Morning. So it's a great pleasure to introduce our shuso, Mary Duryea, whose Dharma name is Hongkyo Jyotsu, which means original home, stable center. This is her first Saturday talk during this 2017 practice period. And if we listen carefully and look closely enough, we may catch a glimpse of her original self. Good morning. It's nice to see so many people on this beautiful day. Happy Mother's Day to everyone's motherly generative energy. and grandmother mind too.

[01:02]

The koan that I've been given is Sejo is separated from her soul. It's case 35 in the Mumenkan. And I'm going to read the question and the commentary and poem and then then we'll take off. Gosu asked a monk, Seijo and her soul are separated. Which is the true one? Newman's poem. Ever the same, the moon among the clouds, different from each other, the mountain and the valley. How wonderful, how blessed. Is this one or two? Now Moomin's commentary is a bit difficult and I'm actually gonna try to come to it at the end. We'll try to work our way up to it, but I'll read it and it may not make sense, so here we go.

[02:07]

If you are enlightened in the truth of this koan, you will then know that coming out of one husk and getting into another is like a traveler's pudding up in hotels. In case you are not yet enlightened, do not rush about blindly. When suddenly earth, water, fire and air are decomposed, you will be like a crab falling into boiling water, struggling with its seven arms and eight legs. Do not say then that I have not warned you." Can you do that again please? Yes. If you are enlightened in the truth of this koan, you will then know that coming out of one husk and getting into another is like a traveler's putting up in hotels. In case you are not enlightened, do not rush about blindly. When suddenly earth, water, fire, and air are decomposed, you will be like a crab falling into boiling water, struggling with its seven arms and eight legs.

[03:17]

Do not say then that I have not warned you. So Gozo is actually the name of the mountain where he lived. His name was Hoan. Yes, Gary? Do you mind reading the poem again? Yes. Ever the same, the moon among the clouds. different from each other, the mountain and the valley. How wonderful, how blessed. Is this one or two? Thanks for slowing me down. So Master Goso Hoen is, you might say, died in 1104. He, His disciple, just as a kind of interesting side note, is Engo, who is the compiler of the Blue Cliff Records.

[04:21]

So this is about 100 years before Dogen. And he's asking a question to his monks that they already know the background and the cultural context for. references Seijo, he's referencing a folk tale, like a fairy tale, that the monks would know, so they don't have to fill in the background. But it would be the same as my saying to you, which child is lost, Hansel or Gretel? You would be able to know what the story was behind that, and that's what would be happening for the monks, they would know the story. And Hakuin calls this a nanto koan. Nanto means difficult to pass through and in Hakuin's grading of koans, it's one that somebody who's further along the awakened path gets.

[05:24]

Like it's not the beginning kind of koan. And it's interesting that, and I didn't take it personally, that Sojin acknowledged to me that I am not a great, I have not spent much time studying koans. This is a novice practice for me. But I take it that actually, We don't get involved in step-wise practice or stage-wise practice that Hakuin was talking about. But I did want to read a quote of Hakuin because I think it's helpful to keep in mind. This is one of the commentaries who is describing what this kind of koan is like. You have to understand it not only intellectually, but figure out how to get it into your marrow and bones, he says. The difficult and never-ending nature of these tasks, that is working on practice, can be seen in Hakuin's statement, this is a quote, I experienced great enlightenment 18 times.

[06:29]

As for the small ones, I'm unable to remember. So there is this sense from this that it's not, a place that you get to and achieve for once and all. It's a way of working with your life is what we're talking about in terms of enlightenment, right? So let me get to Say Jo's story. So Say is her given name. Jo is a diminutive, it means girl. and she was the second child of Chokan, and his first child died, his first girl. And so he especially adored and put his attention on Seijo. And Seijo grew up with a second cousin, Ochu, and they played together wonderfully, and they were cute, and she was a lovely kid, a kid that people were drawn to.

[07:31]

And jokingly, as parents do, he made a kind of offhand remark to them that, you play so well together, you'll probably be married someday. And as children can do, they took that pretty seriously. And in fact, eventually fell in love when they got to be older. But Chokhan, was a traditional Chinese father, and he picked another person for Sei Zhou's husband and told them, and they were despondent and crestfallen. And without telling her, Ou Chu decided that he had to leave town because he couldn't tolerate seeing these events unfold with Sei. So he gets into his boat and starts, I picture him pulling down the Yancey, and he doesn't say anything to Sejo, and yet he sees a shadowy figure in the dark of night along the shore, and he pulls over, and lo and behold, it's Sejo.

