Good morning. In the Genjo Koan by Dogen Zenji, he says, when Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you realize that something is missing. When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you realize that something is missing. So I've been thinking about these verses actually for a number of years and holding them in mind in advance of this talk today.

[01:07]

And it's interesting, you bring things to mind and then sometimes you find out what they're about. So it's It's challenging. I think about 40 minutes ago I got a telephone call just before the Bodhisattva ceremony saying that a friend had died just not so long ago. Was that last night? four in the morning. This was a wonderful man by the name of Hank Swan. He was a very good friend of Melody and Stans. He was one of the group of us that self-identify as Jarvistas, who visit and work with our friend on Death Row in San Quentin, Jarvis Masters, who's a Buddhist practitioner.

[02:22]

Hank had cancer and I think the prognosis was not good from pretty early on and yet he had this spirit and this wonderful circle of love hope. Well, we hope against hope for various things. We hope mysteriously, miraculously a disease will go away and a person will be healed. We hope that they won't suffer. We hope they'll be at peace. And somewhere in there I think maybe we hope as well that we can bear their going away.

[03:37]

And we can't quite figure out how we're going to do that. I talked to Melody a little on the phone and I just came down here and did the ceremony, the Bodhisattva ceremony. I held Hank and his wife Jan and their family in my mind as I did the ceremony. as best I could. As in fact this is what we do actually when we do a funeral. We do a Bodhisattva ceremony. We transmit the Bodhisattva precepts and the repentances and we renew ourselves and hope that beings in all the worlds

[04:58]

renew themselves. So in the the usual echo that we do, let's see, thus we offer the merit of the bodhisattva's way through every world system and to the unborn nature of all beings. I felt I wanted to add a little more specificity and to all the beings living and dead in this Saha world. Saha world is the world that we see around us, which translates as something like the world to be endured, the world of endurance, which sounds like we got a bad deal, but actually, It's the world within which one can wake up and be a Buddha.

[06:08]

And still, something is missing. We know something's missing. Now we know Hank is missing. We know tens of thousands of people in China are missing. We know even more in Burma are missing. There are others missing in our lives, there are those missing in Iraq, known and unknown. We know that they're missing. But what does it mean to realize that they're missing? And also, what does it mean to understand that nothing is missing? Nothing is complete.

[07:15]

Nothing is incomplete. This is why the precondition for realizing that nothing is missing, that something is missing, excuse me, the precondition for realizing that something is missing is Buddhadharma, filling your whole body and mind. I thought I would read you a poem. And then maybe try to unpack this a little bit. This is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. It's a wonderful poet who worked over and over again on her poems. She didn't write very many, but the ones that she wrote are just, they kind of explode in your mind like some miraculous kind of food.

[08:27]

And this is a poem of hers called One Art. There's humor in it, but at its core, I think it's what Dogen was talking about and where we are, what we're circling around here today. So, one art. The art of losing isn't hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent, the art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster, places and names, and where it was you meant to travel.

[09:31]

None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look, my last or next to last of three loved houses went. The art of loving, the art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones, and vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. Even losing you, the joking voice, a gesture I love. I shan't have lied. It's evident, the art of losing's not too hard to master. Though it may look like, write it, like disaster.

[10:33]

So again Dogen says when dharma does not fill your whole body and mind you think it is already sufficient. Well that part's easy we know that you know we think we know things right. Sometimes we even think oh I've had some great experience and now I'm a little bit awake, and maybe that's enough. But it's not sufficient. It could be a foreboding of, well, it could tell of arrogance, and it's definitely a foreboding that whatever you think you know, is not going to remain that way. But the second part, when dharma fills your body and mind, you realize that something is missing.

[11:55]

Dogen follows that by saying, for example, when you sail out in a boat to the middle of an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions. The ocean looks circular and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square. Its features are infinite in variety. It's like a palace. It's like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like this. And then just a To skip a few lines, he says, although there are many features in the dusty world, the dusty world, that's the Saha world, and the world beyond conditions, which is the world within the world, the world that is always abiding, and yet we can't always glimpse.

