out important about practice, important about Buddhism. Literally, koan means public case, and it was a legal term in China that referred to a legal precedent. But for For Zen and for our purposes, it really means, I guess it means a case. It means a riddle or a fable with a riddle tied into it. Alright, so I'll read this one now. Whenever Gutei Osho was asked about Zen, he simply raised his finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei's boy attendant, what does your master teach?

[17:27]

The boy, too, raised his finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy's finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when the boy turned around, Gutei raised his finger. the boy suddenly became enlightened. So that's the case. And I'll just recap it because the moment of the boy's enlightenment is quite a moment, right? It's quite a moment. He's been mimicking his teacher by raising his finger, which is his teacher's favorite teaching, and when the teacher hears about it, He finds the boy and he cuts off his finger. So that's a moment right there, right, for the kid. His finger's cut off, it's bleeding, and he's running away. He's not enlightened yet. He's looking down at his bloody finger, or his bloody missing finger.

[18:29]

He turns around and there's his teacher. And what does his teacher do? He raises his finger. And at that moment, the boy is enlightened. That's quite a moment, I think, that moment. And so that's what I want to talk about. So there's lots of ways to approach the koan. And maybe the most obvious or most common way to think about it is the teacher was challenging the boy about having his own understanding rather than a superficial or mimicking understanding. So he's saying, you know, I raise the finger. When I raise my finger, it's my understanding. When you raise your finger, you're just mimicking me. It's not your understanding. And as an aside, the finger is a common sort of motif in Zen, like the finger pointing to something as kind of a symbol or a sign of pointing to enlightenment or pointing to true reality, just this, the present moment.

[19:58]

whatever it is that we're trying to wake up to. So it seems to me that all koans have kind of an orientation around expressing the personal and expressing the universal and then also expressing the intersection of those. There's a phrase in Zen, not one, not two. One being the universal, and two being represent the personal, that everything is different for everyone, and one being that there's something that's the same for everyone, and that both of those things are true at the same time. And so, one way that I've looked at that moment for the boy is a moment of this intersection.

[21:04]

It's a terrifying moment, isn't it? Kind of awesome. I just put myself in the boy's shoes and he's lost his finger. He's screaming in pain and he turns around and I'm sorry, I laugh, but it's funny. His teacher holds up his finger to him, right? What is happening in the boy's head at that point? And what is Gutei saying? What seems to me, one thing Gutei may be saying is, okay, this moment, you have your life, I have my life and this is it. Your life is completely yours. My life is completely mine, yet we share this moment. Our lives are completely interdependent. We are co-creating this moment.

[22:13]

You were, there's a, Ushiyama Roshi had this great line about the not once part. Your life, my life. He says that none of us can exchange a fart, even a fart. Meaning that our experience of it, of just this, of the present moment, of our life is completely an unequivocally our own. We can't exchange anything of that experience. And that is one of the lessons, I think, that Gutei is trying to transmit in this moment. You know, you were trying to steal a fart from me by using my finger as a teaching when it wasn't your understanding. It wasn't your life. So I'm going to show you your life right now. Your life now is this. You just lost a finger." So he gave him his life.

[23:22]

The boy looks at him and he says, oh yeah, here's my life still. But right now, we're sharing it completely. We had a lot of discussion in the group, and I think a lot about how, what's the, why chopping off a finger? I mean, I think we should say that this probably didn't really happen. This is a fable, right? He didn't really chop off his student's finger. But it's important that in the story, a finger is lost, I think. and that this kind of awful, awesome, terrifying thing does happen. And I think one thing Gutei is saying to the boy as well is that, he's saying, it's not only you having a superficial understanding,

[24:39]

is that you're superficially related to your life. Don't be or don't be superficially related to your life. Feel your life like you feel losing a finger. Feel your life in your marrow. That's enlightenment. Waking up to the present moment is feeling your life with that kind of visceral impact. And I don't think it's unusual, I think it's telling in this story that the entreaty to feel your life like that is through a loss. Because I think that for a lot of us, our gate to practice is through loss, through suffering, through our pain.

[25:48]

I mean, that was certainly mine. I came to practice those 14 years ago when I was trying to deal with the death of my partner at the time from cancer. And it was a loss that, you know, It was like losing a limb. And it was a gate for waking up. So losses have a way of coaxing us or forcing us to relate to our life in the way that Zazen and practice is inviting us to relate to our life. to relate to it without any gap, to really feel our life and experience our life. And of course, even though the first noble truth is life is suffering, you could say life is loss maybe.

[27:05]

And so, you know, losing your finger is certainly an experience of the First Noble Truth. But I think that the Koan is also inviting us to experience all of life with that same immediacy. So it's not just about loss. It's about our joy and our passion and all the things in our life. Can we feel all the things in our life in the way the boy was feeling his life at that moment? That's quite a high bar. But I think that's the bar of our practice. I mean, the other thing about the finger, it feels like to me that moment, in this koan, is it really puts you in your body, right?

[28:18]

You're losing a finger, you get put in your body. And that again is, I think, the entreaty of our practice, to live our life not just up here, but down here in our body. And that unless we do that, we won't experience our loss, our joy, our passion, fully and we won't be present really to our life. How much time is there? Okay, good. One way I've been thinking about this koan has to do with, in my own life, with my relationship to my story.

