Good morning. So I'm continuing speaking of cases from Dogen's extensive record, volume nine. This one doesn't bear directly on the ones we've spoken of the last few days, although I may refer to lines from those. So Swanshaw. great master who once said the entire universe is one great pearl. He also gave a talk and said, all teachers in various regions all speak about guiding and benefiting beings. Now I ask you, how will you guide a person with the three handicaps of being blind, deaf, and mute? If you hold up a mallet or raise a whisk, their eyes will not see it.

[01:00]

If you speak to them, their ears will not hear it. Their mouth is also mute. If you cannot help them, the Buddhadharma provides no spiritual fulfillment at all. So all teachers in various regions all speak about guiding and benefiting beings. So this is, of course, our bodhisattva practice. As an old teacher, maybe it's my responsibility particularly, but all of us are guiding and benefiting beings through our practice. Guiding and benefiting the beings on our own seats. This is part of our practice. So I've been talking about incesheen as the opportunity of going deeper, turning within, settling and calming, and it is.

[02:04]

And that's an important part of our practice, the settling. But there's also then the expression, and Dogen emphasizes that, How do we express this awareness in our everyday activity in response to the difficulties in our life and in the world? So, Swansha then said, now I will ask you, how will you guide a person with the three handicaps? Those who are blind, deaf, and mute. holding up a mallet or raising a whisk, their eyes don't see it. If you speak, their ears don't hear it. Their mouth is also mute. If you cannot help them, the Buddhadharma provides no spiritual fulfillment at all. And I would say that you are all here because you have felt the Buddhadharma providing

[03:06]

some spiritual fulfillment at some point, and you're back for more. But how will we respond? How will a guiding teacher respond? How to those blind, deaf, and mute? kind of an obligation. There's another famous story that Dogen also has in his extensive record about Shang-Yan. One day Shang-Yan spoke to his assembly saying, it is like someone on a thousand foot high cliff hanging to a branch of a tree by his teeth. His feet have no foothold and his hands have nothing to grasp. Suppose someone asks this person, what is the meaning of bodhidharma coming from the West?

[04:08]

If he opens his mouth to answer, he will lose his body and life. If he does not answer, he's abandoning the questioner. At this very time, what would you do? So this is a very famous koan. And actually, the version that Dogen gives, it continues, Elder Zhao came forward and said, I don't ask about the time of being up in the tree, but what about before climbing the tree? And Shangyan just laughed. Anyway, this prime directive to respond to beings, to share this spiritual fulfillment. What about someone who's with these three handicaps, the blind, the deaf, and the mute? We are used to functioning and interacting and receiving

[05:17]

the teaching because we can see and we can hear and we can speak in response. What do we do when there's no one, when there's no way to do that? So as I suggested, this applies not just to a teacher speaking to someone coming for spiritual guidance in that situation, but also You know, what about our own not seeing? What about our own not hearing? What about our own inability to speak? So the first story I talked about this week about the bright, clear hundreds of grass tips, the whole phenomenal world, being the bright, clear mind of the ancestral teachers, Tolkien says, even the hard of hearing feel moved by the sound of evening rain. And someone said to me that they felt the sound of evening rain in themselves as they sat, even if they couldn't hear it.

[06:28]

So how do we respond to this situation? If you cannot help such people, the Buddhadharma provides no spiritual fulfillment at all, So I'll just read Dogen's verse and I'll come back to it after a bunch of other things. Depending on the person, there are not merely two or three different diseases. Many ways we don't see or hear or receive. Everyone expresses their symptoms without turning away or grasping. And we know from the Jalmeri Samadhi that turning away and touching are both wrong. Despite tens of thousands of medical methods, Those who throw up their hands never put out a shingle. So that last line, there's a lot to say about.

[07:34]

But I'll first go back to, well, there's so much to say about this story. How do we receive the Dharma? Well, of course, you're listening now. You're hearing some sound that's emanating from my throat. Maybe you're hearing other sounds internally, I don't know. Are you hearing it in your ears? Are you hearing it as the sound in my voice, as the sound in the air in this room? Is the sound being processed in your brain somewhere or wherever? How do we hear this spiritual fulfillment? How do we see it? So we can look at Kāsa's painting of the the snow within and feel some reminder of the inner calm.

[08:38]

But maybe we can't see it. So if Brian can't see it, it's behind his head, unless he's opened his eye back there. I don't know. So there's a limit to what we can hear. There's a limit to what we can see. And sometimes we're tongue-tied. What do we do about this? So this story comes from a longer story that's in the Blue Cliff Record and I'll refer to. But basically, this story is about how do we receive this wonderful spiritual fulfillment, this wonderful energetic source, this wonderful awakening, teaching, and dharma.

