Good evening. Yesterday was Mother's Day and our Shuso Nyozan gave a very fine talk about Mother's Day and about mothers and about how through mothers we are deeply interconnected to mountains and waters and everything else. Of course mountains and waters as landscape is everything else. But he spoke of the umbilical cord as a kind of line that goes back through our genetics and our heritage and connects us well with our genetical ancestors who are cousins with other primates and further back and how our DNA is actually connected with all kinds of

[01:03]

things with trees and moss and further back how our atoms are connected through stardust to everything. Anyway I want to follow up on that and for those of you who weren't here Nyozan's talk will be up on the website thanks to Jeremy we've been sitting sometime this week. But I want to follow up on that and talk about the stone woman giving birth at night. So in this mountains and waters sutra, the sutra from the mountains and waters that we've been using as an inspiration for talking about our deep interconnectedness. A lot of it comes from a lot of what Dogen says is inspired by a saying from Furon Daokai

[02:06]

Daisho in Japanese who said a couple of generations before Hongzhe who was a little bit before Dogen in China he said the green mountains are constantly walking. The stone woman bears a child by night gives birth to a child by night. So we've talked about the stone woman and we've talked about the green mountains constantly walking and how we really need to learn our own walking our own conduct our own way of performing as Buddha beings through studying the mountains walking how everything is walking nothing is set and settled and in stone as it were but even the stones are moving even the mountains are moving even the mountains constantly are shifting and of course everything

[03:11]

in the mountains and sometimes the mountains are snow and sometimes the mountains are wildflowers and so this phrase stone woman gives birth to a child at night is particularly relevant now as spring is arising and everything and so we need to talk about day and night and we've just been chanting if you would please the harmony of difference and sameness from our great ancestor Shuto Sekito Kisen and he talks about day and night and so this relates very much to the two truths that this teaching that Nyozan spoke of yesterday and I want to say some more about this very very important early Indian Buddhist teaching early Mahayana teaching and this this is about difference and sameness and day and night and and the dynamics of our

[04:15]

own walking and of the mountains walking and of our practice so the two truths again are the well there's the we we come from this kind of worldly conventional truths but then our practice starts to for everybody here all of you in this room have some taste some glimpse of this other truth this we could say you know the word none of the words are right but you could say universal or up or ultimate or this absolute reality the ultimate reality which is that of sameness that ultimately vast emptiness nothing holy is what you're trying to say ultimately just this suchness just this is it or as Dogen said when he came back from China all he all he brought with him was

[05:22]

eyes horizontal nose vertical we all are like that and through our mothers and through our genetics and through I mean even in our own bodies we have our own in our fish and in our reptiles and in the womb when we're when we are embraced in our mother's womb we go through stages where our bodies even have gills and have you know various aspects of all these other relatives of ours so the ultimate truth is the truth of sameness the truth of interconnectedness mountains and waters everywhere the landscape is this realm of sameness and this thing about day and night you know so he's uh Daokai said a stone woman gives birth to a child by night

[06:23]

this has to do with this realm of of sameness or wholeness or the ultimate truth but then there's the then there's the realm of day so as the harmony of difference and sameness said says according with sameness is still not enlightenment there's still this conventional truth so even when we have even more than a glimpse but a deep dramatic experience sometimes that happens of this ultimate reality there's still this other side and we and in this harmony of difference and sameness it talks about it in terms of day and night and that's what's going on in the mountains and water sutra in this saying by Furong Daokai so let me read this section this little section really in the mountains and water sutra that talks about this stone woman as for a stone woman bearing a child by night the time when a stone woman bears a child by night

[07:33]

bears a child is called night and generally speaking there are male stones and female stones and there are stones neither male nor female they patch the sky or they repair the sky and they patch the earth so these stones these these uh this we think of as solid matter is what what heals and mends the world Daokin says there are these are heavenly stones and earth stones though this is a folk saying it is rare for anybody to know it you should know the principle of giving birth to a child and giving birth to a child do parent and child emanate together would you only approach the study of this in terms of child becoming parent being the actualization of bearing a child so that cannot you cannot be a parent so there's a child suddenly there's a child and suddenly

[08:40]

wills a dad so what is this relationship with parent and child and yours I spoke about this and yours I spoke about this yesterday also in terms of our lineage so referring to all these people there are various lineages various genetics various ways of seeing mothers and their mothers and great-grandmothers and so forth all the way back and fathers too so he says when bearing a child do parent and child emanate together do they or do they become parent and child together would you only approach the study of this in terms of child becoming parent being the actualization of bearing a child you should study and penetrate how the time when parent becomes child is the practice and realization of bearing a child so parents become children too in various ways so I'll come back to that this relationship of

