So a week ago, we began our spring practice period, two-month practice period, in which we're looking at the teaching stories of Dombokan, the 9th century Chinese founder of this tradition, who also credited with writing the precious Merit Samadhi we just chanted. I talked last week about this pivotal story, You Are Not It, It Actually Is You, about non-self, and we'll be going back over that, but I wanted to go back tonight to kind of the first story, major story, about Dong Shan and how he came to meet his teacher, who said, eventually, just this is it. So this is a kind of complicated story, and it deals with a lot of issues, but it really has to do with our relationship to the world, to the so-called things around us, to the environment.

[01:07]

And the way it's phrased at first is a little strange, but the initial question that eventually brought Dongshan to his teacher, his name was Yunyan, had to do with how or whether non-Sentient, so-called non-Sentient beings expressed the Dharma. So to try and make the story somewhat concise, Dongshan went and inquired about this story to one of the great teachers of his time, Guishan, who was founder of one of the other five, so-called five houses of Chang or Chinese Zen along with Dongshan later on. But anyway, Dongshan, actually Dongshan is his name after he became a teacher, but we're calling him Dongshan even before that. When he came to Guishan, he questioned him about an older story.

[02:14]

So, you know, this is a tradition of teaching stories, and often the teaching stories refer to other teaching stories, so it gets a little complicated, but he told a story about the national teacher, Nanyang Huizhong, from the century before, who had maintained that non-Sentient beings expounded the Dharma, expressed the Dharma, the teaching, constantly, radiantly, and unceasingly. And in that older story, Huizhong states that all the sages can hear this non-Sentient Dharma, this Dharma, this teaching of so-called non-Sentient things. And part of what this story is about is what do we mean by Sentient and non-Sentient? What does it mean to be aware? What is the meaning of consciousness and even intelligence? But the basic story, Huizhong said that yes, all non-Sentient beings constantly express and expound the Dharma.

[03:23]

Then Huizhong said that fortunately he himself could not hear the non-sentient beings expounding, because otherwise human students could not hear his teaching. So there's a lot of stuff going on here about how the teaching is conveyed and It's kind of slippery, but then the national teacher, Huizhong, talked about a source from the scriptures, from the Flower Ornament Sutra, about sentient beings expounding the Dharma, where it says that the earth expounds Dharma, living beings expound it, throughout the three times everything expounds it. So basically this question has to do with how do we hear the teaching? meet reality as a gift, we could say, from the environment, from the flowers and grasses and trees and all of the things of the world.

[04:35]

So, after Dongshan narrated this story, he asked Huishan to comment. And Guishan simply raised his fly whisk. So this is a teaching staff that they used to use a fly whisk in the same way as to represent the teaching authority back in China. Anyway, that's all Guishan did. He just raised his whisk. Dongshan didn't understand. And he asked for further explanation. And Guishan proclaimed, that can never be explained to you by means of one born of mother and father." Isn't there a line in Macbeth sort of like that? Anyway, so this non-explanation or this citing of non-explanation is important to Dong Zhuo. He talks about this later in terms of his own teacher. Dongshan was puzzled and finally suggested that Guixiang go and talk to this guy, Yunyan, who was not a very well-known teacher but had studied together with Guixiang under the great teacher Baizhang.

[05:57]

So Dongshan went to Yunyan and asked the question again. But at this point, some kind of philosophical or historical or theological background is necessary. So this whole idea of the Dharma being available and expressed in the world, you know, by the things of the world, by the flowers and grasses and trees, by the lakes and rivers, but anyway, where does this come from? Well, there's a tradition of this. It goes back to India in some ways. There was a teaching that came from India to China, along with all the other many teachings from India, called Tathagatagarbha, the womb of Buddhas. And how this got expressed in China, so I'm giving the short version, and there's more about this in the Just This Is It book, but in China, this idea became understood as Buddha nature.

[07:02]

Well, the idea of Buddha nature changed. Originally, the idea of Buddha nature was that certain people had Buddha nature. They had this capacity to awaken and become Buddhas. Other people, not so much. No matter how long they practiced, for how many ages, for how many hundreds of thousands of lifetimes, So, you know, maybe there are people you can think of who you might think might be like that. But, anyway, as this teaching of Buddha nature developed in China, even before Chan, before Dongchang, there were a number of important teachers who talked about this. And, well, one step was that they came to understand fairly quickly that, according to a sutra from translated from Sanskrit, that all sentient beings, without exception, have the Bodhi nature. So they came to see that all sentient beings have this capacity and quality of awakening and of kindness and compassion.

