This week I'm talking about our first ancestors in China, Bodhidharma through Huine. Yesterday I talked about Bodhidharma. This is from the Cases and Verses by Dogen. It's a 90-case collection. So yesterday we talked about Bodhidharma. As Dogen put it, Bodhi, first ancestor, faced the wall for nine years. And we talked about him facing the wall and the wall facing him. And Dogen, rather than being intimidated by Bodhidharma, talks about it. from Bodhidharma's perspective, clearing away all of the weeds to gaze up at the wind and the sound of geese passing.

[01:15]

The case today has to do with the second ancestor, Dasa, Weka, and the third ancestor, Janja, So the case, a great teacher, Second Ancestor Dasa Weka, once had a layperson, the future Third Ancestor, Chandra Songsang, ask him, this disciple's body is bound up in illness. Master, please help me repent for my sins. Second Ancestor said, bring me your sins and I will repent them for you. After a pause, The lay person said, looking for my sins, they are ungraspable. The ancestor said, I have finished repenting sins for you. You should live in reliance on Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Dogen's verse commentary on that, our sins and crimes fill the skies, yet cannot be found anywhere.

[02:19]

The sins and crimes filling the skies are fine and beneficial, Suddenly, right here, another encounter. The clear wind of the signal away blows freely. So there are many, many, many aspects to this story. Maybe the crux of it is, well, John G felt that he was ill because of his previous sins. And the second ancestor cured him by asking him to bring them, to present them, to repent them, so he could repent them or acknowledge them. And after consideration, the future second ancestor says, they're ungraspable.

[03:25]

So, one aspect of this has to do with the traditional Asian understanding of karma. So, in most Asian Buddhist countries, it's part of the culture, or it has been, to think in terms of past lives, future lives, and that whatever difficulties you face here now, this life, are because of bad things you did in the past lives. Now, some of you probably don't believe in past lives or future lives, and that's okay. Some of you maybe do believe in that, and that's okay, too. But the point is that we have to re-evaluate, you find a new understanding of karma here in our time, in the West and in Asia.

[04:34]

So karma is not just about self. Of course, non-self is a basic Buddhist practice. This way of looking at things throughout Asian Buddhist history has been an excuse for oppression. So if somebody's having a hard time or born into an unfortunate life or whatever, well, it's because you did something bad in the past life. This is a really serious misunderstanding of what karma and the law of cause and effect is about, first of all. And the third ancestor to his credit, when he looked, saw that there were no sins, to describe. So just on the first level of the story, Dogen says, our sins and crimes fill the skies, yet cannot be found anywhere.

[05:40]

So yes, we now chant in all of our services, our ancient twisted karma born from body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. So yes, of course, We each personally have, from this life and, if you will, from past lives, a great deal of, you know, maybe things to regret or, you know, we have done things that maybe were harmful. But the wider teaching of karma is not individual. It's collective. Our country is in trouble because we have this legacy of collective karma that started with those immigrants from Europe. Maybe the Native Americans should have built walls to keep us out, but wiping out many Native American cultures and taking their land and so forth.

[06:47]

And then the karma of slavery, racism, which our economy is built on, both North and South, and it still very much affects all of us. So we all have collective karma in lots of ways. We have various lineages. We have this wonderful lineage of these Zen ancestors. We have genetic karma. We have cultural karma. So what happens to us is not just a function of what you did in some past life or in this life. It has to do with all of us and this pattern. And yet, in this case, the third ancestor saw that his sins were ungraspable, his misdeeds, his mistakes. We can't get a hold of anything, in fact. And the ultimate truth is the patience with the ungraspability of anything.

[07:52]

So to blame someone for being unfortunate is all too popular amongst some of our politicians and is just, you know, a legacy of the karma of oppression. Dogen says, our sins and crimes fill the skies. And yes, that's true. It cannot be found anywhere. lead up to this. Each thing we do, each thought we have, produces innumerable causes and conditions. So, you know, Dawkins says in the second line, the sins and crimes filling the skies are fine and beneficial. Here we are. So, again, he's talking to us as practitioners, he's talking to his students. That's us too. So, here we are.

[08:52]

We have to acknowledge our ancient twisted karma, individually and collectively. And yet, this gives us the opportunity for overcoming these things. If, you know, it's not going to happen this week in Paris, but if humans can change the pattern of climate damage that's been caused by fossil fuels, there are many new possibilities for humanity. Of course, there'll be lots of damage too, that's already said. Anyway, Dogen says, suddenly right here, another encounter. The clear wind of the single way blows freely. Right here, another encounter. Each new situation, each new opportunity, each new encounter allows something new. The clear wind of the single way blows freely.

