Good morning. We're in the opening session for Aspects of Practice. Memory for some things is quite good and for other things is quite faulty. How long have we been doing Aspects of Practice? Does anyone know? It's been at least like 10 years. I think when Sojourner Moshi went to China in 2001. That makes sense, yeah. It was during that fall when he created them. So, historically what it's been is an opportunity for newer people to root their practice, and there are some of those in the room, and for others of us to kind of renew it, the fall is a good time, and to get back to basics, and that's what we're hopefully going to do for this month.

[01:11]

And we're going to be studying Bendowa, Dogen's very early text, and I believe that that Ron made a copy of the whole book, which is very generous of him. Primarily, the lectures and the classes are going to be on Dogen's text itself, but since you have the whole book, there's a lot of really good material in here. There's an excellent introduction by Shohaku Okamura, and then the bulk of the book is actually a commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, who I feel he's somebody that's very close to our hearts, in line with Suzuki Roshi's practice and with the kind of Soto practice

[02:19]

with emphasis on just sitting that we really follow. Ron was talking about him a bit yesterday in his own lecture. So I don't know that there's an awful lot for me to say by way of introduction to aspects of practice. Hopefully it's a time when people can renew and put some intensity into their Zazen practice and be refreshed within that. And we'll also be working on polishing some of the formal dimensions of our practice, not excessively, but to some degree. and then we'll of course have a chance to study and to have class weekly, to have teas on Friday, and to have lectures that are generally focusing on Bhendawa, and to get to know each other and be together.

[03:39]

So all of those dimensions, the Buddha dimension of sitting, the Dharma dimension of study, and the Sangha dimension of being together, are part of the whole package. So we'll have an official opening, as official as anything gets, right after this talk. It's also an opportunity for myself and the senior students to be able to lead the practice and to express themselves. If I look around this room, there's an amazing number of cumulative years of of practice here.

[04:43]

Much more in aggregate than almost any place that I've seen. Centuries. All gone to waste. Good for nothing. Some of you may have seen I wrote to PC List about these meetings that Sojan and I attended last week. It's interesting, there's just about no place that has this kind of practice that we do, where people show up day after day, year after year, and just practice together. So there's a great maturity that flourishes among the so-called senior students and then the ones who may not be officially titled senior students but who are very grounded and have been practicing and whose understanding is really good.

[05:57]

So I don't make that distinction so much. want to talk, I think today what I'd like to do is give a kind of overview, an introduction to Bhen-du-wa without going into a lot of detail and hopefully leave some time for discussion. Bhen-du-wa is a very early teaching of Dogen Zenji and as you've gathered, if you've been here for very long, we We studied Dogen over and over again, the different writings from the entire arc of his career, which was not all that long. He was really writing from about the age of 27 until he passed away at 53. But in that time, he wrote stuff that deeply moves us.

[06:59]

affects us. He also built practice places and sometimes he even contradicted himself. So this is an early writing by way of history. So he began to practice, Dogen began to practice first in the Tendai tradition and then when he was in his teenagers he In the early 20s, he was practicing at a Rinzai monastery that had been begun by a very prominent Japanese teacher, Eisai. And when Eisai passed away, his Dharma heir was Myozen, who became Dogen's first Zen teacher. Together in 1223, Myozen and Dogen went to China in a quest for a true teacher because they found that that wasn't available in Japan.

[08:18]

And they looked around, they visited all of the famous monasteries and Dogen was not too thrilled by what he found. As he was preparing to go back to Japan, he heard there was a teacher at Mount Tiantong. In Japanese, Tendon Yojo was a teacher, or Rujing, and Myozen was there. And he stopped off and when he met Rujing, he found that he had met his true teacher. And in that time before, he spent about a year or a little more there at Mount Tiantung and received Dharma transmission from Rujing, who was a very warm, intimate, no bullshit teacher.