[08:15]

But then there developed this kind of discussion in Chinese Buddhism. There's a Tiantai school teacher named John Ron who's very important who said that there was this teaching potential for grasses and trees. And in India, and still in Tibetan Buddhism, grasses and trees or plants are insensitive. They don't have any capacity for expressing the Buddha teaching. But this shifted in China. There was another teacher from the Madhyamaka or emptiness school that said, that if you deny Buddha nature to anything at all, then not only are grasses and trees devoid of Buddha nature, but all living beings are also devoid of Buddha nature. So they started seeing how this capacity and quality of realizing and expressing Buddha's teaching, teaching of wisdom and compassion,

[09:17]

was a quality of reality itself. Now, this is really, you know, this is, for us looking at this in the West, this is really interesting in terms of thinking about our relationship to the environment, that this was established, you know, before, even before the beginnings, or early in the beginnings of Chan, and this goes back to, just to get a little technical, the Huayen school, the flower in the school, the cosmology, which had this vision of the world luminous ground of interconnectedness and of mutual non-obstruction of particulars in which all things share in expressing this underlying fundamental truth. So this is some of the background. Let's just say a little more about this. Jean-Marie, who I mentioned, said that the very colors and smells of the world around us constitute the assembly of the Lotus Sutra. They are the immediate and undefiled expressions of Buddhahood.

[10:20]

So this developed, you know, maybe this had some connection with Taoist culture, kind of appreciation of nature. And in Japan even more so, the sense of nature as the natural order of things, having this liberative, illuminating quality. So this is all sort of background to Dongshan. But one part of this is that this, so we started off, the theme for this practice period is the teaching of suchness, and the practice of suchness. Suchness being our engagement with reality, with just this, with our experience, as we've just been sitting, being present. Upright, breathing. We, of course, our thoughts rumble around and, you know, you may have been thinking about, you know, something you did earlier today or something you'll do tomorrow or, you know, there's all kinds of ordinary, conventional, phenomenal world kind of thoughts that are part of what's happening when you're shooting them.

[11:29]

So I said, but also, somewhere there's this sense, and part of the story has to do with senses and how we sense things. of something deeper. So this suchness is not just a human psychological effect or a perceptual effect. It has to do with the very nature of reality. So that's one important point. So this Buddha nature philosophy, there's a lot to it. Partly this developed in China and happened in India because of Chinese emphasis on human nature and the nature of things, that philosophical context. There's also this really interesting idea of plants having this quality of Buddha nature. And that was not something, again, that was part of Indian Buddhist thought. And actually, it's interesting now in terms of

[12:32]

some botanists talking about plant intelligence in terms of modern science and even plant neurobiology. So they have done experiments. Some of you may know more about this than I do, but they've done experiments to show that plants can make choices. And for example, plants that have vines move towards something that they can grow on. They seem to know. and plants can communicate with other plants in the same species about dangers in the environment. Anyway, so in terms of modern science, there's some interesting correlations here. Anyway, this is all background to this story from Dongshan. And, you know, this is carried on in Dogen, who we talked about also, who in the 1200s brought this to Japan and talked about how there was this, between people sitting zazen and the environment, there was this mutual and comprehensible guidance and support between people and earth, grasses and trees, and fences and walls and tiles and pebbles.

[13:50]

So it's not just so-called natural as opposed to man-made. It's actually part of the nature of reality. That's the kind of underlying theology or philosophy. in his story. But going back to the story itself, okay, Guixiang told Dongxiang, go and talk to this guy, Yunnan. So he went, and Yunnan lived in these caves along a river. And Dongxiang went to him and he told him the previous story. And then, let me find this, let's see, this story. So, Dongzhang asked Yuanyuan if non-sensual beings can express the Dharma, and Yuanyuan said non-sensual beings are able to hear it.