[08:46]

And they embrace, and he is delighted that she has a true heart. And then they realize they can't go back home, they have stepped outside custom, and so they run away. They run away to another land, and they get married, they have two children, and seemingly, life is good. But one day, Sei says to Ochu, I long for my father, I long for my family, I'm homesick and I'm an ungrateful daughter and I don't know what to do. And Ochi said, I feel this, I long for my home too, let's go back and ask for forgiveness and see what Shokan will say. So they do that, they hire a boat and they come back Ochu says to Seijo, stay here with the girls at the river, and I will go and talk to your father and ask for forgiveness.

[09:53]

And so he does that. And Shokan is very taken aback by Ochu's statement that Seijo has been with him, Sei has been with him, and that he's a grandfather. He says, that cannot be. Sei is upstairs in her bed. She has been there and hasn't said a word since you left. And Ochi says, I can show you Sei. She's down at the river. Let me bring her to you. And while he does that, Shokan goes to the Sei who is in her bed and tells her the story. And she doesn't say anything but she smiles and for the first time gets up and gets out of bed. And as the Se from the river is coming toward the house and the Se from the house comes out and they see each other, they merge into one.

[10:54]

And Se says something Quite lovely about it. I did not know at all that I was sick in bed at home. When I learned that Ochu had left his village in distress, I followed his boat that night feeling as if it were a dream. I myself am not sure which was the real me, the one with you sick in bed or the one with Ochu as his wife. So that is Goso's question, who is the real one? You know, this is an unusual koan because it's so rich in detail. There's so many avenues and angles that you can come at this. One of them, of course, is how do you know what's real?

[11:59]

And that's a question that I was raising in a way-seeking mind talk a week ago. But I'm going to leave that particular question to try to simplify the task here. So who is the real Sejo? One of the avenues into this is to say, well, this is a divided self. This is a person who wanted both her heart's desire to have her bliss, to have her direction. She also wanted to be a dutiful daughter. She was divided herself in that way. And that is actually an avenue that we can get access to that's a kind of divide that we might experience in our own daily life. I certainly know that. I know that in my own life. The call of culture or family is very strong.

[13:02]

In fact, how do you distinguish between the inner voice that says this is what I want versus the outer voice that says this is who you are and this is what you should be doing and how you have taken in that outer voice as an inner voice and mingled it up with your own experience and so how do you sort that out? How do you sort out which is the path to follow? Certainly a tale as rich as this offers us lots of opportunities for projecting our own dilemma into it and kind of picking up an angle. But there is a way in which the question itself is asking something about soul. And soul is actually, I think, a kind of interesting and problematic word for me, at least. It's not a word I use. I mean, I use it like as in soulmates, which is a wonderful way of talking about compatibility and connectedness, but as an entity, it's hard to think about is soul the real person or is the body the real person?

[14:15]

Can you have a body without a soul? Can you have a soul without a body? I mean, that's a, I suppose, theological question. If you've had the opportunity to see someone who is dying and then dead, you know how different the dead body is from the alive body in some ineffable way. I noticed it particularly with my sister-in-law, whose name was Joy, appropriately. And we were bathing her with sweet tea. and I noticed after she died, and I noticed that her body felt solid and dense in a way that it hadn't. It felt like a statue feels, like there's no space, like no air or no pockets of anything, but that doesn't capture it. It's so different from an alive body that we don't even know when we're looking at an alive body, when it's even at rest, that there's something that,

[15:25]

I don't even want to say inhabits, the language fails, but some light or some spaciousness in it. So it begins to feel like the question doesn't make sense. In fact, one of the commentators says, this is a ridiculous question. And somebody else said, once you've asked this question, you've already missed it. I will, sort of in full disclosure and maybe partly as confession, tell you one of the, my own projection on this story which has been Part of my going back and forth in terms of understanding what this koan means, I feel like this happened to me, that Sejo's story is the story that I lived through.

[16:32]

When I was 17, I had a boyfriend, whom my mother didn't like. My father had died some considerable time before, so I was just dealing with her as a parent. And on a Tuesday night, we had a fight. I said to her, I informed her that I was going out on a date on Saturday night, and she said, you've forgotten that it's your uncle Phil's birthday party. And we had a struggle, and it wasn't resolved, and I went to school the next day, and this fight, of course, was the culmination of a long string of things. This is not just the only thing that had happened between us. But I found myself bursting into tears at school and I couldn't stop. A friend took me to the nurse's station and the nurse called my mother and took me home where I went to bed and stayed for three days without talking to anybody or moving or eating. And so it's clear to me that I, we call that depression.

