So before I begin the substantive part of my talk, just to say, just to acknowledge how much detail and complexity goes into doing this hybrid format that we're working on on Saturdays. When it works, it seems seamless and really easy and sometimes behind the curtains it's a little wild. But thank you all for helping with this and for bearing with it because it enables us to actually have a very wide field at a time when, once again, the COVID virus is ramping up, and people that we know are getting it, and we're trying to be careful.

[01:16]

And, you know, I'll confess, I was thinking last week, you know, or 10 days ago, I was thinking, well, we're doing really well, and let's see maybe a At the end of the practice period, we can stop doing our monitoring and we can sit in the Zendo unmasked and... No, not ready yet. So we just really take it as it comes and do our best. And I just really appreciate the thoughtfulness and effort everyone is making. And that particularly goes to Gary, who's been very present. And all of us making effort to create a sense of spaciousness for Gary, as if she saw that this is a mutual activity.

[02:21]

So it's really special. It's a special time. It's not necessarily the time we would choose, but this is what we've been talking about, the setting for the Lotus Sutra that we've been studying in the practice period. The setting is this world, the Saha world, where we are bound to endure all kinds of challenges and difficulties. So thank you all. Let's see if this works right. This is gonna start with a sound. Let's see if I can do it.

[03:23]

Does anyone know what that is? Yes, it's a mourning dove. Susan, I thought it was an owl. Susan corrected me, and then I started looking around. So, let me read you a poem. that I wrote. Can't you hear those lonesome doves? Yes, I hear them, morning doves calling to each other, one east, one west, one higher in pitch, one a little lower, two moons,

[05:37]

in the mind's sky while we sit at dawn. Morning light pierces the dark curtain, and these enchanting visitors speak sweet turning words. Right now, I am nothing but the dove's call. lost in a moment outside of time. So, I think right around the beginning of April, I was sitting here in the morning and morning zazen, which is very peaceful and quiet. And I heard these two birds.

[06:42]

One seemed to be on that side of the zendo, and one seemed to be on that side of the zendo. And they were calling in this way. This went on for much of the period of zazen. And I was just, what can I say? I was just really struck. It's like I really heard them. They really, they reached down to the bottom of my mind. It was very wonderful, not a particularly earth-shaking experience, just a really normal, You know, I've been reflecting on it since then.

[07:49]

So I've been sitting here now for nearly 38 years. I never heard them before. I'm sure they were there the whole time. And I never heard them. It reminds me, I think there's something that Ross said in a talk, might have been a couple of years ago, where he was walking up the block and he saw the cypress tree in the, you know, on the curb outside where Mark lives. And I think you said, you never saw it before. And then, then I walked up the block. And, you know, thanks to Ross's alert, and I saw it, and now I see it. Now I see it every time. And now when I'm sitting here, I can be, or walking down the block the other day, I was coming back from Lori and the walk Lori and I had taken.

[09:06]

I hear the morning doves everywhere. So this is actually just such a wonderful awakening in the context of her practice to really hear something. And it reminds me also of another experience I had like this, which was Wow, it was like 35 years ago. Sitting at Okioji, which is the Minnesota Zen Center's country place on the border of, I guess, Minnesota and Iowa, near the Mississippi River.

[10:06]

Is that right? I think. And you were sitting there at night and the zendo there was, it was kind of like a yurt. It had walls and it had then a kind of tent roof. And sitting at night, you know, the wind came up and you could hear the tent cords kind of snapping in the wind. It was like, you know, it was like being on a big sailboat in the the wind whipping through the cords. And it was just a moment of really hearing. So this is really important dimension of our practice.

[11:09]

It's a way of practicing shikantaza. Just hearing. Not even listening, just hearing. To open one's senses. And I think of Chikantaza as a kind of very broad receptivity, where all of your senses are functioning. They're not reaching out to draw things in, but they're functioning and they're open. And, you know, we strike this balance. It's just like the balance in our posture that Sojin Roshi is always speaking about, of having the strength of our uprightness

[12:14]

and yet having complete flexibility that there's not a rigidity to it. And in this sense, it's listening deeply or hearing deeply, but also hearing lightly. And this is just to say, this is what I've been trying to practice for the last I guess the last couple of years just sit here and open, particularly open my sense of hearing and see what comes up or what doesn't come up, which is also hearing. I'll talk about that in a little. Actually, let me suggest wherever you are, whether you're in the Zendo or you're online, right now, let's just try it for 60 seconds.

