Good morning. This morning, we're happy to have an old friend from Zen Center speaking with us. This is Fu Schrader, who's a priest at Zen Center, currently living at Green Gulch Farm, where he is the director. So, welcome again. Thank you. It's nice to be back. I always feel like the Berkley Zen Center is kind of the right size. Where I come from, everything's a little big. So I appreciate the scale. I really hate it when people apologize for talks they're about to give. to say, well, this really would have been a good talk if only such and such.

[01:07]

So, however, as Alan mentioned, I'm now the director of Ringochen. While I was preparing for this talk, I realized that I hadn't been thinking about Buddhism for a very long time. I'm much too busy. It's kind of a shock, and I think I have to reconsider my activity somewhat. So this is some work that I did last year when I was the head monk at Green Gulch, and it's basically around the Sandokai, the merging of difference and unity. I think you're probably familiar with that poem. It's one we recite in the morning quite often during service. Do you do that here? Doers of what is hard are the bodhisattvas who have set out to win full enlightenment for the benefit and happiness of the world.

[02:18]

So what I've been thinking about is that it's pretty difficult to come into the world without a set of instructions. A map or something like an owner's manual that comes with a car and a bike. You know, we get here and we're completely helpless. We have to depend on people we don't know to take care of us. If we're very lucky, they're kind, and teach us things, send us to school, and they teach us things. But eventually, there you are, sky above and earth below, and now what? As I mentioned about my own situation, I think we keep pretty busy.

[03:38]

It's what we do. There's so much to do here. Lots of things. Places to go and people to meet. And then there are all the various accessories which have attached to us from the time of our being born. Our class identity. sexual identity, our political preferences, our education, career, family, and so on. So we can stay pretty busy. But even if we're not so engaged in what we might call worldly affairs, we minimize this involvement and pull back. Still there's this apparatus to take care of, this contraption called the human body.

[04:42]

It requires quite a lot of attention. It needs to be fed, it needs to sleep, it needs to exercise. So this whole realm of relationships and interconnections is what we call a person. Each of you is a person. Very complex. So speaking for myself as a person, at some point I noticed that from the time I was born until now, a small problem started to emerge. And it took the form of a persistent voice, which asked questions that made me uncomfortable. Questions like, well, what does all of this mean anyway?

[05:43]

And what are you doing here? And who are you? What do you care about? What do you really care about? This kind of inquiry, this impulse to inquiry, seems to be pretty automatic. I think it's probably familiar to most of you. The problem is that it tends to lead us toward a kind of discouragement or despair, an existential dread. Many of us spend hours in therapy, used to be in church, but now we spend hours in therapy talking about the fact that we can't find answers to these nagging questions. It's my conviction, I would like to admit, that if you should happen to come in contact with the Buddha's teaching, if you're inquiring impulse,

[06:57]

encounters the Buddhadharma, that eventually you'll go deeper and deeper into your questions until you actually arrive at the place where these questions are being born, at the source of creation itself. And you can begin to use the world as a kind of mirror in which you can study yourself. And fortunately for us, I think, I believe, that the Buddha Dharma is not so hard to come in contact with these days. There are mountains and mountains of manuscripts and texts and some of them have been hidden away in caves for centuries and some are at the UC library right now. And most of these have, many of these have been translated into English And if you're able, they're in Chinese, and Japanese, and Sanskrit, and Pali, and all kinds of different languages.

[08:05]

Some years ago at Zen Center, when we were in one of our crises, the other Zen Center, not sure, I asked Katagiri Roshi, what should I do to continue my practice? And he said, the most important thing for you to do is to read Buddha's words every day. So this morning what I want to talk about is one particular example of Buddha's teaching, the Sandokai. One reason I picked this is because it's familiar. It's something we've all, if we've done, if we've recited it over and over, we've memorized it, we know it. And some of the lines of this poem actually emerge in your consciousness.

[09:14]

Maybe you find that to be true. And fortunately, too, we have a a series of nine lectures that Suzuki Roshi gave on the Sandokai, which are quite wonderful. And they're all printed in the wind bells, old wind bells. I'm sure you have them here in the library. This poem was written in the 8th century by a Chinese Zen master named Sekito Gisen. It's his Japanese name. I didn't think to look up his Chinese name. And Suzuki Roshi mentions that Sekito's practice was to find everything in his own mind. To have a great mind which includes everything. So in looking at the Sandokai, it's helpful to see the whole poem as a meditation instruction, but also to see each part of the poem

[10:27]

as a separate instruction, a different type of meditation. So this first meditation of finding everything within your own mind, this is a kind of expanding awareness, letting your mind grow and fill. And I thought of an example when I was out at Ringochi. And I had people imagine that their body was the valley. And it worked very nicely at the time. And when I was coming here, I thought, well, that's sort of odd to ask people to imagine that Berkeley is your body. But actually, I don't think it's so odd. I think it's a wonderful idea that, of course, the Zen Center is your heart, and universities may be your liver, Your feet are, I'm sorry to say, soaking in the San Francisco Bay.