[09:24]

He didn't wear fancy robes, he wore plain cloth that was patched in many places, and he basically taught Dazen. And this was, this really hit the mark for Dogen. So he went back to, when he went back to Japan in 1227, 1228, he went back to the monastery that he had practiced in, in Kyoto, Miaozhen passed away in China so didn't return but Dogen went back to Keninji and stayed there for about two or three years and it was I think it was not an entirely comfortable environment for him because there already was an established practice which was Rinzai and because Keninji was part of the kind of temple establishment of Kyoto and Dogen was a kind of renegade, I don't think by his behavior but by what he was teaching.

[10:44]

This emphasis on Zazen, on Shikantaza, and on the points that he brings forward in Bendawa. So, speculation is that the monastic powers that be in Kyoto somehow compelled him to move out. So, by 1231, when he was about 32 years old then. Dogen was living alone in a small temple in Fukakusa, which is outside Kyoto then. Now it's actually part of Kyoto, but it was relatively remote. It was a small temple, not a training temple. He had no clear path or idea what to do to teach at that point.

[11:57]

He had people who were drawn to him, but he couldn't train them because he really didn't have a monastery. He had met his first disciple Koen Ejo, but Cohen didn't really formally become his student for another three or four years until they had a practice place. So the context for Mendoa, Dogen writes, I've decided to write down all the customs and criteria that I myself experienced during my visits to the Zen monasteries in China together with the teachings from my master, Tendon Yojo, which I have received and put into practice. I will then leave these writings for people who learn by actually doing things and who find it easy to live in reality so that they will know the true teachings of the Buddha that have been passed on from person to person."

[13:02]

So he's sort of in the position that there's some parallel position to the position of Buddha after his own enlightenment, that he was convinced of his insight into the nature of reality, he was convinced about the mode of practice, but he was unclear about how to do that. which is interesting because then you get to the first sentence of Bhandawa. The first sentence says, all Buddha Tathagatas together have been simply transmitting wondrous dharma and actualizing unsurpassed complete enlightenment for which there is an unsurpassable, unfabricated and wondrous method.

[14:17]

So he knows what he's doing, he knows that he's transmitting all the time and yet he doesn't yet have a formal setting for teaching. So this is his first attempt. And this is the first, Vendowa is generally seen as the first fascicle of Shobogenzu, treasurer of the true Dharma-I. It's the first of the massive collection, the 95 fascicle version of Shobo Genzo. And it's the earliest, and it's maybe his second earliest writing. The earliest one that we have is Fukanza Zengi, which is basically instructions for Zazen, which we've studied before at Aspects, and we've studied numerous times. This is probably the next.

[15:22]

Just historically it was kind of buried and didn't really appear until it was found in some manuscripts in the 17th century. So it wasn't that it was this tremendously influential text. It just was him setting down his thoughts. So the title. Bendawa. Wa means talk or a story or a discourse. Ben means something like putting your total energy into something into an activity. And ド is the same as 道, it's the same character for way.

[16:29]

And Shohaku-san says in this case it's really, it's a contraction, it's a short way of saying 仏道, Buddha way, And so, this is why it's often translated as the talk of the practice of the wholehearted way, or the practice of the way in a wholehearted fashion. I was reading through it last night, so the structure of it is, there's a kind of introductory section, which lays out basics, and then there are 18 questions and answers. Some of the answers are quite concise and short-tempered, perhaps, and some of them extensive.

[17:41]

and there's some speculation that these were really kind of a recorded discussion between Dogen and his disciple Koen Ejo. Nobody knows this, but I was thinking about these questions. I actually went through them all last night and just made notes about what each question was, what was at the heart of each question and answer, in very, very brief notes. I think that the, you could reduce, one could reduce this, all of Van der Waals to a four-word commentary on tsa-zen in English, which is, you can do this.

[18:55]

It's within our power to do it. It's within our capacity to do it. And Dogen encourages us to do it. So does Sojin. So does Suzuki Roshi. But if you look at all of the questions and answers, the first questions are, what is it you're talking about? And then why should we do this? Why sitting meditation? who can do this and what circumstances can we do it under. So it's actually pretty broad without falling into or resorting to the philosophical complexities that we know and love in Doga.

