So basically all of the Buddhadharma is an expression of the experience of just sitting, what we've just been doing, of just being present and upright and paying attention to what it's like to be present here this evening in this body and mind. Beyond our stories about who we are and what the world is and so forth. And yet, we also do things like bowing to express our appreciation to Buddha and chanting various texts. We also have various visual dharma. So initially in Buddhism, they didn't have many images. They were just images of the dharma wheel. The Buddha is said to have turned the dharma wheel. and then images of Buddha's footprint. And then gradually there were images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

[01:04]

And as Buddhism grew and developed into the Bodhisattva practice that we do here, the enlightening being practice and practices that are aimed at universal liberation, there were more and more expressions of the Buddha Dharma. In some ways we don't need any of them. And in our tradition, Maybe for the very best students, the teacher never says anything to them. But practically speaking, for most of us, as we're translating and developing the Dharma in this very different culture from the Asian cultures in which Buddhism grew, how do we express and grow the Dharma? So one of the ways that Buddhism has always expressed itself, and the teaching of awakening has always expressed itself, is through visual Dharma. I don't know if the word art is actually appropriate, because that has some other meaning, but in

[02:10]

pre-literate cultures, and for most of Asian Buddhist history, well, for the first couple hundred years, there wasn't anything written down of the Buddhist teaching. And in many cultures, not everybody was literate. But people would go to temples, and they would see images of the Buddha sitting upright. And really, that's enough to just look at the Buddha and see the calm. and presence. And then, of course, many other unfoldings of visual dharma have appeared. So what I want to do tonight is talk about the expression, the visual expressions of dharma in our zenda, in our meditation hall. And maybe all of them just point to vast emptiness or complete suchness and immediacy of experience. But each of them, in a way, expresses something of what it means to just be present and upright in this body.

[03:16]

So I'm going to go around the room and say a little bit. And actually, I could talk all night about each one of them. But I'll just, you know, this is a little survey. So our newest addition to the Zendo behind Jeremy is an image of a lotus, actually three lotuses. And it's from a painting by a famous Japanese painter. called Three Sages and a Lotus. And I'm not sure if it's a detail of some larger picture. But actually, there are three different lotuses in that image. And you need to get up closer to it to really look at it. But I'll mention it anyway. And actually, when we do walking meditation, you might get a chance to see it more. But I want to say a little bit about what the lotus represents, because it's very important. in terms of expressing the practice and development of awakening. And actually, it's kind of unusual that none of the images of Buddhas or Bodhisattvas in Arzento don't have a lotus pedestal that they're sitting or standing on.

[04:25]

So we have a lotus on the back wall. There are three lotuses. But lotus, first of all, is an image, the lotus grows out of the mud. And for all of us, we come to practice. We come to taking on spiritual practice through the mud of our own ancient, twisted karma, greed, hate, and delusion, through personal causes and conditions and difficulties. We somehow find a way to be present and a practice of being present, a physical practice, a yogic practice. the lotus grows out of the mud and then opens. And Gene Reeves, translator of the Lotus Sutra, was here last week. The Lotus Sutra is arguably the most important Buddhist scripture in East Asia. And as Gene was talking about it, literally it's the Dharma Flower Sutra, or the Dharma Flowering Sutra, that our practice is about, together as Sangha, as community, and each of us individually,

[05:36]

And in our culture, for Soto Zen, our tradition and Buddhism generally, to flower and develop and grow and change. And so anyway, the Lotus Sutra is very important. So there's a lot, and I could keep going again all night talking about lotuses and the Lotus Sutra and the difference between different kinds of lotuses. And there are many stories in the Lotus Sutra that are very interesting and entertaining. But one of them is just that the Buddha is, in some ways, alive for a very, very, very long time. And what that means is that the Buddha is alive now, the Buddha who lived 2,500 years ago or so, more or less, in northeastern India. Through our practice, we are keeping alive the way of awakening in Chicago here this evening. So that's just a tiny bit about that image behind Jeremy.

