Good morning, welcome everyone. Kind of as a prelude to our two-month practice period starting April 1st, I want to talk today about the role of bodhisattvas in Zen. During the practice period we'll be talking about a particular Bodhisattva archetypal figures and their practices. But I just want to talk about, well, one thing I want to talk about and I'll come back to is the difference between Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. But I'll start with the difference between Mahayana and Zen. Mahayana, a greater vehicle, is the branch of Buddhism of North Asia, which is focused on the Bodhisattva practice and figures. Zen is part of that, but from some perspective, maybe when Zen first came to the West especially, the focus was on the aspect of Zen that

[01:15]

It's kind of Taoist Buddhism. So Zen poetry, Zen landscape painting, Zen sense of space and spaciousness, Zen aesthetics, and Zen sense of presence, all of this is important in Zen meditation. Zen just means meditation. So all of this came to have a very Chinese Taoist feeling. And this is very important in terms of what Zen is and how our meditation expresses itself. The sense of awareness of nature and of our being as a part of the natural world and of the rhythms of nature, the seasons and the rhythms of the mountains and rivers.

[02:36]

how the internal landscape that we uncover and open up in our meditation and in our ongoing meditative practice reflects or in some ways calls forth the space of mountains and waters and the rhythms of our landscape, whether or not we live in the mountains, even here in the Great Plains. the rhythm of lakes and prairies, rhythms of avenues and skyscrapers as we live in Chicago. How are the space around us is expressed in this Zazen practice we do and unfolds through it.

[03:43]

And then, of course, Zen has its own kind of language developed through all the old teaching stories, the koans, the dialogues between teachers and students, or between teachers. And a lot of Zen is about working with that material. those and the challenge of those materials. What is Buddha? Why did Bodhidharma come from the West? How is it to be here now? So this side of Zen in some sense we could say is very personal. Dogen says, to study the way is to study the self. Dogen, our great 13th century Japanese founder.

[04:49]

This is about finding our own seat, finding our own space as a mountain or a river or some other space of the natural world. The other side, the form of Buddhism that Zen developed from, Mahayana, is about the Bodhisattva practice. And what this adds, which is not so much in Taoism, or not in the same way, is what we could call, what's called in Buddhist studies language, soteriology. How do we find liberation. Salvation is maybe a more Christian word, but it applies in some ways to Buddhism when we say, sentient beings are numberless, I vow to free them.

[06:02]

So this has to do with liberation, and the Bodhisattva is dedicated to universal liberation. So this is part of Zen too, this sense of, sometimes it gets expressed as a kind of crazy wisdom, Zen figures who are don't act according to social norms. The wildness of the landscape can be reflected in the wildness of how do we find the way to free ourselves and all beings. But this Mahayana emphasizes, the Bodhisattva emphasizes the precepts that we say to embrace and sustain all beings, the inclusiveness. So it includes the mountains and rivers and all the critters that are roaming around in there or swimming or flying through there.

[07:09]

So it's very wide, very expansive. But it's also, well, what do we do about the problem, about the problem? about the suffering and sadness in the world and in our own lives. How do we address that? So, you know, that's there in Taoism too, this sense of being free of expectations, of being wild and free as nature. But in the Bodhisattva way, it's specifically about following practices that help that help, being helpful rather than harmful, being respectful of all beings. So we have our precepts, and we have the paramitas, the transcendent practices that are part of the Bodhisattva tradition. So this is just one way to talk about a couple of sides of Zen.

