I want to continue speaking from this book, Hidden Lamp, Stories from 25 Centuries of Awakened Women. And the context of this I've been speaking about for the last month is, well, actually comes from, well, proceeds from a talk that Professor Charles Strang gave here last month about the Bodhisattva idea, which is the basis of our practice here, and a comparative complementary Western spiritual tradition, the prophetic, which he talked about in terms of a comparison of Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese modern Zen teacher, and the Catholic monk, Dan Berrigan, who's acted from the prophetic, in the Old Testament sense. And then also I've been talking about this in terms of what another Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, talks about in terms of the monk as an essentially marginal being, someone on the margins who recognizes the spaces between life and death, birth and death,

[01:29]

between different beings, and also recognizes the marginalized. So, our practice is about, again, about sitting quietly, settling, facing the wall, facing ourselves, and realizing the deep interconnectedness that we experience as we settle into this regular practice of facing ourselves. in this radical way, and seeing that ourselves is not separate from everyone and everything. And then recognizing, in the prophetic context, how in our society, in our culture, and in the karmic legacy of our culture, there are those who are marginalized. And today, of course, the scapegoating of Muslims for the actions of a few jihadi terrorists, the scapegoating of all immigrants, using walls to keep people out rather than facing the wall as we do, as mirrors, as windows, as ways of seeing our connection with others.

[02:49]

The terrible way in which African Americans are unsafe just walking around in our society. And unarmed African Americans regularly are murdered by policemen. And it's part of the karmic legacy of slavery and racism, which is so foundational to our society. And then I've been talking the last couple of weeks about the way in which women are marginalized, and how that has happened in Buddhist history as well. So this is about facing our ancient, twisted karma on many, many levels. And this book, Hidden Lamp, talks about great awakened women throughout the history of Buddhism, from India, and China, and Korea, and Japan, and in the West.

[03:54]

And it has wonderful commentaries by modern American women teachers and adept practitioners. And we're fortunate to have so many wonderful women teachers now. So this is all preliminary to telling a particular story tonight. And this is a story, well, actually, before I tell the story about Layman Tang and his family, I'll mention, again, the really wonderful and radical teaching by A. A. Dogan in the 13th century, founder of Sempton Zen and traditionally following here, who spoke in one of his essays very strongly about the equality of women practitioners and their capacity for awakening as the Buddha.

[04:58]

But Dogen said, for example, there are foolish monks who make a vow never to look at a woman. Is this vow based on the teachings of the Buddhas, or on the teachings of the non-Buddhists, or on the teachings of delusion? What are the inherent faults of women, and what are the inherent virtues of men? there are unwholesome men and there are unwholesome women. Hoping to hear the Dharma and leave the household does not depend on being female or male. So he talks about the equal capacity of women and makes a very strong statement about this. Before becoming free from delusion, men and women are equally not free from delusion. At the time of being free from delusion and realizing the truth, There's no difference between men and women. So he was criticizing the monastic centers in his own time when women were not allowed. And this goes back to prejudice, not just in Buddhism, but in the last few millennia of most cultures in the world that were patriarchal.

[06:11]

So this is one context. for looking at this situation and for looking at it in our own tradition. I talk about this and about marginalized beings in the context of our bodhisattva precepts, our guidelines for how to bring meditative awareness and awakening into the world. This isn't about politics, it's about how we see our own awakening in terms of the awakening of all those around us. And our precepts include to benefit all beings. So going back to, well, going way back in the Lotus Sutra, for example, the idea of benefiting all beings, that this bodhisattva practice is of universal liberation. We're not practicing just for our own liberation and awakening and enlightenment.

[07:13]

And actually, when we look deeply, we see that that's not possible because we are deeply interconnected. So to speak of all the people and beings, and not just human beings, but the non-human beings who are going extinct now because of the uncaring of our energy systems and so forth, anyway, to see, to benefit all beings is the point, to see they were deeply connected to the rainforests that provide our oxygen, for example. But also to see this in terms of gender. So, the story I want to talk about tonight from The Hidden Land is about actually a family of laypeople who were in Chinese and are very famous now.

