Good evening, everyone. So yesterday we had an all-day sitting and began our spring practice period for two months. We're going to be focusing for these two months, whether you're formally doing the practice period or not, we're going to be talking about the practice of suchness, of just this, of just meeting this reality. And we're doing that through stories about Dongshan, or Chozan in Japanese, the Chinese founder of this tradition of practice that we do. He lived in the 9th century in China. And I'll be reading some from my new book, Just This Is It, Dongshan and the Practice of Suchness. So I spoke yesterday about kind of the fundamental story about self and non-self and suchness in which Dongshan's teacher said to him as he was departing and asked what was his teacher's fundamental dharma, fundamental teaching.

[01:18]

And he said, just this is it, just this. So our practice is to sit and face the wall and be present and upright and learn to again and again just return to this, just this is it. And Dong Shan said, after he'd heard this and had left and was crossing his dream and saw his reflection, he said, he realized, it now is me, I now am not it. So there's this very subtle relationship between reality, universal reality, suchness, just this, and each of us. the self. So, it now is you, you now are not it. So, our limited self is not it, and yet, everything that arises right now, we are part of. So, we are not separate from the ultimate and the universal, even though our usual way of conceptualizing and discriminating

[02:28]

and seeing things as objects and objectifying things as things gets in the way of that. So through the two months I'll be returning to that story, but there are, in the book I have 11 different stories about Dongshan, either when he was a student or most of them when he was, later on when he was a teacher. And the story I wanted to talk about this evening One of the koans or teaching stories about Dongshan has to do with a white rabbit. So the basic story from the Book of Serenity koan collection has to do with when Dongshan was wandering around on pilgrimage with his elder Dharma brother, Senmi, and there's numbers of stories about the two of them.

[03:30]

And as they were walking on the pilgrimage, suddenly a white rabbit darted across their path. And suddenly he said, how swift. Dongshan asked him what he meant. How so? So he said, just like a commoner becoming a high minister. Dongshan responded, how can such a venerable person as you speak like that? suddenly asked Dongshan for his understanding, and he said, after generations of nobility temporarily fallen into poverty. So that's the whole story. But there are many ways to look at this. So this is in the book of Serenity Cohen collection, and there's various commentaries there, and I want to talk about what this is referring to. So we can understand this in various ways. And so there was this white rabbit, but also other things are going on.

[04:36]

So somebody claimed that the rabbit was just like a commoner becoming a high minister. So they're really talking about approaches to practice, how we meet just this. And this has to do with what's sometimes called sudden awakening. Somebody said that the white rabbit was just like a commoner becoming a high minister. This implies the path of cultivation of a deluded person, achieving elevated wisdom through great exertion. And this is often thought of in terms of self-improvement. So we all think that way sometimes. We think that if we just practice, eventually, even though we can see how common we are, often, eventually, you know, we'll become like maybe a high minister, we can become elevated. This is a very common way of thinking about practice. So in many spiritual and cultural traditions, eminence and achievement are often seen as the outcome after long, arduous struggle.

[05:46]

And this, traditionally in Buddhism, is in the Theravada path and early in the Bodhisattva Mahayana path as well, where it's talked of in terms of many, many lifetimes of arduous practice, and eventually one can become swift and elegant like this white rabbit. So, Dongshan's understanding of this, though, is very different. He says, after generations of nobility temporarily fallen into poverty, This implies that such eminence is a facet of inalienable, inherent Buddha nature, not some attainment of a new status or some spiritual social climbing. The upright nobility of a Buddha's awareness and kindness is a birthright already present, not some new state that we need to discover or achieve through great effort. generations of nobility temporarily fallen into poverty.

[06:54]

There is this temporary fall into poverty, and in some ways this is a necessary aspect of, and even a definition of, the bodhisattva way of life. Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings determined to help realize universal liberation, to help free all beings. So we say the bodhisattva vows at the end of our discussions and dharma talks, as we will tonight. But part of what the Bodhisattva does is to be present with all beings, with suffering beings especially, to be in the world of suffering, in the ordinary world, as we are in this storefront out there streets of Chicago and the ordinary world, and we all go out into that and do what we can to encourage ourselves and others.