[09:45]

That is the nature of reality fundamentally. So we have eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind. We have it in our own way. But our practice is to benefit all beings, not just human-type beings. How do dolphins do zazen? Often asked. What do they do with their, they have bigger brains than us, and they're not burdened by opposable thumbs, they don't have to build things and fix things and, you know, what do they, well, maybe they're fixing things mentally underwater, we don't know. How do we perceive the world around us? What are the limits of our perceptions?

[10:48]

So there are lots of people in this room who know a whole lot of things. Many talented, interesting people here, all of you. And yet, what is it you can't see? What is it you can't hear? What is it you cannot speak of? How do trees hear? So if we're benefiting all beings, if all beings are rooted in nature, how is it that trees see it, or hear it, or speak it? So tomorrow we'll have a shosan ceremony where everyone here will ask me questions.

[11:54]

And when we have a shuso, there's a shuso ceremony where the head student, the shuso, asks, goes around and asks questions. So here's some submitted to that. One of the questions, the most memorable questions in my experience of Shuso ceremonies, many, many, many of them, was a question when Robert Lytle was Shuso, Sarah's dad, who shall be here tomorrow, at Tassajara many years ago. There was a Japanese monk. who was there, I think because he was, you know, kind of, he felt sour about Sotoshu in Japan and he wanted to see American Zen and those ceremonies in Japan, you know, they give them the question, sometimes they give them the questions and even the responses beforehand. It's very different from how we do it. And that may sound, you know, kind of Yucky, you know, I mean, tomorrow you're supposed to bring forth your own questions for everyone.

[12:59]

And then I'll say something. But, you know, sometimes if you're enacting a question and a response that goes back to someone like Swanshaw, there's something there, and to actually say it, you know, it's like performing Shakespeare. So there's some value in those kinds of ceremonies, too. But anyway, in this ceremony, this Japanese monk asked the shuso. He prefaced it. He gave this long kind of preface about, this is really a serious question. I'm not making this up. This isn't a joke. Please take this seriously. And he went on about that. And then he said, I have this friend. And he's a very sweet person. He's different. He's from a planet near Alpha Centauri.

[14:01]

His body is circular and sort of gelatinous and he has many arms and many appendages. So how should I tell him how to sit Zazen? And Robert said immediately, I always face the wall. Love that response. But, you know, in this case, that's not good enough, because here's this person who's blind, deaf, and mute. Maybe they don't even have a face. Or what's our face beyond our eyes and ears and nose and tongue? So that's the question. What's your original face before you had eyes, ears, nose, and tongue? So when we sit like this all day or for a couple days or five days or whatever, we have a chance to go deeper.

[15:11]

We have a chance to really enjoy just being here and feel that everything's all right. and feel amidst all of the difficulties of the world that there's some way in which everything is, we can respond positively to, and so forth. We have this chance to feel this sense of wonder. How do we share that? How do we express that in difficult times like these? or even in ordinary times, especially when we don't, to someone who doesn't have eyes or ears and can't speak. So this is the question here. And as part of a longer story. And I'll read some of the commentary. Well, OK, I'll read the second part of the story.

[16:12]

After the part that I've just given, a monk asked Yunmen for his instructions about this. And Yunmen was a great master later. I think maybe a Dharma brother of Xuanzang, or maybe a student of Xuanzang. Yunmen said, bow. Just bow. The monk bowed and rose. Yunmen poked at him with his staff. The monk drew back. Yunmin said, you're not blind. Then Yunmin called him closer. And then he said, you're not deaf. Next, Yunmin said, do you understand? The monk said, I don't understand. And Yunmin said, you're not mute. At this, the monk had some insight. So the story, there's ways to play with it. So some of you may feel sometimes like you've been blind. There are things you haven't seen, that you might have seen, or that you've been deaf, you haven't really heard.

[17:16]

So the Bodhisattva of Compassion, her practice is to listen to the sounds of the world and listen to the sufferings of the world. And I wonder, does she sometimes feel like, oh, I didn't hear, I wasn't listening then. Certainly, we all might feel that. And sometimes we don't know what to say. So in the commentary, it gives other versions or other follow-ups to the story. And apparently, according to this commentary, Xuanzhi said this, gave this statement, this question often. And so a lot of monks heard about this and came, one of them came, one of them who'd been with Xuanzang for a long time, one day came up to him and said, will you permit me to present a theory of the story of the three kinds of sick person, teacher? Xuanzang said, go ahead. The monk then bade farewell and left.