[13:04]

Though there are many features in these worlds, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. So we can only see as far as we practice, as far as we know. And that practice includes what we do in here, sitting zazen. It includes how we interact with those we love, how we hold them, how we let them go. And the same, of course, for those maybe we don't love or don't even like. How do we stay present with them? How do we turn open the eye of practice on those relationships so that we understand, we realize what is missing.

[14:09]

This notion of missing is, I don't know, for some reason it's very compelling to me. It may be a characterological question, you know, it may be genetic, I don't know. I think it might have something to do with, it might have something to do with being Jewish, but I don't think they have the market cornered, frankly, because everyone loses things. Everyone understands that life is incomplete. So a person, just to turn you on to a friend, if you haven't seen his books, David Loy, Some of you know of him. He's, what can I say, he's sort of a Buddhist philosopher, or a Zen philosopher.

[15:17]

And this is his new book, with a very catchy title, Money, Sex, War, and Karma. He left out death, but it's there. And David is a, he's actually, was authorized as a teacher in Sambo Kyodan, Yamada Roshi's lineage, which is the same as Aiken Roshi's, but he decided to pursue an academic career instead. And I think that the way he looks at things, at this question of the realization that something is missing, I find very compelling. So this, everybody is very aware of this constant feeling of incompleteness, of things falling away.

[16:23]

And we have a somewhat mistaken notion that this is emptiness. it sounds right missing emptiness losing emptiness that they one word seems to imply the other but I think what we really sense in our bodies because that's where this is all that's where this all comes home is a constant feeling. What David calls it is lack, which is a useful word. Maybe I should just... What he says is what we lack is

[17:38]

Actually what we lack is the ability to get our minds around what we think of as our self. So what he says is our sense of self is shadowed by the sense of lack that we feel but we do not understand. So we usually try to resolve it in ways that just make things worse. Since this problem is basically spiritual, in fact it's the spiritual problem, The solution must also be spiritual. We need to stop evading the emptiness at our core and realize its true nature. So that's realize that something is missing. So this core, this sense that we have that there's no center. It comes up for us in our life. So we're always trying to fill it up. You know, and this is the source of dukkha.

[18:45]

The Buddha said, what is the noble truth of dukkha or suffering? And suffering is not the best word either. It could be suffering or what's the sense of unease. It is the Dukkha of birth, the Dukkha of old age, the Dukkha of sickness, the Dukkha of death, the Dukkha of separation from loved ones, the Dukkha of facing unwanted phenomena, and the Dukkha of not getting what one wants. in brief, and he says every aspect of the five aggregates, these elements of mind and body that are constantly coming together to create what provisionally we call a self, is when we stick to them, actually it hurts. We try to find something to stick to and it's like we can't actually stick to them.

[19:52]

It's like you know, it's like trying to Stick to something and it just slides off into the Into the void we keep trying to fix it, but it won't fix anywhere so Each time we try to make that effort there's pain and little disasters that we see. They may not actually be a disaster as Elizabeth Bishop tries to ironically argue but in each moment we feel it is a disaster and some things really are. Some things are really are disasters and need to be given that full weight. Some losses are not something susceptible to waving the magic wand of emptiness.

[20:58]

We have to feel, we actually have to feel that loss right to the center of our being. And that that is also the full expression of Dharma. That is not to be avoided or argued away. but it's to be felt and embodied. David Loy talks about this investigation of our notion of self, which is not in an intellectual way what we do in Zazen, but in an experiential or embodied way, perhaps, what the process entails. He says, it's like peeling off the layers of an onion. When you get to the end, there's nothing left.

[22:06]

There's no hard seed or anything else at the core. Once the last few layers have been peeled away, And what's wrong with that? He says, nothing. The basic problem is we actually don't, we don't like being nothing. A gaping hole at one's core is quite distressing. Nothing means there's no thing to identify with or cling to. Another way to say it is that my nothingness means my constructed self, sense of self, is ungrounded. So it is haunted by a basic sense of unreality and insecurity. This is This is like highly concentrated dukkha, this haunting by this basic sense of unreality and insecurity.

[23:08]

It's like the concentrated laundry detergent that you only need like a half a capful. It really does an excellent job of washing away our steadiness. If that steadiness is really not realized, So in the early Buddhism, the Buddha taught the three marks of existence. Those three marks being impermanence, non-self, and dukkha or suffering. So that things are impermanent means that obviously that life is always changing every moment, moment by moment. that it's non-self is that there's no seed or core at the center of the onion or at the center of a stalk of bamboo.