[07:58]

But in many ways, bodhisattvas become impoverished spiritually, if not also materially, just so they can reenact and exemplify an awakening as an encouragement to others. So, this story has a few references to the Lotus Sutra, which we've talked about sometimes here. Gene Reeves, the great translator of the Lotus Sutra, has spoken here a number of times. There's a number of stories about this temporarily falling into poverty. But the point is that there's this original nobility. So this is a way of talking, a kind of metaphor for this Buddha nature, this capacity that we all have already, right now. Right around your seat, there is this capacity that is, in East Asian Buddhist thought, considered part of the nature of reality, but certainly something that each of us can realize.

[09:11]

To just be present and upright and insightful and kind. But there's this temporarily falling into poverty, which is a reference to the prodigal son story in the Lotus Sutra, different from the prodigal son in the Western Bible. So the story goes that there was a father and a son who got separated and the son wandered around and became destitute, whereas the father became very wealthy. And one day the son was wandering and happened to come in front of the estate of the father, and the father immediately recognized his son. and send out some assistants to bring him in. But seeing this wealthy, eminent person, this man in front of his mansion, the son was frightened and ran away.

[10:13]

So the father understood the humble son's shame and dread and sent his assistants, disguised as lowly menial workers, to find him and invited him to come and take a job on the estate, shoveling dung in the fields. After a while, when the son felt comfortable with this job, the father had his assistants steadily give the son more responsibility. And after a long period of time, eventually, gradually, the son was managing the whole estate. When his father finally was about to pass away, he called for all of his friends and the noble citizens of the city, and announced to them, and to the son, that this really was his son, that they were separated long before, but that now all of my wealth belongs entirely to my son. And the sutra goes on to say very explicitly that the very original man is like the Buddha and that we are all like Buddha's children. So this is a way of talking in Bodhisattva Buddhism that we are sons and daughters of children of the Buddha.

[11:22]

We are part of the Buddha's family. And this had a particular significance historically and sociologically in China and Japan and India because monks were considered home leavers. in China where ancestry, veneration, and family was extremely important as a value. Leaving home and leaving one's family ancestry was seen as becoming a child of Buddha. So there's that implication too. Anyway, what the story... exemplifies is exactly what Dongshan was talking about. After generations of nobility, temporarily fallen into poverty, like the prodigal son, who didn't realize that he, you know, thought he had to shovel shit for a long time before he was willing to, to be, before he was ready to realize that he also was

[12:27]

had this treasure of the Buddha nature. So realizing underlying awakening requires the hard work of seeing through habitual views and grasping. Manual labor or hard work is necessary in Bodhisattva practice. And the immediacy of generations of nobility and suchness does not negate the work of ethical conduct, and on the necessity of practicing in accord with precepts and engaging in helpful rather than harmful activity. So the whole idea of accomplishment that we usually have is what Sumi was referring to. Now, of course, this seems like a stretch just about a white rabbit, but I'll come back to that. So there's other stories that are like this. There's a story There's a few other stories in the Lotus Sutra that refer to this, too.

[13:31]

There's a complicated one about the daughter of the Dragon King who comes and immediately becomes a Buddha, which was very radical because, first of all, she wasn't really human. She was a dragon. And she was only a little girl. And also, she was female, which in patriarchal early Buddhism was kind of considered outrageous. But that's a story in the Lotus Sutra that she became a Buddha very quickly. There's another story that's sort of referenced in this story about two friends who were up late drinking, one of them very wealthy or affluent, the other one And he had to go leave, and his front friend was kind of asleep or drunk or whatever. And the host sewed a jewel into the robe, into the coat of his friend.

[14:34]

And the friend left and wandered around and also became destitute. And they met up again some years later. And the host, the former host said, what's happened to you? You have this rich, this treasure. And showed him that he was basically had this jewel in his clothing, in his pocket, so to speak, already. So the point is that there is this, in this way of understanding that Dongshan is exemplifying in the story, it's not that we may feel unworthy, and part of our practice is engaging in, part of suchness is engaging in and recognizing our own habits and patterns of grasping and greed and anger and frustration and so forth. And so, you know, it's maybe natural to think, oh, no, I can't be a child of Buddha.