[13:37]

Just open your hearing. What did you hear?

[14:46]

Say what they heard. Anyone hear, Asando? BART train. Yeah, I hear that too. And it's amazing, the BART train, so it's about three, four blocks, and it's under the ground, right? Yeah, anything else? Yeah. electric car reversing. What about any of you out there? I heard my wind chimes. An airplane taking off. I can hear the puppy chewing on something to keep her from barking. So it's not loud, but it's loud enough. So this is a wonderful... The refrigerator. Yeah, the refrigerator.

[15:48]

And, you know, it was the Theravada teacher, Achan Amaro, said, Nirvana is like when the refrigerator switches off. Which is really true. When you think about it, in the middle of the night, when the refrigerator switches off, it's like, ah. And right now, also I hear, now we have in Zindo, I hear the light hum of the air purifiers which are going on. So this is the practice that I, you know, I encourage you to think about. You know, so this is returning to silence, but in a sense, silence is never silent.

[16:50]

And this is also bodhisattva practice. Bodhisattva, Avalokiteshvara, or Kuan Yin, is referred to as the one who sees the cries of the world. So there's a kind of synesthesia there. And I think this is, you know, in a sense, we understand this when we're doing this hearing that we just did, because the sounds appear as sounds, but we're also seeing them as thoughts, as consciousness. And we can do this in the zazen, in the zendo, because it's relatively simple here, it seems.

[18:04]

Whereas in the rest of our day, often we don't stop to really hear or to really see, to hear the sounds, to see the cypress tree. And as I ponder, why didn't I ever hear this in 40 years? And then I can't tell you why I did hear it one day. It's just like, the stone striking the bamboo rake, that tiny sound opens your mind in some way. But the not hearing is interesting to me because of what it points me towards is I didn't hear

[19:10]

because I was self-centered, because I am self-centered, because what I really hear are my thoughts. And what I really see is everything that I'm looking for or that I'm watching out for, that I'm guarded against or moving towards. not seeing what is really appearing, moment by moment appearing to my mind. And this is true, just, I encourage you really to think about this, to think about your practice this way. And you can begin to hone that here, but the real task is to bring it forth into the world, into your everyday activities to create some sense of space, even in the midst of our tasks and our activities.

[20:28]

And of course, this goes as well to our relationships. to our connectedness or lack of connectedness to each other. Suzuki Roshi said in a 1967 lecture, when you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions. You should just listen to them, just observe what his or her way is. we put very little emphasis on right and wrong or good and bad. This is from the standpoint of practice, we put very little emphasis on right and wrong, good and bad. From the standpoint of our self-centered view, we can very quickly arrive at a point where all we see is right and wrong and good or bad.

[21:43]

But from the... when to practice, that's not what we emphasize. We just see things as they are with him or her and accept them. This is how we communicate with each other. So as I was researching this, and kind of looking around to see what the Buddhist perspective on hearing practice is, I came to the Sharangama Sutra, which is one of the major sutras that I don't think we've ever studied it here. Perhaps we should.

[22:45]

And actually, I'm gonna read you something. Bob Rosenbaum, who many of you know, actually has a new book coming out on the Shurangama Sutra. The title is, That Is Not Your Mind. I think we'd have to read it to figure out what that title means. But he tells this story, at the Buddha sitting with the Arhats. And the Buddha instructs Rahula to strike the bell once. Rahula does so, and the bell sounds. And the Buddha asks everyone in the assembly, do you hear? And Ananda and everyone else responds, yes, we hear. The Buddha waits until the sound of the bell dies away and asks, now do you hear?