[06:39]

So again, I want to go around the room, and maybe there'll be time for questions and further discussion. But behind Mike is this scroll with calligraphy, a very common way of expressing things in Chinese and Japanese culture. This one came to us through Sato-sensei, who is actually a national living treasure in Japan. He lives in California. He was here a couple of years ago or so, maybe three years ago, and did that calligraphy right here in Zendo as a demonstration, talking about Japanese expressions of dharma. And what it says, what is direct mind or straightforward mind, this is the dojo. Dojo is a word that some of you may know from martial arts, but literally, way, place. or bodhimandala in Sanskrit, straightforward, direct mind, is the place of awakening. So dojo means the place where one finds the way.

[07:43]

So again, I could say a lot more about each of those characters and about how Chinese characters work in Chinese and Japanese culture, but anyway, The second one down is mind, which is important. We study mind, which is, of course, not separate from body. And that character also means heart or spirit. The one two after that, next to the last one, is the Tao, or Do, in Japanese, the way. So we are here unfolding the way, allowing the way to flower. So direct mind, straightforward mind, that's the place of awakening. Behind Dawn is a painting that Kaz Tanahashi, an old friend of mine who has translated Dogen and I've translated with him, he came out last year with a full translation of Dogen's Shobogenzo, True Dharma, High Treasury, which is a masterpiece of world spiritual literature.

[08:57]

a huge book, but Kaz also is a peace activist and a world-renowned calligrapher. He's been here a couple of times doing calligraphy workshops. And for a long time, I've been wanting to have, I had in mind some kind of somewhat large landscape to put on that wall. I felt like we needed some outdoor scene. We don't have windows except these skylights behind me in this window. So this is our window. And this particular painting is one that causes one brush, one stroke painting. So he's actually, one of the things he does, he does circles. Out front there's a one stroke painting of literally the character One, which is just a horizontal line. But this one, obviously it's a very large brush, and it went beyond this particular canvas. But this particular painting is called The Snow Within.

[10:05]

So I think it's very appropriate for us, especially in Chicago in the summer, and now in the new normal global heated summer, to remember the snow within, to remember our inner cool. And also, in the winter, when there's snow outside, there's also snow within. So this is the snow within. And it actually is inspired by a short poem by Dogen. Dogen is the founder of Soto Zen, the branch of Buddhism that we follow here. We don't have to call it Soto or Zen, we could just say Buddhism, but anyway, this is the tradition we follow here. Dogen lived in, he was a Japanese master in the 13th century who brought this tradition from China to Japan. And there's a poem, and actually when Kaz was here, he was talking about how he, amongst other things, first came to study Dogen many, many years ago.

[11:09]

And he mentioned a poem that he came across And I'll just paraphrase it, one of Dogen's well-known poems, short poems. He says, for years I saw that snow covered the mountain. Actually, I should say that he lived, he founded a monastery, Eheiji, in the north, the north coast of Japan, in the very remote mountains. He moved his whole community from the capital, the cultural capital of Kyoto, to Eheji, and it's a place where very severe weather, and they have like 10 feet of snow in the winter. It's a beautiful place. It's built up now more than when Dogen lived there. I was doing ceremonies there. Anyway, so the poem goes, for years I thought that snow covered the mountains. Now I see that snow is the mountain. So that poem inspired

[12:11]

cause to start studying Dogen. And so it's reflected in this painting that we have in our center. Going around the room again, this is one that's hard to see. You have to really get close and look at it. But you might want to do that sometime. This is the Bodhisattva Kanon, or Guanyin in Chinese. We chant sometimes Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. whose name means to hear or observe the sounds of the world. So Bodhisattvas, in some ways, we're all doing Bodhisattva practice. Even if this is your first time doing meditation tonight, you're doing Bodhisattva practice. This is a practice in which we see that, and we come to see through sitting, that we are deeply interconnected. We can't actually just practice for ourselves. Of course, you know, people come to practice because they have some problem or some sadness or loss or question, and it does help us individually to find a way to regularly stop, settle, and face the wall, face the floor, face our lives, be present and upright.