[15:35]

But what we do, sitting upright like this, is to, with this body and mind, formulate the Buddha sitting in the center of the room, sits upright calmly. And through doing this practice regularly, this affects influences our being in a way that we don't always necessarily realize, but gradually we can see that actually this was here from the very beginning. So it's like T.S. Eliot returning to the place where you started and knowing it for the first time. So there are various aspects of this story. Throughout many of the stories about Dongshan, there are several others also that deal with this idea of accomplishment through great effort and through stages of practice. And Dongshan is pretty strong about this practice not being a matter of stages of accomplishment.

[16:43]

And that's kind of hard for us to see because We're used to thinking that way, of progressing and passing from one grade to the next, and graduating high school and going to college, and then a number of people in this room going on to get advanced degrees and so forth. And we think that that's how our spiritual progress would be, too. Dongshan very strongly undercuts that in numbers of stories, the whole idea of the path. There are ways of seeing the path as stages of accomplishment, and there are various systems in Buddhism and other spiritual traditions that do that. And those can be useful for some people, like the Prodigal Son. But the basic practice of suchness for Dongshan is just this. are expressing that in some way.

[17:49]

So, again, this is very subversive to our usual way of thinking. So, going back to this white rabbit, what's going on with this white rabbit? You know, these stories, we don't know the historical There was nobody there to photograph Dongshan crossing the stream. Some academic scholars now think these stories were concocted later, several centuries later in the Song. Well, maybe they were elaborated. We don't really know the history, but that's OK. We still have these stories of Dongshan. And it's possible that these were oral transmitters and that they were literally true, but also there's all in these columns, there's always both a literal and a metaphoric kind of aspect. So the white rabbit, you know, in the, in the West, I think, you know, I checked this and I think it goes back to Norse mythology or maybe Plutarch.

[19:02]

We see a man So I don't know how many of you have seen the man in the moon. But actually, in East Asia, they see a white rabbit in the moon. And since I've heard this, when I look at the full moon, I can see that rabbit. I don't know if any of you have seen that before, seen the rabbit in the moon. So if you think of it this way, what's happening in this story is that there was a white rabbit. across the path as Sangmi and Dongshan were wandering. And this represents the moon, and the moon in Asian imagery, when they talk about the moon, usually it's the round, full moon, unless they're specifically talking about crescent moons. And so this white rabbit represented

[20:04]

the full moon and wholeness and enlightenment, running light in front of them. So looking at the story that way, it may be more clear. Some may say, oh, just like a commoner becoming a high minister. And there's a number of stories where Dongshan kind of criticizes his elder Dharma brother for saying things that Immature, put it that way. Anyway, suddenly that says, after generations of nobility, temporarily fallen into poverty. So, how can we see this temporarily fallen into poverty? One modern context for this is a 19th century fable that probably many of you know, by a man named Lewis Carroll. And in that story, there's a white rabbit, and there's a young girl named Alice, and the white rabbit leads Alice to dive down a very deep hole.

[21:15]

This white rabbit, too, is quite elegant, wearing a waistcoat with a pocket watch, holding white kid gloves, and also very swift. So this word is swift in the original Koan in Chinese also means eminent or elegant, swift in, you know, the way we sometimes use swift as a metaphor. But the White Rabbit is saying, oh dear, oh dear, I shall be late, too late. And this anxiety about the time might be maybe more a reflection of a commoner becoming a high minister, working it, trying to, you know, get somewhere. Toiling to purify himself with great effort. over time. But perhaps Dongshan's White Rabbit was, after generations of nobility temporarily fallen into poverty. And, you know, it's interesting that the White Rabbit that crossed Alice's path dived into a hole.

[22:19]

And then she followed, unhesitatingly. She just, okay. Diving down the hole after the white rabbit, she must fall into distress in order to discover herself in a wonderland where things become curiouser and curiouser. All conventional sense of logic and proportion has fallen far away. So, just as our logic and sense of proportion are transformed in the depiction of wondrous Buddha fields and pure lands in the Mahayana tradition. So a 20th century version of this White Rabbit story is from a 1967 anthem called White Rabbit by Grace Slick. And some of you are too young to know who Grace Slick was, but she sang for the Jefferson Airplane. And there's a line in this White Rabbit song that says, one pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small.