[20:12]

And without I was also reading, I was looking for something last night, and this really struck me as another way of framing Ben Dehua from another great teacher. I was looking through the record of Zhaozhou, of Zhaoshu, the Tang Dynasty Chinese master, and there's a great This is a great piece, number 100 in his record. A monk asked Zhao Zhou, what is meditation? The word meditation and Chan or Zen are sort of interchangeable. And this is something if you remember in Fukan Zazengi and then also in Bendawa, Dogen is often saying, the Zazen I'm speaking of is not meditation.

[21:25]

Does that ring a bell with him? So the monk asked Jauja, what is meditation? And the master said, it is not meditation. and the monk said, why is it not meditation? And the master said, it's alive, it's alive, which of course to some of us with our cultural references all that but that immediately brings to mind is the famous scene in the 1931 movie Frankenstein. And then the parody scene in Mel Brooks's movie Young Frankenstein. But it's true. It's alive. And this is the whole thrust of Bandoa.

[22:31]

It pivots on something, you know, I'll talk about it a little, I don't want to go too much into it because I want to leave that scope to, particularly to Ross, who's going to give the first class, right? You're doing first class? Yes. But Sojan has talked about this often, and it's hard to get your mind around it. But in the first, I didn't read the end of the first paragraph. So let me read the whole paragraph. All Buddha Tathagatas together have been simply transmitting wondrous dharma and actualizing complete, absolute complete enlightenment for which there is an unsurpassable, unfabricated and wondrous method. this wondrous dharma which has been transmitted only from buddha to buddha has as its criterion jijuyu-zamai so what he's what he's thinking of as zazen is synonymous with this

[23:56]

with this thing, that's not a thing, with this practice of Jijuyu Samadhi. Jijuyu Samadhi, Samadhi is Samadhi or concentration or practice. And Jijuyu translates as self-fulfilling. or self-enjoying. It's the self simply actualizing

[25:00]

its own function without turning itself into an object, if that makes any sense. So one thing, there are a couple of quotations from Uchiyama Roshi's teacher, Sawaki Kodo, and this doesn't unpack it too much more simply, but he says Jijuyu is the self making the self into the self. Got that? And Okamura Roshi says, he describes Jijuyu as the life experience of the self. So in a sense, what we're talking about is just living without turning yourself into an object, but coming from this center.

[26:17]

The center is not outside of us. The center is within us. And as we're sitting zazen, this is what we've been doing this morning, that as we sit here, each of us is just simply acting in a complete and unselfconscious way. Ron was talking yesterday, what was the quotation from the It was about resting in your naked ordinary mind. That's one dimension of Jiju Yusamaya, I think. But resting is not enough also. Resting is one dimension. at the same time as uh did you use of my since it's not meditation and we think of meditation as resting it's also the way we serve each other food the way we cook the food the way we do our work together the way we ring the ring the bells each one of these is a complete expression and manifestation of self

[27:56]

without getting caught and stuck on self-consciousness. And this is the activity that's fundamentally cultivated within the Zazen that Dogen is talking about in Bendawa. So he's talking about this Bendawa is also he from very early on he begins to talk about what we translate as practice enlightenment or practice realization, which is actually quite different from the expression of other Zen schools at the time or in the present day. There's a conundrum here. In many schools there's an emphasis to practice as an instrumentality or as a way to become enlightened because enlightenment is the point and enlightenment is nothing wrong with enlightenment, enlightenment is important but how Dogen approaches it and I think this is partly where he ran into trouble with the powers that be

[29:26]

in institutional Buddhism is that he's saying, and we've said this over and over again, his approach is we practice because we are already enlightened. We may not have a realized awareness of this, but in an intuitive way we're manifesting this by how we sit down, by how we sit and practice. So this is an essential tenet and I think it's a tenet, although different perspectives changed over Dogen's life. In this text he's asked very bluntly, do this practice?"

[30:28]

And he says, no, it's really, the practice of enlightenment is available to everyone, women, men, nobles, commoners, kind of people that we see populating this room. And his physician shifted on that somewhere as his life went on, probably for very particular, for reasons most likely to my mind pertaining to who he was practicing with. At this point he was practicing in town, in community, and these are the people who were coming to him, and these are the people that he worked with, and later he was working in a monastic setting. But anyway, the one thing that never shifted was his perspective on this principle of practice realization.

