Good morning. So we are this weekend finishing or formally ending this practice period we've been doing focused on the sutra of samsui, mountains and waters, or landscape, the landscape sutra, the landscape of mountains and rivers, but also the landscape of air, of prairies and lakes, of skyscrapers and avenues. In transcribing this sutra from the landscape, Dogen refers to the teacher Furong Daokai from ancient China who said, the blue mountains are constantly walking.

[01:16]

A stone woman gives birth to a child at night. So I want to talk about today, this morning, about giving birth at night, but first I'll review a little bit about the mountains constantly walking. We talked about yesterday, and some people are here who weren't here yesterday, and just to review for all of us, this mountains constantly walking. So again, In some sense, it's just that the mountains are constantly walking. It's just the reality of the world, that everything is shifting in geological time, but also right now as spring arises and the snow has melted from many mountains.

[02:20]

And one of the Chinese characters for walking also means to practice the Gyo and Shugyo, or conduct, or I would interpret it as how the landscape conducts itself, to perform. So I was talking yesterday about Zazen as performing Buddha. As we sit upright, we are, each of us, in our own way, performing the Buddha on our Kushner chair. So this isn't a practice about figuring something out or reaching some particular state of being or mind, but as Dogen emphasizes, expression. How do we express Buddha in our body-mind right now and over time as we continuously, constantly continue to walk and practice and perform?

[03:31]

How do we see or realize how we are expressions of the landscape of our lives? The mountains and waters are not somewhere out there, out west in the Rockies or back east in West Virginia or New Hampshire or wherever. The mountains and waters are performing themselves on your bush and your chair. And the landscape of our karma and of our Dharma position. We each are a Dharma position that's constantly walking, constantly shifting. We each have our position in the Zendo, our place in the various Sanghas of our life. We each are expressing many things. And all of this multitude is the many Buddhas and ancestors. They are right here as we do that And this walking is particularly kind of poignant event.

[04:46]

So I was reading yesterday from Wanderlust, A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit. I want to just repeat a few of the things that I mentioned from her wonderful book about walking. She talks about, at one point, doing nothing and, um, her own experience of walking, and I kept coming back to this route that she was walking for, she says it was about six miles, for respite for my work and for my work too, because thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture. And doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something. And something closest to doing nothing is walking. So she talks about walking as being an intentional act that connects the rhythms of the body, breathing and the heartbeat and so forth.

[05:50]

And of course, walking as we do it, walking meditation, Well, the formal walking meditation we do very slowly, but even walking meditation that you might do when you're aware of the soles of your feet kissing the ground as you take another step and you're breathing, when you're walking at a regular pace or even briskly out in the world, the landscape of Chicago or wherever. is a kind of doing nothing, and this is also like our sitting. Zazen is about doing nothing. Usually we are busy doing things, as she talks about. We're busy manipulating the world to get what we want, or we're busy producing things, or destroying things, as the case may be. But our sitting is not about arranging or accomplishing anything. We're just sitting. It's not about reaching some destination.

[06:54]

So there are various kinds of walking. She talks about walking to get someplace, and that's a kind of fine walking. But there's also strolling and just meandering and just going out for a walk, like we come here for a sit. Or you can, even in your own home, sit down and do nothing. And this is an unusual activity, very radical activity in our consumerist society. We're always supposed to be manipulating and producing. So these blue mountains constantly walking, well, are they accomplishing anything? Well, sometimes they are. Sometimes as the tectonic plates come together, they are accomplishing the Himalayas or whatever. Or sometimes as they're worn down, they're accomplishing the Smoky Mountains or the Appalachians or whatever. Anyway, our walking is an activity that is about just appreciating the next breath, just like our sitting.

[07:58]

So just a couple of other quotes I referred to yesterday about how the Blue Mountains are constantly walking. and how we are constantly walking as we sit. Even as we're sitting, there's movement. Even if you sit very upright, very still, don't move a tiny bit, there's blood flowing, there's thoughts flowing, there's enzymes and all kinds of stuff flowing around on your cushion. Don't shake. So she talks about walking He talked yesterday about babies learning to walk and how we learned to walk once. He wrote someone saying, human walking is a unique activity during which the body, set by set, teeters on the edge of catastrophe. So we know this in our kin handing, this very slow walking meditation where we're drifting from one leg to the other, kind of teetering.