[23:22]

And the ones that Mother gives you don't do anything at all. So, what does this have to do with our practice? Well, in the path of cultivation for commoners working to become eminent, some practices make you larger, providing a lofty perspective that may lead to self-inflation. And some practices make you small. either via a narrow focus of concentration or through the humbling awareness of one's self-centeredness, of one's limited self. But from Dongshan's viewpoint of the foundational generations of nobility and the stark immediacy of suchness, maybe the practice that Buddha gives you also doesn't do anything at all. So it's not about this practice. This is hard to hear for a lot of people because we want something to do. So I can give you particular meditation instructions to follow your breath and listen to sounds or various mantras or teaching stories or koans that you can work on.

[24:29]

But really, it's just this. in just this right now. So, for Dongshan, Dongshan's Buddha simply reminds the practitioner of our inner uprightness, our inner dignity and nobility, this intrinsic awakening, which of course we need to allow to unfold and develop. So, So this is one story from Dongshan about just this and how we meet this reality that's already here. So I could say more about all that, but I want to pause and just allow some time for comments or questions or responses. Anyone have any white rabbit stories?

[25:31]

Please feel free. Bill? Speaking of just this, I have a Jack Cassidy bass that I bought at the Haight-Ashbury Music Center. Cool. So I was wondering when Jefferson Airplane was going to come into this. There you go. So Jack Cassidy was the bass player for the airplane and the Starship, I think. Yeah, he's still around playing music, isn't he? One practice makes you larger, one practice makes you small. It doesn't mean anything at all. It's a very uncommon... You know, just we've seen Jack Cassidy recently with a band called Hot Tuna. Oh, Hot Tuna, yes. Cool. So I have a bunch of old rock references on this book.

[26:36]

Yes, Barb. I don't have anything to say about Jack Cassidy, but I have a question. I'm trying to understand the falling from grace, the white rabbit. Is that it? Falling from grace? Temporarily falling? Well, grace fell into it in the hitch to her song. Oh, that was it, yeah. In any case, he's fallen from somewhere. But at one point, it was this venerated being of some sort. Is that correct? Well, it's the idea that the background is all these generations of ancestors, these noble ancestors. And that when we sit, we connect with this inner dignity. And the teaching provides us with these generations. That's already here in our sitting. That's already here in the germ of it, just in the inclination to first come to practice.

[27:40]

This bodhicitta, this sense of wanting to live in an upright, kind, true way. We look for something to help us and to remember something that's already here. That's the way that Dongshan thinks about it, rather than we have to work to get something new. Does that make sense? I'm not sure I got to your question. I'm still trying to figure out how the light on it had fallen. I'm very confused. Well, you know, part of the Bodhisattva idea is to totally be common. Bodhisattvas, you know, the Bodhisattva figures that we venerate, that we have images of, and so forth, seem very shiny and sparkly and magical and all that.

[28:48]

But really, the Bodhisattvas are just common people, and that's how they're thought of in Asia. who express kindness. So, I've encountered bodhisattvas as bus drivers or cashiers at grocery stores or, you know, just ordinary people who are just there in presence and kind. But we do, as Bodhisattva practitioners, fall into impoverishment, spiritually, materially, whatever way, we think that we're unworthy. And sometimes bodhisattvas have to, are actually fooled by this and actually become, you know, low class or whatever, whatever that means. And then, you know, our practice, we gradually see this inner dignity. But it's necessary to sometimes, in order to demonstrate awakening,

[29:56]

necessary, it seems to feel like we are deluded. So they're not really so separate, this delusion and awakening. In the story about Just This Is It, Dong Xuan says, I am not it, it now is me. And there's a line in Dogen's Genjo Koan that kind of comments on that, where he says, Carrying the self forward to experience the myriad things is delusion, which is what we usually do. This is our usual way of being. We project ourselves onto the world and onto things. So that's delusion. Awakening is that myriad things come forth and experience themselves, which is, it now is me. which is the it of suchness, of the universal. That's the side of awakening.

