Morning. So as we continue on our way through our practice period this fall, we continue also with our study of our Zen ancestors from the so-called Golden Age of Zen in China. And today's speaker is Rei Oliva Seisen Ikushin. Her name, which was given to her by Sojin, where she meets, pure spring nourishing heart. Jerry's been practicing here for quite a while. She was ordained as a priest here in Juso, and so is among the senior students. And she leads the Wednesday night group, which brings a lot of newer people into the practice. Jerry, like all of us as we move through our lives, accumulates lives and identities.

[01:08]

She is a mother and a grandmother and a doctor and a Zen practitioner and now teacher. Well, good morning. It's interesting settling in here. My house is being remodeled. Everything is being torn up. The walls are being cut open. Wires are being redone. And I found very little space to study. I have to kind of find a little niche somewhere to do this. So getting prepared for this talk was actually something of a respite from the busyness of what's going on all around me all the time. So as Alan said, this is the third week of our Aspects of Practice, and we have been, some people may be new, we have been studying the Golden Age of Zen, which occurred during the Tang period in China between the 7th century and the 10th century.

[02:26]

And the period begins with the teaching of the Sixth Patriarch. And as we got to the 9th and 10th centuries, it culminated with the Five Houses of Zen, or the Five Houses of Chan, which were five major schools of Buddhism that originated during that period. And we've been talking about a number of them over the past couple weeks. And today I'm gonna talk about the Guishan School and the two founders of that school, Guishan and Yangshan. So I had a hard time kind of deciding what I was gonna, which ancestors I was gonna pick, so I thought I'd just, it was interesting because one of the reasons I felt like I wanted to be ordained was that I wanted to kind of step in the line of the ancestors. I kind of had that feeling that there was something, there was a stream flowing, and that I was entering the stream.

[03:35]

So when I was looking at the different choices, at first I thought, well, I'll look for a woman. And I discovered Miao Xin, who was a teacher of Jiang Xin. But there was very little about her. she kind of led me to her teacher, Yangsheng. And then what I started feeling was, I started reading about his teacher. And I started getting this feeling of, this familial feeling of that familial transmission is kind of a characteristic of a lot of the Zen schools. and it kind of drew me in to this family of the Guiyang tradition. I felt a part of it, so that's kind of how I found them.

[04:38]

They were the one I felt most part of the family, felt like I was one of their family. So I'm first gonna talk a little bit about the biographies of Guishan and Yangshan, and then I'll talk about the main characteristics of their Guishan school, and give you some stories that illustrate the various characteristics of the school. So Huishan Lingzhou was born in the 8th century and he was ordained at 15. Most of these folks were ordained really early and he was ordained at 15 and studied sutras in the Vinaya. And he became, the Vinaya are the, other rules of ethics for monks. And that became a very strong part of his teaching. It was really based on ethics as well as a lot of the other characteristics and it grounded his school.

[05:41]

In some cases, historically, there's a kind of feeling when you get too abstract and you get off in the world of emptiness and non-duality the ethical basis is sometimes not accentuated. But in his background, he had a very strong basis, ethical basis for his life and his teaching. So he became a student of Pai Chang, who someone's talked about earlier, and moved to Mount Gui where he got his name Guishan, and he stayed there for 40 years. He also had, the other thing that characterized his teaching was that he had a strong basis in Taoism, and particularly the teachings of Lao Tzu. He was also a very matter-of-fact, down-to-earth guy all the time, and so he was working as Tenzo at Baishan's temple.

[06:48]

He was a Baishan student, he was working as Tenzo. And then Baishan was approached about forming a new temple and he picked the Tenzo, Rishan, to take over. So I thought I'd read you the dialogue between Baishan and Guishan, that very famous dialogue where Guishan has an enlightenment experience. So one day, Guishan was waiting upon Paishan. The latter asked him to poke the stove to see whether there was any fire left in it. Guishan poked but found no fire. Paishan rose to poke it himself and succeeded in discovering the little spark.

[07:56]

Showing it to his disciple, he asked, is this not fire? Thereupon Guishan became enlightened. So I'm gonna talk a little bit more later about the spark. But this was his enlightenment experience related to finding the spark. So according to, Guishan's biography also, in the Sung Dynasty, there was a great persecution from the government of many of the Buddhist temples. And there's a story that kind of characterizes how he dealt with adversity, how he dealt with life, what his practice was when he had to face great adversity. So according to the biography, at the time of the Great persecution, Guishan simply put on a cap and dress of a layman when he was ordered to return to secular life.