[09:58]

So our Bodhisattva precepts come down to including all beings, respecting all beings, ourselves and others, not causing harm and trying to be helpful. And that can arise out of seeing the ancient twisted karma of ourselves and our culture and human beings. So how do we open our eyes to the ungraspable? How suddenly right here do we face the wall and allow the wall to face us? Our misdeeds fill heaven and earth, yet cannot be grasped. And the true way

[11:02]

not from running away from them, not from avoiding them, but from facing the pain of our situation. So there's a whole other aspect to this story. We don't know so much about the second or third ancestor. Starting with the fourth ancestor, there's kind of more information historically, from the point of view of academic historians. Of course, Bodhidharma is shrouded in this too, but we now know he existed at least. We don't know so much about the second or third ancestor. I actually, in China, visited a temple that was called the Second Ancestor's Temple. Not because he ever was there, but the story is. that after he died they put his remains in a boat and the boat floated upstream and landed at this village. So they built a temple there commemorating a second ancestor.

[12:09]

And the people there, it's far from any even town, it's just this little village and the people there probably had never seen Foreigners didn't have time to build walls. So they were very welcoming of us. And it was very sweet. And there's a memorial stele that commemorates how the second ancestor's body arrived there. Anyway, we don't know so much about the second ancestor or the third ancestor. We do know about the third ancestor one thing, which is that he was a leper. So when he's saying to the second ancestor, this disciple's body is bound up in illness, He wasn't kidding. So leprosy is a really interesting disease, which I hadn't really understood until this year when I read a book by Rebecca Solnit called The Far Away Nearby.

[13:15]

She'll be here, speaking here for Sunday in April and the day before that at DePaul. She's actually a student of Blanche Hartman, who was my Shiseo teacher. She's a practitioner, but also a brilliant writer. I've talked about her before in terms of her book about the history of walking and anyway, many, many wonderful things. She's an activist, a feminist, as well as a historian. In this book, which is about, well, it starts with her mother and ends with her mother's Alzheimer's disease, and talks about, there's a lot of stuff about the Arctic, and anyway, she's traveled a lot. But there's a chapter in here about Che Guevara, who we mostly know of as a, friend of Fidel Castro and a revolutionary in South America, but before that he was a doctor. And there's a book that he, and a movie called The Motorcycle Diaries that talk about his traveling around South America and really awakening to suffering as a doctor, but through actually working with lepers.

[14:28]

So, I didn't realize this until I read Rebecca's comments, that The disease of leprosy itself, it causes so much damage to hands and feet, that have this disease worse, is that it strangles nerves, kills off feeling, and when you cannot feel, you cannot take care of yourself. So this is very relevant for Sashin too, as well as for the problems of our It's not the disease, but the patient that does the damage of leprosy. When you cannot feel your extremities, as starts to happen in the numbing that happens with leprosy, you begin nicking, burning, bruising, abrading, and otherwise wearing out your fingers, toes, feet, hands, and then losing them.

[15:33]

So, I guess Rebecca says, pain serves a purpose. Without it, you're in danger. What you cannot feel, you cannot take care of. It seemed shockingly accurate at the time, a new and brutal version of an old truth. So, she talks, she studies more about, let's see, It's a bacterial infection to which most of us are immune. And the small percentage who aren't have a hard time catching it. It's among the most incommunicable of communicable diseases. And when you catch it, many years may pass before symptoms appear, making the method of contagion a little mysterious even now. Those who contract it sometimes have only minor symptoms on their skins. or they have on their skin, or they have disfiguring skin rashes, eruptions, and growths, and those areas grow numb.

[16:39]

Or they sustain more extensive nerve damage. The leprosy bacillus is particularly at home in the cooler parts of the body, the skin, the hands, the forearms, the feet and lower legs, and the nose and eyes. In almost any of these places, infected nerves can swell up and then strangle in their sheath and die. The nerveless part of the body remains alive, but pain and sensation define the self. What you cannot feel is not you. What you cannot feel, you do not readily take care of. Your extremities become lost to you. So this is very important. Pain pretends. You get something in your eyes and you do something about it. But definitely, gingerly, or it hurts. You flinch, you blink, tears flow.

[17:43]

With leprosy, you might stop blinking. So your eyes go dry, or you rub them too hard and scar the cornea, or fail to notice some injury at all. Thus, blindness is a common consequence of this disease. our third ancestor in Zen. He couldn't feel pain, and therefore, I don't know what damage that resulted in for him particularly, but this is very interesting for us. A big part of our practice, sitting here doing Zazen for a week, is to feel what we feel, to face the wall, to not turn away from ourselves, to not turn away from the pain.

