Good morning, everyone. I want to continue this weekend discussing themes that have come up with the Mountains and Water Sutra, or more thinking of it as the Landscape Sutra, San Sui Kyo in Japanese, and San Sui together means landscape, so this is about how we see and engage with and express the landscape of the world around us and under us and above us, but also the landscape of our lives and of our practice, our Sangha. Just as a little reminder, by talking about the mountains and waters of the immediate

[01:16]

present, as the manifestation of the past, the way of the ancient Buddhas, together abiding in their Dharma positions, and for each of us abiding in our Dharma positions, they, these mountains and waters, have consummated the qualities of thorough exhaustiveness. They've realized completeness. So, when we are in our Dharma positions, when we are willing to take on our situation, and sit upright with body and mind, even for a little while, the landscape itself awakens. So, this is the self, this is all the self before the emergence of signs, before we name and identify it, and the penetrating liberation of the immediate actuality.

[02:20]

So, Thurak Valkai, Dogon Kus, is saying that the Blue Mountains are constantly walking, still a woman who bears a child by night. So I want to focus today on how it is that these mountains of our life and around our life are constantly walking. What is this walking? Dogon says we have to, if we see and study how it is that the mountains walk, we can start to understand and see and fully engage our own walking as well. So, how is our walking? And as I've said, not the character in that statement by Furong, but later on, Dogon uses

[03:39]

one of the other characters for walking, Gyo, which also means conduct, or practice. So the Blue Mountains are constantly walking, constantly conducting themselves in their own dharma position, constantly practicing, constantly performing. So I'll come back to that, but this walking has many facets. And just as we do walking meditation, how is it when we inhale and lift our foot, and how is it when we put our foot down as we exhale and allow our soles of our feet to kiss the ground? This landscape of walking is the landscape of how we realize and recognize our landscape,

[04:52]

the landscape of our planet and world, the landscape of our own lives. So I want to refer today to a very interesting book by Rebecca Solnit about the history of walking called Wanderlust. She quotes Henry David Thoreau talking about walking, an absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the king of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape

[05:56]

within a circle of ten miles radius or the limits of an afternoon walk and the three score years and ten of human life. This landscape, this radius of our walking will never become quite familiar to you. So this is true in the woods, it's also true, and I'll say more about this later, even in our urban mountains and waters, our urban landscape. Walking for a few hours, we see things we haven't seen before, even if we're not looking around so much. And, Sola says, the something closest to doing nothing is walking. So you might feel bad about your sitting. Just sitting, doing nothing, accomplishing nothing, hopefully, just enjoying your inhale

[07:05]

and exhale. So our walking meditation is just a kind of slightly more active variant of our sitting. So I don't know if anybody's written a history of sitting, sitting in the world as opposed to just sitting in the way we talk about it in Zen. There are books about just sitting as a Zen practice. But at any rate, she says the something closest to doing nothing is walking. She says walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. Walking is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. After all those years of walking to work out other things, it made sense to come back to

[08:09]

work close to home, in Thoreau's sense, and to think about walking. She says moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time. So how is our walking? How do we appreciate walking as we get up from our sitting and walk for a little bit? Or how do we appreciate walking as we go for a walk? Whether we're walking to some particular place or just going out for a stroll. So she talks also about the history of walking as an avocation, as she's talking about it in terms of Western European culture, and how appreciation of the landscape changed as a result of walking.

[09:11]

From formal gardens to the 1700s, people started appreciating the scenery and there would be guidebooks to places to go to walk in. People would just walk as an avocation for its own sake, not to get something. So, at least as she says, European history, that just started in the late 1700s and developed in a sense of connection with the landscape has to do with walking and appreciating natural landscapes or kind of cultivated landscapes of gardeners. Then they started having the gardens being less geometrical and more meandering. So, walking is an interesting activity, and again, an extension of our practice of