[08:57]

When the persecution was over and the governor of the province invited Guishan to come out of retirement and shave his beard and hair, Guishan refused to shave, saying with a smile, do you think that Buddhism has anything to do with my hair and beard? But when he was repeatedly urged to shave, he yielded and again with a smile, shaved his beard and his hair. So this is the way the great master looked at the great persecution. He just, it's another one of these things, okay, so this is the way it is. Oh, I see. He just accepted what came with the persecution. He did what he needed to do. And when he was coming back to be an abbot again, So now I'll talk about Master Yangshan. Yangshan was from the South. He wanted to become a monk.

[10:01]

He was another one. 15 seems to be a big age for these people. I wonder somehow whether somebody makes up an age. But at any rate, he wanted to be a monk at 15, and he went to his parents. And they said, absolutely not. So two years later, he demonstrated his resolve by cutting off two of his fingers and presenting the two fingers to his parents. This is a typical, I love all the stories with cutting off arms and cutting off fingers. But of course, this is just, as Sojin always says, this is just our mythology, but it shows his dedication that he was able to prove to his parents that he was so sincere that he was willing to cut off his fingers or do anything in order to be a monk. Do you like it because it might give you more work as a doctor? I like it because it kind of takes you out of your usual way of thinking.

[11:02]

It's like, oh, you know, it makes you pay attention in a certain way. And also it's just the kind of, it's the flavor of how people talked about things. It feels like there's a flavor of these old stories. Bodhidharma cutting his eyelids, and Wiki cutting off his arm, and Gikai getting his finger cut off. I mean, they're all ways that we talk about people either giving or getting a message, or showing their sincerity in some way. So he went off and he became a novice, following the Zen path. went to, initially, Master Dan Yuan, who was a very famous Zen teacher. But after leaving Dan Yuan, he traveled to Mount Gui, where he met Master Gui Shang. And the master asked, are you a shamanera, or novice monk, with a master, or one without a master?

[12:09]

Yang Shang said, one with a master. Where's your master, said Huishan. Yangshan walked from the west end of the room to the east end. Huishan thought that this was very special. And then Yangshan asked the master, where does the true Buddha reside? The master replied, use the profound thought of no thought. Reflect on the infinite spiral flame. Return to the source that lies beyond thought. where form and nature are eternal, phenomena and principle are not too, and the true Buddha is suchness. He stayed with Guishan for 15 years, and then he started his own monastery at Mount Yang, which he was known for, and a few years before he passed away, he composed the following verse.

[13:11]

Completing 77 years, today I'm gone with old age, floating and sinking with nature, holding bent knees with my hands, and that's exactly how he died. So he again kind of accepted his fate very easily. So Guishan and Yangshan were very close. In fact, Yangshan described the relationship as two mouths with a single tongue. And together they formed the Guishan school, which was the first house of the five houses of Zen to be formed. during that period. And the Guishan is distinct from other schools in its use of esoteric images, symbolic numerology, imagery, and many colons. The Guishan school died out as a separate school during the political upheaval of the Sun Dynasty.

[14:13]

But later, it was absorbed into the Linji School. And in fact, there are several current teachers, or actually, some of them are not around anymore, but Xuan Hua was a best-known representative of the school and contributed much to Buddhism in the United States. And this school is also represented in the City of 10,000 Dharmas in Ukiah, California. And that teaching of Wushan and Yongshan exists in some form. And also, like many of the schools, a lot of the aspects of these teachings kind of were integrated and there was a lot of crossover and cross-fertilization of all these teachings. So I thought I'd go over kind of the key So let me go over some of the key aspects of the Guiyang school.

[15:22]

Although the inner self is pivotal in all houses of Chan, the hidden spark is considered the symbol of the Guishan school. And the reference to it occurs in the enlightened stories of both Guishan and Yangshan. And the spark is thought to correspond to Lao Tzu's subtle lighter inner vision. So I thought I'd read another example. So when Yangshan went to visit one of the junior disciples, He wanted to test him to see if he had been progressing in his learning and his teaching. So that student, Wuyang, was studying elsewhere and Yangshan went to him and asked him to describe his understanding.