[09:07]

And we trust that the floor or the ground will be there for our foot to meet. We can see how fragile it is walking, and so slow walking or slow chanting like we'll do tonight is much more difficult than a normal pace. We learn to keep our balance. Babies learn to walk and to keep going, not from just taking one step, but from finding a rhythm of taking a number of steps. And as she says, children begin to walk to chase desires no one will fulfill for them. to get to the thing across the room. The desire for that which is out of reach of freedom, for independence, from the secure confines of eternal Eden, the wonderful womb they come from. And so walking begins as delayed falling. And fall meets the fall. We fall out of the womb. So this walking is...

[10:09]

Maybe until we fall and we take a step and move forward and we might just fall over, but somehow we learn to put our foot down. And then again, and so anyway, this is like the mountains constantly walk. How do we perform our life activity, our practice? And the last quote from Rebecca Solnit I'll mention again, talking about... She talks about walking in literature, but she mentions James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who developed a style called Stream of Consciousness from their novels in which the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfold best during walks. It's a blank for a walker that I spoke to recently. to walk zazen, or to allow the thoughts to illuminate or meander. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking, which is also a description of our zazen, is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act.

[11:19]

So Thoreau was expressing appreciation for improv as a way of seeing our practice. We are improvising Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha here this morning, folks. We're making this up. Well, not exactly. We have a tradition, a wonderful tradition. We have models of practice from many beings. And yet, we're improvising this. Tonight, we'll improvise a Shuso ceremony for the first time. So we're developing Buddha, in Chicago, in this time and place. So all of this is just the green mountain constantly walking. And the constancy is important. How do we continue? Just to continue. So how do we sustain our improvisation? Because this practice of walking

[12:24]

of sitting, of breathing, of allowing the mind to unravel a little bit. Associative thinking, or sometimes concentrated thinking, focusing on each exhale. But all of this unfolds and deepens and flowers through our sustaining this, through this constant and continuous practice. And through this ongoing sitting, walking, Buddha-ing, improvisation, something happens. A stone woman gives birth at night. So we will chant at the end of the morning the Harmony of Difference and Sameness, which talks about night and day or light and dark as a way of talking about the two truths in old Buddhist teaching.

[13:44]

There's the conventional, provisional, particular reality or truth of our world, which we all know. And most of us are here because we saw how the conventional version of conventional truth of phenomenal reality is a catastrophe that's already befalling us, that we are in some sense escaping from to come and take refuge in our upright, constant walking. Just sitting. So that's what we might call that conventional relative truth is the world of the day, daylight. We can see our mind is very good at making distinctions.

[14:51]

We can notice the differences. This is the conventional reality and it is a kind of truth even though it may be a delusion from the point of view of the ultimate truth and the ultimate truth is what we see at night blackness no difference eyes horizontal nose vertical for the human species anyway um And part of what we taste in this practice of constantly sitting or ongoing sitting or facing the wall is this world of night, this second truth, this ultimate truth, the universal truth. So the Zen founder in China, Bodhidharma, when he came to China and met the emperor, Emperor Wu, who was a Buddhist patron and also studied Buddhism the way he was available then, Bodhidharma was that.

[16:11]

The emperor asked Bodhidharma, what's it all about? What's the highest meaning, the sacred reality, the sacred truth? Bodhidharma just said, vast emptiness, nothing holy. Vajrasattva Rasa said, nothing special. So this is the night, the world of ultimate truth, the world of... Well, anything you say about it, anything I say about it is wrong. We can't talk about it. Since we use words, we're caught in subjects and predicates and objects and we tear apart the world, separate the world and make distinctions. We need to do that in the conventional world. We need to know to stop when the light turns red or go when the light turns green. But where does this life come from?