[10:12]

just sitting. So there's also Zen walking. Walking is a kind of delicate endeavor. The first part of this is quoting someone. She says, human walking is a unique activity during which the body, step by step, teeters on the edge of catastrophe. Man's bipedal mode of walking seems potentially catastrophic because only the rhythmic forward movement of the first one leg, then the other, keeps one from falling flat on our face. So, in our very, very, very, very slow walking, you know, Kinhen, that we do here, usually between sittings, you know, you can feel it's so, so slow that you kind of sway a little bit from side to side. And, you know, I can't remember if I've ever seen anybody fall over in the middle

[11:13]

of Kinhen, but that's just my memory failing. I think it's possible. Anybody see that? Yeah. So it can happen, you know, taking a short step, but, you know, we could just, you know, and then, of course, as I've said, we trust that the floor will be there to meet our foot and that our sole of our feet could kiss the floor, kiss the ground. But maybe we shouldn't always assume that. Children begin to walk to chase desires that no one will fulfill for them, the desire for that which is out of reach, for freedom, for independence from the secure confines of the maternal Eden. So coming out of the womb after, I don't know, several months, a year, whatever,

[12:15]

however long it is, at some point, children want something across the room and they could crawl, some children crawl for longer than others, but anyway, at some point they could get up and walk. So walking begins as delayed falling, and the fall meets with the fall, or the fall. So she's talking about being in the fall, released from our mother's wonderful womb where we can just kind of be there, and now that we have to get out of it, find our way in the world, of course, with a lot of support, hopefully, at first. But still, okay, they stand up, they fall over, and then they stand up and fall over. Maybe some do it, like, very easily, but a lot of us, when we were that young, I don't know if any of you can remember when you started to walk, but you'd fall over.

[13:20]

Walking is, you know, an unusual activity in the animal world. It's kind of walking on two feet. It's one of our unique qualifications for being present as a species. I think there's some monkeys that can walk on two feet too, but some other primates, but anyway, so how is it that our walking is informed by studying the Blue Mountains' constant walking, the churning of rock and mountain and stream and trees coming up and birds singing and all the things that happen on a mountain, in the snow-covered mountain that we have there as a reminder, Narasimha. How do we perform the practice of walking and the practice of the rest of the things we practice? So Dogen emphasizes very much in the Sutra from the Landscape that he transcribes this

[14:44]

kind of situational perception we have. We can be aware of things based on our human faculties, which change from a baby learning to walk and then other things happening and then some of us, including all the people here, learning to sit and then, as happens later on, learning to be with body and mind falling apart, either gradually or sometimes suddenly. How do we walk this walk? So you know, we see Lake Michigan differently if we're humans or fish or dragons or hungry ghosts and Dogen says that people in the mountains love the mountains and the mountains

[15:52]

love the people who are in the mountains, but for the people in the mountains they can't necessarily see the mountains. How do we see the landscape of our lives? It's not so obvious sometimes. So people who live in the mountains, just live in the mountains and they walk around and you know, there's relatively recently, Rebecca talks about this too, the situation of people trying to get to the top of the mountain. This is a very bizarre, bizarre practice, thinking there's some peak experience we need to get and if we only get to the very top of the mountain, you know, that's it. So mountain, people in the mountains, the way Dogen's talking about it, does not include mountain climbers who are trying to get to the top. You know, walking around in the mountains, just walking, you know, at one level in the

[16:56]

mountains, walking around on trails, it's a wonderful, wonderful experience. We don't have to get to the top of the mountains to be the people in the mountains that the mountains love. In fact, those who want to, you know, get to the top of the mountains sometimes have a lot of difficulty. So there was this terrible accident in which Manny Sherpa died recently in Nepal and they just lived in the mountains. They just, before, before Europeans came and wanted to get to the top, they didn't climb to the top. Now, they're considered the experts at that, but they just lived in the mountains. Although I can't, I remember once, one summer, I was camped out in the mountains west of

[18:03]

Boulder and one night, a group of us climbed to the top of the nearest mountain and there was somebody there who had been up there, so we knew where, which trail led actually to a high mountain and we got there around sunrise. It was amazing. So, you know, if you ever, if you ever get to the top of, how many of you have been to the top of a mountain? Quite a few. Anyway, this particular mountain, I guess it was still considered the foothills of the Rockies because it, you know, but you could see way back to distant mountains where the distance that were white and snow covered, it wasn't snow on this, this was the sun over it. There were big, beautiful rocks with lichen on them, all kinds of beautiful color of lichen. You could sit there and the sun was just rising, so we saw funnels of water, so the mountains