[16:37]

Weiyan composed a gata. Last year's poverty was no real poverty. This year's poverty is poverty indeed. Poor as I was last year, I still possessed enough ground to stand an owl on. This year, I'm so poor that I do not have, even have an owl. Yangshan remarked, however, From this I can tell, dear brother, that you have attained the Tathagata Chan. As to the Patriarch Chan, you do not seem to have dreamed of it yet. Shang Zhen then improvised another gatha. I have an innate aptitude to look at him by a twinkle. If anyone does not understand this, let him not call himself a monk. So, A lot of the We Young dialogues have to do with going past the teaching of the absolute and the relative, or the noumenal and phenomenal, and going past and balancing those two.

[18:08]

and rather than going one way or the other. So in the first gatha, when he says, I'm poor, I don't even have an owl, he's really talking about going to the more emptiness side. And then when he talks about having a little twinkle, he's talking about this inner place of more unity and non-duality. So all of, and there were a lot of dialogues with them where they talked about this inner spark or inner light. So inner light and inner spark was a characteristic of the school. The other thing about this encounter was another contribution of that house is Jungshan's distinction between, he mentions here the Tathagata Chan, which is the faith stage, and the, and the patriarch chan, which is considered the personality stage.

[19:18]

So when you, there's a place where you can go where you have faith in the teachings and faith in the teachings of ultimate reality, faith in the teachings. And you can get to a place where, you get to the place where you don't have a leg to stand on. You can get to the place of emptiness. But you have to go, but there's a sense of faith in the teaching or faith in the practice. When you go beyond that stage, you only have a twinkle. You only have a spark. That's all that's there. You have nothing to stand on. So that's kind of a going beyond place and he looked at that and that was that was very much a part of what they were pushing their monks to do. So in all the dialogues, they were pushing their monks to kind of not take the form emptiness dialogues and take an easy answer.

[20:27]

They had to go beyond that into this place. Ross talked about the five ranks last night. They had to go beyond the place where where we can simply answer, we can simply say, that's form, that's emptiness, that we would go beyond that. So another characteristic of the school, during that period of time there were a lot of debates about gradual versus sudden enlightenment, and many, many debates about that. In the Guiyang school, there was an understanding that it wasn't one or the other, that there were these enlightenment experiences, but really, that was just the beginning, that there was more after that.

[21:29]

You didn't just have a moment of awareness, oh, I get it, and your whole life changed because you still had to go back to the functional world you still had to go back to the marketplace. And so that required continued practice. There's a dialogue here that maybe illustrates that. A monk asked Guishan, after a man has attained an instantaneous enlightenment, must he still cultivate his spiritual life Guishan's answer to this important question is the locus classicus of the union of instantaneous enlightenment and gradual enlightenment, which has become a prevailing doctrine among Buddhist philosophers. This is John Wooler's book. If a man is truly enlightened, and this is what Guishan said, if a man is truly enlightened and has realized the fundamental, he is aware of it himself.

[22:36]

In such a case, he actually is no longer tied to the pulse of cultivation and non-cultivation. But ordinarily, though the original mind has been awakened by an intervening cause, so that the man is instantaneously enlightened in his reason and spirit, yet there remains the inertia of habit, formed since the beginning of time, which cannot be totally eliminated at a stroke. He must be taught to cut off completely the stream of his habitual ideas and views caused by still operative karmas. So there was a sense that even when someone manifested in a dialogue, their understanding, that people needed to be pushed further. And in a lot of the dialogues, there was a pushing beyond and asking of another question to try to push further. So another characteristic of a school

[23:39]

was that words were not, people, words were not counted on. Words, nonverbal expressions were stressed in the school, like they were in some others, but they were particularly stressed in the Liyang school. One famous story is Guishan placed a jug in front of the assembly of monks and asked, if you don't call this a water jug, what do you call it? Yangsheng kicked the water jug and walked away. This was his way of using silence to express essence. So there's essence and function, and he was expressing silence. And this way people talked about the interaction between the substance of self-nature and the functional interaction between substance and self-nature.