[31:01]

That's not something out there. We are part of that. So this is what I was talking about yesterday. We have a context and a responsibility to suchness, to awakening, to all beings. But, you know, it takes sometimes a lot of work to just realize that. It's something that was there from the very beginning. That's the generations of nobility. So, I don't know if that helps at all. It does, yeah. Yes, Claire? On the same question, this for me echoes a chant that we used to do, which is Hakuman in praise of Zazen. Wonderful chant, yeah. Like a child of rich birth, wandering poor on this earth, we endlessly circle the six worlds. It's the same thing there, that we are already complete, but we don't realize it.

[32:02]

This world, as it stands in superior lotus land, we have everything that we could possibly can't see it. So the temporary falling into poverty, the way he works it there, seems to me to be just another aspect of the same. Yes, and Hakuin, great Japanese master who was the founder of modern Japanese Rinzai Zen, like Dogen, who founded our tradition, both very much esteemed the Lotus Sutra, where this is a prodigal son story. So, yeah, and here we see it in Dongshan, or applied in Dongshan. So, yeah, and I think this applies you know, to us as a whole, and we've fallen into distress and, you know, climate change, and there are rationing water in California, and yet there's enough to take care of all our needs actually.

[33:15]

I've mentioned it a while ago, but there's this wonderful website that the actor Mark Ruffalo was involved with and some Stanford professors that shows how each state has enough sustainable energy resources to fulfill all of its energy needs. And yet we've fallen into this distress. So maybe humanity after generations of struggle will realize what you said, that you have enough on this planet. Other comments, questions about this way of thinking of practice? It's really subversive to our usual way of thinking. Yes, Juan. Yes. After generations of nobility falling into poverty.

[34:18]

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So once you're, so if you stay within and you focus your attention and practice on the body, through the successful, through the experiences, yes, then you're pretty, you're safe, you're in good hands there, there's awareness there, which you can be steady with, but if you fall into the hole, so to speak, and you look out, and you're just distracted by myriads of Yes, so in his verse, after he looked into the stream, echoing what you said, Dongshan, in this fundamental story, said, just don't seek from others or you'll be far astray as yourself.

[35:34]

which is like, don't separate from the skin bag here and now. I now go on along, but everywhere I meet it. It now is me, I now am not it. One must understand in this way to merge with suchness. And just don't separate from the skin bag here and now. But there's another dynamic going on in this story of the prodigal son or, well, in the bodhisattva idea anyway. that, yes, as you say, the basic orientation, one of the basic instructions for Zazen is to give a longer version of it. Take the backward step that turns the light inwardly to illuminate the self. It's turning within. So in our Zazen, sitting facing the wall, facing ourselves, upright, present, in this suchness, we pay attention to our own experience. And that's really important.

[36:36]

That's, in some sense, the starting point of real practice. Part of the idea in the Lotus Sutras, though, is that then after we feel grounded enough, when the prodigal son is confident enough, he can take on, or the prodigal daughter in a non-patriarchal context, can take on the whole the whole estate can take on taking care of a wider field. So the Bodhisattva ideas starts with turning the light within. Actually, the Song of the Grasshoppers says, turn the light within and then just return. So there's also this returning to the marketplaces sometimes said in the Oxford pictures, just, you know, step out from the temple onto Irving Park Road or onto the L or wherever we're going. And so then one implication of this is that how do we share that awareness of suchness which we start to not just think about but feel in a visceral way when we turn within.

[37:53]

How do we express that or share that in our everyday activity? with our friends and family. So this is the long-term work, and it's a lifetime work. It's not about having some sudden experience of, you know, some flashy experience of realization and then we're finished. It's how do we take care of the world around us, in a way that's helpful in kind. But then we also have to keep coming back and turning within, as you were saying, to see this context. But we are a part of everything. That's the it-now-is-me. That this suchness also includes us. So, each in our own way. And each of us has our own approach to this. So it's sort of time to stop, but if anybody has a last comment.

[38:54]

Okay, we'll close with, before Gordy starts with ours, I'm going to extend the last page if we can. I vow to free them, indulgence are insoluble. I vow to end them, darkness are boundless. I vow to enter them, but earth's way is unsurpassable. I vow to realize it. Beings are countless. I vow to free them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are endless. I vow to enter them.

[40:01]

Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to realize it. Beings are no less. I vow to free them. Delusions are extraordinal. I vow to end them. Dharmadists are boundless. I vow to enter them. The devil's way is unsurpassable, I vow to be a martyr.

[40:43]

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