[09:44]

parent and child or mother and child but in terms of these two going back to these two truths there's the this aspect of reality that you know we could talk about it philosophically and that these two truths was a kind of philosophical teaching in Madhyamaka Buddhism the early Indian Mahayana teaching of emptiness basically that there was this ultimate reality but there's also this other reality the other reality is our personhood our personal responsibility our individuality each of us in our own individual particular way gives birth to a child by night so in the day we can see we see distinctions in the day we can use our discriminating mind to

[10:45]

notice Paul, Laurel, Jeremy, Roy well I could say they're all the same they're all sitting over there by the by the snowy mountain but also I can see their see their differences so there's this side of conventional reality we know it's because of ultimate truth we know it's an illusion ultimately but actually it's a reality that we have to honor and take care of when the light turns red we stop when the light turns green we can go again we it's not ultimately real but still we have to take care of conventional reality so this this business of a woman stone the stone woman giving birth to a child by night has to do with this these two truths and has to do with really these these this inner dynamic of our practice so part of the image of a stone woman we might say is that

[11:53]

or a stone person is stone-faced kind of unattached kind of not caught up in attachments and this is also a metaphor for our practice maybe more than a metaphor but anyway we sit still we sit like rocks sometimes we need to change our leg position and of course we're breathing hopefully and still we're sitting still still still this is like night this is like still still this is like night this is like this silence relationship to this ultimate and so this image of a stone woman or a stone person is or a wooden man is to be is this kind of silent being uncaught not caught by attachments even while sometimes acting in the world so again

[12:57]

how does the stone woman come to life how does the stone woman give birth to a child so this is you know this is a poetic way of talking about something that's very deep in our lives and in our practice another way of talking about this that also goes back to indian teaching indian buddha's teaching tatagatagarbha, tatagat is another word for buddha it means the one who comes or goes in suchness so to be present in suchness amidst the movements amidst the coming and going that's the buddha but this tatagatagarbha it became the basis of the buddha it became the basis of the teaching of buddha nature that there's this buddha potential in all of beings and all of us and in everything and this word garbha is really interesting so uh as i mentioned yesterday the word matrix which is also relevant and sometimes garbha

[13:59]

is translated as matrix this network or source from which things arise this ultimate reality but garbha also can be translated as womb so tatagatagarbha is refers to each of us as a kind of womb of buddhas the potentiality to emerge as a buddha to come forth as buddha but garbha also means embryo so i don't know what that would do to the whole um abortion discussion if we if fetuses were also in wombs were if there was the same word for fetus and womb that's basically what this is saying that there that we are at the same time embryos of buddha and wombs of buddha and this goes back very deeply in our tradition and buddha's teaching to this idea of mountains and waters of the landscape of and of stone women and

[15:04]

with men so this idea of giving birth at night has to do with our practice we sit in stillness we stop and sit upright hopefully relaxed more or less facing the wall facing the floor facing ourselves and something happens and we can't say how it happens you know we can recognize when it does happen and i've recognized it practicing with many of the people in this room how something happens out of this womb of what the mountains and waters so in some sense the mountains and waters the landscape of the phenomenal world is our womb so um you know this in in zen teaching and particularly

[16:09]

in in soto teaching dogen and dong shan there's this play about this that's very deep and and i've talked a lot at times about the self-fulfilling samadhi where dogan says when one person sits fully displaying it the buddha mudra the buddha position the buddha matrix in body and mind all space awakens this is the same thing as a stone woman giving birth to a child in the middle of the mountains and waters we are deeply related to these mountains and waters or prairies and lakes or skyscrapers and lakeshore avenues and the landscape of chicago not just the landscape of people living in east asia or california or the rockies these this landscape this tension between we could say form and emptiness i i don't want to reduce it to that actually but you know that's

[17:15]

part of that we could see it that way uh there's there's two aspects of our life so you know how do they interact how do we how is it that we wake up in the light there is darkness but don't take it as darkness in the light there's just light you can see the distinctions in the dark there is light but don't see it as light allow the dark to do its own work light and dark relate to each other just like the front and back foot when we're walking like the mountains each of the myriad things has its merit expressed according to function and place so there's a time for acting in the phenomenal world it's called daylight there's a time for settling down into this