[18:22]

Well, it's interesting. Sometimes that happens in these stories. Schwantz just said, wrong, that's not it. You know, the commentator asks, did this monk understand Xuanzang's meaning or not? Afterwards, Fayan, who's founder of one of the five houses of Chan, said, when I heard this story about this monk who just said goodbye and left, I finally understood the story of the three kinds of sick person. Another time, a monk named Duzang said to Xuanzang, teacher, I hear you have a saying about three kinds of sick person. Is this so or not? And Xuanzang said, yes, that's right. And Duzang said, but I have eyes and ears and nose and tongue. How will you guide me, teacher? Xuanzang immediately stopped. So there are various ways to turn all of these stories.

[19:30]

So he calls this three kinds of diseases. We might say disabilities, or people who are visually challenged, or auditorily challenged, anyway, various PC language. But the point is, There's these diseases, there's these ways in which we are not fully functioning. No eyes, no ears, no tongue. So how do we receive the teaching beyond our senses, beyond our perceptions? How do we share the teaching beyond our senses and perceptions? So, the phenomenal world is our place of practice, and maybe the

[20:57]

The myriad grass tips are the bright, clear ancestral minds and minds of the ancestral teachers, but still, So I haven't, I've never, I have not met with every single person in the world, but everybody I have met is damaged in some way. We've all suffered loss. We all, you know, at times feel inadequate, at times we, we may not even know that we're not seeing or hearing. If you know that you don't know, that's pretty good, actually. This is one of the gifts of zazen, is that we start to see all the things we don't see, or that there's a limit to what we can see.

[22:02]

And a lot of Zen teachings are about this. So again, this question also is about our own disabilities. How do we open to the teaching when we start to realize that there's a limit to what we have seen. There's a limit to what we've heard. And we don't know how to talk about it. And yet there's this practice we do, this upright sitting, that allows us to have some, I usually use the word sense, but I don't know, it's not a sense.

[23:05]

Maybe it is some other kind of sense, some seventh sense. You know, in Buddhism, there's the five senses that we usually think of, but there's also the sixth sense in Buddhism, which is the thinker and the thought of. So thoughts are just more, you know, so when you're sitting in zazen and the thoughts are rolling around, which happens sometimes, you know. For those of you who've never had a thought in zazen, I'll just let you know that many of us do have to think and have thoughts come up in zazen. And the brain continues to secrete these thoughts. And that's, in Buddhism, that's considered a sense and sense object, just like eyes and colors. It's just more sense objects, all of those thoughts that rumble around and chatter around in your monkey mind. But what is this other sense, if it is a sense, that allows us, as we sit, to settle and go deeper and also open up to some wider space that maybe does not depend on seeing or hearing or speaking?

[24:30]

How do we allow ourselves to just settle into this? How do we help the disabled person on your seat now? And of course, you know, there is the teaching and there are teachers to help give guidance. But also, this is all a function of zazen. What is it that we don't know? Not to denigrate all the things that we do know. How do we use what we do know to realize that there are things we don't know, to appreciate that there are things we don't know, not to try and figure out that which we cannot figure out but still don't know.

[25:53]

So there's a lot in this story. Dogen has a verse about it. He says, depending on the person, there are not merely two or three different diseases. So right. So as many senses as we might enumerate, they may all be flawed. Everyone expresses their symptoms without turning away or grasping. So it's like a jewel mirror. This is the first noble truth, that there is some misalignment. As perfect as your sasana may be, there's some misalignment. There's some symptoms. And this jewel, without turning away or touching, is expressed. in your sasana, in your walking, in your standing, in your lying down.

[27:00]

This is what we express. So I could say we express our woundedness, but we also express something that goes beyond that. Or we can. despite tens of thousands of medical methods. So, you know, there are 10,000 different meditation instructions out there. There's libraries full of concentration objects, and there are all kinds of techniques to try and find this deeper awareness. But we talk about this practice as objectless meditation, just sitting, just being present with all the disabilities and with everything that goes beyond and beneath those. So Dogen says, despite tens of thousands of medical methods, those who throw up their hands never put out a shingle.

[28:12]

This is a line that cuts at least a couple different ways. This actually comes from a line in the commentary of the Blue Cliff Record. It's a different translation from the way Tom Cleary translates it. But at the line in the story, if they couldn't guide such people, then the Buddhadharma has no effect, is how Tom translates it. We translated it, the Buddhadharma provides no spiritual fulfillment at all. If you can't guide people who can't seek, hear, or speak, then the Buddhadharma has no effect. And the commentary on that, the added saying on that from Yuan Wu, the commentator in the Blue Cliff Record, he says, how true these words are, I fold my hands and submit, having already accepted, I'll strike. Well, I'll fold my hands and submit is Cleary's translation.