[14:59]

Oh, well, the first part was that when he went to ask Dongshan if... Oh, then Dongshan asked why he could not hear it himself, and Yunyang raised his gloves. The same thing that Guishan had done. And, you know, they didn't have email to communicate, they just responded the same way. said, you can't even hear when I expound the Dharma. How do you expect to hear when a non-Sanskrit being expounds the Dharma? So this is sort of a strange issue for this young monk to be so determined about, so perplexed about, walking around asking all these Zen teachers. After they had this exchange about it, Yun-Yan also gave us a citation from the sutras, interestingly from the Pure Land Sutras.

[16:08]

We think of that as separate from Zen, but he quoted the Pure Land Sutra saying, water birds, tree groves, all, without exception, recite the Buddha's name and recite the Dharma. So there are many of the traditional Mahayana sutras that talk this way. about the world itself as being a source of the teaching. So this was an issue that was important to Dongshan, and he reflected on Yunyan's response, and then he wrote a verse. So we talked about the verse he wrote after hearing his teacher later say, just this is it, and he wrote this verse that I've talked about that's kind of the core of Dongshan's teaching, just don't seek from others or you'll be far estranged from self. Now I go on and on, but everywhere I meet it, it now is me, I now am not it. Talking about this reality of suchness.

[17:10]

One must understand in this way to merge with suchness. That's later on when he leaves Yunnan. This is the story of how he met Yunnan, and he heard this teaching about non-sensory beings, and he said, how marvelous, how marvelous. The Dharma expounded by non-Sentient Beings is inconceivable. Listening with your ears, no sound. Hearing with your eyes, you directly understand." So there's a teaching here about how we practice suchness. It's actually a meditation instruction here. And this has to do with both the limitations of our perceptions, but also how we how we know things, and what does it mean even to be a sentient being for each of us on our seat and in our life as we go out into the world. So part of this thing about hearing with your eyes, you directly understand,

[18:16]

It has to do, of course, with the limitations of our human perceptual faculties. There's lots and lots of these old koans that have to do with this. A lot of Dogon is talking about how our understanding is limited by our particular human faculties and our examples, given that we cannot If you have ever walked a dog, the dog is aware of this whole other world around us, around him and around you of smell that we don't know. Some of you may have a better sense of smell than me, but still, you don't know what that dog is smelling and knowing about what's been going on right there. And hearing too. Dogs can hear sounds we can't hear. So there's a limit to what we know through our senses. This is an important issue in terms of meditation, just to be aware of the limitation of our senses and of our spiritual and intellectual so-called senses as well.

[19:28]

So this idea of hearing with your eyes, you directly understand, has to do with what's sometimes called, technically, synesthesia. to be aware of things with different senses. And there are lots of examples of this. So, you know, we might think of this in terms of chanting or mantras, that there's a way in which we hear the teachings through our own voice and through hearing all the voices around us. So, again, how we know things, how things know us, is at issue here. There's a story, another story about Yun-Yang and his Dharma brother talking about the Bodhisattva of Compassion. What does she do with all those hands and eyes, because sometimes she's depicted with

[20:30]

literally a thousand hands with different tools in them and with an eye in the palm of each hand. And in the United Kingdom we were asked, how does the Bodhisattva use that? And one of them said, it's like reaching back for your pillow in the middle of the night. Which is a wonderful image, just in the middle of darkness, in the middle of not knowing, just reaching back and arranging your pillow. for more comfort. And in the Book of Serenity case about this, the commentator says, when reaching for a pillow at night, there's an eye in the hand. When eating, there's an eye in the tongue. When recognizing people on hearing them speak, there's an eye in the ears. Sometimes we hear a voice and we recognize it. We don't see the person, but we hear the So, once I'm asked, the Buddha spoke of the interchanging functions of the six senses.

[21:40]

It's definitely true. There's another example, so in the story about I am not it, it actually is me, and Dongshan's looking at his reflection in the stream, and I've talked about it, we'll come back to, I mentioned the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who said, I is an other. this whole idea of self and what is the self's relationship to suchness, to reality. And this is not just an intellectual, theoretical question. How do we use reality to help relieve suffering is in the background of this. This is all about how do we practice for the sake of all beings. But the French poet Arturian Beau also did a study where he said, I invented the colors of the vowels, A, black, E, white, I, red, O, blue, U, green. I regulated the form and movement of each consonant.