[31:39]

We practice because in some essential and intuitive way we're already enlightened. Why else would we come on this kind of chilly Sunday to be here? Especially, I was thinking, a lot of us were here yesterday and then other days this week. We'd come here day after day. If that wasn't enlightened activity, if that's not enlightened activity, it's pretty dumb. Maybe we have better things to do. But I think that we're here and we're here on a daily basis and we're here from year to year because we actually have some intuitive sense that this is enlightened activity, even though we don't know what that is and we can't really describe it very effectively and name it.

[32:45]

It's not just faith. I think that we see it as it's flowering and unfolding in our own lives. And, since we practice in Sangha, we actually get to observe it happening in others, which is tremendously encouraging. I mean, I might think, Well, I don't know about my own enlightenment, but I can look at Laurie or I can look at Leslie or I can look at Peter. If I look around this room, we know each other. A lot of us know each other very well and we know what in our lives we struggle with and contend with.

[33:49]

and we also see how we continue to expand how uh enlightenment unfolds not as some not like not like many of us some of us maybe are walking around with like some glowing auras and colors around our heads so some of you are but I won't say who that is, but we understand, we see that each other is changing, we see that even though we may not understand this notion of did you use am I, we have some sense that it's at work, it's at play. Yet the interesting thing, so Dogen talks about, again in his first sentence or his first paragraph, he says, all Buddha Tathagatas together have been simply transmitting wondrous dharma.

[35:13]

What is that? Is that something that Ron can give to me and I can give to David, it doesn't work like that. This is another great classic expression by Sawaki Kodo. She says, we cannot exchange so much as a fart with another person, which in my own usual fashion got me thinking. My farts are my farts and your farts are your farts, but there is a kind of transmission there. And we're all aware of what that transmission is.

[36:16]

So it's very intimate. I don't want to take it too far, but body-to-body activity, body-to-body sense is transmission even where there are no, it's not like there's pipelines between us. but the senses are stuff that we resonate with the beings that we are practicing together with. That's why I think that's one of the wonderful things about our practice, this particular style of Buddhism that's relatively unique. It's a body-to-body practice. We sit next to each other And in the course of Seshin, particularly if we're sitting for a few days, you get to know every creak of someone's leg, you get to know their expression when they get out, you see how they hold their body, you see how they nod off to sleep and wake up.

[37:43]

and whatever we're doing together, this is where Jijuyu Zamae becomes larger, where Zazen becomes larger than what is just contained within this particular bag of skin. So I think that's where I'll probably where I'd like to end for today and leave a little time for discussion before we have the ceremony. I feel like I've just sort of skimmed the surface, but that's what I had planned to do because we'll have a chance over the next four weeks to go through this whole great is you will all have the opportunity to hear people's understanding from a variety of positions.

[38:57]

There's no strict doctrine here. So anyway, I'll stop there. Do you have any thoughts or questions? What is Chan or what is meditation? Was that the same character in the answer, do you know? Like when he said, it is not meditation? Was it like, what is Chan? It is not Chan? Or is it, what is Chan? It is not Samadhi. I think it's the same character. Oh no, I don't have the book with me. I'm pretty sure the footnote implied that it was the same character. But I couldn't read the punctuation to you. So, Joshu says it is not meditation. at least the punctuation which doesn't exist in Chinese but it exists in English the way this is translated by this guy Green, the monk said, why is it then in quotation marks not meditation?

[40:09]

So in other words proposing something called not meditation as opposed to And then, Joshu completely obliterates that. There's not something not meditation. It's just alive. Paul? Do you know any more details about Myosin being with Rujing? Is there any knowledge of why he was there, any significance to his being with Rui Jin? I don't know about significance, but I think it was, I'd have to look at the biographical stuff, my recollection is it was some communication

[41:14]

from Myosin to Dogen, because Dogen was getting ready to sail back, saying, you should come back here. Actually, he had been there previously, but Rujing wasn't the teacher. I think somebody can correct me. Rujing had been established as the head teacher in the time since Dogen had been there last, and I think it was Myosin who said, you know, you should come and check this out. This guy is the real thing. Peter? What's the relationship between the story of Dogen encountering Nintenzo, you know, at the outside of the ship where he was staying, Is there any connection between that figure and the Virginian temple? Yes. He was a Tenzo there. So that's why Dogen had visited there.