[08:15]

Layman Pang actually was a student of Shito Sekito, who wrote the Song of the Grass Hut we just chanted, and also wrote The Harmony of Difference and Sameness. And Layman Pang also studied, he didn't study in just one lineage, he studied also with the great teacher Mazu, from whom the Lengi or Rinzai lineage comes. The basic case, as presented in this wonderful book, Hidden Land, Laman Pan was sitting in his thatched cottage one day, studying the sutras. Difficult, difficult, difficult, he suddenly exclaimed, like trying to store ten bushels of sesame seed in the top of a tree. And then his wife, who's called your laywoman, Pang. You know, they don't always have the names of women whom they talk about in these stories, but anyway, his wife was also a great charm addict, and she said, easy, easy, easy.

[09:21]

It's like touching your feet to the floor when you get out of bed. So, laywoman Pang was talking about how difficult it was, and his wife was talking about how, oh, it's easy, just like, you know, He can't bend, his feet touch the floor. And then their daughter, Lingjiao, said, neither difficult nor easy. It's like the teachings of the ancestors shining on the hungry grass tips. So, Leng Yunpeng is very famous as a great Chod adept, and his daughter Lingjiao is equally renowned. She was more, in some stories, she seems to be more enlightened than her father, even. Actually, the whole family has a son, as mentioned in some of the stories, too. But anyway, Lin Zhao is actually the basis for one of the 33 forms of guanyin, or kanzeon, guanyin in Chinese, the bodhisattva of compassion, in China, going back to

[10:36]

a story of 33 forms of the Bodhisattva of Compassion and the Lotus Sutra. One of them is called Basket-Weaving Guanyin, and that's based on Ling Jiao, who made her weaving baskets. So what's this story about? Let me read it again. And then there's a commentary in the book, in this case, by Jisha Warner, who's a teacher in Sevastopol. A very fine teacher who I've worked with and some things. So the story again, Lenin Pan was sitting in his thatched cottage one day reading the sutras. So when we studied the sutras, And he was sitting in a thatched hut, like the grass hut that Shih Tzu talks about. And, you know, sometimes some of you have this feeling when you're studying the sutras. Difficult, difficult, difficult.

[11:37]

So many strange stories and images and intense, radical teachings. He said, so he exclaimed, difficult, like trying to store 10 bushels of sesame seeds in the top of a tree. But his wife just responded, easy, easy, easy. It's like touching your feet to the floor when you get out of bed. Easiest thing in the world. Well, you know, I guess if you got out of bed and didn't put your feet on the floor, but just kind of, you know, levitated and sailed across the room, that would be difficult, I guess. Anyway, but then their daughter Linjia said, it's not difficult, it's not easy. is like the teaching of the ancestors shining on a hundred grass tips. And so actually, there's a famous saying that attributed to Laman Pag. Actually, he refers, he says it's from an ancient book.

[12:42]

Dogen, again, 13th century Japanese monk, refers to this saying, the bright clear hundreds of grass tips are the bright clear mind of the ancestral teachers. And that's kind of based on what Angel is saying here. The hundred grass tips, or sometimes they say the myriad, 10,000 grass tips, are the bright, clear mind of the ancestral teachers, like Sruti and Masa. This is a really important radical teaching. So, you know, we chanted the song of the grass hut. Grass, in this context, The grass tips, you know, it's like the weeds that Chitto Sakra made of. They didn't have nice mowed lawns. Grass means wild grasses. Chitto actually built a thatched hut near his monastery where he lived.

[13:42]

But the bright, clear hundreds of grass tips are the bright, clear mind of the ancestral teachers. as an ancient saying, I guess maybe he's referring to Lin Zhou, not Lumen Pang, although that saying is associated with Lumen Pang. The teachings of the ancestors are like this, are shine on a hundred grass tips. So this is not, this is related to the question of how do we see our interconnection with all the different beings. including the beings in whatever age we're in, and throughout the ages who have been marginalized, including the beings who are not considered, including the weeds that are considered, you know, sort of not worthy. The bright, clear mind of the ancestral teachers is right there on the hundred grasses.

[14:47]

So this is about seeing the mind of the Buddhas, the bright clear mind of the awakened ones, not in some lofty, you know, mountaintop somewhere, not in some exalted state, but right here, right in the midst of the phenomena of the world, right in the midst of the difficulties of the world, right in the midst of the problems of economic injustice and racism and prejudice and hatred and right in the middle of the weeds growing all around us. And in our own minds. So one of the things that happens when we do this sitting practice is, well some of you in this last period of Zazen might have had a couple of thoughts. or some feelings, or some emotions, or even some challenging emotions or thoughts arise.