[24:19]

At the center of a stalk of bamboo, what's interesting is there's space. You peel away each strip and you find in the middle there's this space. So that's how our self is provisionally constructed. And then there's dukkha, which just means that, to me it means, my understanding is, our response to the fact of impermanence and the fact of no constructed concrete self that I can point to is something aches, something just, I'm not comfortable with that. So that's kind of, and that's what is seen as a universal feature of our life.

[25:25]

And we see it around us. There's so much of what we do is to fill up this sense of void in ourself. You'll excuse me, I'm known to have spurious kinds of images come up in my mind, and bad jokes, but I'm remembering when I was a kid, and I got, this is like in the late 50s, early 60s, and I got a copy of Mad Magazine, and there was, they would have these movie parodies, and so they had some parody of like a torrid romantic drama featuring a dentist and a patient in her chair. And the caption was, he tried to fill up a hole in her life. You know, so this is our entire, you could say, David Loy says, all of civilization is a strategy for filling up this sense of lack, this sense of what's complete.

[26:33]

And so we have all of these, you know, we have all of these projects, projects that we hope will give us meaning and verification. And some people, like Woody Allen, get to the heart of it and say, I don't want to become immortal by, what is it? I don't want to become immortal through my work. I want to become immortal by not dying. It's like, well, that's really getting to it. And yet, He's gonna die and his work is gonna live on and we're gonna be laughing at it and future generations will be laughing at it. So nothing is lost either. But we keep on with these immortality projects.

[27:34]

So this is the, this is the, This is the thrust of early Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism, I think you find this in the Parinirvana Sutra, which is the sutra about the Buddha's passing. So there's a shift or reinterpretation of the three marks, which is they're impermanent, non-self, and nirvana, meaning the fact that they're impermanent, the fact that they're non-self, implies the possibility, the attainability of real peace. Or impermanent, non-self, and you know what, that's just fine. because you start thinking about what problems would occur if there really were selves, and if things were really permanent, those problems are even bigger than the ones we have with reality as we presently have it.

[28:54]

So, this is a Mahayana view, impermanent, non-self, and nirvana. So to me, what I always found deeply encouraging about this verse from Dogon, when Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. I find that a relief. It relieves me from the responsibility of trying to fill things up. It allows each of us to flow in the incompleteness of our life, in the sloppiness of our zazen, in the potentiality, the constant potentiality for transforming the relationships that we have.

[29:58]

it gives me a way of looking at what's incomplete. Can I be okay with that? So maybe I'll read you something I'm not sure what it is, a poem or something that I wrote last night and then leave time for discussion. Something's missing. Peeling back the layers of self like an onion, I'm not there. If enlightened, I can't see it all. If not enlightened, I can't see at all. Every single thing is incomplete because there is no single thing.

[31:12]

Life is unfinished. Work piles up on my desk. The children, sooner or later, leave home. The car overheats. Parents die. Teachers die. Partners die. Friends die. I'm gonna die. Unfinished. For now. And now is all I see. Because the eye of practice only reaches so far. How is it there's always something missing? Is that a problem? Yes. No. Yes.

[32:15]

No. Yes. Let it go. Well, that's easily said. Is that what the iceberg mockingly said to the Titanic? But I see Suzuki Roshi is standing at the end of the dock, waving and smiling. He says, life is like stepping out onto a boat, which is about to sail out to sea and sink. Think about it. Thank you. So, open to questions or comments. Greg? Thank you for a great talk. I was thinking about David Lloyd's proposition that all the constructions of human endeavor and culture and civilization come from this lack.

[33:26]

And just recasting that a little bit, then the lack itself is the force of life. And I was wondering if you were going to mention the circle. And how the gap, everything depends on the gap. Yeah. It's a wonderful ENSO. It's really, I've looked at it often. No, I didn't, I wasn't thinking about that, but right. There's that gap. that incompleteness. That's, I mean, I think it's a feature of a Japanese Enso. Sometimes the ends do butt up against each other, but there's never perfection. There's always actually imperfection, which is, of course, what makes it perfect.