[08:18]

The Bodhisattva is about all beings. So it goes beyond personal liberation. It's not just, how do I find my way to be free and easy in the space of the world? It's about our sense of non-separation, of connectedness to everything. So this comes back to study of the self. What is our true self? What does it mean to be personally liberated? How is that actually the same as universal liberation? So another aspect of this is Bodhisattvas and Buddhas. So we, you know, the word Buddhism didn't, well, it's an English word, but the sense of Buddhism didn't really exist in Asia until Western missionaries came and looked around and saw that in all these different countries,

[09:25]

you know, venerated the Buddha, so this must be Buddhism and, you know, but there's so many different Buddhisms. Maybe, you know, the heart is the same, but there's all these different forms in different cultures and at different times and different schools and so forth. And then there's this Bodhisattva, and that's, actually now it's in South Asia too, so if you go to Thailand you'll see pictures of, you'll see images of Kannon, or Kanzeon, or Guanyin, even though it's supposed to be a Theravada country. So, you know, part of what's happening in this strange amalgam called American Buddhism is that all of these different strands are interweaving. So this is something, what we're doing here is actually something new, something that is an unfolding of all of this. But just to say that, you know, there's Buddhas and there's Bodhisattvas, and the question comes up, are they different?

[10:32]

So in the practice period, we're going to be focusing on the six bodhisattva figures I talk about in my book, Faces of Compassion, after Shakyamuni. Shakyamuni also was a bodhisattva, so, you know, we'll talk about him too, but in terms of what I'm asking for people who formally participate in the practice commitment period and For those of you who don't do it formally, but just show up while we're doing it, you'll be hearing about all this. But Shakyamuni was considered a bodhisattva when he was Siddhartha Gautama. And then eventually he became the Buddha. He awakened and was the Buddha, the awakened one. So what's going on there? What's the difference between Bodhisattva and Buddha? from some point of view, well, maybe nothing.

[11:34]

From another point of view, bodhisattvas are working towards becoming Buddhists. So in the traditional, in some of the traditional Mahayana scriptures or sutras and some of the traditional Mahayana idea of the bodhisattva, the bodhisattva practices for many, [...] many thousands or millions of lifetimes, and eventually awakens and becomes the Buddha, a Buddha. So in the Lotus Sutra, Shakyamuni tells some of his bodhisattvas and some of his disciples, oh, in some great future age, distant future, you will be the Buddha so-and-so in the Buddha field, such-and-such. So there's that side of bodhisattvas. Bodhisattvas are working towards becoming Buddhas over many, many lifetimes. And it's possible to see our practice that way. We are sitting here doing zazen, some of us for the whole day, studying ourself, seeing all of the things about the world and ourself that arise as we sit facing the wall.

[12:54]

in one view of Buddhist karma is that we are reborn and come back again and again, taking on the spiritual aspects of some past being. And so there's this train of beings and so forth. And so all of the stuff to use the technical term that you're are you dealing with as you're sitting there is you know it may not be about you it may be about somebody in some past lifetime who had some problem and you've got to deal with it uh... that's one view of how this works uh... so uh... bodhisattvas are just very dedicated to working towards buddha that's one one side of it so uh... The other side is that, well, I'll read a little bit from Faces of Compassion.

[14:12]

We might also describe the Bodhisattva descending from Buddhahood. The story goes that it was only at the urging of the Indian deity, Brahma, that Shakyamuni Buddha agreed to stay in the world to help teach those beings who were ready how to enter into the way of awakening. Although a Buddha teaches and demonstrates this awakening, a Buddha is also one who already sees the world as whole and perfected. In this sense, a Buddha does not need to do anything and has nothing to accomplish. And we say that in the Heart Sutra. So Bodhisattvas, on the other hand, do the work of the Buddhas in the world, acting to relieve suffering and liberate all beings. In the course of our ongoing regular practice of zazen, there are times when you might feel that the world

[15:15]

the world on your seat right now is whole and perfected. Maybe it's important to see that, to see that side, that everything is just as it is. And all the problems in your life and all the problems in our society and all the craziness of humanity is just karma working itself out. And in some ways, everything is just as it is. And it's wide and open as the sky and as the rivers and mountains. On the other hand, you might feel the suffering of other beings or yourself. And so bodhisattvas are doing the work of Buddha in the world. The descending bodhisattva practices in order to enact and express enlightenment, not to achieve it.