[17:28]

Where does this practice come from? How are Buddhas born into the world? A stone woman gives birth at night. So all of us are here because somehow in our Zazen, or that which brought us to Zaza. And we taste it. We may not realize it. You may think, oh no, everybody else but me knows about this. But no, all of you have some sense, some taste of this night. Sometimes it's a dark night. Sometimes it's a discouraging night. But it's the world of vast emptiness, nothing holy, nothing sacred. or everything sacred. Well, also we could call it the world of suchness. Those are just names.

[18:33]

And this is, as Zofran says, at the beginning of the Mountains and Waters Sutra again. the mountains and waters of the immediate presence of the manifestation of the ancient Buddha's way, together abiding in their Dharma positions, they consummate the qualities of realized completeness. They are the self before the emergence of signs, before we have names, before we make distinctions. They are the penetrating liberation of immediate actuality. So... So this is invoking this ultimate reality. But again, I would say we have some taste there. But then there's how do we reenter? So, you know, we can come here for a day or two or three and just sit.

[19:39]

We can go for a long walk. We can go to places like Tassajara, Green Gulch and immerse ourselves in practice for couple months or a few months or whatever um and yet dovin says the stone woman gives birth to a child in the night this means that the time when a stone woman gives birth to a child is night there are male stones female stones and stones neither male nor female they repair heaven they repair earth How is it that all of these stones, all of these rocks in the mountains mend the earth? Some of them are in the mountains, some of them are maybe in the prairies. Some of them are in the sky, Dogen says. He continues, though this was said in the secular world, quoting Furong Gapai,

[20:41]

It is really understood. We should understand the reason behind this giving birth to a child. At the time of birth, are parent and child transformed together? We should not only study that birth is realized in the child becoming the parent. We should also study and fully understand that the practice and verification of birth is realized when the parent becomes the child. So, a parent with a child... well, hasn't been a teacher, but also becomes a parent thanks to the child, but also can become a child thanks to the child. This is also about teachers and students. Something happens at night, something happens in that immersion in You know, sometimes people think that their Zazen is good or bad, you know. Oh, I was very distracted, or I was very sleepy, or my Zazen's all foggy today.

[21:47]

You know, I hear that a lot. Sometimes I hear, oh, the Zazen is wonderful. I'm so happy to be here. That happens too. And somehow in the middle, whether we think that we are concentrated or whether we think we are distracted, just sitting upright facing the wall or just walking while we breathe and allow our feet to receive the ground. something happens. So we don't stay in this world of immersion, this world of night. We can taste it, and it's important. And, you know, sometimes it happens just in one period of zazen, sometimes, you know, in a day or two or three. But anyway, you get tastes of it. You get glimmers of it. You may not even realize it. It doesn't matter what you think about it. And then we go back out into the world and express this ultimate reality in the particularities of the Dharma position and the karma of your life and your landscape.

[23:09]

And each of us, everybody in this room has their own way of sharing and expressing that and shining that dark light, that black light, into the world. So, a poem I mentioned yesterday by Sudong Po, Sutro Prabhupada, this is Japanese pronunciation, that Dogen refers to in one of his Shobo Genzu essays. Thich Nhat Hanh had some realization and he said, the sounds of the valley stream are the Buddha's long tongue, long eloquent tongue. The shape of the mountains is the Buddha's body. And sometimes when you're in the mountains, you can feel that. You feel an outline of the mountains or...

[24:12]

If you're high enough up to look, to see the other mountains in the distance, gathering around the mountain you're occupying. Oh yeah, this is the dharmakaya, this is the dharma body in this world. But maybe we can see it in the prairies too. If you look out and see a field of leaves or grasses or whatever is growing. And maybe we can even see it going for a walk in Jakarta, looking down an avenue and walking along the lake shore. So maybe the form of Lake Michigan is also the Buddhist body. Anyway, there's more to Siddhartha's poem, though. He says, the sounds of the valley stream are the Buddha's long eloquent tongue. The forms of the mountain are the Buddha's body. At night, I heard all of the verses from the sutras proclaimed.

[25:22]

How can I tell them to others? This is our practice. So at night, stone woman gives birth. At night, Buddha's come forth. We turn the light within. We take the backward step to turn the light inwardly to face ourselves. To study the way is to study the self. We sit facing the wall and we allow the wall to face us. and we focus, and something can be born. Another version of that, another version of that poem is from the great Soto Zen Monk Ryokan, who lived a lot later. He's Sudanko. It's to the early 1800s.