[34:30]

So thank you. I went through various phases of what you were talking about. I was listening. Hey, whatever gets you through the night. We have this idea that the selfness of self is what's underneath the layers, rather than saying that the self is in fact all of those layers and what struck me was This idea of getting to some presupposed core in the middle has something in common with talking about the Big Bang. Because what did it come out of? I had this fetter about 20 minutes ago. But there's something about, you know, the mere concept of the Big Bang implies a precedent.

[35:38]

in the same way that the existence of the onion implies a color, and I'm not offering an answer, I'm just thinking out loud. Well, I think it's fun to think out loud and it's fun to think, it's just fun to think. And the Buddha was, those are questions of origins were ones that he was not particularly willing to entertain. It's not that he said there was no origin or that he was nihilistic, he just said this was as far as his eye could reach and as far as was useful for our life. But meanwhile, there are people whose lives it is to think about the origin of the universe and we're lucky to have them. I'm picturing the Buddha saying, Maybe, you know, he might have known though.

[36:42]

Who knows? What if you said, what if you reframe Dogen's verse, when dharma fills your body and mind you realize that everything is broken.

[38:40]

When dharma fills your body and mind you realize that everyone is wounded. If we are operating, if we're realizing it from passing on the wound. If we don't realize it, then I think unconsciously we're probably going to transmit it. What do we want to transmit in the world? And that only goes as far as our eye of practice case for really looking at our lives and looking at what we do. Maybe one or two more. Laurie? Just to play devil's advocate on this topic of all of civilization being sourced by trying to fill this lack.

[39:47]

I think that, I'm not saying that doesn't ever happen, of myself and watching other people, I think another way it happens, or could happen, is that we just express something, and then the self is kind of like an afterthought. Then we look back to see if it did the trick. So we have a natural expression of creativity that we just, it's just a natural life force function. And then, there's this thought, I did that, or maybe that'll get me somewhere. And so, that feels more whole somehow than to think that Shakespeare and everybody, I mean I'm sure he struggled. I think the words came out or he wrote them and they were amazing and then it was like, and now I can be a famous writer, you know, afterward in a certain way. Well, you're right and this is why you're my teacher. What I was putting out was really a reductionist view that doesn't account for lots of what is mysterious and creative and non-self in life.

[41:06]

Self and non-self are all mixed up together. Right, and just because we have those kind of thoughts, we shouldn't feel that our offering is not sincere. It's just an afterthought. Well, David is a philosopher. One of his books is called A Buddhist History of the West, which he takes on all of the great philosophical systems and thinkers and puts it through this kind of Buddhist lens. That's just one lens for looking at it. So all these teachings are medicine. You know, they're not going to bring something, they're not going to bring a person we love back. They're not going to, they're just corrective to bring us to the center and we get pushed off and come back. You know, in the Sura of Garbha Sutra, Manjushri says there's two voids. There's two emptiness. There's the two voids. and then there's a sense of emptiness that's a lack.

[42:10]

So the sense of something missing is what the true void does to us when we try to approach it with a gaining idea or with the ideas that we have about practice. But that process, the very process of nature of the void. But the void itself, the true void, is not an absence. Exactly, exactly. So actually, let me. And then what is it? OK, so let me do one more thing, and then that's exactly on Mark. It's not that everything is this emptiness or lack. It's like, and that's our path, right? So one more thing, and then we'll end. This is sparked by what Raul was saying in one of David's, in this opening essay.

[43:12]

This is very interesting. The original Buddhist term, usually translated as emptiness, shunyata, or Sanskrit shunyata, actually has a double-sided meaning. It derives from the root shu, which means swollen. in both senses, not only the swollenness of a blown up balloon, but also the swollenness of an expectant woman, pregnant with possibility. So a more accurate translation of shunyata would be emptiness slash fullness, which describes quite well the experience of our own spiritual emptiness, both the problem and the solution. I want to thank you all and I look out on these friends and I am again in touch with the sadness of loss that I talked about at the beginning and that that is also

[44:40]

It's not going to go away easily. And it's not anything other than Buddha's yearning to be with Buddhas. So thank you very much.

[44:58]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