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
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 in a sip 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,
Daisho in Japanese, who said a couple of generations before Hongzhe,
he 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, 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 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 in the mountains and sometimes the mountains are snow
and sometimes the mountains are wildflowers.
So this phrase, the 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 is about difference and sameness and day and night
and the dynamics of our own walking and of the mountains walking and of our practice.
So the two truths again are the, well, there's the, we come from this kind of worldly
conventional truth, 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 ultimate or
this absolute reality, the ultimate reality, which is of sameness, that ultimately,
vast emptiness, nothing holy as Bodhidharma said, ultimately, just this session, just this is it.
Or as Dogen said, when he came back from China, all he brought with him was 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 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,
of mountains and waters everywhere. The landscape is this realm of sameness.
And this thing about day and night, you know, so he,
Furong Daokai said, a stone woman gives birth to a child by night.
This has to do with this realm of sameness or wholeness or the ultimate truth.
But then there's the realm of day. So as the harmony of difference and sameness 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 Waters Sutra in this saying by Furong Daokai. So let me read this section,
this little section really, in the Mountains and Waters 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,
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 we think of as solid matter, is what
heals and mends the world, Daokin says. 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
you cannot be a parent until there's a child. Suddenly there's a child and suddenly there's a
dad. So what is this relationship with parent and child? And 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 their mothers, and so on.
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 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
parent and child, or mother and child. But in terms of these two, going back to these two truths,
there's 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 notice Paul, Laurel, Jeremy, Roy.
Well, I could say they're all the same. They're all sitting over there by the
snowy mountain, but also I can see their differences. So there's this side of
conventional reality. We know it's because of the 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.
It's not ultimately real, but still we have to take care of conventional reality.
So this business of a woman, the stone woman giving birth to a child by night,
has to do with these two truths and has to do with
really this inner dynamic of our practice.
So part of the image of a stone woman, we might say, is that
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 this silence.
Relationship to this ultimate. And so this image of a stone woman or a stone person is,
or a wooden man, is this kind of silent being, not caught by attachments, even while
sometimes acting in the world. So again, how does the stone woman come to life? How does the stone
give birth to a child? So 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 Buddhist teaching, Tathagatagarbha. Tathagat 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 Tathagatagarbha became the basis of
the teaching of Buddha nature, that there's this Buddha potential in all beings, in all of us,
and in everything. And this word garbha is really interesting.
So, Nyozan, you mentioned yesterday the word matrix, which is also relevant,
and sometimes garbha is translated as matrix, this network or source from which things arise,
this ultimate reality. But garbha also can be translated as womb.
So Tathagatagarbha 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 abortion discussion if fetuses were also in wombs, if there was the
same word for fetus and womb. That's basically what this is saying, 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 landscape, and of stone women and wooden 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. 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. In Zen teaching and particularly in
Soto teaching, Dogen and Dongshan, there's this play about this that's very deep.
I've talked a lot at times about the self-fulfilling samadhi where Dogen says when one person sits
fully displaying 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 and avenues. The landscape of Chicago, not just the landscape
of people living in East Asia or California or the Rockies. This landscape, this tension between,
we could say form and emptiness. I don't want to reduce it to that actually, but that's part of
it. We could see it that way. There's two aspects of our life.
How do they interact? 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. We 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 communion with this ultimate reality. We call it sometimes night.
So 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 tectonic plates
brush against each other and bring forth the Himalayas?
What's the inner movement of the mountains?
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 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 are heavenly stones
and earth stones. And then there's this principle of bearing a child, giving birth to a child.
And what is the relationship between mother and child or just parent and child?
Would you only approach the study of this in terms of child becoming parent?
Well, you know, when people, sometimes very young people, they seem very young to me,
become parents. What's going on there? That's this amazing, miraculous thing that a new life comes
forth. And before that, there's no parent, but then there's a parent, then there's a child.
This is also about, again, about our own practice.
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 remember it 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 on some of the trees.
And I remember there was a lot of snow. How is it that, how is it that
out of our stillness, something comes forth?
Out of our sitting still like rocks, like stone and wooden men,
something comes forth. So, this is also about what I was talking about last week,
the stage of faith or the stage of person.
There's this aspect of our practice, which is just trusting, entering the womb of stillness,
just sitting upright in the dark of samadhi,
being willing to commune with 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 just sitting all day. And then at the end of the day, you know,
you can't tell a lot of times. Some days, at the end of the day,
tired and just kind of achy. Some days, at the end of the day, there's some energy.
How do we give birth to this or what gives birth to that or 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 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. Furong Daokai said the green mountains
are constantly walking. The stone woman gives birth to a child by night. We've heard about the
stone woman before. So, last practice period, last year, we talked about the Jewel Marrow Samadhi
from Dongshan who was a while before Furong Daokai and he said
the wooden man starts to sing, the stone woman gets up dancing.
So, apparently, stone women, 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 who start to sing.
