Good morning everyone and welcome to Berkley Zen Center. I'm very happy to introduce our guest speaker this morning, Liam DeBarros. It's been downhill ever since. I was getting to that. Not much has happened since after that until Lee married Martha Barrows. Lee began his Zen practice

[01:03]

We live. It's always nice to come back to my original sangha here.

[03:04]

I thought today I would talk about study as practice. We've been at a course at Greenville. A number of us have been meeting and thinking about study as practice. I suppose a number of you are in the process of reading this book or that, or intending to, or have just finished. Perhaps there are a few books on the shelf that you didn't finish. So, quite a number of years ago, when I was at UC Berkeley back in the 60s, there were very few books on Buddhism. There were some, but few, and fewer on Zen. Over a period of time, there's been a huge explosion, a proliferation, or shall we say a flowering of Buddhist books on everything.

[04:07]

I was giving a Sunday talk at Green Gulch one time. During question and answer, a woman raised her hand and said, you know, I've been trying to read the books, you know, and that, and I can't, you know, there's so many, what shall I do? How shall I approach this question of the sutras and the commentaries and all the books on Buddhism? Buddhism and archery, Buddhism and cooking, Zen and swimming, Zen and Zen and so on, and she was anxious about it. She was a great student and was trying hard, but for every book she read, Eight appeared, sort of like the Ulysses, you know the monster? What was the name of that monster in Ulysses? The Hydra. Cut off the Hydra's head and boom, you got eight more heads.

[05:16]

And that was her problem. There were so many books and so little time. And you know, you may have a few, I have a few. that I'm working on right now. But how do we approach this problem? It causes suffering. Our effort is to penetrate the question of suffering and the end of suffering, yet the very effort itself is replete with difficulty. So how do we do this? How do we think about it? So the idea of I'll study and then I'll be liberated kind of problem, I guess is pretty obviously an issue. Shouldn't study itself be included as life, as practice itself? So I thought I'd share some of these ideas about it that I brought up in our class.

[06:17]

You might be familiar with the Zen Manifesto, supposedly put forth by Bodhidharma. our Zen ancestor about 500 AD in China, he taught a Zen beyond words and letters, a transmission outside of the scriptures, a direct pointing at mind. This is Bodhidharma's teaching. I was in Mel's office over here. There's got to be 300 books in there, and I know you have a library over here, and we definitely do at Green Gulch. Very important to library, very important to study. And then there's the Zendo and the library, and you got to go back and forth. But how do we deal with this issue?

[07:23]

Zen histories and stories are replete with this question, stories about this question. In fact, almost all the stories are about this question, all the koans. What is the way? How do I practice the way? And how is that related to whatever you say to me when I ask you that question? I'll tell you a couple of the stories. the story of Tokusan in China around 850 A.D. He was in northern China, so there was like a northern China and a southern China thing. And in the northern China was where the words and letters were really happening up there. Tokusan was a great scholar and studied the Diamond Sutra in great depth and collected commentaries, wrote commentaries of his own. They would have lecture upon lecture, class upon class, debate upon debate.

[08:30]

Well, he heard about this school in the south of China, which is a Bodhidharma kind of approach of direct pointing at mind, a transmission outside of scriptures, outside of even the Diamond Sutra. and all the commentaries. So this is heresy from his point of view, so he decided he was going to go down to southern China and clean him up down there, you know, and stamp it out, this heresy. So he packed all his sutras on his back, the Diamond Sutra and all the commentaries. being a monk, he had a robe, a bowl, a few things, and this load of sutures on his back. I mean, talk about karma, right? Entrenched south, you got to feel sorry for this guy. He's the brunt of this particular kind of Zen. And he trembles off down to the south. to confront, if he could find, the head of this non-words and letters school, direct pointing at mind school, and he got down there and he was tired and he stopped by this tea house or a little roadside stand, just kind of a hut there, and in the hut was

[09:54]

this old lady, and this old lady shows up over and over again in Zen stories, this little old lady, and little roadside stand, and the monk's coming down to confront the teacher and stops in at the stand, see, and he says, And when you read about this, it says his mind was afire, you know. He was really, and his speech was bitter. Anyway, he asked the old lady to let him have lunch to refresh his mind. She asked, what sort of literature do you carry on your back? And he told her what it was, and she said, oh, I hear that it is said in that sutra, the past mind, mind of the past, your past mind cannot be grasped or held.

