I'd like to welcome your attention, Roshi. Thank you very much. I'm very grateful for your coming to teach and practice with us again. I think this is your fourth time here. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. And congratulations to all of you on continued growth and innovation of the center. I see little changes and little signs of intimate care details here each time I come, something new. It's very nice. Congratulations. It feels like already I feel the the heart of the communities.

[01:02]

Very, very flourishing. Congratulations. This is the first time I've come here in the springtime. Minnesota Zen Center, I remember that we would invite you either in December or August. or January rockets, I think. Yeah. So I haven't been in Minnesota in the springtime for a really long time. It's very nice in the spring. I saw that the, sorry, the title, for this time together, something like Heroic Stride Sashi.

[02:11]

Is that what it says? The Heroic Stride of the Bodhisattva. Yeah, but on the schedule it just says Heroic Stride Sashi. And the title I sent was Heroic Stride of the Bodhisattva. I think that I was attracted to the practice of the Zen tradition by stories I heard of the heroic stride of the bodhisattva, stories about Zen monks, Japanese and Chinese Zen monks who heroically strided into the life of living beings.

[03:37]

I wasn't really attracted to practice by images of great enlightened beings, or beings that seem to be great enlightened beings, but I was attracted to people who could plunge into daily life fearlessly and selflessly. Like the story about the monk Hakuin, who lived in a town on the coast, the Pacific coast of Japan, and a girl in the village

[05:37]

told her parents that she was pregnant by Hakuin. And parents were shocked and became very angry that Hakuin would have had sex with their daughter. And they went to him and severely criticized him as a disgrace to the Buddhist clergy. And also said that, you know, when the baby was delivered, he could take care of it. And so they apparently did that. They brought in the baby and said, here, you take care of it. We don't want it. And when they reviled and insulted him, his only response, at least in the story, was, is that so?

[06:56]

And then apparently he took care of the baby for two years with the help of a wet nurse. But he just took care of what was there, even though he was a monkey, took care of the baby, along with his other activities. And then the girl finally told the parents that actually it was someone else who was the father. And they went to Hakuin, and then they praised him greatly. And they apologized profusely. for unjustly accusing him and insulting him. And then they further praised him for the way he responded to their insults and the way that he cared for the baby.

[08:02]

And they asked for the baby back, and he gave the baby back. And when they were praising him and apologizing, he said, is that so? So I saw this heroic stride type of behavior on his part and I thought that I wanted to walk in the world like that. And then another story, and these are stories I read when I was living here in Minnesota. Another story I read was about another Zen monk who lived in Japan named Ryokan.

[09:07]

And this one night he was sitting in his simple little hut and he heard somebody kind of approaching his hut in the dark, but still under the light of the full moon. And he thought maybe it was a thief. And I believe that before the thief even entered his house, he took all his possessions and his clothes and threw them out the window as a gift and said, please take them all and I'm sorry I can't give you the full moon too. And there again I saw this this willingness to stride intimately into the world

[10:20]

of living beings suffering, stealing living beings, and meet them and give everything to them with joy and wishing to give them more if possible. And I thought, yes, that's the way to live. And as I read more about these monks, I found out that most of them had some period of training prior to being able to stride in this heroic way, and that the training was quite similar, had some similar elements for all of them.

[11:21]

usually involving sitting meditation. And so I thought, well, let's study that and see if we can practice that. That might be helpful. So that's how I got into Zen. And then I found out about, you know, Buddha. I had heard about it before, but I found out about how Buddha fits into the picture of this kind of behavior. These monks weren't exactly said to be Buddhas, and yet they were in a way completely ordinary people, but in a way they were acting just like Buddha would have acted, probably, if Buddha had been in their situation. So usually we don't picture Buddha being in a position where somebody is accusing him of being the father of some girl and insulting him.

[12:35]

Usually the Buddha is surrounded by a big assembly of people who are revering and devotedly listening to the teaching rather than throwing insults at him. But if Buddha walked away from his assembly, from his group of devoted students, and were just strolling about the countryside, he might not look so special. And if somebody was in trouble, And people were going to blame them for some unskillful action.

[13:39]

They might say, oh, that guy did it. People might go over to the Buddha and attack him. So the conditions could be that actually a Buddha could wind up in a situation like these stories I just told you. And then how would the Buddha respond? Well, I'm not saying the Buddha would respond just like these monks did, but he wouldn't have had to respond any better for me. He might have responded by saying, when they were insulting him, he might have responded by saying, You're accusing me of having sexual intercourse with this young girl?