[16:25]

There's nothing to gain. It is only a matter of all beings reintegrating and reconnecting with their own fundamental, inherent Buddha nature. But the descending bodhisattva practices no less intently than the one who is working to get to Buddha, demonstrating cultivation for those who will be encouraged by it. So there's this way of seeing bodhisattvas and buddhas, and technically, formally, all of us sitting here are doing bodhisattva practice. We're here, we will chant the four bodhisattva vows at the end of this, and we're doing this practice in the Mahayana tradition, and so we're all practicing bodhisattvas. you may feel like you're a baby bodhisattva. Or sometimes you may feel like you may be able to recognize that actually, as far as I know, each one of you is doing some noble work to help relieve suffering.

[17:36]

in terms of the people around you, in terms of your work perhaps, in terms of your attention to Sangha, in terms of your attention to Zazen. This is all part of the Bodhisattva work that each one of you is doing. So we're already Bodhisattvas. The Bodhisattva, great Bodhisattva figures like Kanon or Manjushri or Jizo that we will study in the practice period coming up are these great kind of cosmic cultural figures that have moved from between different cultures that represent aspects of our practice. In all these different cultures, we have different versions of Manjushri riding on the lion in front of Shakyamuni on our altar, the Bodhisattva of insight and wisdom, or of Kanon, Guanyin, Vallakiteshvara, trying to express compassion for all beings.

[18:53]

So we have all these stories. We have stories from the koans, and we also have these stories of the Bodhisattva figures. And each, all of these stories, so our practice is also about looking, about unpacking narratives. And Dogen says, to study the way is to study the self. What we have is story about a self. We have our sense of identity. We each have some, it may be recognizing that we are, we may each in our own way at times recognize that we are vast and contain multitudes as Walt Whitman said, but also we know something about who we are. And that's okay, that's true. The Buddhist teaching of non-self doesn't mean that you don't have a self. It just means that the self you think you have is, initially at least, is a fiction.

[19:59]

So we study other fictions. We study these koan stories because they teach us something about. our life in practice. And we'll be studying these stories of many stories from different cultures, many images from different cultures about these particular Bodhisattva figures as a way of seeing aspects of ourselves, aspects of our own practice, and different approaches to practice. So we may be inspired or we may see other possibilities for who we are, who we might want to become, how we might want to unfold our practice. And so some of the more colorful Mahayana sutras say that there are Buddhas and Bodhisattvas on the tip of every blade of grass, or on the tip of this staff, or innumerable Bodhisattvas and Buddhas in each atom.

[21:20]

What does that mean? Well, awakening is possible and is available everywhere. Opening, you know, as G. R. Roshi says, opening the hand of thought, letting go of our old stories, taking on new stories maybe, or shifting the stories we think, shifting who we think we are. shifting the stories we've been telling about ourselves, seeing them freshly, changing the past, changing the karma of our old stories, and seeing them from a different perspective. All of this is possible by studying these stories. Not to get caught in deciding that you are Manjushri or something, but just to see new ways to see yourself. So we will be studying these six particular figures, and there are Bodhisattva charts out on the...

[22:31]

Out front, Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, just to name the six. Samantabhadra, the universally good Bodhisattva who practices devotion and helpfulness in society. Kanon Avalokiteshvara, mentioned the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Jizo or Kshitigarbha, the earth womb Bodhisattva who He takes care of things down to earth, takes care of women and children, who goes down to hell to help beings in hell. Maitreya, the next future Buddha, who practices loving kindness and metta. and Vimalakirti, the awakened layperson. Anyway, these are just six figures that are maybe the most common in East Asia, and they go back through India and they're in Tibet too.