[11:33]

And your head is covered with eucalyptus trees and encircled by hawks. And tiny little cars are moving urgently throughout your arteries. Right now it seems that fall is beginning to emerge through your pores, and small leaves are strewn all over the surface of your skin. Not so bad. When you see yourself as Berkeley, you can begin to understand how you might take care of your body, take care of this other body, a little different way than we usually think. Usually we're kind of critical of that mess up. But how about if it's your body? What are you going to do to take care of it? To love it? And of course you don't have to stop at the city limits.

[12:38]

You can begin to move out to Livermore, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and so on. Continuing this kind of meditation until you've actually wrapped your arms around the entire Earth. So how would that feel to have a body like the earth, a mind like the sky? So this kind of mind is something like what we call the mind of the Bodhisattva, which vows to save all sentient beings without exception. The value of this kind of meditation, it's kind of fun for one thing, but also it helps you to appreciate the context of your life, the context which surrounds and nurtures and creates each of us every moment, moment after moment.

[13:44]

We're not in isolation, we're not alone. Another name for this context is the mind of Buddha. So, the beginning of the poem, Sandokai, the first line is, the mind of the great sage of India. The great sage of India is the Buddha, the mind of Buddha. The mind of the great sage of India is intimately communicated between East and West. So the mind of the great sage of Buddha, the intimate mind, the great mind, the great context, connects east and west, connects left and right, right and wrong, light and dark, difference and unity. When we forget this context, this mind of Buddha, which we do pretty often, what happens is that we shrink down into what's called the mind of delusion.

[15:01]

And it's pretty easy to picture the mind of delusion as a kind of shriveled up little thing that is grumpy. It's forgotten its context. forgotten where it belongs, what it is, what it truly is. So, it's important to remember when you're caught in this mind of delusion that context for the mind of delusion is the mind of enlightenment, the Buddha's mind. That the mind of delusion is an aspect of the mind of enlightenment. They're not separate, they're not two things. So the Buddha's mind includes the mind of delusion, but it's not limited by the mind of delusion. Suzuki Roshi says this about this particular line.

[16:08]

He says, the mind that we have when we practice zazen is the great mind, in which we don't try to see anything. We just sit. We're not bothered by whatever happens to us. It's like something happening in the great sky. The sky doesn't care what happens in the sky, what kind of bird flies through. Even the atomic bomb, it doesn't care. That is the mind transmitted from Buddha to us. So I think we can appreciate how this kind of meditation helps us to develop what's called right understanding or right view. And at the same time, if you don't understand, well, that's included too. Not understanding is also an aspect of the enlightened mind.

[17:09]

In fact, it's kind of a comfort to know that no one ever has understood something completely, not even Mr. Einstein, because Understanding itself is too limited. It's only an aspect of this greater mind. So, just to repeat a little bit that a mind of delusion and not understanding, greed, hatred, confusion, all of these are simply aspects of the enlightened mind. Don't think you can take all of these out and then you'll have the enlightened mind. You won't have much at all to do that. So you better leave it in, so we can be in there too. So in this very same way, you can consider all things light,

[18:19]

is an aspect of darkness, and sound is an aspect of silence, and so on. Again, this is the merging of things that are different, the merging of difference and unity. They're all interactive. They're all touch. Right in light there is darkness, but don't confront it as darkness. Right in darkness there is light, but don't see it as light. Light and dark are relative to one another like forward and backward steps. So even if all of your dreams and your wishes should collapse, you can't fall down. There's nowhere to fall. Your life simply will re-emerge in no wishes and in no dreams, without the limitations of wishing and dreaming. This is what is called having a mind like the sky.

[19:28]

You can't fall out of the sky. The next line of the poem is that grasping things is basically delusion. Grasping things is basically delusion. Merging with principle is still not enlightenment. Grasping things basically means that you have forgotten, once again, the context which surrounds each object. You think you can get a hold of something because you've forgotten what is included. So, for example, sound and silence together is ungraspable. Light and dark together is inconceivable. Evil and good together is incomprehensible.