[26:26]

He was sort of a strange guy. Had a little hermitage outside his home village. Lived based on begging, food, and used to go and play with the children. But anyway, this is a poem about being old. Some of us are feeling that. Not all of us, fortunately. This is sort of the story here. He says, Old and sick, I woke up and couldn't sleep. Late at night, the four walls were somber and heavy. No light in the lamp, no charcoal for fire, only a miserable chill piled up on the bed. Not knowing how to divert my mind in darkness, I walked with a cane at the garden's edge. All the stars spread out, blossoms of a bald tree. So was night, but he still had the stars on his bald tree.

[27:31]

All the stars spread out, blossoms of a ball of tree. The distant valley stream flows, a lute with no strings. That night with that feeling, I had some understanding. Some time, some morning, for whom shall I sing? So when the stone woman gives birth to a child, that child wants to sing and laugh and play. How do we allow the child within us to come forth from the dark of night and sing for others, share for others the joy or wonder or strangeness of night? How does practice come alive?

[28:36]

How do we give birth to the Buddha lurking on your cushion or chair right now? How do we help that Buddha express herself in the situations of our everyday activity? So often during sessions, I like to turn back to my old friend, Anzhu Zhengzhui. Anzhu was a predecessor of Dogen back in China in the 1100s. Just a little section of something. People of the way journey through the world responding to conditions carefree and without restraint, like clouds finally raining, like moonlight following the current, like orchids growing in the shade, like spring arising and everything.

[30:03]

They act without mind. They respond with certainty. This is how perfected people behave. then they must resume their travels and follow the ancestors, walking ahead with steadiness and letting go of themselves with innocence. So this may seem like a high ideal, to journey through the world responding to conditions carefree and without restraint. But this is what the way, the Tao, our practice teaches us, to just respond to the situation in front of us. without holding ourselves in, without worrying. So I'm just speaking from this very deep immersion in But also he comes forth in the dead and sings to us. He says, like clouds finally raining, like moonlight following a current, like orchids growing in shade.

[31:08]

Very natural. Like spring arising in everything. An act without mind, they respond with certainty. So act without mind means not being caught up in calculations. It's one way to understand that. But just to respond, responding clearly. Like spring arising in everything. So after this past ferocious winter we had here in Chicago, spring is arising in everything. Maybe spring is already passing into summer. Spring arising in everything. There's still some spring. There's still some spring arising in this room. Spring arising in everything. So we can see it, you know, the leaves, the flowers, but we can also feel it somewhere on our fishnet chair.

[32:10]

He says this is how perfected people behave. I don't know. I have to go back and look at it. I translated this myself. I don't know if I translated it the same way. But anyway, maybe that's what he says, one way of saying what he says. But, you know, it's not about being perfect. It's about people who've walked the walk. It's about people who've practiced, people who are willing to keep coming back. and face themselves. Take the next step, next breath. But then they must resume their travels, resume their walkings, resume their meandering, and follow the ancestors, follow the teachings. Walk ahead with steadiness and letting go of themselves with innocence. So, you know, the art of all of this is letting go. So in the complexity of the daylight and all the distinctions and all the categories and all the deliberations, you know, so many things.

[33:23]

How do we just let go? So this is, we have three days here of letting go, of just allowing. Buddha to express yourself on your cushion or chair. And thoughts come. And feelings come. And we give them names. And sometimes we give them names like frustration or ambivalence or confusion or sleepiness or mind too busy or whatever. We give them these names. But how do we just let go and come back to taking the next step taking the next breath. So, that's a little bit about how it is that the stone only breaks at night.

[34:32]

And I could keep babbling, but I guess a few of you, we'll have time for discussion in the afternoon, and we'll have time for, you know, to ask, you know, some questions, and you can give us responses. But since a few people won't be here this afternoon, I thought I would just allow, if anyone has a comment or a response at this point, we can take a couple. They're saving all their questions for you. Good luck with that.

[35:29]

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