[13:32]

This practice is also about compassion. We come to see that we can't be truly free, truly awake, unless others around us are too. So we practice not just for ourselves. And in fact, when we do Zazen and do this regularly, it changes how we are with people in the world. It changes the people in the world who see us without our trying to figure that out or how to do it. But part of that is expressed by this bodhisattva of compassion, whose name means to hear the suffering of the world, or the sounds of the world. There are many different forms of this bodhisattva. Some of them have a thousand arms, literally, and with different implements in each hand, and an eyeball in each hand to see from different perspectives. and act skillfully to help beings. This particular image, and again, it's a little hard to see. This is a cast iron image that I got when I was living in Kyoto. An American fellow who lived in Nara had a bunch of old pieces of things from temples.

[14:41]

This one is 11-headed Kano. So if you look closely, you can see there's actually 11 heads around altogether. And the story about that is that And this is one of the standard versions of this bodhisattva of compassion, that one time she saved all beings from hells, all the hells. And she looked back and saw that all the spaces in hell were being filled by other beings. And her head broke apart in grief. And then she did it again. And this happened 11 times. And finally, the 11th time, she was able to save all beings. And they'll let the top, usually on Kannon you can tell, one of the ways to tell that bodhisattva is there's an image of Amida Buddha on the top. Anyway, if you take a look at that. Also, this is a standing rather than sitting version, and she's holding a jar with nectar in it to, or ambrosia, to help relieve the suffering being.

[15:47]

So that's a little bit about that image. The image over here is a longer story about. It's hard to tell the story briefly. But this is also the Bodhisattva of Compassion, a different version. And the story about that particular image, I got that when I was living and practicing. I spent a couple of years in Kyoto, the capital of Japan, and I did a practice period in a monastery in Kyushu. And part of that was we would go out on begging rounds. because all the food that we got was from what was given to us as we went around. And that's a whole other story, talking about that. But anyway, we would go a few times a month, once to the local village and a couple of times a month to the big city, Kumamoto. It was the large city near, we were up in the mountains of this monastery, but we'd go down there and walk around doing this chant, holding out our begging bowl, and people would put

[16:51]

money or food in it, and it's kind of like walking sashimi, because you're just walking and chanting all day, and you're wearing these straw sandals, and it takes a while to get used to how to walk on those. But anyway, they took us on a break, though, to this temple near Kumamoto, which at this point is inland a little bit. Kumamoto's on the coast. At Dogen's time, it was right on the coast, I guess then a Shingon temple, a Vajrayana tantric temple. Now it's a Soto temple. So small temple. It's as small as our temple, but very, very old. Maybe smaller even than our temple. And there was no priest there, but there was an old couple who were the caretakers. And the story is that that's where Dogen landed when he came back from China in 1227. the story about this image, and probably it's not historically true, but this image is attributed to Dogen, and it's an image of Kannon, and the story, which is lovely, and so even though this may not actually be Dogen's handwriting, although it's claimed to be, and it may not have actually been Dogen's image, but the story is that he was coming back from China, and at that time it was difficult to travel from Japan to China,

[18:20]

and there hadn't been anybody who'd done that for several hundred years. And then during Dogen's time, there were numbers of monks who did. It was a dangerous trip. Coming back, there were big waves, and it was a typhoon or something, and the ship was about, was going, looked like it was going to capsize. And Dogen was sitting on the deck, and he chanted the last verse, the verse closing of chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra devoted to the Bodhisattva of Compassion. It's a chant we do occasionally, the Universal Gateway of Kamsa and Bodhisattva. So he chanted that and eventually the turbulence of the sea calmed down and he had a vision of, and this is another particular, sometimes there's 33 different forms of of this bodhisattva in the lotus sutra. So this is all part, all of these images refer to aspects of our bodhisattva, you know, we could say myths or old stories, teaching stories.

[19:27]

We don't have to take all of these literally, but anyway, the story is that this bodhisattva appeared on the water. And this particular image of Kanon is called One Leaf Kanon. So if you look later, you can see that there's Kanon sitting on a leaf on the ocean. And the story is that Dogen inscribed this image that he saw onto the deck of the boat. And when they landed at this temple that I was at, The priest there eventually took a rubbing of that and made an image of that. And in 1243, the year before Dogen, just in the year before Dogen moved from Kyoto to Eheji in the north, this priest went to Kyoto because Dogen was becoming well-known by then. And Dogen has supposedly inscribed the poem, which is on the top, which says, Roughly one petal is the Tathagata, is the Buddha.