[15:52]

It's possible. In fact, it's likely for all of us. We are human beings. We're not lofty beings up on some mountaintop. We're right here in the middle of Chicago. So the bright, clear hundreds of grass tips are the bright, clear mind of the ancestral teachers. awakening, illumination, freedom, liberation, happens right here in the midst of our problems, in the midst of our facing ourselves, facing the wall, facing our own grasping and anger and hatred and confusion and our own habits of making judgments about ourselves or others. And so Suzuki Roshi talks about mind weeds, that when we recognize these weeds growing in our thinking, that they're actually beneficial.

[17:00]

They are the bright grass tips, the bright mind of the ancestral teachers. And he talks about composting these mind weeds, looking at them, turning them over, allowing them to be part of that which allows us to see ourselves and see our deep inner connection to all others. So it's really true. The bright, clear hundreds of grass tips are the bright, clear mind of the ancestral teachers, right in the weeds, right in the thick weeds, right in the problems in our own life, each of us. in our own patterns of grasping and anger and confusion and fear and so forth. And for our world, for our Sangha, for our society, the problems we have now, and they're pretty intense, but many people are working on them. There are, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement is pointing out the difficulty of

[18:09]

racism, for example, in our society, for all of us. For those of us who think we're white as well, who are African American. And for those of us who are, all of us, you know, we are also caught by patterns of, you know, thinking about male and female and what's male and what's female and who's worthy and who's not and, you know, this is part of what is being composted in our age and bearing fruit in terms of seeing genders in fresh ways and the LGBT movement and all the difficulties of this. So, you know, both sides are there. When we study the teachings, it's difficult. It's difficult. It's like trying to store 10 bushels of sesame seeds on the top of a tree.

[19:12]

It's an amazing image. And then there's another wonderful image that Lambert Penn's wife says, oh, it's easy. It's like just touching your feet to the ground, to the floor when you get out of bed. So, you know, we don't have any choice. We have to face the weeds. They're here. We can, you know, sometimes people use spiritual practices as an escape. You know, they use intense practices to get into a state of, I don't know, cathartic states of, you know, of avoiding facing our life in the world, but that's not it. Right in the grassroots. So, Lin Jiao, the great daughter of Lin, said, neither difficult nor easy. It's like the teaching of the ancestors shining in the hundred gravestones. So our practice is not to avoid or run away from the problems in our own hearts and minds, in our own bodies and minds, in our own lives, in the lives of

[20:22]

in the interactions we have, even the difficult ones with family, friends, co-workers. But to face all of that, to face the world, to look into what's going on. How do we respond helpfully rather than causing harm? And similarly, in the world, we have this opportunity now to face, you know, Naomi Klein is a wonderful writer about climate, talks about this climate damage as an opportunity to really change fundamentally many things about our society. And we're going to have to do that. I continue to be right now up there. There's a state of emergency in Missouri and parts of Illinois with extreme weather. We have to face the change that needs to happen from fossil fuel to solar and wind and all the other sustainable technologies that are available. How do we as a species make that change?

[21:24]

It's difficult. It's difficult. No, it's easy. It's just like putting your feet on the ground when you get out of bed. Well, yeah, both. We're going to have to do this. We're going to have to use this program. So let me read a little bit from G. Sher Warner's reflections on this. G. Sher is someone I've worked with in various ways. Charlie McCorney, my daughter and brother, and Sarah Anderson, his wife, who have been here at Ancient Dragon, are now working in G. Sher's, helping G. Sher as assistant teachers in her temple in Sebastopol, north of San Francisco. So she's describing the story of Jesus as the family is closely gathered at home. The layman suddenly cries out. At this very moment, he is piercingly aware of life's tangles.

[22:29]

He's been studying the sutras, a favorite occupation. But his cry is not about the subtlety of the sutras. It's about the difficulty of living. Life in a body is endlessly complex. seething with thorns and tangles, erupting with love and tenderness. Studying the sutras won't save you. Zazen won't save you. Being enlightened as Lama Panya won't save you from difficulty. Lama explains what he means. It's like trying to store 10 bushels of sesame seeds on the top of a tree. How frustrating to push heavy bushels up a tree. And all that sesame seed is just going to spill out and slither down the branches when the wind blows. It takes such effort to hold things in unstable conditions and combinations. So, while G. Shek goes on to say, one day during a retreat, I moaned to myself, that's so hard.