[18:47]

So the first noble truth, the beginning of our practice is just the truth of, sometimes it's translated as suffering, the truth of dis-ease, And recognizing that, recognizing the pain, is where our practice starts. The great Zufi poet Rumi said, the cure for pain is in the pain. So this applies on so many levels. At some point in the course of a day of sitting, or five days of sitting, or however long you're here, you probably will experience some discomfort, to put it at its mildest. The pain may be in your knees, or your shoulders, or your back, or your bottom, anyway. And one of the things that's hardest, that is difficult about sashi, when you start to do this practice, is that, of course, we want to avoid the pain.

[19:57]

So we clench up, we resist it. And then there's pain somewhere else. So I used to try to clench up in my shoulder so I wouldn't feel the pain in my knees. The cure for pain is in the pain. How do we face the pain? So it's not a matter, you know, well in some ways it's a matter, you know, this word sins is difficult because kinds of Judeo-Christian guilt stuff and all that. But how do we avow our intertwisted karma? How do we face the pain? How do we sit with sadness? I remember in a shusa ceremony at Tassajara, Richard Jaffe, who is now a noted Buddhist academic, who was Tenzin, asked, what do you do about the sadness?

[21:11]

I can't remember what Leila said, but that's, you know, that's like, why did Bodhidharma come from the West? How do we face each of us in some ways? I don't know. Well, I think everybody here, I haven't met anybody for whom this isn't true, but each of us is damaged in some ways. We've all suffered loss. We've all suffered disappointment. So the First Noble Truth is just to face that. It's called a Noble Truth because we can actually be present and face the pain. And the poor Third Ancestor, because of his leprosy, couldn't feel his pain. You saw the results in whatever symptoms the lack of feeling resulted in. And of course, in sitting sashi and sitting zazen, the physical pain in your knees or your shoulders or wherever is nothing compared to the pain we feel when we see our

[22:22]

when we sit still and upright long enough to see our own patterns of anger, and greed, and craving, and ignorance, and confusion, and fear, and frustration, and the consequences of that. So that's probably what the third ancestor was talking about, about all of the sins. He saw his own pattern of self-grasping. And it's painful. Rumi says the cure for pain is in the pain. We have to be willing to face all of that and take another breath. And when the third ancestor looked for his past misdeeds, he saw they weren't So this is true for us individually in Sashi.

[23:32]

We need to face the pain gently, kindly. We need to learn compassion by feeling compassion for ourselves in our own patterns of craving, grasping, anger, whatever. this isn't just about us personally either, just like karma is not just about us personally, it's collective. So the causes and conditions that beset each of us individually and all of us collectively, you know, having to do with, well, slavery, racism, wiping out many Native American cultures, and now the politicians playing on fear to build walls to keep out people who speak Spanish or Arabic or, you know, anyway. Rebecca Solomon talks about this also in terms of our psychiatrist, Robert J. Lifton, who was investigating the psychology of survivors of the Hiroshima bomb and the Nagasaki bomb.

[24:48]

And he coined the term psychokinetics, to describe the survival strategy of disassociation and apathy, a diminished capacity or inclination to feel. And this is what Joanna Macy talks about a lot, too, who's been here, and talks about how we can face the situation of our world. And first, Joanna started talking about despair and empowerment and facing You know, all of us have grown up. Is anybody here born before Hiroshima? No. I think some of our song members, maybe. But anyway, ever since then, people have known that there's the possibility of all of this ending and all of our efforts just, at least for human beings, war and spreading of nuclear weapons.

[25:53]

And now we have climate damage too. And we know, it's already physically verifiable that there's going to be a lot of damage to human civilization from this. It's already starting to happen. And, you know, it's hard to just to kind of be aware and think about this all the time. So in some ways this psychic numbing is a kind of survival instinct, but not really. He says the cure for pain is in the pain. In some ways maybe our, maybe humanity has leprosy. We don't feel the people who are having, the war in Syria was partly started by climate effects that there was drought and there was famine and people started moving around and civil war. Of course, any particular situation is ungraspable, many causes and conditions.

[26:57]

So, you know, there's this... And now we have, as part of the karma of our world, you know, this epidemic of gun violence. There was another mass shooting yesterday in Southern California. And we're just numb to that because it happens, you know, every week. And African-American men killed by police, unarmed African-American men. This is happening almost every week, it seems. What's changed is that we have videos of it. And we're numb to all of that, because what can we do? And we feel hopeless. And so it's the gun industry that won't allow our politicians to pass legislation for reasonable gun control.

[28:03]

And it's also the weapons companies that are profiting off of the wars in the Middle East and send weapons to Saudi Arabia, which end up in the hands of ISIS. sending weapons to all the different people involved and somebody's making a profit. And we're numb to all of that. So, our personal pain, sitting on your cushion or chair here, is not unrelated to the pain of our world. It's produced in part by that. We each are affected by all of that. We have the habit of numbness. We have the habit of not facing the difficulties of the world. Rick and I were both in Paris or near Paris during the attacks recently. Anyway, this numbness is being turned towards creating more fear.