[24:49]

Another story like this is, one day when Master Guishan was walking on a mountain, he saw Luigi doing sitting practice under a tree. The master tapped Luigi on the back with his staff. Luigi turned his head and Guishan asked, Riji, can you say it? Riji replied, although I cannot say it, I will not depend on someone else's mouth. The master approved. There's another story in Roaring Streams, Guishan says, in the 40 volumes of the Nirvana Sutra, how many words were spoken by Buddha and how many by devils? Yangshan says, They were all devils. Guishan says, from now on, no one can overcome you. So this idea of using silence as a teaching, and that the teaching was beyond words.

[25:58]

There's another case. regarding Guishan and Yangshan. Attention, Guishan asked Yangshan, where do you come from? Guishan replied, I came from the fields. Guishan asked, how many were in the fields? Yangshan stuck his in the ground and stood with his hands folded on his chest. Yangshan, Huishan said, in the southern mountains lots of people reap thatch. Yangshan pulled up his hoe and left. So in this In this dialogue, there's really, again, silence and physical activity rather than words to describe what's happening.

[27:17]

So when someone answers, there is no answer. There is no real answer. And in this case, The reason I'm having difficulty is I have two names. Some of the names are Japanese and some of the names are in Chinese. In this case, Guishan and his student, Yangshan, are having a dialogue and Guishan probes for this first question to see whether whether Yangshan is coming from a literal place or is an understanding. So when he answers, where do you come from? And he says, I come from the fields. He's answering from a literal perspective.

[28:26]

But when he asks, how many were in the fields, then Yangshan gets that he's not just asking a regular question and he says, and he sticks his toe and he says, just this, just this. So this kind of characteristic of this school was that they had many non-dialogue dialogues where very little was said and all was assumed because the idea was that the minute you said something, you lost it. And if you gave people answers, you lost it. So they wanted to express their way in a way that was made people pay attention, but didn't give them the answers.

[29:35]

So you weren't left going home with the answers, you were left going, hmm. The other thing that characterized the school was, at least as far as we know, people were supportive of women. There were very famous women disciples, both of Guishan, who we all heard about, Liu Timo, and also Yangshan, who had another famous disciple who was a woman called Miaoshan. these women were very empowered and were very much great teachers in their own light, in their own realm.

[30:40]

And the classic story of Miaoshan was people came to see Yangshan and asked him a question and Miaoshan was taking care of the logistics of the monastery, and she overheard them talking about the story of what's moving, the flag or the wind. And Waning's famous answer to that was, not the mind, that the mind was moving, but the famous answer that Yao Shin gave was it wasn't any of them that were moving. So she was able to go beyond the teaching of her teacher and of the ancestors to bring out her own level of intensity and her own, to go beyond

[31:57]

the distinction between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world by putting them together in that sense. So they both were very supportive of women and gave women very high places in their temples. So another characteristic of this school of Guishan and Yangshan was the gentle master-disciple and friend style or family style of teaching. It was very energetic and very fervent and often physical in terms of people doing physical actions rather than verbal actions. And they were very different from the Wing Chi school in which there was a lot of lightning bolts hitting violence and that kind of thing in many of the old Zen stories, but this was basically a school that was very gentle.

[33:07]

There was a strong relationship between the two and they did a lot of repartee with each other and challenging of each other and challenging of their disciples, but they did that in a way that made their point without the kind of violent kind of imagery that was in many of the other Zen. But there was still a great depth to Master, one example of this was, the master just awoke from sleep. Yangshan came in and bowed. The master arose and said, I just had a dream.

[34:11]

Why don't you try to interpret it for me? Yangshan went to get a basin of water for the master to wash his face. A little while later, Yangyang, who came in and bowed to the master, the master said, I just had a dream. And Yangshan interpreted for me. Why don't you interpret it for me also? Zhengyang went and brought the master a cup of tea. The master said, the two's understanding is better than Charyaputra's. So there was a kind of a non-verbal, physical way that they interacted with each other and they were taught and taught each other, but without any of the violence or drama that occurred in some of the other schools. is another story. Once when all the monks were out picking tea leaves, the master addressed Yangshan. All day as we were picking tea leaves, I've heard your voice, but have not seen you yourself.