[11:00]

The present mind cannot be grasped or held. And the future mind cannot be grasped or held, it says in that sutra. Now, I would like to ask you, what mind are you going to refresh? So you can get a flavor, you know, this sort of direct pointing at mind thing. And well, Tokusawa was dumbfounded, right? He wasn't expecting this. He did make his way up to the monastery where the teacher was, and there are many other stories, but gradually his eye of enlightenment opened, supposedly, and then A year or so later, he was seen out in the courtyard taking a torch to the commentaries, burning them. I don't know whether Mel would appreciate it if we went over there and burned down his library. So this is the story of burning the scriptures.

[12:05]

And you know, the Blue Cliff Record, which is this wonderful collection of koans, which Dogen, I think, brought back. which are a series of koans, little interactions between a student and teacher that have been handed down and illustrate a certain kind of conundrum or paradox, a dharma point of some kind. And it's very alive even today when you look at them. But back in those days, and perhaps today, people were trying to figure out, well, you had to pass these koans. They're like, let's say, 100 koans. You were given a koan, and then you go tell the teacher what you thought. And then he'd say, pass or fail. I guess that's where that came from. So, of course, the Zen students were all talking to you, what did you say? And what do you think the right answer is? And then you go back and test the teacher over and over again. So there became little lists of answers and things.

[13:08]

So the whole thing got incredibly corrupted. One of these guys went out and the blocks that you print the things with, they got those blocks, burned them, and gathered all the coal and burned those. But they were so widely spread by that time that some of them were lingering in attics and things. We have them today. Another story around this subject is the third koan in the Book of Serenity. It's called the Invitation of the Patriarch of Eastern India. And this one goes, the Raja of Eastern India was invited the 27th Buddhist Now, this is what you do, right? If you're a raja or emperor or king, what would you do with your time?

[14:09]

Well, one of the things you'd have a little department, which would be involved in inviting really interesting people, wise people, jugglers, and gurus of all kinds, and bring them to court and let's hear what they have to say, right? That's what you would do. And that's what all of them did, I think. Certainly this one did. And so he brought in Prajnatara, who was the patriarch at that time, supposedly head of the church, of the religion. And the Raja asked him, why don't you read scriptures? You've got to realize this guy's in the Zen patriarchal lineage. Why don't you read scriptures? Now, let me just say here that I think you'll find if you study, to the degree you can, what these people knew, like Prajnaparamita, they knew the scriptures.

[15:12]

They studied, they memorized the scriptures. Anyway, he said, why don't you read the scriptures? And of course, now he wasn't reading the scriptures, but the patriarch said, this poor wayfarer doesn't dwell in the realm of body or mind when breathing in, doesn't get involved in myriad circumstances when breathing out. I always reiterate such scriptures hundreds, thousands, millions of scrolls. breathing in and breathing out. You know that party favor when you blow and the thing unwinds? So he doesn't get involved in, so this is his teaching, right? This is his practice, actually. When breathing in, he puts his agenda, so in other words, he doesn't get involved in preferences.

[16:14]

let's say, self-grasping activities internally when he breathes in. They're probably there, but he doesn't get involved in them. He doesn't dwell there, hang out there. And when he's breathing out, he doesn't get involved in, you know, all the possessions, all the activities from a self-grasping point of view. I approve of that, I don't approve of that. He doesn't do that. So Zen seems to have kind of an anti-intellectual bias, doesn't it? When you hear about this kind of stuff, about thinking too much, too much thinking. Some people are burning texts. Being enlightened in brief encounters, if you read the Zen literature, the person has been trying for realization and then all of a sudden a tile falls off the roof and his mind opens up.