[29:13]

Okay, this has to do with Sashi and you on your cushion or chair right now. How do we start to have the habit of facing the pain, of not being numb to our pain? It's sad. All the things that have happened to us or that we have helped to cause And yet, we can't get a hold of it. It's ungraspable. The cure for pain is in the pain. Our sins and crimes fill the skies. It cannot be found anywhere. The sins and crimes filling the skies are fine and beneficial. It's okay to hurt. It's okay to be sad. In fact, sashin is the opportunity to enter the Dharma game of the First Noble Truth, to feel the sadness that is part of your life.

[30:27]

It's okay to cry in session. This isn't baseball. But that's the starting point. Suddenly, right here, another encounter. Right now, how are we going to take on our responsibility for trying to be helpful, trying not to cause more harm, trying to face the wall of our lives and ourselves and our world? The clear wind of the single way blows freely. So I'm tempted to say there's a kind of art or craft to facing the pain in session. But you know, when we start looking for some easy way out, that's not it. Bodhidharma faced the wall, and he faced himself.

[31:39]

The Stokian says about that, that Shalman, one sitting was hardly enough to pass the years, raising his eyes with no companions, geese crying in the sky. People don't laugh at him, brushing away weeds to look up at the wind. And then the astonished snake emerges, making his match. So this was the disarmed, one-armed successor, the second ancestor, Wicca, It's interesting, there's another case in Tolkien's Ninety Cases, which is the next to the last one, and it's strange because it's sort of chronological in order. His first punch starting with Bodhidharma and the second and third ancestor, tomorrow the fourth and fifth. But he waits till the next, the last, to talk more about the second ancestor's encounter with Bodhidharma.

[32:55]

So, the case that Dogen, the way David Dogen framed it, the second ancestral great teacher, Dasa Huika, asked the first ancestor, Bodhidharma, my mind is not yet calm, will the teacher pacify it? So I've had students come to me and say, I don't feel calm and peaceful. Please help. Teach a pacifier. And sometimes it's appropriate not to feel calm. Sometimes it's appropriate to feel the sadness. But when we really feel the sadness, when we can settle and settle and settle in there, we can find our calm. We can find our openness and expansiveness. So the first ancestor said to the second ancestor Rekha, bring your mind and I will pacify you. The first ancestor said, bring your mind and I will pacify you.

[34:15]

And Hueka said, seeking my mind, I cannot grasp it. And Bodhidharma said, I have finished pacifying your mind. So, you know, all of these, all of this ancient history, all of this sadness, all of this karmic legacy of the, and the missile companies and so forth who are right now controlling so much of our world. We can't get a hold of it. It's all ungraspable. We can't just blame it on, you know, any one person. Donald Trump didn't invent xenophobia and racism. deep in all of us. Suddenly, right here, another encounter.

[35:36]

The clear wind of the single way blows freely. Duggan says, So, as you face your pain, whether it's in your knee or in your heart, right here, there's another encounter, there's another opportunity to be present, to forgive yourself, to pay attention, to actually go beyond the numbness To feel what you feel. The clear wind of the single way blows freely. I don't know if the answer's blowing in the wind, but there's something clear in this wind. There's something that can free us.

[36:38]

It doesn't mean that we don't have So we're all, you know, we all have a little bit of leprosy, I think. Feel what you feel. So, in your sawsan, Practice. Allow thoughts and feelings to arise. Don't try and do anything with them. Don't try and figure anything out. That's not the point. It's ungraspable. Can you be present? crimes fill the skies, yet cannot be found anywhere.

[37:47]

Duggan says these crimes filling the skies are fine and beneficial. What does he mean? How do we make it so? In this satsang, I sometimes recommend mantra practice. And you can take a phrase from any of these teachings. The clear wind blows freely. You can just say that over and over to yourself. Or you can use the Heart Sutra mantra. But I have often mentioned How does it feel? How does it feel? So it's sort of a koan as well as a mantra. Sometimes they're both.

[38:52]

Or you could take a line from one of our chants, like the song of the grass hut. Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely. So letting go of hundreds of years means not that we deny the karma of for hundreds of years of cruelty and violence and slavery and so forth. But we can let go and relax completely when we face it. The cure for pain is in the pain. Or just how does it feel? How does it feel? Feel what you feel. Sometimes maybe Find shelter there. Don't build walls around it, around your numbness.

[39:57]

Don't keep out the unknown and painful. I vow to free them till the chains are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Thine apologies are boundless. I vow to enter them. When I was away in this monster castle, I vowed to re-learn.

[40:53]

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