[23:33]

And I realized for the first time that I was simply describing my limited view. Of course, that's how I feel when I am boxed in by my delusions. Difficult is sometimes the feeling of the world pressing harshly on us, and sometimes the feeling of suffering arising in our hearts. Difficult is not inherent in the dharma world, yet it is embedded in how we perceive and live. The world of myriad soft bodies coming and going is passionately beautiful, an endless marvel, and it's a world of stumbling and groping, dying as well as growing. And then there's lame woman patting at your knees. What could be more straightforward than your feet reaching the floor when you stand up? She speaks to us from the grounded viewpoint of unity, where no thing is divided from the rest of reality, where her body is not separate from the ground. So, we sit on the ground. We get out of bed and we stand on the ground.

[24:35]

We trust the ground beneath us to support us. Shiksha continues, when each thing is allowed to be as it is, an effort does not twist and force things out of shape. All is related and open. Sometimes life unfurls softly for me, everything fitting like a box in its lid, as Chaitra would refer to. If I try to hold on to that state, I find myself suddenly back in confusion, having lingered while life has moved on. And then I take my place in the flow again, in the endless moving stream that I never really leave. So, Leonard Peck's teacher, Schutte, wrote about the harmony of difference and sameness. Both sides are there, difficult and easy. We can see, and as we sit, and as we do sustain our practice of being present and facing the wall, we do see this side of the sameness and wholeness, the unity of all things.

[25:39]

that we are all connected. But also, we have to honor the differences. We have to honor each particular situation that we're in, each particular way that each of us has of responding to all of this. Disha says, it's crucial to know our undivided nature. It is a true side of life, the side where things are related to in terms of their sameness. The differences among people, trees, and stories and stones are not accounted for here. So, laywoman patterns, easy, easy, looks like the goal, but despite our yearnings for life to be smooth, awakening is not an exit ramp from difficulty. So when Ling Xia says it's not the one or the other, she's not denying anything. This daughter is by birthright a synthesis of father and mother. Reality is neither difficult nor easy. These are both opinions. Of course there's difficulty.

[26:42]

That's our experience of feeling thwarted, but it's not what life is in itself. We forget this to our peril. So, it's like the teachings of the ancestors shining in the hundred gravestones. Ling Xiao offers us the living Dharma. She wove baskets to support her family, and here she weaves for us a basket. of all the merry phenomena, often spoken of in Zen as the hundred gravitas. So there's this interweaving of the universe, of sameness and difference, of male and female, of all the differences that we see, and our practice actually is about integrating that. Studying the Sazen, we do in this practice of settling, of being present, of facing the wall and facing ourselves, we do get some sense.

[27:45]

Sometimes, occasionally it happens very quickly, suddenly, sometimes it happens over time, but we have this sense of this side of wholeness, this side of sameness, this side of something deep, some background universal reality, ultimate reality, that is part of our life. And then we get up and we go out into the world in Chicago, or we turn around and see this other side of ourselves, and we see our own problems, and we have to face that too. I wanted to add, though, about this story and about the Pang family. and Ling Zhao as her parents. I was talking yesterday about the way women have been dishonored at times in the Buddhist tradition. There's something else in the story, though.

[28:49]

Layman Pan is a layperson. He was considered one of the great Chinese Zen Chan figures, as was his daughter. is particularly important to us. So we're doing this radical thing here, where we have a non-residential center. And lay practice in Buddhism has been also marginalized at times in the history of the tradition. So all of the forms we do here, those of us who are ordained priests, or those of us who are lay ordained, but also the forms of how we move around the zendo, the forms of the service we just did. All of these go back to very, very old traditional monastic forms, developed over a thousand years, more, 1,500 years, in East Asia and China and Korea and Japan.

[29:55]

And the standard for that is kind of residential practice where people live together. So Hokusai just came back from a practice period for two months at Green Gulch Farm in Marin, where I've lived also. And a number of people in our sangha have spent time at some of these residential places, but we're doing something different. We're lay people living separately, coming together to sit zazen, to hear, to talk, about the Dharma, to perform these ceremonies, to do this practice of sitting and facing ourselves together, facing the wall. And so, you know, this is very new. This is a new development in, you know, that's developed in the Western Zen, and it's even new in our own lineage. You know, most of The teachers and students in our tradition have developed from practicing in residential places in California.