[17:41]

And I would call what happened to Sejo depression. But there's another way of understanding it, so that's the question, is Sejo depressed? Is that what we would call that state? Or what would we call what's happening to the Sejo that doesn't move and doesn't speak? So just hold that question. The dilemma I was facing as I set it up was a binary choice between if I go my mother's way, if I do what my mother wants, I abandon myself, but I keep my mother. If I do what I want, I have myself, I save myself, and I lose my mother. Now whether that's the way it felt, whether all that is true, actually, when things, I had a very wise person said to me one time, when things break down into a binary decision like that, you know you're in, well, in our terms, we would use charged conditional circumstances.

[18:52]

In psychology terms, you would say we were in deep transferential waters. Because the universe never comes down to a simple and a reduced choice like that. The universe is so much more complicated than that. So on the third day, I started to rouse myself and I got up and I decided that the way out of this dilemma was to kill myself. and I didn't know what I was doing, fortunately, but I made a cut on my wrist, and the moment that I saw blood, my whole feeling changed and I don't want to put a name on it, I would just say that some very deep and powerful life force just was present. And I felt very calm and I was resolved and the two questions didn't matter anymore somehow.

[19:59]

And for me the crisis was over. There was a great deal of uproar after this as you might imagine. You know, and I haven't thought of this, this was 51 years ago, so it's a long time and a lot of water under the bridge, and I haven't thought of it from this developmental stage looking back, but I realize that I just set my course. I ditched the boyfriend. Immediately it was over and I finished out my, I was a senior, I finished out my senior year and set my course to get out of Dodge basically and get to college. So coming back to Sejo, one reading is that the Sejo in the bed is, what do you want to say, the true self while the busy one is the body out there in the universe and that she doesn't know that she's disconnected.

[21:12]

She says that, I didn't know that I was disconnected from my true self. So that would be one way of framing it as opposed to the depression story way of framing it. But I think that the pointer really is in the A pointer is in the poem. So let me read the poem again. Actually, I have several different translations. So let me read a different translation. The moon above the clouds is ever the same. Valleys and mountains are separate from each other. All are blessed, all are blessed. Are they one or two? I don't know if you've noticed this week, driving in to Mourning Zazen, the moon was in the western sky, and there have been many clouds, and so you see the moon coming and going behind the clouds, and the poem is saying, you know, the moon is still there, even if you can't see it, even if you're disconnected from it.

[22:29]

And we know all the associations we have to the moon, right? Valleys and mountains are separate from each other. They're one land, but they're really different and you really know it if you're hiking up or you're hiking down into a valley. You know the difference between a valley and a mountain. So there's a particularity and a difference and a diversity in that. So then there is this declaration, all are blessed, all are blessed, which one commentator says is the same as saying everything is all right, if everything is fine. My talented and curmudgeonly Aunt Sylvia And Sylvia's last words before she died were, it's okay.

[23:41]

It's all okay. It's very okay. And I thought that was about as encouraging as a death could get, actually. Let me read this because it's a wonderful commentator. If you realize that the truth of the beautiful valley is solely due to the moon, then you will know how foolish it is to argue about equality and differentiation. Equality is sameness is oneness. The true one and the illusory one, the outer Sejo and the inner Sejo, just as it is in its as-it-ness. Whatever you see and whatever you hear is forever blessed. It is neither one nor two. This actually daily life of ours as it is, is the blessed life in which we work and rejoice, hand in hand with the patriarchs.

[24:50]

Can there be anything more wonderful, more remarkable? So, Harold, tell me at what point you're going to raise the striker. Great. It would be so nice if we could just stop. But we have the matter of women's commentary. which actually gets us right into the matter, the great matter of life and death, right? Newen's Commentary. If you are enlightened in the truth of this koan, you will then know that coming out of one husk and getting into another is like a traveler's putting up in hotels. Getting out of one husk is a little obscure, but it means you have different moods, you put on different perspectives, you have different, it's your different preferences.

[26:01]

It's the transientness of your expression. And putting up in hotels is wherever you are in time and place. All of that changes. But if you are enlightened, then you will know what the constancy is under that. That's how I read it, but you can tell me if that's right. In case you are not enlightened, do not rush about blindly. In other words, sit down. Sit down in zazen. When suddenly earth, water, fire, and air are decomposed, this is the earth, Water, fire, and air are the ancient understanding of who we are. So this is your body when you are decomposing, when you are dying, when I am dying. If I'm not enlightened, I will be like a crab falling into boiling water. In other words, I will be fighting it and really minding it.