[20:35]

There's a saying that I found the other day in the introduction to this Book of Serenity which touches on this point and I hoped would be helpful. Insects may land anywhere else, but they cannot land in a raging fire. Insects can land anywhere else, but not in a raging fire. The mind may fix on concepts, but not on the ultimate truth. So wherever you land, or whatever you get a hold of, or whatever you think you know, at least you can be sure, is not it. Grasping things is basically delusion. And then it says, merging with principle is still not enlightenment.

[21:44]

To me, this is a kind of red flag. Merging with principle sounds so wonderful, and to join with the ultimate reality. Sounds like the final goal. It was the ancient goal, the time of the Buddha, that you joined with Brahma, you became one with the great mind. That was the end of the story. Merging with principle is still not enlightenment. There's no end. Zen stuff is really difficult. We don't get off the hook. I think what this is warning us about is this particularly insidious form of delusion called, I think I'm enlightened. There are lots of warnings about this one. People who think they're enlightened are called corpses or dead branches.

[22:50]

And unfortunately for the pitfalls in the Buddha way is that one way you know that they're there is that we all fall into them. You know, they're kind of unavoidable. That's how you come to understand them is that you fall into them, one after the other. Then you understand it. I know about that one now because I did that one. So this is another one that even though you'll hear about it and you'll be warned, you'll still fall into it. Because it's just so nice to merge with principle. How great, you know, at last I'm off, I'm out of here. One of the Zen masters said that it's fine to go to the other side so you know that it's there, but you have to come back to this side in order to practice. So we have to come back to the world, It's okay to go over and find out about this no-self and no-this and no-that. But then, you have to come home. You have to deal with all this crummy stuff that human beings have to do, you know, with recycling, with Supreme Court nominees.

[24:03]

Endless, endless. Read the paper. I'm really sorry, but it's really important. There was a cartoon in the New Yorker several years ago. Maybe you saw it. There's a lot of kind of Buddhist cartoons these days. This one was... the temple gate of a monastery, Japanese monastery, and there were several monks standing there looking kind of sheepish, and they were deferring to this man who was sitting in a big Cadillac convertible, smoking a cigar, has this beautiful woman on his arm. And the monks were saying to him, well, thank you so much for coming to visit us after your enlightenment. And one time I was talking to Mel about my own sort of glowing notions about enlightenment and he said to me, who ever told you that enlightenments were something you were going to like?

[25:08]

I really like Mel though. He's a good kind of middle way guy and he always brings you right back to something practical. So Sandokai lecturer, again by Suzuki Roshi, he goes on to say that it may be enlightenment, but it's not always so. An enlightened person does not ignore things and does not stick to things. They don't stick to the truth either. There is no truth that is different from each being. Being itself is the truth. So, so far the meditations that I've been talking about in the Sandokai have been this type that expands your awareness. Kind of like blowing up a balloon, seeing how far you can make it go. Is there any limit? Is there any end? It doesn't seem to be, but you can find out for yourself.

[26:15]

How far can I go? It's pretty safe, maybe. But the important thing is to have some flexibility. That you know how to go this direction, but you also know how to bring it all back down to one single point. One pointed concentration. To pick a single object and allow your attention to settle there. And we do this a lot in our meditation. You maybe can choose the impulse to inhale. Allow your attention to settle there. Or you can pick the What's important in this type of meditation, contraction, is that you recognize the utter intensity which is present in each single object in the entire universe. Everything is the center of the entire universe. Each thing has absolutely equal value.

[27:17]

Each one of us. Each part of us. Nothing is greater or lesser than anything else. So now we have these two types of meditation, one which has a kind of wide look, a wide view, an appreciative view, and the other which sees each thing with appreciation, developing respect, even for silly little flies that come in through the screen. The four gross elements return to their own natures like a baby taking to its mother. Fire heats. Wind moves. Water wets. Earth is solid. Eye and form. Ear and sound. Nose and smell. Tongue and taste.

[28:19]

Thus, in all things, the leaves spread from the root. The whole process must return to the source." So this last type of meditation that I want to mention is meditation on interconnectedness Everything is connected to everything else I inform ear and sound nose and smell tongue and taste Thus in all things the leaves spread from the root and The whole process must return to the source So this poem gives us a real sense of flow constant flow changing events changing perspectives, changing point of view. Not to get stuck somewhere in some tiny aspect. A little bit like the lens on a camera. You learn that your mind is capable of opening and closing without too much friction, kind of ease.