[35:15]

Show me your original self. Yangshan thereupon shook the tea tree. The master said, you have attained only the function and not the substance. Yangshan said, I do not know how you yourself would answer this question. The master was silent for a time. Yangshan said, you master have attained only the substance, not the function. Huishan said, I absolve you from 20 blows. So Yangshan shook the tree. He shook the tree pointing to the inner self by means of a functioning in a functional way Not and and it was it was it wasn't only part of the story, right? It was only part of the story. He was only looking at it from one perspective The master said you only got the function not the substance the master

[36:26]

preferred silence or walking away to show the substance. That was the tradition in their school. Then Yangshan, so he kind of didn't answer in the traditional way, the nonverbal way, using no words, just using actions. But then he compounded his era, by challenging the teacher. So he challenged the teacher, how would you yourself answer the question? And then he criticized the teacher by saying, you have only substance, not function. So one says you have function and no substance, and somebody else says you have substance but no function. This is an error because you can't have one without the other, so it was one-sided, and it was a kind of family dialogue.

[37:34]

No one got hit, even though Yang Chang made a big mistake by being one-sided in his answer. So a lot of these old stories, somebody would have gotten hit or pushed aside if they had done a wrong answer, but he says, I absolve you of 20 blows, so even though His absolving of 20 blows was just like giving him a blow. He's basically saying, you're way off base, but I absolve you from 20 blows. It's 11.02. 11.05, I hold up the striker, and then you keep on going. Well, I may or may not. I think the other part of this teaching, the other characteristic of this teaching was there's a lot of symbology.

[38:36]

There were a lot of, and for me, think about this, it made sense to me because sometimes I see the symbols in the koans and I don't always know where they come from, and apparently And usually if I study enough, I can find out that the reference, but they're quite complicated, a lot of these columns for, you really have to go do homework and find where that, it doesn't seem like a symbol, it just doesn't make any sense at all. So there's, so just to give you an example of the kind of things they did, they used a lot of, what they call circular forms in their teaching in the school. So, and there were 97 apparently circular forms, and I do not know them, so I won't tell you anything about them, but they came from the patriarchal union.

[39:42]

There's a story, and there's a story about this. The national teacher having received the teaching of 97 circular forms from the sixth patriarch, transmitted it to me. This is what Yangshan says. 30 years after I'm gone, a novice monk from the south will come and widely spread this teaching. Continue this teaching and don't let the lineage end. Now I transmit it to you and you shall uphold it well. So he gave the manuscript to Yangshan. Yangshan examined it once and burned the manuscript. One day, Don Yuan reminded him, you should treasure those forms from a while ago. Yangshan said, after I saw them, I burned the book. Nobody understands this teaching except the past master, Wanyin, the ancient patriarchs and the saints in the world. How could you burn it? I read it once and understood their meanings. What is important is to apply them, but you should not get attached to the forms, even though you may be able to do it.

[40:51]

but the future generation may not have enough faith. If the master wants, it is not hard to reproduce." So Yangshan made a copy from memory and turned it in without leaving anything out. So these people, again, this was another way, there was no anger, they just went ahead and it was a very familial style in this school. And they really, when you read, and I encourage anybody who's interested to read about this school and these people, because they really had this wonderful way of having difficult discussions or pushing each other, but being able to somehow, there was there felt like, to me, there was a lot of support and encouragement that everybody gave each other and the pulling of legs was very characteristic.

[42:00]

They would just kind of ding each other to see if they could trick each other. And then sometimes one would come up ahead and sometimes the other one would come up ahead. And a lot of these teachings from these two certainly the light, the spark, you can find in Dogen's teaching, some of the other gradual versus sudden enlightenment teachings, the kind of use of silence in the teachings, rather than saying anything and giving the answer, the value of that, are all things that were very much part of our own lineage. And so it's really fun to kind of read them. really encouraging to read these dialogues where people were trying to work through these difficult issues and talk about them. And particularly in this school, kind of going beyond the simple, the kind of rote answer, you know, in a koan with, well, you can take the form side or the emptiness side, and going beyond that duality to really getting pointing towards the non-dual.