[14:46]

Do you realize who you're talking to? I'm the Buddha. How dare you? You might have said that. That might not be bad. It was true. He was the Buddha. Or he might have reached out and said, would you like some teaching about Dharma? And they might have said, are you crazy? You pervert. I don't know how I would have responded. So these stories are not, in a way they're pretty ordinary, but in another way they're a little bit spectacular, that people could be that unprotected, so little concerned about protecting themselves, and just sort of handling the situation in a way that seemed appropriate.

[16:22]

In the teachings of the Mahayana in India, in various scriptures, there is the appearance of the expression heroic stride, samadhi. the Heroic Stride Samadhi of the Bodhisattva. And there is one scripture which is titled the Heroic Stride Scripture, Shurangama Samadhi Sutra. There is also a sutra which was quite popular in China called the Shurangama Sutra, the Heroic Stride Scripture. But that scripture, although it's about meditation and it's about samadhi, it's a different scripture from the one that I just mentioned.

[18:54]

It's just the Heroic Stride Sutra, and this one I'm mentioning is the Heroic Stride Samadhi. This samadhi also appears in the Prajnaparamita literature and in the Paya Nirvana Sutra and in a number of other sutras. And it has a reputation for being placed at the center or at the summit of the samadhis of the bodhisattvas. In a sense, to talk about such a great meditation state

[20:03]

seem somewhat antithetical to the kinds of ordinary daily life situations I just mentioned. But part of the irony or paradox is that this highest meditation is a meditation which realizes the true relationship between daily life situations and the situation of being a most highly advanced bodhisattva or a Buddha. In a number of these texts, it says that the shurangama samadhi, the heroic stride samadhi, is the nature of the Buddha.

[21:22]

The Buddha nature is this samadhi. And as you probably have heard already, One of the most dear teachings in Mahayana in general, and in Zen in particular, is that living beings fully possess the Buddha nature. or the way Dogen Zenji puts it, all living beings, whole being, Buddha nature. The whole being of each living being is the Buddha nature.

[22:27]

The way we really are is Buddha nature. So you could also say that the way we really are is this samadhi, is this heroic stride samadhi. When we realize this samadhi, we can be these kinds of bodhisattvas. We can be a Buddha in the world because we realize our nature. But the scriptures also say that although all beings are really this samadhi, each one of us in our wholeness is the samadhi, and the samadhi is all of us.

[23:36]

All sentient beings together, the way they're all operating, is the samadhi. And each one of us in our wholeness is the samadhi. Although that's so, we don't usually understand it. As a matter of fact, it's very rare to understand our nature. But we have this kind of nature, this Buddha nature, this heroic stride samadhi nature. And part of what makes it difficult for us to understand it is the way our mind works. Our mind works in such a way as to grasp the surface of itself and the surface of things and by grasping the surface as what's happening not see the actual nature of what's happening.

[25:01]

Part of the samadhi then is to initiate ourselves into studying how our mind creates a surface over things and believes that the surface of things is the things. And in this way we become initiated into what we already are. and then realize it. Living beings like us, who have consciousness and have a vast variety of conscious functions,

[27:27]

and all of its functions, and a body, which has these consciousnesses and functions, we receive all this in a way that, as you've also probably heard, is We receive our life due to various causes and conditions, independence on things other than ourself. We have received, we receive this life and this body and mind. But the nature of this body and mind that we have now, which we have just received and which has just passed away, and now this new one we've received now, the nature of this constantly changing body and mind is the heroic stride samadhi.

[29:00]

The nature of this body-mind we have is Buddha. One of the functions, one of the conscious functions of most of us is that our mind has the ability to think.

[30:58]

Our consciousness can think. It can it can experience something like wandering among different objects of awareness. It can know many things, unlimited, more or less, objects of awareness, and it can wander between them, can experience a kind of wandering or going back and forth among things. Like thinking about the beginning, middle and end of a sentence, or thinking about in this room and outside this room, or thinking about this person and then that person, or about this way of feeling and another way of feeling. So we have this ability to wander among the things we know, rather than just know one thing and then know another thing and then know another thing, which we do.

[32:00]

We can also like relate them and wander among them. But usually people are not aware, as they wander from object to object, they're usually not aware of not wandering from object to object, and they're also not aware that the objects that they're wandering among are basically the same. most people are caught by the superficial appearance that different objects are different. And they're caught by the superficial appearance of moving from one object to another. And then dealing with the movement from one object to another and also dealing with

[33:03]

and actually sort of indulging in the apparent difference between objects, all this is part of what we usually call thinking. And there are some patterns by which most of us deal with these objects of awareness, and those patterns are the patterns of our individual thinking. And we have different patterns of thinking, and we have some shared patterns of thinking, like, for example, the grammar of our language is a pattern of thinking that we generally share. There's other patterns of thinking which we don't share so much, like some people have a set pattern of thinking around certain people, And someone else who knows the same person has a very different pattern of thinking about that person. This person habitually thinks this... This one person thinks habitually or in a patterned way thinks about a friend in a certain way.