[17:23]

The literature is full of stories of illumination beyond literature. St. Thomas Aquinas, Remember St. Thomas? It was middle ages, sort of European. Was Aquinas Italian? Anyway, St. Thomas, what a guy. Did you ever look at the Summa Theologica, his works? They're huge. Back in the rational period, he analyzed everything. from a logical point of view, the proofs for the existence of God and so on. And he was brilliant, very spiritual and religious guy, but he came at it from the rational point of view. And he lived in this sort of, where he lived in the country, and every day he would get up and he would walk down this path

[18:29]

there was a river there going by and he would walk along over a bridge into a church and he would go in and say mass in the church and then he would after mass he would go out the door and he would go into this other building and in this other building he would open the door and there were many scribes in there, many secretaries, editors, activity and he would go in and he would you know, speak, and they would write things down, and they would organize material, and new insights would be recorded, and his works would be developed, and he would stay there for the day doing that. Every day, I think. Maybe he took a day off. But one day, after many, many years, he got up in the morning, left the house, walked along that path and he looked over and you've got to realize he was very concentrated, right?

[19:41]

I mean his mind was really trying to penetrate along this path and the water is coming and there's a glimmer on the water and he looks at this glimmer and all of a sudden body and mind drop away, his attachment to his, it's a question of body and mind dropped away. And he was just, well, I guess he was really amazed. I guess he must have said, what? And he didn't know what to do. Anyway, he continued and went into church and he said mass. And then after Mass he went over into that room and he dismissed them all and he never, he just ended that whole effort. And he said, all his work was as straw, he said. It was all as straw. He saw something, or I don't know, did he see something?

[20:46]

I do have a sense, though, that we do need to, you know, make an effort and study. Sometimes when I think about or talk about this stuff, I think, well, people might think, well, I don't think I'll study anymore. You can't help but study. You know, study as practice, or is practice study itself? What do you think? Is practice study itself? Or again, can study be practice itself? When you're studying, are you practicing? Are you awake? So here we have this kind of problem, you know, of words and concepts and practice. Now, Dogen talks about it. Especially in a fascicle where he talks about a painting of a rice cake. The idea being that the painting of a rice cake is not the same as a rice cake, right?

[22:03]

You can't eat a painting of a rice cake. It's just a painting, a representation of a rice cake. This is the usual idea. The idea that words and concepts will not liberate you. Representations will not liberate you. Only experience beyond concepts, beyond words, will liberate you. Now, Dogen develops the view that language or study as such, as words and concepts, are not the problem. But the use of words and concepts to explain and describe is an issue. He argues that all experience right now is mediated by concept. Your perception is completely involved in concept. Floor, ceiling, anything you can think of or perceive is a concept there.

[23:07]

The whole universe and the whole Dharma is not but the painting of a rice cake. Human reality is realized from the painting of a rice cake. There's nothing that will satisfy hunger but the painting of a rice cake. In fact, hunger itself is the painting of a rice cake. So we need to work within, because it's all words, it's all concepts, it's all perception. We need to work within this, with words, to extract ourselves from the tangle of words. We use words and concepts to free ourselves from words and concepts. But there's always the danger of landing on this word or this concept and having a fixed view about it, grasping, oh I got it now. to constantly let go, let the bird go, let it fly.

[24:15]

So this tradition is designed to free us from the prison that our usual relationship with language creates. Words and concepts do not represent unchanging substantial things. reification. They're just representations. They're the play of life in awareness. Suffering is the grasping a concept, getting stuck in fixed views. But we need concepts and viewpoints to extract ourselves from the grasping and the fixing. It's a dangerous little game we're playing. We have to stay awake. You know, if you look a word up in a dictionary, what do you see?

[25:27]

What do you see if you look a word up? More words, yeah. And you can look each one of those words up. And look each one of those words up. And they're all sort of like holding hands, these words. But they're sort of defining each other. Each word is... And no word stands alone, it's defined by the other words. There's actually no real, you know, there's no word there, it's all these other words defining it, right? But you can move around and go to the different words and there's nothing there, no matter where you go, it's just defined by all the other words. It's all this kind of floating meaning space that that drifts and it takes on colorations of various kinds. It's a dream. This is actually something like a dream. But it's our dream. Everything is participating in a vast fluid meaning space.