[27:06]

do not say then that I have not warned you. In other words, this is an admonition to practice and to keep practicing. It reminds me of the story about Suzuki Roshi almost drowning in a pool at Tassajara. And one of the things he said after that was, because of the anxiety he felt, I guess I better sit some more zazen. And the question is, the question I'm holding and maybe we can hold together is, how do we absorb this into our marrow and blood? How can we be reassured about this great matter of life and death.

[28:14]

So let me read what Suzuki Roshi says. Interestingly, I'm reading from the first page of Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. This is the most important teaching, not one and not two. Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong. If you think they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one. We usually think that if something is not one, it is more than one. If it is not singular, it is plural. But in actual experience, our life is not only plural, but also singular. Each one of us is both dependent and independent. After some years, we will die. If we just think that it is the end of our life, this will be the wrong understanding.

[29:17]

But on the other hand, if we think that we do not die, this is also wrong. We die and we do not die. This is the right understanding. Some people may say that our mind or soul exists forever and that it is only our physical body which dies. But this is not exactly right because both mind and body have their end. But at the same time, it is true that they exist eternally. Even though we say body and mind, they are actually two sides of one coin. So I would say one of the things that brought me to practice, brings me to practice, is this question of feeling reassured that everything is all right. So, what's your take?

[30:29]

Yeah, John? It seems that the valley can't exist without the mountain, because it gives the definition. It kind of seems like the mountain might be able to exist without the valley, but without low, the mountain has no high. The valley is always there, even without the mountain. Why? Because there is something that defines a valley, which is something higher. And something lower becomes a valley. If there's a valley, there's a mountain. So I find it incredibly beautiful and comforting and reassuring to visualize the moon and to understand the moon as you know, behind the sun, behind the earth, behind the clouds, wherever, all these various hiding places, and to know that, nonetheless, it is always there.

[31:37]

And so the poem was the key. That poem was the key. And so when it comes to... A poet said, in that time, the hour, only thoughts can be gone sour. Very archaic. But that is, when we have the pressure on us, Only then can we turn away from knowing that the moon is always there. Only then can we define ourselves as a mountain without a valley. And only then do we, of course, find ourselves lost, desperate, and alone. And so, knowing when we see the blood, knowing when we see the drowning, that, in fact, there's no end. Somehow, my experience has brought me to that idea that even at the very end, there is no end. And so what defined me was everybody else, right?

[32:42]

The separation of me and everybody else. What is me when I die? Everybody else is still there. Everything else is still there. So therefore, there's no end to the valley, the me, the moon. Linda? This is a double intertwined question. The first one is, have you looked into possible alternate translations of soul? Like where is that word coming from? And the second part is, just as it's not two, it's not one, it's both two and one, as you were saying, So everything's all right and everything's not all right. So how do you deal with making effort in your life and in practice?

[33:45]

How do I deal or how do we deal with effort in practice? Is that the question? Effort, in my mind, is connected with Well, that reminds me of another experience that I had. Many years ago, I was trekking in Nepal. We were doing the throng law pass loop going around Annapurna. So it was 10 days in, and we were at 13,000 feet before going over the Tharong Lot Pass, and that was my goal. My goal was to see those mountains. And we hadn't seen them yet because the weather was coming in, and the weather got bad, and the pass got closed.

[34:54]

We hung out as long as we could, and we had to turn back. And I had taken as a mantra going up I think it's the Marsalanga Valley. Thich Nhat Hanh's present moment, wonderful moment with my breath. So present, wonderful, present, wonderful. I was having a wonderful time. Coming down, I was so upset and pissed and disappointed that I dropped that. I forgot it completely. I hiked by myself. I didn't want to talk to anybody. The weather got worse. And, you know, it was 10 days of coming back the other way, never having seen those mountains. On the last day or so, it occurred to me that if it was a good idea to say present moment, wonderful moment, going up, it might be a good idea coming down. So I started it and I was soaked to the skin.

[35:56]

My socks and everything was wet, it was raining. And I started that chant, present moment, wonderful moment. And it suddenly dawned on me that that wasn't like an affirmation like I learned in my new age church when I was a kid, that I was making it by force of will true, you know, that as you think, so it is kind of thing. Actually, that moment, I would never be in that moment again under those circumstances, and I better look around. And the place just went into high def. It was stunning, I was walking, I'll never forget, I was walking through a rice paddy and it became so illuminated and green. So what do you mean it's not all right? In other words, even when it's not all right, maybe there's a place where

[37:06]

If you don't have preference, it's all right. Works both ways? Yeah. Like, on the first day of the descent, I could notice it's not all right. Thank you. Yeah, Jerry. Well, this has been a very meaningful comment for me for a very long time. And I've always seen it through a kind of feminist lens. Because when I first discovered it, I was balancing my life as a mother and my life as a physician. And so it seemed like I had to separate and wall off certain things when I was in certain circumstances so that I could be completely present. And completely present with my kids when I was with them, and then not be worried or concerned. And I'd have to put on my white coat, my outfit, and go into an examining room and be whatever people were expecting me to be there.