[18:22]

communion with this ultimate reality and we call it sometimes night so this is another you know so this this little section of the mountains and watersheds where he talks about the stone woman it's pretty interesting he doesn't talk about this as much as he talks about the waters or about the mountains but he says there are male stones and female stones and there are stones neither male nor female so we don't usually think about stones that way but how do stones relate to each other how do stuff how do tectonic plates brush against each other and and bring forth the himalayas bring forth the himalayas how do stones how does how but what's the inner movement of the mountains

[19:23]

how do they how do the various rocks and stones that are part of the mountains along with the trees and grasses and snow sometimes and wildflowers sometimes how did this how does how is it that the mountains walk he says they repair the sky and repair the earth these stones well you know maybe it's easy to see that of course they repair the earth because the stones are the earth and they're moving around and that's how the mountains become and find themselves as mountains but they also repair the sky what's that about there are these interrelationships going on everywhere here there's there are heavenly stones and earth stones and and then there's this principle of bearing a child giving birth

[20:25]

to a child and what is the relationship between mother and child or just parent and child so would you only approach the study of this in terms of child becoming parent well you know when when when people sometimes very young people they seem very young to me become parents oh that's what's going on there that's that's this amazing miraculous thing that a new life comes forth and before that there's not there's no parent but then there's a parent then there's a child this is also about again about our own practice um in the middle of stillness something is going on so you know we suddenly this week you know it's hot today and suddenly well i just i remember it

[21:31]

was you know not so long ago when it was really really cold something's happened how does that work what's going on and there's flowers and leaves little leaves now there's little leaves some other trees and and yet i remember there was a lot of snow how is it that um how is it that out of our stillness something comes forth out of our sitting still like rocks like stone women or women men something comes forth so this is also about what i was talking about last week the stage of faith stage of person there's this aspect of our practice which is just trusting entering the womb of stillness sitting upright in the dark of samadhi being willing to commune with

[22:34]

who knows what's going on with all these thoughts floating around and sounds and the discomfort in their knees or shoulders or wherever and yet something comes forth so many of you have experienced sitting for a day and you know and it's hard it's hard work it's really you know who would think that something is as totally simple and seemingly dull as just sitting all day you know getting up to walk occasionally like a mountain but all sitting all day and then and then the end of the day you know you can't tell a lot of times some days the end of the day tired and just kind of achy some days the end of the day oh there's some energy how do we give birth to this or what gives birth to that

[23:35]

where are the stone women underneath our cushions and chairs it's mysterious and yet this is the dynamic of our practice so this also goes back and and um so dogen is talking about this these mountains walking and the stone woman giving birth to a child at night by referring to furong daokai so this is another kind of lineage like our connection to the fish and the reptiles um furong daokai said the green mountains are constantly walking the stone woman gives birth to a child by night and we've heard about the stone woman before so last practice period last year we talked about the jewel mare samadhi from gongshan who was a while before furong daokai and he said the wooden man starts to sing the stone woman gets up dancing

[24:39]

so apparently some women not not only do they give birth to children at night but they also sometimes get up and dance and then there's these wooden men start to sing so what is that about so this is where this image comes from and it goes further back so um well you know again the meaning of this there are many references in zen to this vitality arising from utter stillness from upright meditative sitting sustained settling practice allows access to deep sources of creative energy somehow it does that and and then there's this revival of spirit that supports awakened beneficial activity in the world so we go out from the stage of faith into taking responsibility so in some sense in our practice we are our own mothers and children or we find that matrix of creativity and of possibility and when we sit still

[25:47]

when we stop running around when we are willing to just pay attention to what's going on this evening let go of all the stories about me me me and who we are and how we have to do this or that but then out of that comes this energy this creative energy and we go out and do the buddha work so they're meant so one of the sources for this wooden man image and i don't know i don't know if it's also refers to the stone woman there but in the perfection of wisdom sutras one of the longer versions we chant the heart sutra often which is just one page but there's also a longer version it's well there's the diamond sutra which is a little longer perfection of wisdom with 8,000 lines and 50,000 lines and 100,000 lines anyway somewhere in there it talks about the bodhisattva as a wooden puppet that's one image for a bodhisattva with no discriminations free of passions