[29:19]

I don't know if it's exactly the same characters that are in the Dogen's extensive record, but we translated it, those who throw up their hands. Never put out a shingle. So this is, I heard, from one of the Sangha members here is saying from Kamala Harris, who's the new senator from California, who said about the current situation, don't throw up your hands when it's time to roll up your sleeves. So, you know, it's also been said that this time, these such difficult times, this is the time we've been practicing for. So don't throw up your hands. So that's one way to understand this line from Dogen.

[30:21]

Those who throw up their hands never put out a shingle, never are available to teach. So don't give up. Don't just throw up your hands in helplessness and despair because you can't teach someone who can't see or hear or speak. And you may feel there are people out there like that. But if you just throw up your hands, that's no good. That doesn't help. So that's one way to hear this line. But according to Genryu Kagamishima, who was maybe the leading Japanese scholar of Dogen in the last century, he heard this line differently. He thought of it as a positive statement for letting go as the ultimate medicine.

[31:22]

Just let go. Show up your hands. But that's actually what what helps. So Kagamishima said, he translates that line from the Blue Cliff Record, this mountain monk holds up my hands in surrender and thereby has already completed the guidance. So this is interesting. How do we take it on and how do we let it go? Again, this is about going beyond the tens of thousands of medical methods. How to share the teaching with those who don't see or hear or speak. So we've been chanting, and we'll be chanting the Harmony of Difference and Sameness, but Shuto or Sekito also wrote the Song of the Grass Hut we sometimes chant. And he says, buying grasses to build a hut and don't give up

[32:30]

Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely. Together. Bind grasses to build a hut and don't give up. Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely. Right after each other. So, maybe to paraphrase, don't throw up your hands when it's time to roll up your sleeves. But also, just let go of hundreds of years. Relax completely. How do we receive the deep nourishment of reality? How do we receive the guidance of the Bodhisattva way even in difficult times?

[33:32]

Well, don't give up and let go. Let go completely, relax completely. in the middle of sashaying, the second day, the third day, sometimes even the fourth day. And those who are here for the first time today, this is the fourth day, whether you've been here in the previous days or not. You just jumped into the fourth day. But sometimes, you know, it's... your back or your knees or your hips or your shoulders or whatever it is. Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely. This is subtle, it's not like, you better relax.

[34:38]

Just let go. Give up trying to fix it all. Shift to another posture and there'll be pain somewhere else, maybe. And yet, also, if you just throw up your hands, that doesn't help. How do we actually help? How do we actually respond appropriately to whatever the situation is, no matter how dire it may actually be? Everyone expresses their symptoms without turning away or grasping.

[35:46]

That line is striking me now, because not turning away or grasping or touching is from the Jewel Mary Samadhi, which we've been chanting in the midday service. Everyone expresses their symptoms. So maybe right in the middle of our most blissful, joyful, wonderful sense of zazen beyond our eyes and ears. That is totally a function of the symptoms that brought you here. The first noble truth is a noble truth because we can actually sit upright and face our symptoms and the symptoms of the world.

[36:54]

So we each have our own personal karma and we feel it sometimes with a knot in our shoulder or an ache in our leg or whatever. And the world is expressing its symptoms now. Our society is expressing its symptoms. from 10,000 years of greed, hate, and delusion. How do we share spiritual nourishment with those who don't seem to be able to see or hear or speak kindly. So Katagiri Roshi wrote a book called Remain in Silence or something like that.

[38:18]

What is it called? Returning to Silence, thank you. Yeah, so our practice is returning to silence. So we are maintaining silence as much as we can in this sitting. Then he wrote another book that said you have to say something. And Dogen says, everyone expresses their symptoms without turning away or grasping. So you're always speaking in some way. So as Dogen said in commenting on the story about the bright, clear hundreds of grass tips that are the bright, clear mind of the ancestral teachers, he said, without your caring, it is easy to lose the path of active practice.

[39:30]

We talked about that the first day. So somehow, you are here because you care about your symptoms and you care about the world's systems and you care about even disabled beings who can't speak or hear or say anything. So please enjoy your practice. Please enjoy settling and opening Please enjoy your inhale and exhale. And whatever you know, there's more that you don't realize you don't know. Thank you very much.

[40:31]

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