[23:34]

But each of them has a particular style of practice, each of them has particular practices. focus on, each of them also is a focus in particular sutras and represents particular schools of Buddhism, for those of you interested in learning about Buddhism. But all of them are ways of, present ways, present strategies for practicing the self. For seeing how this limited particular self actually is an aspect and can be transformed into the great self, the dharmakaya self of non-separation that saves all beings, the self that sees all self as itself, the self that is actually a piece of wholeness,

[24:46]

So the point of all this is not to learn about some old spiritual tradition, but to see how we practice this. How does this inform how we act in the world? This is a kind of question and problem for modern American Zen. What do we do with all this? How do we practice? How do we meet the world? How do we function in the world? And I've been recently thinking about it in terms of the activist side and the recluse side. Thinking about the Taoist aspect, some part of me would like to just find a cave or just hang out in my room and meditate all the time.

[26:06]

or maybe wander off along the lakeshore and just enjoy the spaciousness of the Great Lake. This is part of our tradition, too. I've been looking at a book one of my publishers sent me by a man named David Hinton, who's a translator and poet. And he has this book called Hunger Mountain, where he talks about various aspects of practice or the tradition in terms of Chinese characters. And so I was going to read a little bit from his section on bowing. And he talks about the Chinese characters and their origins and the image that the character for bowing, to bow, the image on the left side, the radical on the left is the hand character with five fingers in the old version.

[27:11]

And on the right is an image that means to whisper. It's a mouth above an ear. So he says a bow is one of those elemental movements that can only be called dance, as it so perfectly expresses spiritual gesture offering the center of identity to something beyond. So in addition to sitting and walking and eating and chanting, we do this practice of bowing here. He says, in our everyday perceptual experience as a mirrored opening of consciousness, the vastness of the 10,000 things dwarfs the center of thought and knowledge, memory, and intention. Still, that center remains insistent, rarely allowing our sense of identity to open beyond it. knowing it is in that mirrored opening to landscape, and it's 10,000 things, that we become most elementally human, because he's been talking about the, kind of from a Taoist orientation, the relationship of humans to our landscape.

[28:26]

So the ancients took their ritual gesture of a bow as the underlying structure of their spiritual and artistic practices. These practices might also be described as a ways of cultivating sincerity by weaving outside and inside together. And they constituted the terms of self-cultivation through millennia in ancient China. Meditation. was widely practiced as perhaps the most fundamental form of bowing." That sentence really struck me because I've talked about bowing as an extension of zazen, of meditation. But he says that meditation was widely practiced as perhaps the most fundamental form of bowing. Our zazen is a form of bowing. For in meditation, the center is replaced by the opening of consciousness and all of that elsewhere that fills it. He says the arts were ways of adding the complexity of lived experience to that bow.

[29:38]

Painters crafted their artistic visions primarily from aspects of landscape, mountains and rivers, fields and gardens, So anyway, just to think of meditation as a form of bowing. And, you know, in early American Zen there were great recluses or hermits. Nakagawa Soen, have any of you heard of him? Yeah, he was an early Rinzai master, a Japanese master who came to America. I knew some people back in the old days at San Francisco Zen Center who knew him or were around him at least when they practiced a place in New York. But he was famous for just hiding in his room for weeks at a time, not coming out. But totally widely respected as a great master.

[30:40]

So there's that side of our practice, just the part of studying the self that's really just allowing the mountains and rivers or the prairies and lakes to come in and settle with us on our seat and just see how this practice is a form of bowing. There's nothing else that's needed. That's one pole or one polarity, one aspect of our practice. There's also the activist side, which is sort of where I came from coming to practice. How do we take care of all of the difficult things that are happening in the world? How do we take care of the systemic sources of suffering as well as the difficulties and suffering of people around us, family members, friends, and so forth.

[31:46]

I was an activist back, you know, 50 plus years ago during the Vietnam War, which is why I was in New York last week, and maybe I'll talk about that more tomorrow night, but there's that side that I feel, but I feel both sides. How do we take care of the world? The Hebrew word, tikkun olam, to heal the world. How do we take care of responding to all of the chaos and crisis in our world? How do we help that? And then there's the side of, how do we just settle within and see the world as it is and bow to the whole thing? So it's not that we have to pick one or the other. there's no answer to how do we find our way amidst all of the possibilities of practice.