[26:50]

just performing the buddha work without hesitation we're like a marionette being kind of having our strings pulled by the buddha to respond and be helpful and anyway there's all these images we can play with but anyway that's where this idea this image of a wooden man comes from and there's many other images you know the point of this is how do we find our own life and vitality how does the stone woman give birth to a child at night there's also the image of a dragon singing in a withered tree or howling in a withered tree so this comes from a story Dongshan well there's various various old Chinese and guys who are involved in this but um Shangyan was asked what is the way he said a dragon sings in a withered tree and when he was asked about that he said oh there's an eyeball and a skull

[27:58]

and Shaoshan said what does this mean about the eyeball and the skull and he said it doesn't dry up so it seems you know everything seems to wither in the winter you know this is a time for a new life now and maybe soon it'll get so hot that we start to fade away again but anyway there's this there's this there's this spring is this time of rebirth and there's various this this is not just a central thing there's various images in Renzai too in some of these Catholic verses the stone woman dances the dance of long life the wooden man sings songs of great peace and there there's another one putting on his shoes the wooden man went away at midnight wearing her bonnet the stone woman returns at dawn

[29:05]

so anyway there's various poetic expressions for how this works Hongzhi said about one of the five degrees at midnight the wooden boy pounds on the moon's door in darkness the jade woman is startled from her sleep so how is it that we find our creative life how is it that we find our energy stone woman gives birth to a child by night what is the offspring of our own practice well together it's you know just this room and and all of you and all of us sitting together and for each of us it's oh how am I going to express caring and kindness and awareness in this situation in this dharma position that I see in the day this particular place where

[30:12]

whatever your situation whatever its limitations whatever is whatever it's whatever your abilities or interests something can come forth from this stillness so anyway this is a little bit about the stone woman giving birth to a child at night but I'll turn this down and let you respond to further questions comments Bill I think a lot about the relationship between excuse me the kinds of changes that are needed in the world and and the question of letting go and giving up attachment and

[31:17]

tell me what you think about this I think that I think we are in a period where all kinds of conventional truths are suddenly just not making very much sense right and whether that's climate or or I think we're in a very rich period as far as receive gender categories so right sort of thinking more just kind of a funny thing that you know there may not there may be not only female stones but male stones but transgender stones sure sort of everything and and I wonder so generally when things start to be up for a radical rethinking and and conventions are all up in the air and people are very broadly questioning them of course there are some who like those insurance commercials where they run the film backwards to get back

[32:27]

to where things were you know you know it's a fearful thing for many people and difficult but it's also the only real place of hope I think and I just wondered what specifically Buddhism gives us to kind of press forward good yeah well this is the question you know what do we do now in this world and you know there's so many the the areas where we can see that the way that our received conventional truth is shifting and they're just all over the place climate being one dramatic one the failure of the rule of law in this country in so many ways yeah anyway I can go on and on about this the the recent cases where someone some corporate head was had done some heinous crime and but was was given a suspended sentence because

[33:33]

he wouldn't fare well in prison that was the judge's turn so you know all of all of our ideas about what should be you know the toothpaste is out of the tube we can't put it back so what do we do well you know part of this practice is not to reach some perfect you know enlightened state or something or some some perfect peace or some perfect wisdom and understanding but just by being willing to be present and upright like stone women in the middle of the night of chaos in the middle of our own confused thoughts if we can just sit and be present and pay attention without having to react without have to having to go fix everything when we know we can't fix a lot of it some possibility is there some possibility is there and you know in the midst of loss and

[34:42]

loved ones you know passing or loss of different and in the middle of birth in the middle of new situations new reality it's all you know tumultuous what this practice does is give us the power to be present and upright a kind of steady sturdiness and a kind of flexibility so that when the effects of climate or whatever get really bad we have we're more adaptable and we can be more calm and we can be helpful in as much as that's possible and that's worth a lot so all of you are training to be ready you know i've mentioned joanna i spoke to joanna macy at length last week and she's she said it's actually an old saying but that uh we don't know if we're if we're doing hospice work or midwife work something new something really creative and

[35:47]

new is possible now and you were saying that though i think because our so much of our ideas about reality in our society are tenuous now so but part of it is that we have to just be willing to admit that it's important to be able to grieve to feel the sadness at losses to feel to to be honest about our own confusion about not knowing what to do because nobody has the answer and yet change is happening change is always happening and new possibilities are emerging and many many many many people all over the planet are understand this and they're working towards something so there's possibilities now as well as a lot to be said about other comments or responses i have time for one or two more