[29:21]

I think it's helpful for us, and you may have found already, sitting meditation is a good place for us to allow the mind to move, to expand and contract. And at some point it becomes very similar to our breathing. It joins our breathing. The same kind of ease, opening and closing. Inhale and exhale. I wanted to finish with a a koan which I had used at the time I was, she was so, at Greenville's farm, which is the head monk position. And I think this koan is very helpful in helping us to orient a kind of instruction, an owner's manual for how to have a human mind and human life. The Raj of East India invited the 27th ancestor Prajñātāra to a feast.

[30:37]

Prajñātāra was the teacher of Bodhidharma. He sent Bodhidharma off to China. The Raj asked the ancestor, why don't you read scriptures? And the ancestor said, This poor wayfarer doesn't dwell in the realms of the body and mind. This poor wayfarer doesn't dwell in the realms of the body and mind. Doesn't get involved in the myriad circumstances when breathing out. I'm sorry. This poor wayfarer doesn't dwell in the realms of the body or mind when breathing in, doesn't get involved in myriad circumstances when breathing out. I always reiterate such a scripture hundreds, thousands, millions of schools.

[31:44]

So I do have some questions I could try to answer. reading the words of the Buddha is the most important thing? Is that above sitting in zazen? He didn't say that. He didn't say above sitting in zazen. He just said the most important thing is to read the words of the Buddha every day. A lot of the words of the Buddha tell you to sit in zazen. So I just took it as a kind of encouragement. to understand my practice. I was sitting in zazen when I asked him the question. It was in the context of a sashin. So I take zazen as a kind of given for a practitioner that we're talking out of our zazen experience.

[32:49]

So, if you're not sitting Zazen, that would be a different question. I would have said to him, what do I do if I'm not sitting Zazen, if I'm not practicing Zazen? Then we would have had maybe, he might have said, sit Zazen. There is no truth, and each thing is true. I was wondering, I was thinking about it in the context of Liz's decision.

[33:51]

And it's really, I think it's very easy to want to take sides. to see Anita on one side and Clarence on the other side, and this clash, and the bigger context of the Supreme Court, and the bigger context of the war between men and women. And just, that's the truth right there. That's sort of a painful truth. Yeah. Yeah, and it's helpful to... There's something called exchanging point of view or exchanging yourself for others. So if you imagine yourself being Clarence, it must be pretty painful, pretty awful.

[34:55]

If you imagine yourself being Professor Hill, that must be pretty hard. Each of the senators. I mean, you can put yourself in any one of those people's positions and see where your limitations would be and where your pain would be. This is true almost always, on every occasion. It's kind of hard, we usually get stuck in our own point of view when we think it's something that's threatening us. You know, maybe it's easier for me to get caught up in being a woman right now. Get all swollen up with that identity. I feel real angry. But I don't know if that's very helpful. It might be more helpful to keep shifting. See if you can really find out where the pain starts and stops, and what's the cause, and what's the solution. I mean, the only solution I've ever heard for the whole thing is that everybody's got to get enlightened.

[36:00]

It's the only hope. You know, Clarence and Anita and all those senators, you know. This new Teddy Kennedy was kind of shocking. Who are you to talk about this? It's like, you know, just everybody is just kind of lying, ultimately. Everyone's lying. Because they don't know who they are. And they don't know how everything works. So they're just guessing. They're just throwing stuff at it. Raging fire. But we want to say that that's the truth. Which one? Each of them. Each of them is the truth in themselves. Their being is the truth. What they're saying is irrelevant. They're true. They actually are there. They're really there. Well, I mean, I think they're there. It's on TV anyway. The TV is really there. And you don't know. You have to keep peeling away the layers of what you accept as reality. You know, and at some point you make contact.

[37:04]

And it either feels good or it feels painful or something, but you make contact and then you do what you have to do. And each occasion, each time you make contact, you do what you need to do. And you check in with yourself. Try to find your wisdom first. You balance yourself and then you act. First you balance. Balance yourself before your judgments. If you're balanced, when you start your judgments, they'll be quite different than if you're off balance. If you're leaning into your own habits of thought, your own, already I know, already you don't know. So it's better to start with balance, non-duality, right and wrong, equal, one in each hand. I don't know, I really don't. That's part of being enlightened.

[38:21]

Everything's included in this great mind. As I was saying, it includes the mind of delusion. It's important to understand how human beings think. How they tend to get caught. If you're going to be a teacher, or a helper, or a friend, or a bodhisattva, or anything of use, then you need to know where it is that people get caught. You have to understand human life completely. from both sides, from where you get caught. Enlightenment doesn't mean you don't get caught. Well, this is the interconnection problem. Somebody else 3,000 miles away is in fact you, whether you accept it or not. Ultimately, it's all one big thing. The one taste. One taste of reality.