[19:10]

and waters have this interesting relationship. There were like cones of, well, water as vapor rising from each of the valleys as the sun beautiful, and then there were also these bald eagles flying over these mountains. Anyway, so, you know, sometimes it's nice to climb up to the top of a mountain and see all of that, but our practice is kind of just to sit, you know, walk around, you know, just to enjoy the landscape where we are. And this constant walking, you know, sometimes we go out for a walk, sometimes we, you know, walk just to the grocery store or whatever, a walk to the L or, you know, a little bit of a walk. But anyway, these mountains are constantly walking, and of course, this image of the mountains that we think of as the most solid thing we're aware of, constantly walking gives

[20:18]

us a different, as well as a different, we have different situational perspectives depending on whether we're humans or fish or, you know, dragons and how we see the water in Lake Michigan. We also have different temporal perspectives, so, of course, we can, we all can imagine and see how mountains are moving in geological time. So mountains coming together, or if you've been to mountains like the Himalayas or wear it down like the Appalachians, it's a little smoother. But also, even right now, the mountains are constantly walking, turning blue or turning green, turning colors as the wildflowers come out, turning white as the winter comes. And the landscape of our lives also has this kind of longer temporal or very temporal perspective.

[21:27]

So there's also a mountain lineage and a Buddha lineage. Mountains are nicknames for different teachers. Many of the teachers in our lineage are named, their name is Esbushon or Zon in Japanese. That's the mountain where they taught. So we have various lineages in time. And yet, in each, you know, in Buddhism they have this thing called a kshana, and I think there's 62 of them in a second. And so in some sense, emptiness is about seeing how each kshana, each instant is unique and totally self. And we imagine connections, you know, between the previous time you were in this room and today, for example, or some previous time.

[22:31]

But in some way, from some perspective, it's just right now that the mountains and the landscape of our lives is constantly moving and walking. And yet from another perspective, we have this lineage going back to Dogon in the 1200s or Buddha 2,500 years ago, or in all the different, you know, each of many of you, all of you have different activities that you're involved with. And each of those activities have lineages of, you know, cultural mountains, cultural peaks and great figures you look back to. So our life is a kind of meandering, and yet we can do that as practice. We can do that intentionally. So in terms of our East Asian heritage, Rebecca Solnit talks about the Dallas roots of walking.

[23:48]

It wasn't descending so much as being in the mountains, yet not climbing to the top, but just being in the mountains that the Chinese poets, sages, and hermits celebrated. And the mountains so frequently portrayed in Chinese poetry and painting were a contemplative retreat from politics and society. So we have this weekend, and in some sense it's a retreat from society, except I might start talking about climate change or something like that, you know, I'll get riled up. But anyway, in China, wandering was celebrated. To go off into the mountains was a way of seeing something deeper than just the cultural artifacts of this immediate presence. To wander is the Taoist code word for becoming ecstatic. Arriving was sometimes regarded with ambiguity.

[24:52]

The point was just to wander. So she quotes Han Shang, the great Cold Mountain poet. People ask the way to Cold Mountain. Cold Mountain, there's no road that goes through. How can you hope to get there by following me? Your heart and mine are not alike. So there's a whole lineage of what wanderers, you can call them Taoist or Zen or whatever, but they walked around in the mountains. And this is part of the mountains walking also. But again, this, well, seeing the mountains and the waters as our life and as our landscape, also there's a tradition of seeing, really seeing how the mountains and waters express Buddha. So, the founder of Soto Zen, Dong Shan, who we were talking about last year, his question

[26:01]

that led him to his teacher was about how not so-called non-sentient beings can express the Dharma. But later on, in around Dogen's time, there was a great Chinese poet named Su Dongpo, in a song, who wrote a poem that the sounds of the valley streams are the Buddha's long wide tongue. So, one of the 32 marks of a Buddha is having this wonderful tongue to speak. The sounds of the valley stream are the Buddha's long tongue. The shapes or forms of the mountain are the Buddha's body. So whether you're in the mountains or if you're at a little distance and you see a line of the mountains, you know, anyway, he says the shape and form of the mountains is the body of Buddha. And then he said, at night, I heard all of the sutras, all the verses from all of the sutras. Now, how can I tell them to others?