[26:37]

Each word completely dependent on all other words. Is there any absolute unchanging meaning? Something to take refuge in that's fixed? Our job is to remain awake in this dream. Stay awake and dance with the play of it. And Dogen says, I mean, not that we don't land every now and then, right, for a while. We have to take off again. Dogen says, when we bring our fixed agenda forward to all things, that is delusion. So we have an agenda, right? some kind of, let's say, our ego, unresolved conflict agenda, small self-grasping, I-habit agenda.

[27:40]

We look out there from that point of view and say, oh, I like that, that works, that's going to get me what I want. We see things from that point of view when we look out. That's delusion, Dogen said. When all things come forth and validate and recreate us moment by moment, that's liberation. Or Suzuki Roshi says, in beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's, there are few. So that's kind of the background we're coming from when we were studying, studying, or practicing studying, studying, practicing. So I'll just go over some of the things about study that I thought about and some other people thought about.

[28:41]

Norman actually gave a lecture on this one time, somewhat similar. Well, one of the things, I mean, why do you study? Why do you pick that book up? Probably not a bad idea to think about or just reflect, you know, what am I about here? Maybe go a little deeper than, what's my fundamental intention? Not that you can figure that out, but it's good. Ask the question. You need to ask, I think. It's okay to ask. So, well, inspiration. is one reason I would read things or listen to things, to be inspired, to be energized. You know, I mean, practice, things can get dry. It can be hard. Resistance can build. Feeling of meaninglessness and doubt, depression.

[29:46]

I don't want to bum everybody out here. But we need a little help, right? We practice together. This is a sangha. It's wonderful to be together. We support each other. To read the stories of the great teachers and students in any religion, really, reflect on them. and be inspired by that. If you find something that moves you, the story, it's good to keep it close, I think, or a picture. Study also feeds the mind, in the Dharma, feeds the mind with nourishment, wholesome images. Peoples your mind with, beings your mind with, with wholesome ideas and images and stories.

[30:56]

Yeah, you know, I mean, your mind is completely, always being bombarded by a lot of negative stuff, right? Some of it bubbles up from the inside, you might have noticed, if you want to call it the inside. You know what I'm talking about. Inject some positive stuff in there, some wholesome stuff. Read the Dharma. It gives you some ways of looking at things in relationship to the world that are wholesome. Interpret things in a wholesome way. I remember when I was down at Tassajara years ago, I had this little book by Wang Po. It's one of the patriarchs, a long time ago. Anyway, there were like paragraph-long things that Wang Po said, and he would say them in this sort of poetic, mind-expanding way.

[31:59]

You go, wow. I don't know. Before I went to bed every night, I had Wang Po next to my bed. put out the kerosene lantern, I would read one of these things by Wang Po, and I would let it settle there, and I'd just turn the light on and go to sleep. There's a Zen workshop, Zen retreat in the summer, which I'm part of. And one person told me when we were talking about things like this, that he did that with Dogen. You know, you've got to pick something poetic, something that sort of pulls you deeper. Not necessarily something that you know, but something that you don't know, but you go there. And one of the things about studying

[33:02]

One attitude, Suzuki Roshi mentioned this about study, is, what is your attitude? Are you looking for things which verify what you already think? You know, like you can study, oh yeah, that's right, that's right. I like that, because that's what I think. Self-verification. Do we read for that? Discard things which seem like, hmm, It's a little, there's something to examine. How do you get around that if you could? Are you going to study, are you going to read things and study things that when you read them you say, no, no way. Are you going to do that? Or is there some way to get in there beyond your already preconceived structures? I hope so. Yeah, can you sort of suspend judging every concept that comes up from a point of view of yes and no?

[34:15]

And even things like when it comes up, no. I mean, you will judge, but you can sort of notice you're judging. Oh, this is practice, right? I'm judging no on this one. But I have this intention to stay open. So I'm going to try to stay open and go with this anyway, see where it leads." And when Tarotuku came to Green Gulch, he talked about reincarnation, which isn't talked about much in Zen. It was hard to stay open. And as soon as he mentions an idea that I seriously have trouble with, I got a whole bunch of concepts and arguments that I can immediately pull forth and put on top of that. And it's kind of fun. You can even win, maybe.