[39:23]

We all share that. It's a simultaneous moment-to-moment. Simultaneous arising of the whole thing. And it all goes away. And it all comes up again. Just breathing, inhaling, exhaling. We're all floating on the ocean together. We all affect each other. It's like air pollution. Senator Kennedy inhales, and I exhale. It's the same thing. I know him. I know his breathing. You know his breathing. We are the same. So we can't really just separate it all out and say, well now, we'll all live over here who think this way, and all those guys can live over there who think that way. It's really important that we merge our awareness, actually accept it. that this whole Earth is my body. Every single speck of dust. I can't separate anything out.

[40:26]

I have to embrace the whole thing. I think my usual tendency is to try and separate it all out. Get it into categories so we don't have to deal with the ones we don't like. But I don't think it works. So you're saying by clearly observing, the practitioner prepares himself moment after moment to be ready to face anything that comes up, something like that, any eventuality. And maybe the thinking goes beyond whether the non-eventual is the figure of death. Well, and without being ready. You know, you just are. What comes up, what comes at you, comes at you. I can plug my ears and close my eyes and all that, but actually, I don't even have a TV and I know more about this whole thing that's going on, you know.

[41:34]

I don't have to. My friends tell me everything I need to know. Did you hear about what she said and he said? And it's like, everyone's talking about it, you know. So, and that's my life. It's with all these people who care about something, and so I care about it too. You know? I have to. If I want to be with human beings. Well, maybe, but if that were it, it would be pretty lopsided. It has to include being groggy and having a snooze-a-long. You know, the whole thing has to be possible. We don't want to leave anybody out. So, that's the Mahayana dilemma.

[42:37]

Nobody's left out. You've got to get everybody in there. It's a big boat. So again, whatever you think you know isn't it. So that's your only guarantee. That's your walking papers. and checking in with yourself, looking, actually putting on what it would be like to be Clarence Thomas right now. Putting on what it is like to be Anita Hill right now. And I find that very useful, but I also find it paralyzing.

[43:43]

I find myself getting somehow, maybe it reflects what you said in the beginning of your talk about the downward spiral of inquiry sometimes. And then I'm just struck with what you said about being and that my being is, the response of my being to all of that, is to happen, is to act, is to sort of see things in a dualistic manner, I guess. And I feel a little stuck there and I was wondering if you had some thoughts on that. That's real familiar. I mean, I think that's what happens. I have a terrible mouth. You know, I say terrible things without all my opinions.

[44:46]

And I hear them and they're just like, you know, like a saw, a chainsaw in my ear. That's coming out of my mouth. It's really awful. So other than being quiet, I haven't really found a way to quite catch it. So I try to be quiet a lot, let it rage away from here. I think the precepts, basically when you get more involved in your curiosity about this Buddhist practice, eventually you run into the precepts. It's an unavoidable calamity. And one of them is to write speech, not speaking of the faults of others. The function of that precept has a lot to do with just kind of, almost like a radioactive isotope that you placed in your system. And before you take on that precept, before you actually say with your own mouth, I vow not to slander others.

[45:50]

You said it, I said it, and I put this robe on when I said it. So each time I find myself slandering. I mean slandering, I don't mean just carefully working my way around my opinion, you know. But saying something harmful about someone else, that isotope starts to activate. I don't know if you remember Clockwork Orange, but they made him sick, they made him throw up every time he did something bad. They actually programmed him for a reaction to bad behavior. And I feel a little bit like the precepts have that kind of function for me. And I'm doing it voluntarily. I really want that problem. I want that problem. I want to stop doing that. And I need help. I need help. I don't think it helps anything. Which doesn't mean you can't have an opinion.

[46:53]

But how do you make your opinion an opinion that saves all sentient beings? That is of value to everyone? How do you do that? That's our trick. As Buddhists, that's our problem. Other people have other jobs, but that's our job. So... And that leads you back to practice. Yeah, yeah. I was just very struck by Thich Nhat Hanh taking on the view of the policemen in L.A. and the beaten man. And I just thought that was an opinion in the LA Times saying that he felt that he hadn't meditated on it enough, you know, that he didn't have, perhaps you read it, he didn't have enough, I mean he just took it on, I don't have enough enlightenment yet to be able to respond in a way that I think is, you know, reflective of the great mind, I don't have words for that, you know, that sort of sounds right or good.

[47:59]

Thank you very much.

[48:16]

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