[20:37]

Each, no, wait a second. I'm getting it a little bit wrong. No, each flower is five petals. Each petal is one Buddha or Tathagata dedicated to carrying And then there's a name, Zenzai, which is Sudhana in Sanskrit, which is a particular bodhisattva from the Flower Ornament Sutra. Anyway, something about carrying him on his way. And then the last three lines are, the last two lines are the date The 1243 in the last line says, Shaman Dogen inscribed this. So it's supposed to be Dogen's writing. And probably it's not, actually. But I like the story anyway. So they gave us copies of this at this temple. So I had it framed, and now it's the one I've done. And anyway, this is a story about calling on the spirit of compassion at dangerous times.

[21:44]

And this response. As the Jewel Mary Samadhi we chanted, it says, drumming and singing come up together. So this sense of calling on the bodhisattva. Now the bodhisattvas, you know, bodhisattvas like Hanon and another one I'm going to get to, you know, are in popular Asian Buddhism are considered spirits who are out there to help us. you know, like we might call on saints in some Western religions. But also, they're understood as parts of us, too. So to call on the Bodhisattva of compassion in difficult situations, to remember compassion at such times. And it may not actually miraculously help us, despite what it says in the Universal Gateway of Kamsa on Bodhisattva, but it can't hurt. So just to remember kindness when we're feeling some urgency is the spirit that's represented by that image.

[22:56]

So again, I could say a lot more about it, but I won't. I'm going to say a little bit about what's on the altar and then open this for discussion. Again, each of these visual expressions of dharma You know, it's just pointing to emptiness. So we could actually take everything down. And there are some Zen teachers in America who don't have any images and no Buddhas. Toni Packer is probably the most notable. She won't mention the word Buddha, but she's a Zen teacher. Joko Beck was also somewhat like this. But, you know, in our tradition, we welcome all the profusion of the flowers of dharma and visual expressions. So we have a Buddha at the center of our altar, and I'll come back and talk about him a little bit. But to my left, right there, and maybe you can't see it, Casey, but there's a standing image of Bodhidharma, who's the legendary founder of Chan in China.

[24:03]

And there's a lot of stories about him. He's a great legendary figure. And there's so many tall tales about him that for quite a while, modern scholars thought he never really existed. In the last 10 or 20 years, they're going to admit that, yes, there was some guy named Bodhidharma. Some of the stories are clearly false, like he said, well, I saw the cave in China where he sat for nine years, supposedly, in the snow. There's lots of wonderful stories about him. Well, I'll tell one. It's the first story in the Zen, Blue Cliff Records, one of the great Zen koan collections. He went to South China and was in the kingdom of, a small kingdom, and the king there, the emperor there, Emperor Wu, was a very famous Buddhist patron and had built many temples and ordained many monks and arranged for many translations. So a lot of the sutras talk about all the merit that you get from doing that.

[25:06]

And so the emperor said to Bodhidharma, what merit have I gained by all of this? And he said, no merit. And the emperor said to Bodhidharma, oh, what? He was taking it back. He said, what is the highest meaning of the sacred truth? And Bodhidharma said, that's emptiness, nothing holy. And then he split. And the emperor was perplexed and asked his Buddhist minister, who was that guy? And the minister said, oh, don't you know that was the Bodhisattva? Kan Guanyin, Avalokiteshvara, the same Bodhisattva of compassion, come to spread the Dharma in China. Historically, when Bodhidharma came to China in around the 400s, already there was very developed Buddhism in China and Chinese Buddhism. And there were very fine Chinese Buddhist schools and translations and so forth, but Bodhidharma and early Chan or Zen emphasized not getting rid of the theory, but going beyond words and letters to bring it into experience.