[42:16]

This is my recollection anyway. It's not a gospel. That's why Dogen had visited the first time and had vivid exchanges with the Tenzo, but didn't really care for the monastic, the whole monastic, that monastic environment. I think he was kind of picky. Maybe that's good. Jake? When Dogen was perhaps encouraged to leave the Rinzai temple, was it because Dogen was talking about you are, and Rinzai was encouraging the Koan study. I don't think so. I don't think it was a conflict particularly with that temple.

[43:16]

I suspect it was a political conflict and it had more to do with the Tendai school, which was the dominant school in that time and place, and this happened again in 1243. He had established Koshoji, which was the first Soto Zen monastery in Japan. He had established that, and some of you have been there. Haven't some of you been there? I've never been there, but I think they've rebuilt it. In 1243, in very short notice, they shut down this place that they'd been practicing for 10 years, which had all of the buildings and all the stuff in it, and they just split.

[44:18]

They packed them on their backs and on horses and took it pretty far away to place where A. H. E. is now. And it really happened in short notice. I mean, I think it was within a couple of months that they had to pick up and go. The monks then didn't fool around. It's like if there was some conflict between monasteries, then monks from one monastery would go and burn down the other one. It's like, sorry, no nice guy. This was very political. Charlie? I did read your email about the conference. I'm just wondering, if they don't have a sangha in the other practice places, what do they do? Oh, it's not that they don't have a sangha.

[45:20]

Some of them are quite small. They might have four or five people coming for Zazen, or they might have classes. There's something about the longevity and maturity and scale of ours that is... It's unusual, that's all. There are other places that are thriving, but we've been here for 40 years or more, 45 years. That actually is a long time, and there aren't many places that have been there that have been around. There aren't any places that have been around that long, except for Zen Center and ZCLA. So there's just an advantage.

[46:23]

We've had incredible stability. We've had consistency of teaching, and all of that just builds up. Anything else on your mind before we close? So Dogen went back to Japan and his teacher was in China. Yeah, and his teacher died also. Well, I think shortly after he got back from Japan, is that right? Rujing died. So he got most of his teaching while he was alive in China. Well, he got Rujing's teaching in China, all in China, yeah. But when he came back then he was kind of on his own, he didn't have another teacher or anything? No, he did not have another teacher. And I think he had documented his own experience there pretty thoroughly.

[47:35]

What's that really long? Is it Hokioki? And then you turn yourself around. Yeah, I mean, there's a very long fascicle which goes into a lot of detail. And then, of course, all of the Xingyi and the regulations. I mean, he studied on this stuff, and he brought back everything that he could. So when they asked him, what did you learn in China? It's apocryphal according to Kim. He reportedly said, all I learned was eyes horizontal, nose vertical. It's wonderful teaching which you can expand on greatly, but whether he actually said it or not, there's some question.

[48:41]

if it's useful, which I think it's useful, so why not? Yeah, Paul? I believe you said that this work was lost for several hundred years. Yeah. That's interesting. So does it kind of suggest that, well, we're focused on learning through this text that wasn't taught that way for several hundred years? Or were all his other texts being used? No. Almost none of them were being used. There was a revival that began in the 17th century and from then you started having some influential monks and scholar monks disseminating this stuff widely. Basically he was They didn't read him, but he was an ancestor figure. He was seen as the founder, and they knew where his relics were, but his actual words were, very few people saw them, and very few people had access to them, because they were actually in the temple treasuries of two or three temples.

[50:05]

But there were other teachings that had been affected by him that were circulating more widely. It's just that nobody could go back to the original teachings, which are somewhat different than the later manifestations of it. Well, this is a good place to end. We can get set up. the short ceremony opening and we'll all have a kind of big party together for the next month. Thank you.

[50:50]

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