[38:20]

And then there was also my own self, whoever that is. You know, the person who's experiencing all of this. And it felt like society was also putting a lot of pressure on women to take on this role and to take it on kind of like a man would take it on. And so there was this thing about separating in that way. And I was wondering how you might experience it, say, either in your personal life, in your professional life, but also as a psychologist, having to put on, having to be a certain way. and whether you've experienced that. Right, right, oh yeah, I mean I think that absolutely I think many of the ways that I have coped are by compartmentalizing by leaving this here and forgetting it completely when I'm over here and walling it off.

[39:28]

I mean I've had many experiences of being quite cut off from parts of myself. And that is a part of this story that I didn't reference, but I think it's a part of the story to come back to as the ways in which we cut ourselves off from parts of ourselves because we think we have to or because we don't think they're acceptable. I mean, I remember being kind of in a new couple, in a relationship, and out to dinner with an older couple that had been around for a little bit. We were making friends, and the dinner table conversation was sort of everybody doing a little autobiography, like where they had been the last 20 years or something like that. And I came away from that dinner feeling like, boy, everybody else's life is really interesting. You know, they really done lots of things in those, you know, that I, where have I been?

[40:30]

I've done nothing. And as soon as I said that, I realized that I had left out 10 years of my life in which I was in the women's community as a dyke. It was in this heterosexual, and I just walled it off. I just, I wasn't that anymore. I left it out completely of my, you know, my biography. So it's, Sometimes it's what our projections are about what other people allow us to be. What we think there's, you know, anyway. Peter. But that his choice, everything, he described the moment in which everything changed when his hand left the rail.

[41:45]

And it seems like a lot of the times when I'm feeling really stuck, I'm in a deep conflict, internal or external, and it just doesn't seem like there's any place to go, that's what, I find it frightening. And so, There's some key to unlock those things, and sometimes it just happens. You step out of the car and suddenly the argument's over. It's a common thing we deal with. The thing that helps me, has helped me, is having the person who said to me, it's never, when you find yourself in that territory of a binary choice, you know you are in this kind of territory, which means, by definition, you're not seeing the big picture.

[42:52]

And if you know that, and then you can refrain from doing anything, while you're in that space, then you can start looking for what the bigger picture is. But I think the key is figuring out how to stop yourself. For me, it's just sit down. Sue? Well, it seems that that, in a way, is exactly what you did when you took to your bed for three days. That was your way. not being in the binary situation. So it seemed maybe not so wholesome at the time, but it was not a real way to go beyond the binary situation. Sometimes I guess we do extreme things for that kind of reason. to your bed, it was surviving a set of circumstances that you could no longer process.

[44:08]

The problem is then it becomes, I think it becomes patterned in one's body, and then it becomes a dysfunctional method. So what leads me in terms of this poem, I think, well, what would have happened What would the story be if Seijo Enmei had died? And I can't even spin this out, but there's something really poignant about that. And here we have it spread out in a beautiful folk tale of chronology. I think that probably many of us experience that separation more momentarily. My experience is, I'm home, I was lying in bed last night thinking, I'm home, I'm so comfortable in my body here, and I know I'm in my body.

[45:16]

And three days ago, I was 7,000 miles away, and everything was very vivid, comfortable, but I was there. And so we learned to negotiate these separations, moving in and out, I think, like an enemy. Like a traveler going to a different place. Right, exactly. moving from hotel to hotel. Some of us may not be so comfortable, you know, going from the fleabag to the marionette. Do you want to say something? Well, Peter talked about jumping off the bridge.

[46:17]

At the moment you jump off the bridge, I realized suicide is a binary problem looking for a unitary problem. Because a unitary problem would be to end it all and be one with the universe. So that's a false way of becoming one with the universe. Which is, say Jo, embracing yourself. It's a little Seito embracing your big self. So, the problem is, how do you do that without committing suicide? But, you do commit suicide when you let go of your ego. That's how you die while you're still alive and come back to life. That's our trick.

[47:22]

How do you let go so that you become one with the universe, with your true self? I say it's fine.

[47:39]