[32:55]

So to have six different versions of the bodhisattva I think is helpful because we see each one of them has a combination of different practices that they work with. So there's no one right answer, and maybe the most harmful approach is self-righteousness, to think that you have the answer and to hold up some particular response as the correct one. So this is the challenge we face. This is the challenge that American Zen faces and that the world faces and that all of us are part of. So maybe that's what I have to say this morning. We will have time for the people sitting all day for discussion later in the afternoon, but there's others here. And if anyone has any comments, questions, responses, anyone, please feel free.

[34:00]

Yes, Samantha. Yeah, so they're both, both Rinzai and Soto, in Chinese, Linji and Xiaodong, come from the sixth ancestor in China. And actually, we are both. here, because Dogen inherited the Rinzai lineage too. So in terms of the precepts lineage and the lineage papers that people receive in precepts, ordination, lay or priest, it has both sides.

[35:23]

But in terms of modern Rinzai and Soto, the differences are in But there's also differences in style between different lineages within each one and within different teachers within each lineage. it's hard to generalize. And all the generalizations and stereotypes about it are mostly wrong. So, you know, it used to be said, and this was something that was enforced by the Japanese government at some point that they had to define themselves, you know, because the Japanese government wanted to have control over the religious institutions because they were big and powerful. But it used to be said that Rinzai used Koan practice and Soto used Zazen. That's not true. Rinzai peoples do Zazen. In fact, at some point historically, early 20th century, Soto teachers sent their students to learn about Zazen from Rinzai people.

[36:30]

And in Soto we also work with koans, but just in a different way than the one form that is usually thought of as koan practice. Soto again talks about koans all the time. So anyway, it's fine to ask that question, but it's hard to give a simple answer. There are differences in style in Japan. In China, they sort of... merged or there's not, those distinctions aren't as important in China as they are in Japan or in America maybe. In America there are a range of different approaches. Sometimes, one stereotype was that, in Japan, was that Rinzai was for samurai and Soto was for farmers and peasants. And to some extent, historically, that's true, you know, and so that Rinzai has this kind of more macho style some of the time, and Soto is a little more laid back, I don't know.

[37:38]

And each side has its strengths and its weaknesses, so there's a lot more to say, but that's just start by start. Other comments or questions about this question of how we find our greater self and how we Practice the way of awakening with everyone. Michael. Uh huh, uh huh.

[38:44]

There's such a limitation to how we think things is. And part of all of this, you know, one way to talk about all of this is just the investigation of reality. What is it? What's going on? What's it all about? And the practice side is, what is our part in it? What is our responsibility to it? How do we find what's true? Dharma means truth or reality. So we're studying the Dharma. We're studying reality. And reality has all these facets. And we can only, and our way of seeing and thinking about anything is just so limited. I'm still reading this book about octopuses, intelligence and octopuses, who are amongst the most intelligent species on the planet, and as far apart from us as any being, any animal, you know, on an evolutionary scale.

[40:58]

I mean, they're invertebrates, but they're very intelligent. They're really interesting. So there's so much we don't know, and yet are these questions, how do we find a way of living that's authentic and helpful? That comes down to that. Other comments or reflections or questions or whatever. Nicholas. Yeah, it's part of reality.

[42:06]

I love this saying by the artist William Blake, anything that can be imagined is an image of the truth. So we should not deny our limited reality, but it's limited. Amen, brother.

[43:23]

That's exactly what we're going to be doing the next couple of months is looking at these old stories and seeing how they can help us shift the stories we have habitually been telling about ourselves. Not to get rid of them, but just to see fresh possibilities. So good. That's a big part of the work of Bodhisattva practice and of Zen practice. And for those staying this afternoon, we'll continue this more. And for the next two months and the next two years and as long as we have, we'll keep at it.

[44:06]

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