[26:25]

So that's the kind of tone and culture of Chan. Anyway, Bodhidharma is an image of that, and that particular statue that's on our altar, I went in 2007 on a tour of Buddhist temples in China, and one of the people on the tour was a fellow from my old sangha in the Bay Area. he purchased that for a temple. That's from Kongshan Temple, empty gate, empty form temple, where Bodhidharma taught, and that's made from cypress wood, and it was there at that temple. So anyway, that's Bodhidharma, and he's on our altar. On the other side of the altar, the colorful doohickeys there, thing there, came from Chinatown in Chicago, and it's an image of the Dragon Gate. So our temple is called Ancient Dragon Zen Gate.

[27:25]

Do you all know the story of the Dragon Gate? Do you all know about the Dragon Gates? No? Okay, good, so I can tell the story. So the story is an ancient Chinese story that there is in one of these deep rivers in China, number of very huge rivers, There's a gate, and any fish that comes to that gate, if they swim through it, they become a dragon. And you can see, if you look at that later when you come around afterwards, you can see that there's this gate and there's a fish kind of hanging out by the gate, you know, not sure. And maybe that's the best thing, just to be a fish by the gate, by the dragon gate. But also you'll see that there's a fish that's gone through the gate and that's ready to rise up as a dragon above the gate. So, you know, We have this temple named Ancient Dragon Zen Gate. And I kind of, you know, I can't prove it scientifically, but I kind of think there's a dragon gate in Lake Michigan too.

[28:34]

So anyway, here we are. So there's the Buddha, and then there's the little image, the littler image in front of the Buddha, which Will and Mike and Jeremy probably can't see, but that's another different bodhisattva, Manjushri. So on the sides we have the bodhisattva of compassion and kindness. This is the bodhisattva of wisdom. And traditionally in Zen temples, Manjushri sits at the center of zentos, of meditation halls, to represent wisdom, to represent So this image of Manjushri, you can look at it later, is sitting on a lion, and that's very traditional. Often Manjushri sits on a lion to represent the fierceness of Zen wisdom. And sometimes he carries a sword to cut through delusion.

[29:35]

In this case, he carries a teaching scepter like this to represent the teaching. Manjushri himself is very calm and youthful and yet represents wisdom which in Buddhism and in Bodhisattva way means insight into emptiness, or we could say into oneness, into the ways in which we are all the same, or there's great commonality. Whereas the bodhisattva of compassion represents appreciating the diversity and all the particular differences and acting skillfully to help different kinds of being. Manjushri represents just one. So anyway, that's the bodhisattva of insider wisdom. And it's traditional for him to be in the center of the altar.

[30:36]

This zenda was also a Buddha hall, because we do our ceremonies, as you just saw here. And that's the Buddha. And the platform he's sitting on is called a Sumeru platform. Often Buddhists sit on a lotus pedestal. This pedestal, when my teacher was here, he thought that Buddha should be higher, so he suggested a Sumeru pedestal, which Mount Sumeru was, according to Buddhist myth, maybe connected with Mount Kailash in Tibet, but said to be the center, the axial center of just not just the world, but the universe. And of course, we know that Earth is no longer, is not the center of the universe, but they didn't know that back then. Anyway, so he's sitting up on, so he's the center of the temple, really. And that's Shakyamuni on the top there, although my friend Gene Reeves, when he was here, was saying, well, maybe he really looks like Amida. But we had an eye-opening ceremony and dedication for this Ashakyamuni Buddha.

[31:42]

Anyway, there's much more I could say about each of those things, and we're almost out of time. We have a little bit of time before tea and cookies. So does anybody have any questions or comments about visual dharma in general or about any of the particular things I've talked about tonight? Please feel free. Jeremy, I'll pull you in next. So you said at the beginning of your Dharma talk that kind of like the, I think what you're getting to, I've heard you say this before, is the statue is kind of like something we can imitate and sit on. Something we can imitate and sit on Buddha. Yeah. I was hoping you would comment on this comment I had heard during your Dharma talk on Goji. I'll be paraphrasing the whole thing, but essentially he said that somebody had seen the Buddha sitting in a statue and he's basically saying that the sitting posture came from a very natural evolution of just sitting, that kind of thing.