So, what is that about? So, this is where this image comes from and it goes further back. So,
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 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,
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, one of the sources for this wooden man image, and I don't know if it 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.
Well, there's the Diamond Sutra, which is a little longer,
Perfection of Wisdom, and 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,
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. 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. The point of this is, how do we find our own life and vitality?
How does a 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 old Chinese Zen guys who are
involved in this, but Shangyan was asked, what is the way? And 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.
And Shangyan 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. This is a time for a new
life now. And maybe soon it will get so hot that we start to fade away again. But anyway,
there's this, spring is this time of rebirth.
And there's various, this is not just the central thing, there's various images in
Renzai too, in some of his Catholic verses. The stone woman dances the dance of long life.
The wooden man sings songs of great peace. And there's another one, putting on his shoes,
the wooden man went away at midnight. Wearing her bonnet, the stone woman returns at dawn.
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
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 just this room 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
whatever your situation, whatever its limitations, whatever your abilities or interests,
something can come forth from this stillness. So anyway, this is a little bit of the stone
woman giving birth to a child at night.
But I'll turn to stone and let you respond.
Questions, comments?
Bill?
I think a lot about the relationship between the kinds of changes that are needed in the world and
the question of letting go and giving up attachment.
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. And whether that's climate or
I think we're in a very rich period as far as received gender categories. So
sort of thinking more in just kind of a funny vein that, you know, there may be not only
female stones and male stones, but transgender stones and sort of everything.
And I wonder, so generally when things start to be up for a radical rethinking 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 to where things were, 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, the areas where we can see the way that our
received conventional truth is shifting, it's just all over the place. Climate being one dramatic one.
Failure of the rule of law in this country in so many ways.
Anyway, I can go on and on about this. The recent cases where some
corporate head had done some heinous crime and but was given a suspended sentence because he
wouldn't fare well in prison. That was the judge's term. So, you know, 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, some perfect peace or some perfect wisdom and
understanding, but just by being willing to be present and upright like stonewomen 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 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 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
sturdiness and a kind of flexibility so that when the effects of climate or whatever get really bad,
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,
I spoke to Joanna Macy at length last week, and she said it's actually an old saying, but that
we don't know if we're doing hospice work or midwife work. Something new, something really
creative in you is possible now. And you were saying that, Bill. I think because so much of
our old 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 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 understanding this and they're working towards something. So there's possibilities now,
as well as a lot to be said of it.
Are there comments or responses? I have time for one or two more.
Right. I don't know if you would call it that theory or just some thoughts about
the concept of the stone giving birth and the mountain walking.
And I don't know if you can tell me if this has any value or not.
My understanding is that, you know, the stone woman 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 Hongshuo about mountains and clouds. Mountains are used as an image for teachers
and for... because the teachers took their name of the mountain where they taught. And
the clouds, it's another form of water where monks are called unsui, or clouds and water. So
the waters, vaporized waters are floating around, hanging out on the mountains, you know. So
anyway, yeah. So I guess the original quote from, is it Furan Daokai?
I sort of took that in a way defensive of saying, in a time before monks would marry or have
children in China, where there was a big emphasis on respect for your ancestors and that sort of
lineage that was sort of saying, look, it may look like we'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 night, in this realm of the spiritual,
in a sense, to use quite a bad word for it. But, well, I think that's period of night. And then
Daogen in his way kind of takes this and he says, okay, I'm going to use this metaphor. I'm just
going to 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. 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 and 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,
the point of koans, the point of these old Zen stories is not to figure out the right
interpretation, whatever speaks to you. So, so it's, it's, you know, you, you kind of
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, Dogen does talk, as Niyazan pointed out to me last week,
Dogen 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 then stepping forth in the day.
All of these images are there to, for you to find what speaks to you and what's going on in your
life, you know, this week or this month. Yes, sir.
Just an observation. It was great to hear about Tathagatagarbha. I don't know how I
didn't think to talk about that statement. But, you know, you were talking about this sort of
thing between, you know, Tathagatagarbha 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's
trying to be its own grandfather. And it's kind of, you know, and now, now that you say that thing
about Tathagatagarbha, now it makes a little more sense to me. Yeah. So, you know, 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 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 Sangha. It's meaningless. So, and this situation we have
here, 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, and it's wonderful. Jeremy and I
were talking about earlier to go off to Tassajara. It's wonderful. And yet, in some ways, this is a
much richer situation. Of course, there also, there's all many different, you know, Sanghas in a way, but
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 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 so forth. So anyway, that's our challenge.
Why don't we close with the four bodhisattva vows.
I vow to hate them, but a lot of hate 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 vow to hate them, but a lot of hate is unsurpassable. I vow to realize it, beings are numberless.
I vow to free them, delusions are impossible. I vow to end them, dharma gates are boundless.
I vow to render them, but a lot of hate is unsurpassable. I vow to realize it.