[27:02]

So Dogen has a whole Shobo Genzo essay about this poem, but this is the basic question. At night, like the song, Woman Giving Birth, which I'll talk about more tomorrow, at night I heard all the sutras, the verses from all the sutras being spoken amidst the sounds of the valley streams and the shapes of the mountain. Ryokan has a poem like that too, where he says at the end, sometimes some morning, who will I tell first? So how do we share our engagement with the landscape of our lives with others? Well, part of this is, again, seeing the mountains as constantly walking, seeing the mountains as the Buddha, the body of the Buddha and the tongue of the Buddha. And, again, this walking also means to practice or to perform.

[28:07]

So in some basic way, I talked about this a little recently, but Zazen is performing Buddha. So I want to encourage you to feel this during this weekend, that your sitting, your Zazen is that which is on your Krishna chair performing Buddha. Your posture, your mudra, your inhale, your exhale is a performance. Even while you're sitting, even before you get up for a walk in meditation, you are walking Buddha's walk. You are taking on the mudra, the posture, the position, the pose of Buddha, of the mountains and waters walking. So enjoy your sitting.

[29:10]

Sit upright. Sit. And breathe fully. And you are walking the Buddha's walk. And of course, even when you sit still like a mountain, there's movement, blood, the water of your body circulating throughout you, veins and capillaries, and the thoughts wandering around. So in her history of walking, Rebecca Solnit refers a lot to literary figures, sort of the history of the literature of walking too. She mentions James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, their walking and meanderings and trying, but also how they would try to describe, how they tried to describe the workings of the

[30:13]

mind. And they developed the style, through describing walking around in various cities, they developed the style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. So, you know, some people have this idea that Zazen is supposed to be sitting with no thoughts. Or maybe they even think that walking is supposed to be walking with no thoughts. That's not the Buddhist practice of sitting or walking. Again talking about this walking, she says, this kind of unstructured associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. So even if you're walking from place A to place B to get such and such or to accomplish

[31:15]

such and such on such and such an errand, still the actual walking is, allows a kind of improvisation, a kind of performance. When you sit down to, for the next period of Zazen, it's not going to be exactly the same as the last period of Zazen. I mean, you know, in some ways, you know, every period of Zazen is just sitting and they're all wonderful. But each period of sitting has its own qualities. There's not going to be the exact same tape of thoughts going through you, being generated by the brain. So this performance of Zazen, this performance of mountains and waters constantly walking, this performance of our living the landscape of our lives through returning again and again

[32:17]

to just sitting. This is an improvisational performance. If you think there's some perfect Zazen that is the ultimate Zazen that needs to be done in order to be, you know, whatever you say you should be as a Zen person, that's not it. Zazen is improvised and it's performed. So you have the opportunity today and for most of you tomorrow and the next day to just sit and improvise Buddha, perform Buddha. That does not mean that you're not going to have thoughts about your own landscape of confusion or sadness or the problems in your life this week or this month or this lifetime. It doesn't mean some, you know, improv doesn't mean, performance doesn't mean just this kind

[33:19]

of wondrous floating around in the mountains. It's actually taking the next step, kissing the ground, the next footstep. Taking the next breath and, you know, each inhale and each exhale is unique too. I don't know, Dale, is there some way to say medically how each inhale is different? Are they all, would you say, you know, from the point of, from a medical perspective are they all like the same or is there, what is the uniqueness of an inhale? The varieties, the different qualities of different breaths, clinically. Okay, it's too complex to even say.