[29:31]

It's a common way, I think, that I have had and I've heard others speak about practice and about Buddhism as a way to let go of our story. We tell ourselves the story of our life, or we have a narrative at any one moment, and There's a sense I've always had that the story is this grasping that I'm doing, this clinging that keeps me from experiencing and seeing things as they are. And so I keep telling myself, or I have told myself, well, it's just a story. Let it go. It's not true. But recently, I've been seeing how I do that a bit too much and I had this kind of proclivity for when I'm, instead of being in the moment like Gutei's student and feeling my life, this device comes up in me and says,

[30:48]

Well, you lost your finger, but this is just a story you're telling yourself, and it's not really true. It's not really happening. Just let it go. But that's not it. Certainly, everything is a story. I think that's still true, but I think I still have to avow what's happening to me. I have to say, I feel hurt or I feel happy. And in doing that, I am going to create a story. And it seems to me that waking up to the present moment and waking up to my life is waking up to my story at any moment. waking up to it without trying not to leave anything out.

[31:57]

I think what I used to do with this idea about the story is that I'd say this was a story because that was something I wanted to leave out. And that if I didn't leave anything out, if I really included everything, then If I include everything, then I am waking up to things as they are. But that also means that I'm including things that are painful and including things that are difficult, like losing a finger or losing a loved one. That didn't come out quite as well as I intended, but... I guess what I'm trying to say is I think that I'm, maybe others share this, I've had a history with my own practice of maybe hiding in what's called hiding in emptiness.

[33:19]

You know, sit Zazen, see everything, say, well, I'm not going to become attached to that, or I'm not going to cling to that. So that, in a way, I was distinguishing myself from my experience. And I don't think that's just what practice is really about. And I think it especially shows up in the koans. It seems like every koan is this invitation to really experience your life and feel your life fully. And that, feeling your life fully, is maybe how you let go of it. Because you feel your life fully in a particular moment, and then you go on to the next moment. And that's the best we can do. You know, it makes me think of, throughout my history of practicing, I always return to the genjokon. You know, Dogon says, to study the self is to forget the self and to wake up to myriad things.

[34:21]

Study self is to forget the self, to drop body and mind and wake up to myriad things. And it seems to me another way of expressing that is just like in this moment in the koan, is to study yourself is really to To look at what's happening right now in my life and not leave anything out. To draw body and mind is to be totally in my body and mind and in my life right now without leaving anything out. And if you do that, if I do that, then there is a letting go that happens. But it also doesn't mean, in this idea of things as they are, it also doesn't mean that in that moment, and Dogen talks about this in the Genjo Koan too, that I'm still not in a story. He talks about there being delusion and enlightenment.

[35:25]

At every moment, we're still on our story. He talks about being on the, there's a passage in the Genjo Koan where he says, it's like you're in a boat in the water. And everywhere you see is water in the horizon. But that doesn't mean that beyond the horizon, there are a multitude of worlds, a multitude of realities. At every moment, waking up to our life is still waking up to the limits of our life. And the limits of that moment, the limits of our story at that moment in time. Oh, I didn't read the comment. I want to read the comment because it's great.

[36:26]

Mumon's comment. The enlightenment of Gutei and of the boy does not depend on the finger. If you understand this, Gutei, the boy, and you yourself are all run through with one skewer. So I had this idea where you could rephrase the first noble truth that instead of life is suffering, life is a skewer. and we're all just chunks of meat. Cooking, right? I mean, the skewer is great because, again, it touches this idea of living your life to the marrow, right? A skewer. and that the skewer is life, and that the life is skewering us all, right, at the same time. So at the same time, we're all, that's the universal part, right? We're all in the same skewer, but we're discreet in the skewer at the same time, right?

[37:31]

And our experience of it is completely our own. Before, Yesterday when I was thinking about this talk and I went over to the board and I saw the posting about the zazen that's at the Jodo Shinshu Center on Mondays that we're sponsoring, if anybody's interested in that. But there's a quote from Suzuki Roshi on there that says, the most important thing is to accept yourself and stand on your own two feet. That's a comment on this koan, right? That moment for the boy. The most important thing is to accept yourself and stand on your own two feet. Is there something else?

[38:35]

No. So I think I'll stop there and open it up for any questions or comments. Yes, Peter. I really want to believe that this happened, because that's where the power of the story is for me. But what I wanted to ask you about was, I'm wondering how it is for Gutei when he hears that the boy stuck out his finger. What's happening there that he comes forth in this way? Well, I don't know. One way, he's a human being, so he could be pissed off because the boy is kind of stealing his material. But the more generous way to look at it, and we talked a lot about this in the group, is how is this compassionate action on the part of the teacher, cutting somebody's finger off?

[39:41]

But on the one hand, if it really did happen, it's pretty tough love, right? It's pretty tough love. But if we look at it, I think it is compassionate if we sort of take the events more symbolically. If what is happening with the student And the students holding up the finger as mimicry, it stands in for not really living your life, kind of superficially going through things, superficially sitting Zazen, superficially being a husband or a father. Then to shake somebody out of that is a very compassionate thing to do. There's not much difference between what? His action.

[40:44]

Uh-huh. Whatever is going on there. Uh-huh. So that's what this story brings up, that question. What's really happening there? That's not symbolic. It's just like, what really? Right. It's not symbolic. That's right. That's right. It's skewered, man. Yes, sir. And your name? My name is Holy. Holy. I always thought it was this one, or this one. on it.

[41:50]

And then you can get back to reality and that there's real compassion there and respect because if the teacher didn't see that that student was a Buddha, it would just be cruel. So everybody is the same. That's right. We're almost out of time, and I see a lot of hands, but I also want to make sure I didn't leave anything out. Leaving something out is good. I think that you can think about it, and grapple with it, and grapple with it, and then grappling with it is the best part. And if you explain it away, or turn to the right, Intellectually, that's not it. So, this should be your column for the rest of your life, in every situation.

[42:58]

So, thank you for noticing. I have one other thing. It just revises the term being skewered. So if I saw other hands, I'll be out there and we can talk some more, but I don't want to keep everyone here. So thank you.

[43:24]

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