[23:52]

Ananda and everyone responds, we do not. The Buddha does this three times, asking the same questions each time. Each time he receives the same responses. After the third time, the Buddha asks, why have you given such muddled answers? The listeners protest. What do you mean muddled? When the bell was ringing, we heard it. When the bell wasn't ringing, we didn't hear it. Bob writes, I'll paraphrase the Buddha's reply. You did not clearly distinguish between hearing and sound. You thought you heard the bell when it was ringing and didn't hear it when it wasn't.

[24:54]

In that case, how could you know that the sound had ceased? You had to be able to hear the sound's absence. Your true unconditioned hearing awareness, hearing awareness, includes both sound and silence. It is more fundamental than sound and silence. In other words, the mental functioning of hearing awareness, of hearing consciousness is not dependent upon an object. Or you could say, in the sense of what Buddha was saying, that silence is an object of our hearing. It's the sound of silence.

[26:00]

Make a good song title. This is what you... will hear when you, even when we just did this minute of practice, there were sounds that arose and there were moments when you're hearing, mental activity of hearing was happening and there was no particular sound that you could identify with. I think the, you know, the powerful thing is to extend this to all of our sense, perceptions, and in fact, all of our mental activity.

[27:03]

I will say, you know, and I'm sort of puzzled over this. sometimes there's some very, what seems like very refined instructions or descriptions of the Buddhist practice. You know, for example, this is also in the Strangama Sutra. This is the chapter that relates to Huan Yin, Avlopiteshvara, says, I entered into the stream of the self nature of the sense of hearing, thereby eliminating the sound of what was heard. Now proceeding from this stillness, both sound and silence ceased to arise.

[28:07]

Advancing in this way both hearing and what was heard melted away and vanished. When hearing and what is heard are both forgotten, then the sense of hearing leaves no impression in the mind. When the sense and objects of sense both become empty, then emptiness and sense merge and reach a state of absolute perfection. When emptiness and what is being emptied are both extinguished, then arising and extinction are naturally extinguished. At that point, the absolute emptiness of nirvana became manifest and suddenly I transcended the mundane and super mundane worlds. So my my incomplete awakening has not come to that state.

[29:22]

And I can't say that this is not a really accurate description of kind of awakening that Guan Yin is speaking of. But while I can imagine a state of merging with hearing sound and silence to where the self drops away. But I'm not sure I can imagine the moment where the sound itself drops away.

[30:27]

That's just, that's me. And, you know, I confess my, that I'm just still on that path. But what I do try to do, which is really interesting, and you may try this yourself, while I'm sitting and hearing, I make an effort to hear the sound before I name it. That's, I'm not sure that's something you can actually do. It may be something that happens. And there's some sounds you can't identify because you can't identify, because you have no point of reference for it.

[31:40]

An example of that, Some of you may have experienced that this is an old, this is now an old building. And depending upon the, you know, temperature and expansion, and you know, sometimes you're sitting here and there's this crack. This is also like the pebble against the rake and the go on. It's like a very sudden, sharp sound. And that strikes me before I put a name to it. Just the sharpness, the immediacy of it is that way. But most things, at least I can put the general term, bird,

[32:44]

or dog barking, I may not be able to identify it, but that activity of naming just happens really quickly. And I'm coming to accept that. I'm coming to accept that there's, that's the way one's mind works. And to recognize there are also things that happen that happen, they do happen before you identify them, but you can't be looking for them. As long as you're looking for them, then you're going to be layering in another mental activity. So often we don't look for what's happening in Zazen. Sometimes consciously we're doing something like giving ourselves Zazen instruction.

[33:52]

But sometimes we're just sitting, being receptive and thoughts arise. We don't even necessarily notice them. Sensations, perceptions arise. That was just the crack that I was talking about. Happens all the time. So it's really important not to berate yourself for this process of this almost automatic process of identification. This is the very, really, really fast mental process of like a perception which so quickly zips down into your alaya vizhnyana, your store consciousness to make the identification and then zipping back up to the seventh consciousness, the consciousness that is the

[35:13]

Well, it can zip up to the consciousness that is the I, the I-making machinery, or it can go just to the sixth consciousness where it's just something you hear that's not about you, but so often we make it about ourselves. How can we not make it about ourselves? And how can we not make it about ourselves without judging ourselves for making it about ourselves. The judging is actually egocentric activity. So just hear. Just listen. Just accept. what is coming in through those senses.