[36:54]

right um i don't know if you would call it that theory or just some thoughts about the concept of the stone giving birth and walking and i don't know just you can tell me it just has any value or not um my understanding is that you know the stone woman uh is an expression for a barren woman can't give birth right and so the idea and mountains were sort of metaphors for monks well yeah part of mountains and waters actually i read last week something about from hungzhou about mountains and clouds mountains are used as an image for teachers and for teachers took their name of the mountain where they taught and the clouds it's another form of water where monks are called unsweeter clouds and water so the the the waters vaporized waters are floating around hanging out on the mountains you know so anyway yeah so i guess the original quote

[38:02]

from is it i sort of took that as a way defensive of saying in a time before monks would marry or have children in a in china where there was a big emphasis on respect for your ancestors and that sort of that was sort of saying look it may look like you've got these teachers who are just sitting there not doing anything and they're going totally against our culture of this lineage right that actually they're doing they're constantly moving and that what you would see as a barren woman is giving birth but doing it in in night in this realm of the spiritual in a um to use probably a bad word for it but um well i think that's period of night and then don't get in his way kind of takes this and he says okay i'm gonna use this metaphor i'm just

[39:04]

gonna go run with it and build on it and just totally explodes it in a way that's you know draws a lot of the elements that were there in the original but really brings them up to the surface yes um and i think that's a lot of the power of it is that and to what bill is saying is not only but originally it was a way of saying okay we understand how you look at the world look at it in this way you'll see that really it's consistent with what you hold dear and i think that we can do have the same sort of creativity seeing the rocks as male as female as neither as transgender and that is totally a call to shift how we look at things and shift the metaphor around yeah so the point of you know these uh the point of koans the point of these old sad stories is not to figure out the right interpretation whatever speaks to you so so it's it's you know you still you kind of

[40:05]

introduced what you were saying by saying well i don't know if this is you know if this is has value or not but whatever in these texts you know it's not about you know they do dogan does talk as nearsome pointed out to me last week dogan does talk about trying to understand this but it's not about reaching some particular you know understanding figuring out some particular interpretation whatever speaks to you whatever images come forth for you about how how it is that that there are male and female and and stones and non-male and non-female stones and and you know things in between and giving birth at night and and then stepping forth in the day all of these images are there to uh for you to find what speaks to you and what's going on in your life you know this week or this month yes just a observation uh it was great to hear about to tata garba i don't know how i didn't think to talk

[41:07]

about that statement but um you know you were talking about this sort of thing between uh you know to talk to tata garba as both the sort of the embryo and the womb of the buddhas and you know i've had this thing from roy rattling around for maybe two weeks now where when i gave a talk about bodhichitta and he said it's like yeah it's like bodhichitta is trying to be its own grandfather and uh it's kind of you know and now now that you say that thing about tata garba now it always makes a little more sense to me yeah so you know this is a this is a communal practice i mean we each sit in our own on our own seat and i encourage you to sit at home in your spare time but also you never sit alone it's impossible it's impossible we're always we're in this together with the mountains and the water and and and everybody in sangha so sangha so buddha doesn't exist without sangha just like there's no no you can't be a parent without a child there's no buddhas without without

[42:13]

song it's meaningless so and this situation we have here uh storefront temple in chicago is so rich because each one of you has your own combination of sanghas your own communities your own associations but all of them all of them are here in the room now so this is a very rich situation you know it's wonderful as jeremy and i were talking about earlier to go off to tasahara it's wonderful and yet in some ways this is a much richer situation of course there are also there's all many different you know songs in a way but uh this is challenging how do we allow something to come forth out of stillness out of silence out of sitting still that we then take out with us onto the streets and express in our life for all the other sanghas all the other

[43:16]

combinations of beings who are not separate from us too for the lake and for the chicago river and for the prairies and all the all the people up in the high floors in the in the loop and and so forth so anyway that's our challenge um why don't we close with the four bodhisattva vows so beings are numberless I bow to them collisions are exhaustful I bow to them dharma gates are boundless I bow to them but a lot of way is unsurpassable I vow to realize it

[44:17]

beings are numberless I vow to free them delusions are inexhaustible I vow to end them dharma gates are boundless I bow to them but a lot of way is unsurpassable I vow to realize it beings are numberless I vow to free them delusions are inexhaustible I vow to end them dharma gates are boundless I bow to them

[45:19]

but a lot of way is unsurpassable I vow to realize it

[45:29]

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