[35:18]

You might think you can, but you think you can't win. But how about, oh here's Taratugu, this is an amazing teacher, a wonderfully evolved dharma person. He's giving you a teaching. Can you stay there with him? And notice when your resistance comes up and just like float there with the concepts and stay open, stay open, stay open. Not so easy. Dogen in Zui Manki, when he was talking to his students, one of the things he said was, don't defeat anybody in an argument. Don't do it. Why do that? The idea is to keep things open, open stuff up, ask questions that allow things to get bigger and deeper.

[36:26]

But it's so much fun to win an argument or to notice an inconsistency and then point it down. Isn't it? I mean, you know, we're all college students or something. We're arguing and defeating. But this is, Dogen says, don't do it. It's not in the direction of life. It's death. It closes things off, solidifies things, stops the evolving of life. to find a way to keep things open when you're reading. And so this is a challenge, I think. And how do we approach study? Actually, this is study. You invited me here to give you a talk, and this is study, right?

[37:31]

I'm talking, you're listening. Now, in our tradition, there's a ceremony. and a chat beforehand. And there will be after. So how do you study? Where is the book you're studying right now, if you are studying? Did you put it somewhere? How do you treat this book? Do you feel it when you pick it up? Do you actually turn the page? Do you turn that page? The Torah, they say that the words are sweet. It's to lift the Torah, take care of the Torah. And then when you kiss the words, they're sweet. And I was told that some Jewish scholars will put honey in their mouths when they read the Torah. Things have a feel to them.

[38:37]

All the senses can come forth and study. Can we take care of where we study? Take care of the book? Take care of the pencil? That's our life. This is our life. Our life is taking care of what we do. The practice of suchness, as I said, is paying attention to details. To concentrate your efforts single-mindedly is the way. There's no rush to get through this book so you can get to the next book. Well, maybe there is.

[39:41]

Yeah, and sutures are great to read. This is another aspect of study. I mean, it gives you kind of ideas for a practice application of your mind in practice. The Four Foundations of Mindfulness is very helpful in that regard. Detailed practice instructions the Buddha gave. Years ago, in 1985 I think, Zen Center San Francisco was going through a turmoil and Mel, your teacher, came over and my teacher came over. to Green Gulch to help out and taught a few classes. I was there and he taught us, one of the things he taught us was the Abhidharma, which is this very highly technical Buddhist psychology.

[41:05]

And we thought, well, why are we studying this? I mean, it's just putting more stuff in our head, you know. And Mel said, the function of the mind is to think, and it will think. It might as well think about this. Think about the way it thinks in relationship to creating suffering and ending suffering. I think you won that argument. So as a Zen practitioner, I try to enter practice with the spirit of non-grasping, you know, we need to realize the issue is there, and the non-grasping of concepts and words, in some sense of tolerance and flexibility and patience, you know.

[42:10]

Avoid the tendency to arrive at a fixed position. You know, this is just life itself. Studies just life itself, life itself. What, you want a fixed position? What are you going to do then? Nargajuna, the great logician, Indian logician, created a system for defeating any proposition. So any proposition you could come up with, this is that, or whatever, he would defeat it with his system. destroy any proposition, any statement of truth, let's say. And it's pretty heady stuff, really, to be able to do that. But he warned you to not get stuck there with this power to destroy. It's just used to liberate. They put it aside.

[43:16]

Don't think of it as a fixed truth. So we need to stay awake and notice the working or a tendency to take refuge and hold on while studying. And then all practice becomes a playground for the Dharma. I'll read you a little poem. Wallace Stevens. This is called The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book. And summer night was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm.

[44:23]

The words were spoken as if there was no book, except that the reader leaned above the page, wanted to lean, wanted much most to be the scholar to whom his book is true, to whom the summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning. part of the mind, the access of perfection to the page, and the world was calm. The truth in a calm world in which there is no other meaning, itself is calm, itself is summer and night, itself is the reader leaning late and reading there. My wife Martha pointed that one out to me.

[45:31]

Thank you.

[45:33]

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