[43:17]

that includes everything. And that was a lot about the silence, using silence in that way to get to the non-dual, and yet also having fun along the way. They were always jousting with each other along the way. And it's interesting, because I didn't realize that there are still some some schools that incorporate a lot of their teachings and a lot of their teaching styles. Certainly they did later on, but even now that it lived on, it's odd to me that they lived, that they were absorbed by the Lin Chi school because they were very opposite in terms of their style from the Rinzai, from the very harsh student-teacher interactions. But this, it was interesting that they have, although they don't hit or yell, They were able to get each other with zingers. And that's really when you pay attention.

[44:20]

I mean, that's kind of Sojin Roshi does that. He doesn't, I don't think he hits or yells too much. Not recently anyway. But the kind of asking the question, just pushing past the easy answer. And that was what their school was about. Let's have these dialogues and then never, always leave the person with, if not a harsh zinger, just something, something to push past. So, any questions? No? Yes? Circular, what are you saying? They're just these symbols. There are a lot of symbols where a monk asks a question and somebody makes a cross in the dirt or somebody makes a swastika and then draws a circle around it.

[45:22]

So they use these forms to have a dialogue with each other. So it's always like a a physical figure. Yes. Well, sometimes they'll wave their hands in the sky, you know, make a circle in the sky or make a symbol. But yeah, they make, they use symbols that they all know the secret language. And, um, but there, and they were, and everyone kind of, there, there's something that's, that's able in a kind of a nonverbal way to kind of convey something. So you'll see a story about somebody, and the monk says something, and the teacher makes a cross, and then the monk says something else, and the monk makes a circle, and the teacher draws a line through it, you know, that kind of thing. So it was kind of a way for them. I don't see how it's made from a word. I don't know, but it's kind of the way that there was kind of this esoteric symbology, which they were, which, that's the first time I actually read about it,

[46:26]

I read about it in more like the New Age literature with using the old Celtic symbols and other symbols, but yeah. Thank you. I was talking about a word or a symbol. There was a time when I did a protest work on it with a lot of people of a coffin. George Bush was sending coffins back, trying to hide them from the public. We made a march in New York of 975 coffins. no words, no, there was only the coffin. And for that very reason, the message was transmitted. So that's a word, but a symbol. It's a symbol, but that's a lot of what there's a lot of Koans that refer to these people in all of the books of Koans. And a lot of it is these symbolic gesture, somebody walks around in a circle and then leaves, or somebody makes a cross and leaves, or somebody makes another kind of symbol and leaves.

[47:30]

So there's the symbol and the action, and that's another characteristic. In other words, there's an action that happens, but there's not a verbal. Translation. Yeah, yeah. Possible. That's the symbol. There's no translation in the words. Yeah. And you just get it the way you get it. or not. Yeah? The story about the shovel in the ground and his response, can you say anything about that response? Like the symbolism? Well, he first asked him, where do you come from? And that was just like a regular question, like you could ask anybody, where do you come from? So he said, from the fields. And then he said, how many people were in the fields. And then basically, Xiang got that it wasn't really about the fields. He was asking him kind of, what is it?

[48:33]

And he said, this is it. So it was his using a symbol and an action rather than a word. Didn't he say a number, like 10,000 people in the fields? No. How many in the fields? God asked him how many and he just did his. Oh, okay. Yeah. Anything else? Well, I thank you for allowing me to connect with an ancestor or two. And I very much appreciate and experience here that gentle Yeah, learning from really regular interactions with each other and sometimes asking questions or probing. And stepping back from the explanation. So, Jim? Oh, well, there's a whole bunch of things.

[49:41]

Nissan had 97 circles that he talked with. But in those days, at the time, people used circles. like the 10 ox-herding pictures or 10 circles. Dongshan's five ranks, five circles, and Isan had 97 circles. And as an example, he had a circle with a character for a cow. Another little saying would be, a cow inside a circle eating patient's grass. So that's a kind of example. And they're teaching devices, using those symbols as teaching devices.

[50:41]

And it's kind of like how you negotiate the practice. And the other thing is, Master Hua, which you mentioned, his name was To Lan originally. He came from America, and he had a temple here in San Francisco. And eventually, someone gave him some land up north. Yeah, that's what you were referring to, but I don't know if anybody got that. Oh, okay. Yeah. This teaching, even though the school officially died out, it's still there. He claimed that he was the descendant of the Guayana spirit. Yeah. That was your reference.

[51:43]

Yeah. No?

[51:51]

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