[36:16]

Keep those senses open so that you're not sitting here for 40 years when something's going on and you don't hear it. So that you're not walking up the block all these years and missing the Cypress Tree. or the sound of the wind, any of that. This is the training that comes with Shikantaza. This is the training that comes with Arsazen. So with that, I am going to stop and leave time for questions or comments. I hope this Let's point you towards a practice you can do.

[37:19]

So, please start looking in the Zen Do and see if any of you have questions or comments. Mark. Thank you, Rosani. Talk about opening our senses. And the heart tutor says, no eyes, no ears. No nose, no tongue, no sight, sound, smells. How does opening our senses arrive at no sight, no sound? I think that what Sochan was constantly teaching us to include everything. What the Heart Sutra is providing is the other side.

[38:33]

The other side of the traditional practices of really focusing, of mindfulness of these senses. And it's saying, I think including everything includes both eyes and no eyes. Sound and no sound. And I think that's what is no sound. This is the side, I think this is the side that actually Guan Yin is speaking about in the passage that I read. And as I said, I don't disagree with that, but I don't think I can look for it. You know, I think that the no eyes, no ears is just letting things happen without the active

[39:43]

So I think of it as, so when I talk about receptivity, I think of it as seeing but not looking. Hearing but not listening. So there's the receptivity and then there's the activity. And I think my understanding of the heart citrus is pointing us towards that. towards that receptivity rather than the more active practices that might have been part of the methodology of Buddhism before that time. Maybe. Anyhow, thank you. Karen? Isn't there a space between, you hear a sound, and then you talked about naming it.

[40:55]

There's something in between that activity. There's a spaciousness. Yeah, there can be, but Often it's very subtle and very fast. And I can't always locate a space. That's kind of what I'm exploring. I believe that that is, but it's also one of the things that that communicates to me is how powerful the activities of mind and the activities of self are. And, you know, I'm thinking about this a lot. I'll talk about it in the future. Like I've been reading Shinran, thinking about the other power school, you know, and part of the thrust of Shin Buddhism is how much we are caught in this self-making

[42:12]

machinery and you know we may be it posits you know we really can't deal with this it's just happening all the time it's only only the buddhas can give us the space and the grace to hear that that distance and if that happens great but Yeah, I think that it exists, and I'm sure that if they had sensitive enough analytic instruments to use to measure your brainwaves, you would see it. Well, I think that can happen during sashim, for example, or even probably

[43:13]

these stories we read from the Blue Cliff Record, that moment of awakening, but that's, I think Sashin really. Sashin slows down the processes of mind. Really, you know, in a strong Sashin, you know, as it goes on, they really slow down. You can, you know, so you get, you feel, a sense of spaciousness in very much the way a skilled musician is really attuned to the space between notes. That's exactly the same thing. Susan had her hand up and then I need to turn to the, there's a bunch of hands here online. Okay. So, Let's see. I'm seeing Nathan first and let's see if my sound apparatus works.

[44:21]

Thank you. You've spoken about this before and it prompted me when I'm sitting to pay attention to what I'm hearing here in Seattle, the home of Boeing, the airplanes travel over the city and there's a lot of airplane noise. And I have found that there are times I make an effort to separate or I'm not sure it happens before my mind has made that connection or not, but... to hear the noise and to separate it from the idea that there are people traveling or a picture of an airplane and to just hear the qualities of the sound, which is pretty dramatic. Separate it from, oh, it's a plane. And I wonder if that effort is misplaced.