[32:59]

But at the same time, our bodies are not all like that. To find a seat of joyful ease, we need to find our own posture. Absolutely. So it's not that you had, so, you know, we have a whole tradition here. It's not that we're trying, that we can't be Japanese or Chinese or Indian. As Americans, whether we're Indian American or Japanese American or Chinese American, it doesn't matter. We have to find a way to, a new way to express this that makes sense for us in our culture, in our lives, in our causes and conditions. So the tradition is not something that you kind of try to copy exactly. It can't be done. But it's a guideline. And practically speaking, yes. So this Buddha is sitting in full lotus. And I don't know if anybody here is sitting in full lotus. I used to once upon a time. Can't anymore.

[33:59]

And it's not even necessary to sit cross-legged. It's fine to sit kneeling, like Daniel's doing. It's fine to sit in a chair, and people do that here. There are many ways. The point is, though, that what he demonstrates is this yogic position of upright and relaxed. And it's true that it takes a while to find your own seat, you know, depending on how higher how hard the cushion is, how far back or forward you sit. It takes a while to find your position of what's sometimes called royal ease. And also, if you do a longer sitting, it's advisable to change positions sometimes during that. So the point is, though, that this is one model of upright sitting.

[35:03]

And so we find our way of copying how the Buddha sits. There's a statue. I myself came to Buddhism, not solely, but in very large part, through seeing Buddha images. And there's a statue of Jizo in Kyoto that I love. Jizo's a different bodhisattva who protects children and ghosts, and particularly protects people and beings in hell. We have an image of Jizo standing, a large painting in the kitchen of Jizo. We have two images of Jizo out front here. The earth womb bodhisattva. But there's this one statue at this temple in Kyoto that I really love because it kind of taught me how to breathe. Just seeing this Bodhisattvas sitting cross-legged. There's something about, it's by a great sculptor named Unke, who lived at the same time as Dogen. Anyway, I can't go on about that. But anyway, we have some model of what it's like to be present and upright through these images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Paul, you had a comment or question?

[36:06]

At the start of your talk, you made a First you used the word art and then you changed it to visual dharma. I was wondering where the, I guess where visual dharma starts and stops and where you would say visual art starts and stops, or what is the difference? business is not what I'm talking about. You know, I'm not talking about formal standards of art. You know, I actually, you know, Zazen, as I say very often, Zazen is about supporting your own creative artistic expressions in the world. Zazen is about connecting in a very deep way with the source of creativity. So, you know, it's not that I'm against art at all. But I wanted to use the word visual dharma because it's not merely, you know, paintings or pictures or artistic pieces.

[37:09]

These are dharma expressions. But of course, art and music and poetry and, you know, all kinds of creative expressions are part of expressing this awareness that we connect with in zazen and can be helpful for others to find that for themselves. So the Bodhisattva way is about inspiring others to help them find their own way to enter into the path of awakening. And art can be a wonderful part of that. Time for maybe one more comment or question. Ben? I have to ask, why did you agree to sleep there with Amida Buddha? Well, technically, I'm not sure. Technically, one way that Amida Buddha, one of the differences is that Amida Buddha sits like this, with this mudra.

[38:15]

And it's really hard to tell. It might be that mudra that this Buddha has. And Shakyamuni often is shown like this, with his fingers touching the ground to witness. So the story about that is that when the Buddha was sitting up all night to become the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, the spirit of Mara, or temptation, said, well, who are you to be the Buddha? And he just touched the ground, and the earth goddess, or the earth witness, oh yeah, this is the Buddha. I think the image of Shakyamuni that's on the altar in the kitchen is like that, touching the ground. But Buddha is Buddha. It's OK if it's not Buddha. Let me ask Bernie. Yes, Daniel. What was it you mentioned earlier in the context of the piece over there, the writing, and you said it was the greatest work, or maybe it was in the context, perhaps, of the year?

[39:17]

Oshobo Genzo, Dogen's True Dharma, I Treasure It, which has 95 different essays in it, several of which I've translated. Yeah, so Ehei Dogen is the 13th century founder of this branch of Zen, and so we have a painting and some calligraphy supposedly by him over there, and this is a painting inspired by him.

[39:45]

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