[22:43]

And with instinctive rhythms, I prided myself on investigating a poetic language accessible someday to all the senses. So this is just one historical example of this capacity that actually people have. And it's not the way we usually think, and it's not the way we usually see the world, but to be aware of what's around us in a kind of multi-sensory kind of way. So there's a quality of presence that this has to do with. When we're sitting, so sometimes I've said to use as a concentration object your breath, but also sounds, just ambient sound. But also, we're sitting facing the wall. We have our eyes open and we see this. Not focusing, but we see this wall in front of us. And we're also aware of seeing things with our body. We can see the discomfort in our knee or in our shoulders.

[23:44]

We're aware of things in a multi-sensory way. And this helps us to actually be more available to this suchness, the practice of suchness that we're talking about. The practitioner's openness to the phenomenal world is not narrowly defined in terms of particular sense medias or from verbal understandings based on hearing the dharma, but rather awareness of phenomena occurs within a kind of primal wholeness, not separated into visual, auditory, oral, smell, taste, tactile, or thought. All of the senses might be seen as part of a single instrument. for perceiving, engaging, and practicing suchness. So again, our senses are limited, but we can be open to just realizing that we know things other than just through our rational system of linear thought.

[24:54]

Dogen said later, having heard the Buddha's teaching is like already seeing the Buddha's body. Furthermore, seeing Buddha's body with your ears, hearing Buddha's preaching with your eyes, and similarly, for all the sense objects, it's also like entering and residing in Buddha's home, and entering Buddhahood, and arousing the vow, exactly the same as in the ancient vow, without any difference. Well, there's a little more from Dogen to talk about. He talks about, there's a quote from Dongshan where he says, experiencing the matter of going beyond Buddha, finally capable we can speak a little. And so I asked Dongshan, what is speaking? Dongshan said, at the time of speaking, you do not hear. And the monk then asked, well, Dongshan, do you hear or not? And Dongshan replied, just when I do not speak, can I hear? So we also have this practice of just being silent.

[26:02]

And yet at the same time, sometimes we speak a little. And Dogen commented on this dialogue, he even says, seeing words we know the person like seeing his face. Three direct pointers are tongue, sharp wit, and writing, fulfilling the way wings naturally appear on the body. Since meeting myself, I do feel respect in speaking to myself. So, okay, the point of this story, this combination of stories, is how we, and I think this particularly points to meditation, but we can take it beyond that, how we are open to meeting reality in a kind of whole-sense way. or beyond our usual idea or stories about how we meet reality and how we share that and how that helps us to see beyond the limitations we see about all the problems in our life and all the problems in the world.

[27:14]

So there's more to reality than we usually think of. So I'm going to just pause there. and see if anybody has any comments or responses or questions or anything else. Okay. So, you know, as you can see, it really occurred to me, Why was Deng Xiang so obsessed with this question? Yeah, it's a strange kind of question for him to... It's kind of a doctrinal question, right? Well, it seems like it. Yeah, it seems like it, but there's something, I think, that almost all of us probably have some kind of question like that, that we're sitting with. You know, in some ways, I felt, oh, Deng Xiang probably already knew the answer on some level, but needed to... We're just helping him contact that, but it's such a... You know, I think that kind of thing of staying with one's question, and not just going, oh, yeah, teacher, right, okay, cool, you've whipped out your whisk, and, you know, I've got it now.

[28:29]

You know, like, sometimes that works, but he was like, no, I don't really, but yeah, you know, I want to see what somebody else has to say about that. And I just, I really like it very much, and thank you for illuminating it. Well, yeah, thank you. Yes, it's this sense of, it does show the persistence of Dongshan in taking this question. And there are lots of different aspects to this question. It seems like it could be just doctrinal, but it's really about how do we hear the world? How do we hear reality? How do we share that? What's going on? that we're all part of. And I'll talk about this later in the practice period more, but there's also this idea in this strain of thought that suchness is not one single thing. It's actually alive and shifting and dynamic. So this ultimate reality is totally connected with appreciation of the shifting phenomenal world.

[29:35]

the flowers sprouting and falling and so forth. But yeah, this questioning. Actually, I told yesterday, yesterday we had a Buddhist birthday celebration. Some of you were here, had a bunch of kids here. I told the story of Dongshan when he was a young boy studying and I don't know, but I think maybe he was like an orphan who was sent to the monastery. Anyway, his teacher was studying the Heart Sutra with him. And he got to the part where it said, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind. We chant that regularly here in Dombrasana. Wait a second, I have eyes, I have ears, I have a nose. He didn't just take things on faith, as we say. be part of the story. Other questions, comments, responses, reflections, please.