[45:21]

Sometimes it feels as though I can hold off the arrival at the idea and the the shorthand by just listening intently to the sound. But I wonder if that effort is just sort of misplaced and I've missed the boat and the connection was already made and I'm just kind of fooling myself. Well, if the connection is made, that's okay. But I would point out that what I notice is describing those overpassing airplanes, you said noise. So there's a judgment embedded in that, I think. I mean, part of what I, just to say, part of what I hear, and I heard it just as at the end of that minute that we were sitting, there's,

[46:29]

There are airplanes coming over all the time that are landing in Oakland or taking off in Oakland. And I don't hear them as noise. I hear them as sound, and I investigate. I actually listen. Then I'm listening. I'm listening to the quality of the sound as it, you know, as it comes and goes, you know, as you track the frequency with the Doppler effect and all of that. I just, you know, just... hearing it as sound. Now, if I live someplace where this is happening all the time, all the time, I think I would have a hard time avoiding characterizing this noise. But just listen. Just let it arise. Yes. I think what a lucky person I am to live in Seattle, the home of Boeing.

[47:42]

Okay, Jim. Good morning, Hosan. As you were talking about perceiving without attaching signs to things, It occurred to me that art, maybe especially contemporary art, encourages a practice of seeing things in a new way, maybe without signs and maybe to observe what signs we attach to things. I wonder what your thoughts were about music, being a musician in this regard. Well, it's interesting. You know, our teacher... Sojin was an abstract expressionist painter. And so he was trained in that field of non-objective perception.

[48:44]

And I think that was probably very helpful to him in framing his practice. For me, even though ideal, the music that I play is, very traditional in form, parallel you could say to our Zen practice. But nonetheless, whatever I'm feeling as I'm playing or singing a song may have almost nothing to do with what you are hearing or what is called forth in you. And that's why often songwriters are loath to interpret their own words. And I think that that's a wise, that's a wise effort, you know, because yeah, it has, I am digging through my entire consciousness to either to write a song or even to sing a song.

[50:02]

And you are digging through your entire consciousness when you listen to something. It's wonderful. You know, we may find that we have mutual resonances and maybe not, but neither of us is in error about our perception. It's just, this is what Suki Roshi says, just accept accept what you're hearing. And you make an effort to try to understand what is being communicated, but still the communication is beyond that kind of one-to-one identification. So thank you. I had one more thing to say. Like you're hearing in the morning doves or Ross's, noticing in the cypress tree.

[51:04]

You made a distinction between listening and hearing. And I think we've all had experiences where we hear something almost as for the first time. I've never heard that color. I've never heard that phrase in the music before. Yes. I understand what I mean by the distinction between hearing and listening. I also understand that that's there's a fluid boundary there. You know, now it's like if I'm walking down the block and there's a mourning dove, I hear it and then I'm actually listening. You know, there's a pleasure in the identification as well. I'm gonna, Susan, or Susan. Thank you. What struck me most about your story, you know, hearing the morning dove for the first time was, you know, that there's another side of that.

[52:12]

Like Sojin used to say, the whole world is doing zazen. So there's this recognition. It doesn't have really anything to do with you or me or us. And the thing is the morning dove was also changed by your experience of awakening because now you care about the morning dose. That's right. And that seems to me what's key about our practice in terms of dealing with our, you know, our egocentric self. You know, that your care, our care includes, can include everything. Yeah. So I just wonder what you think about that. Well, another example, I don't think until the pandemic, I ever really noticed and attended to the crows.

[53:20]

And I now feel really emotionally connected to those crows. There's a lot of them. I listen to them, I watch them, I actually, I talk to them, you know. And again, okay, 35 years, and it's like the crows were there all the time. So I think that you could say that hearing hearing might be the beginning of responsibility. That when you hear something, when you see something, and you feel a relationship to it, and you want to take care of it.

[54:22]

The other thing that, what I was getting for you, you didn't go there, is I think what was, that those calls, they are calling, those calls are all an expression of relationality. Those animals are calling to each other, those birds are calling to each other. And that was what was really amazing was like hearing these morning dives in stereo. and one was a little lower in pitch, one a little higher in pitch, and that they were so clearly communicating in a sort of call and response. I don't know what was, I don't know bird behavior, what was going on there, but something was going on. And that's also, it's really important that we don't make this about us. We can use what we perceive.