[34:13]

Another person thinks in a really different way. One person thinks this person's really wonderful. Another person thinks this person's really troublesome. And they just, they generally kind of like their mind works that way as they think about the same person. And both of them are wandering around, running back and forth, making various deductions about this person's behavior, judging the different appearances of this person. So this kind of activity is sometimes called thinking or meditation. or the dynamics of the factors of consciousness which are associated with consciousness, or discursive thought, or wandering around in your head, and so on. The actual, you know, nature of this wandering mind, the way this mind actually works, is the Heroic Stride Samadhi.

[35:21]

its actual nature is buddha nature but again if we don't understand it it just seems to be misery more or less there are two basic approaches to the situation of having a mind and body and mental activity, two basic approaches to understanding the nature of the situation of being a living being with a mind like this. One approach, and both of the approaches actually, as you begin, both of these approaches use the very mind which I just described Both of the approaches use a mind which seems to move among objects and which moves among objects which are seen as different.

[36:31]

That mind of discursive thought will use that mind in order to actually penetrate to the nature of the mind. So we use the discursive thought or we use the thinking to study in two different ways. One way study or study and understand the nature of the mind. One way is that we use our discursive thought to disuse our discursive thought. We use our discursive thought We use our mind which moves among objects to train ourselves to give up discursive thought. Not to destroy it, not to suppress it even, or not to try to suppress it, but let go of it.

[37:39]

So this category or this basic approach to our discursive thought is using our discursive thought to talk ourselves into giving it up. So these types of meditations, this approach to initiating ourselves into the nature of the mind is often called tranquility practice. Yeah, in Sanskrit, shamatha, calming practice, or sometimes concentration practice.

[38:50]

The page is . So in the Fukon Zazengi which we chanted this morning, there's a section which says, put aside, no, not that part. It says, discard all involvements and take a respite of concern. Do not think good or bad. Do not educate right and wrong. cease all movements of the conscious mind, the gauging of all thoughts and views. That type of instruction in this text is instructions to read that. You have to use your discursive mind to read the instruction and to think about that instruction and apply it. You're actually applying that discursive message to your discursive mind, to encourage your discursive mind to give up discursive thought. So that section of the Fukunzazengi is giving you instruction which would come to fruit, if you practiced giving up discursive thought, that would come to fruit as tranquility and serenity.

[40:24]

But not just that, but also a bright and buoyant and flexible body and mind. Body and mind, mind and body. become tranquil, flexible, buoyant, workable, and so on when we give up discursive thought. But we have to usually hear the instruction to give it up before we can actually give it up, because we naturally are involved in it. So again, what this is, is basically to train your attention to stop moving among objects. So that when different objects are presented, you feel more like they've just changed what's on the screen, they being all conditions that just change what you're looking at, rather than you're moving from thing to thing.

[41:31]

So things appear and disappear. rather than you running among them, running from one to the other and running back and forth, which is the way we usually feel about things. The other gesture, so that's the first gesture, the first type of approach to penetrating the nature of our life, which has a calming effect. The other approach, which again this is a type of giving up discursive thought, the other approach is again to use discursive thought, but this time we're not using discursive thought to give it up, we're using discursive thought to guide our attention to actually now instead of just not moving among the different objects,

[42:33]

but to look at each object with the guidance of the teaching so that we can penetrate to its nature. And this type of meditation comes to fruit as wisdom or insight. So you use discursive thought to develop insight and you give up discursive thought to develop tranquility. Now in the final stages of wisdom these two forms of meditation are joined so that you're actually in a state of tranquility or you're in a state of wisdom and then you enter into a state of tranquility and a new type of wisdom arises out of just being in a tranquil state.

[43:40]

So these actually can be these two types of meditation or these two types of initiation into our nature. can be practiced separately to some extent, or one can be emphasized more than the other, and they can also be perfectly balanced finally. As we go on further, I might mention some places where sometimes I've experienced that people sometimes try to do tranquility type of meditation and are somewhat unsuccessful for whatever reasons. They have trouble giving up discursive thought. But when they start... In other words, they have trouble using their discursive thought to give up discursive thought. But when they use their discursive thought to develop and listen to the teaching and apply it to what's happening,

[44:43]

Sometimes in the wisdom side, the way that they use their discursive thought in wisdom work actually turns out to be more tranquilizing than when they try to give it up. In other words, they're better able to give up their discursive thought when they're using it to study the nature of their mind than they are when they're trying to just give it up. In some ways, we maybe seem to be working on one thing, but sometimes we find out that actually we're working on two things. And that's really kind of like great that that happens sometimes with people.

[45:24]

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