[31:05]

So we're doing something really radical. Like Leng and Pang, Emily and Joe, we're practicing in the world, but we're also facing the wall. We're also coming together to sit and connect with that side of wholeness and sameness And of course, we also have all these differences. And we see the myriad grass tips, the myriad weeds of the world and of our own lives. And yet, so I think what Ling Zhou says is very important. Both sides are there. And it's possible to do this. And it's courageous that we're doing this. It's just like the teachings of the ancestors shining on a hundred grass tips, neither difficult nor easy.

[32:09]

So right in the situation of the world, we can see the ancestral teachings, the bright, clear minds of the Buddha ancestors. And I think it's wonderful the way we're doing it. And it's challenging, so we should give ourselves credit. Not too much. But appreciate that what we're doing is something really wonderful. And that how we each, you know, and the people who are here tonight, and all the people who were here yesterday morning, and the people who come here at different times, are all partaking of these wonderful ancestral weeds and then sharing them in their lives in this world that needs it so much.

[33:15]

So, maybe that's enough for me to say. Comments, questions, responses, please feel free. I found this beautiful story of domesticity and practice realization. You know, I was thinking this thing about the seeds, you know, it's like the transformation of the seeds of karmic consciousness within a very quotidian, intimate, domestic scene where everything becomes awakening. And I just thought it was kind of cool, like, you know, they're not like, what do you mean it's easy? You know, a typical kind of, you know, marital conversation.

[34:18]

Or, you know, the daughter's like... But they're actually just supporting each other and practicing in this very intimate way. And I think it's really great. Something we can do every day. Family practice, yeah. Papa bear, mama bear, baby bear. Yes, Ben. So I'm not entirely sure what this has to do, but you were talking about enlightened daughters. And I have a daughter who is way more enlightened. And she's 12. And I picked her up at school. And we were in the car driving back. And she said, Daddy, there's a new student in school. She goes to a very small school. This is exciting. And I said, oh, who is it? And she said, oh, it was Katie who was visiting before the break. And so she was very excited about a new student. And she said, and I was talking to my friends and asking them, you know, what they thought of Katie.

[35:21]

And she said, my friend said, that's not the new student's name. And my daughter said, I was very confused. And then we had the classroom meeting. And Katie got up and introduced herself and told everybody that she wanted everybody to call her Sam and that she was transgender and she was a boy and wanted everyone to refer to her as him. And then my daughter said, and I thought that was so, and I was waiting. So, and she said, I thought that was so brave. And I thought. Wow, when I was 12, I don't think that's the word. Weird, strange, confusing. And I was just, I was struck by the empathy that she had, right? Right from the start. I can't take any credit for that. take credit for.

[36:24]

But that's what I mean about the spouse, basically, right? There's this bubbly kind of support. Well, a lot of her comments after that were these very grounded, like, wondering where Sam was going to sit. Who was Sam going to sit with at lunch? Was Sam going to sit with the boys or the girls? And she said, I'd be happy to have him sit with us, but maybe he wants to sit with the boys, but will the boys want him to sit with them or not. So even her concerns weren't, her concerns weren't these day-to-day concerns about, so this new kid, who are his friends going to be? That's very much to the point, and actually last Sunday, the commentary about Dogen's teaching, about the equality of women is by Katherine Thannis, an old friend of mine, and it talks about transgender.

[37:26]

And she had a student who transitioned, and actually there are, and there's now a Zen teacher, there are actually at least a couple of transgender Zen teachers that I know of in Latin America. But yeah, so there was a whole, so that talk is on the website. You can listen to that from last Sunday. Not yesterday, a week ago from yesterday. But yeah, so much is different, you know, in your daughter's generation than in, you know, our generation and older generations. This is, you know, how things change. It's really important to know that things change. We get stuck in feeling like it's hopeless and things can't change, but they really do change radically. Gay and lesbian marriage being legal now.

[38:33]

That happened, the Supreme Court ratified that. That would have been unthinkable, what, five, ten years ago. Things do change, and that's just one example. So it's really important that we not think that we're stuck in a world where there has to be racism, where there has to be bashing of immigrants, where there has to be hatred, where there has to be warfare. It's not necessary. Where there has to be only fossil fuel energy systems, things change. And they don't change just kind of in some straight progression. Suddenly, people realize, hey, and like your daughter, just accepting Katie is Sam. So we can all be part of encouraging that change just by being open to the hundred grass tips and all the weeds in our life and in the world.

[39:36]

So thank you for that.

[39:39]

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