[55:27]

but we can use it to deconstruct our self-centeredness and recognize and to move towards all-centeredness and to recognize these birds, these animals, they are in relationship. They have their own universe of relationship, which is wonderful. Judy, and I think I can take one more from the queue. I'm really, I'm sorry, our time is going on. Judy. Yeah, what you just said, I'm wondering how, how we connect that to, say, Claude Anshin Thomas, you know, who talked about surviving the Vietnam War, living with PTSD, and also as a priest and so on, that he still, When he hears a car backfire, he automatically ducks and covers because that's just in his body, no matter how long he's practiced.

[56:39]

And yet his response to that is, first of all, to share that story and then go from it towards healing and relationality. I was in a lockdown about a week ago at an elementary school in Oakland because we heard boom, boom, boom. I was in the schoolyard the teachers with me immediately looked up like they were tuning their ears and one after the other they said I think firecrackers but we still called 9-1-1 and all these kids had to go into a lockdown so you know that's happening now and I wonder how this connects to that kind of relationality still have that something is in the body, so to speak. The relationality is really important to transform on every level. How do we apply this practice, you can cause them particularly to meet that?

[57:44]

Actually, I don't know. And this would be a wonderful, I'm sure, some of you would have responses. You know, what I'm, what I'm talking about, what I've been talking about are opening experiences, what you're relating, and by extension, you know, we're talking about Anshin, and by extension, of course, we can immediately think of think of what's happening in Ukraine, we think of what's happening around the world, those are closing and protective experiences, which are also, those are survival mechanisms. You know, there's nothing wrong with them. But I think maybe the, for me, immediately the common thread, if there is one, is just

[58:53]

how finely tuned we are as beings to what we perceive and where we go and where this really just so finely tuned as organisms, the mechanism of fight, flight, of safety, risk. This is organically built into us. And we have to be kind to it and not judge it, but, you know, we also, we're trying to make a world where there's less of that, even though this is the Saha world. So I'm just gonna, Joe, and this is gonna be the last, I'm afraid. Thanks, Ozan. um somewhat relatedly but i will ask it in my own way um hearing the morning doves and seeing the cypress tree and then noticing them kind of elsewhere these opening moments um those seem kind of pleasurable experiences and it doesn't feel like we have to do a lot with them you know the morning doves come and the morning doves go and we just just uh open up to them

[60:21]

And then there's the experience of being opened up to suffering, opening up to something, something really uncomfortable, whether in ourselves or like, you know, encountering it with our interactions with other humans. And that feels more like we got to do something about it. You know, we can't just, you know, let it go like the morning doves. So it kind of relates to what you've been talking about, but I thought I'd just ask what you might be able to say about that. Well, just responses at two levels. One, what immediately made me think about was that I had an MRI this week, which just came out well, but it's like, you know, you're spending, I spent like 45 or 50 minutes in this very intense, very closed space with all this banging and clanging going on.

[61:34]

It, you know, I wasn't scared. I wasn't entirely comfortable, but I actually could I could just, I felt myself, I think I used my practice to feel myself in the space and just hear, just, you know, that these sounds were part of hopefully some process of healing. But anyway, it was not a comfortable space. But what the other thread is just to say, what I was saying a moment ago, To hear the crows, to see the crows creates a sense of responsibility. To perceive what's going on around you that might be harmful also creates, also raises the question of one's responsibility.

[62:44]

How does one live, how does one act to harmonize? And, you know, recognizing that, you know, our actions may not work. They may fall short, but we do the best we can. This is a hard perception that everyone is doing that everyone is doing their best, even though we may think some of it is really, really misguided, but we have to do our best, whatever that is. And just to be grateful that we have this practice. That's where I'm going to end. Let's do the Bodhisattva vows.

[63:47]

I'm happy to. You can email me while I'm happy to continue this discussion. I apologize. There seems to be a lot of questions, but thank you. Meetings are numerous. I vow to awaken with them. Delusions are exhaustible. Amen. trustable.

[64:48]

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