[34:22]

He was too busy breathing. Yeah, there's a muscularity to breathing just as there is to walking. Part of walking is actually experiencing your pelvis and each leg moving, whether it's very slowly or, you know, slightly or if you're out walking, doing very fast walking meditation during your life sometimes. What is the quality of, and like for breathing, the diaphragm, chest, and so forth. All of this is improvised, even though, you know, once we learn to walk as children, of course, we don't usually fall over again. As we get older, maybe we might fall.

[35:25]

Be careful. So, sort of getting towards the end of what I want to talk about today, I want to talk about this walking as not only in the littoral mountains of the Himalayas or the Rockies or the Appalachians, but in the landscape that we are in. So even walking, actually, I'll bet the psalmist spends a lot of time talking about urban walking and even walking in Chicago can have lots of qualities. You may walk, you know, from one place to another by the same route, but it's sort of nice sometimes to take a slightly different street just to see what that's like. Or to just walk, to head out and meander and improvise. How do we see the landscape, even in the mountains and waters or skyscrapers and avenues of Chicago?

[36:42]

So she talks about walking and how we see the land we're walking on. The connection between walking. So when we walk, we actually feel a distance in a different way than if we just drive or take the L. And I mentioned earlier in the practice period, Gary Schneider saying, to walk from the East Coast to the West Coast takes about six months if you're walking 20 to 30 miles a day. That's how we actually know our place. And when you were children, walking, walking to school or walking around your neighborhood is how we learn where we live. So walking around this neighborhood, you can learn this neighborhood or whatever neighborhood. But Solna says walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces, but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism.

[37:51]

Walking is in this way the antithesis of owning. It postulates a mobile, empty-handed, shareable experience of the land. Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the boundaries that define nations. Walking does the same thing on a smaller scale, private property. So maybe, you know, in a big city like Chicago, you need to be a little careful about where you walk, or at least at night or sometimes. But also, walking allows some circulation of your experience of what this landscape is that we inhabit. She talks particularly about the sense of landscape in Britain and the battle there between chopping up the land and taking away the commons and making it private property and the tradition that was then present of walking in the scenery of the world.

[38:53]

So she says, most British people I spoke with have a sense that the landscape was their heritage and they had a right to be there. Private property is a lot more absolute in the United States. The existence of vast tracts of public land serves to justify this. So there are places that are marked off where we go for a walk, like the Lakeshore. But also, as does an ideology in which the rights of the individual are more often upheld in the good of the community. So there's a way in which walking is a communal, community activity. Even if you're walking on your own, you're connecting with a different way of seeing the landscape. And she said she was thrilled when she got to England and discovered a culture in which trespassing is a mass movement, so that people would go trespassing intentionally because they don't like it if the land is marked off. There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude.

[40:00]

A dark solitude, punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars. And I think we could say that about our sitting, even though we do this together to support each other in it. In some ways we sit, each at our own place, in the landscape of this end zone. Basking in solitude. So, I don't know. Basking is allowed. In the country, when solitude is geographical, one is altogether outside society, so solitude has a sensible geographical explanation. Then there is a kind of communion with the non-human. In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers. And to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently, bearing one's secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries. She says, not long ago I heard the singer and poet Patti Smith answer a radio interviewer's

[41:10]

question about what she did to prepare for her performances on stage by saying, I would roam the streets for a few hours before each performance. With that brief comment, she summoned up her own outlaw romanticism in the way such walking might toughen and sharpen the sensibility. Wrap one in isolation, out of which might come songs fierce enough or sharp enough to break that museum silence. So, walking constantly like the mountains is an activity that we can do. It is a kind of basking that we can do as a way of performing Buddha. Each of you, each of us in our own way, when we are willing to just sit or just walk, are finding our own way to improvise and perform Buddha in this body, in this mind, with this heart. So please enjoy the constant movement of your sitting and when you get up to do walking,

[42:29]

please enjoy allowing the floor, the ground, all of these pieces of trees that are here on our ground here in this center to kiss your feet as you take each step. Thank you. So we will have time for discussion this afternoon and we will have other kinds of discussion in the next few days. Please take good care of the space around your seat, of your body and mind, with appreciation and respect for the people around you as we all support each other to do this practice of constantly walking and constantly sitting together.

[43:33]

Thank you. Thank you.

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