[30:38]

Laurel. I'd love to think about these things we can't really talk about very easily. Good. Music is this intangible way of communicating that it's hard to... You can't communicate in words what music communicates in music. But in the last few weeks, WFMT, the Fine Art Radio Station, had a series where they looked at every single key and said what that key So like C major would be one key, or D minor. You sort of know a major key would be sort of happier than a minor key. But every single one, and there's lots and lots of them, they talked about all the various things that that key could communicate.

[31:45]

And it sort of opened up this entire set of subtle ways of thinking about, you know, every minor would be so different from Anyway, I guess what it does is just pry open a box in my head or use it. Oh, it's communicating in ways I haven't really thought about or can think about. But Joe probably knows a lot more about this than I do. He's a professional musician, but anyway. But yeah, yeah, and that's also a little bit like Rambo finding colors to sound. Yeah. And all the different languages we might speak or learn. And it sort of invited you almost like a... I don't want to reduce it to something silly, but almost like a horoscope, you know, what keys appeal to you, like what touches your heart. He'd slap me if it was wine.

[32:49]

Pluto's wine. Joan, do you have anything to say about that from a music perspective? No. That's weird. Yes, Jan? I was always kind of interested in the music of the spheres. I don't know what that could possibly be. I don't think it's something that you know, if you're an astronomer, that you hear it. And I don't know what it is. And then, when I was a little kid, there was a guy on the radio called, named Arthur Godfrey. And he had friends, he had friends that made an album, and they were musicians. And the name of this album was, Like Treat. And they took bird songs, and slowed them down, and turn them into jazz creations.

[33:57]

And the one that is especially interesting is the Red Wing Blackbird, because when you hear it doing its thing, It has many different calls, but the main one that you hear in the spring is, it's obviously going back and forth, back and forth, between at least two tones. And they slowed this down and made something that you could hear, that you could hear slowly. And then there's whale songs, too, that are always, that people who know the whales know which whale is singing that song. Because the whale songs change from one generation to the next also. One thing I was thinking about when we were speaking earlier is about non-sentient beings and their capacity for Buddha nature.

[35:26]

And certainly the research that's coming out about especially trees being able to communicate drought coming, and potential environmental dangers, so be prepared, and it's fascinating what they've been finding that these non-sentient beings communicate, and so indeed, science is supporting this new way of thinking, and so that could lead us to believe that they have buddha nature indeed. And maybe it'll come to you all just to respond to what you just said, that part of what this is about is seeing, as I was saying, a wider view of reality, which means the natural elements, and this idea that plants have intelligence, and sometimes the Cheyenne people say that rocks have consciousness.

[36:38]

So what do we mean, what is our usual idea our human, you know, anthropocentric idea of awareness, of communication, of awakening even. So, what is the Buddha nature of rocks? How do, and so, and in these old stories, Dogen's not just talking about grasses and trees, he's talking about fences and walls. You know, how is it that the nature of reality itself has something to offer us that can inform our sense of how and who we are. Well, something really quickly that you've written about before, I think from a deep ecologist perspective, and I once read some of your other work on the poet Gary Snyder, I mean, it's almost a natural tendency to see the root of nature

[37:40]

one with these other beings, and not just mammals either, but plants and what we typically consider to be non-sentient. Yeah, and I guess DNA, you can change a few pieces of the DNA stranding and from humans it's like a fly or a bumblebee or something. Or a cat. Yes, last question. So I'm reminded of two famous anthropology stories from an astronomer who worked with the Ojibwa. And the Ojibwa think that it takes babies a long time to learn human language, but the babies are born speaking the language of dogs and coyotes. So the babies speak dog and coyote, and then they have to gradually forget dog and coyote to be able to learn human language. And another famous story in ethnography was speaking with an Ojibwa couple, and there's a big lightning thunder bang outside, and the old man turned to the old woman, and the Ojibwa man told the woman, he said, how did you hear what he just said?

[39:04]

Okay, so yeah, and it's interesting how these stories about the foundation of our meditative practice tradition are kind of revoking all of this modern scientific reality.

[39:21]

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