Good morning. Well, Mary Mosine was supposed to give the talk today, but she apparently had a dying student somewhere and had to attend to that person. And I was asked at the last minute to give the talk. So I shall. So today, I'm going to comment on a very interesting koan from, which appears in the Mu Man Khan, Master Mu Man's collection of koans. Koan number five in this, collection.

[01:01]

So this is, I'm sure most of us are familiar with this koan. I've commented on it several times in the past 20 or 30 years or something. It's called Kyogen's Man Up in a Tree. So I'm going to read the case And then a comment somewhat on Kyogen's life. I'm going to read about Kyogen's life, because Kyogen's life is connected to the case. So Kyogen, Kyogen was a disciple of Master Isan. I'm using the Japanese names. Of course, this is all Chinese. Kyogen and Kyosan were Isan's, two of Isan's major disciples.

[02:08]

And the Ikkyo school, there are five schools of Zen. The Ikkyo school is named after Isan and Kyosan, Ikkyo. And Kyogen was one of those three. I mean, he was, the three of them hung out together, let's say. And there's some stories about the three of them, but I won't go into those today. So Kyogen said, It is like a man up in a tree hanging from a branch with his mouth. Actually, it's with his teeth, I would say. His hand grasps no bowel. His feet rest on no limb.

[03:10]

Someone appears under the tree and asks him, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West? If he does not answer, he fails to respond to the question. If he does answer, he will lose his life. What would you do in such a situation? That's the koan. Dogen has a fascicle where he talks about this koan. It's a wonderful fascicle. It's a little more elaborate, but this is good. This is the essence of the koan. So now I want to talk about Kyogen, who presented this koan. So Kyogen stood seven feet tall.

[04:16]

That's pretty tall, and was a scholar of great erudition. So he was a prominent guy, you know, both in body and in mind. His learning, for a long time, stood in the way of his enlightenment. But Isan, his teacher, recognized his innate ability. So one day Isan asked Kyogen, When you were with our teacher Hyakujo, Hyakujo was the teacher of Isan. And apparently, Kyogen was also a student of Hyakujo before he was a student of Isan. So when you were with our teacher Hyakujo, You are very clever enough to give 10 answers to a single question.

[05:19]

Really smart guy. Very intelligent. And hundreds of answers to 10 questions. Great scholar. However, sagacity, I think that's the way you say that. Sagacity does not help you in studying Zen. In fact, it can stand in the way of your enlightenment. Now, I am not going to ask you about what you have learned from your reading or from your study of the sutras. Instead, tell me this. What is your real self? Who are you? What is your real self? The self that existed before you came out of your mother's womb and before you knew east from west. So, You know, there's a lot of, in Zen, it looks, it seems like study is frowned upon, but that's not really so.

[06:36]

What's frowned upon is substituting erudition for reality, for the thing itself. So, you know, as Dogen says, or as it is said, you can't eat the painting of a rice cake. So Isan is telling him, please show me your rice cake. Don't give me the picture. without giving me the picture, show me the thing itself. So that's Zen. It's okay to study. We have a great library. This is my time to pitch for the library. It's full of great books, you know. And as a matter of fact, we've been trying to popularize it a little bit so that people will know it's there.

[07:39]

And at one time, I invited people to come in to the library. I think it was actually the residence. And I said, everybody go get a book. And everybody just picked a book at random and then opened it at random and everybody read the page of the book they had picked. And it was so interesting, really interesting. So any book you read on Zen is interesting, or Buddha Dharma is interesting. So I'm thinking of doing that again. It's a kind of fun thing to do. So anyway, show me your true self, which is not just an idea. So this is what Zen is about. You know, that's why, anyway, I'll leave it there. So at this question, Kyogen was stupefied and did not know what to say.

[08:42]

He racked his brains and offered all sorts of answers, but Isan brushed him aside. He said, no, that's not it. At last, Kyogen said, I beg you, please explain it to me. And Isan replied, what I say belongs to my own understanding. How can that benefit your mind's way? So Kyogen went through all of his books and the notes he had made on authorities of every school, but could find no words to use as an answer to learn, as an answer to Ison's question. So sighing to himself, he said, you cannot fill an empty stomach with paintings of a rice cake. Okay. Sometimes, you know, if I wanted to give a talk, I think, well, let's see, I'll take, I'll look at this book or that book or something, but I cannot find any, I have the whole library, enormous library, and nothing, nothing fits the question.

[10:00]

That's really interesting. And then at the very last minute, something occurs, and I work real hard for an hour. That's what I did today. And under pressure, under pressure means you have to let go of everything. There's nothing to rely on. And you just have to give space for something to come up by letting go of everything. Dying. That's what this case is about. So then he burned all his books and papers saying, I will give up the study of Buddhism in this life. I will remain a rice gruel monk, meaning just, you know, guy in a monastery who just goes about his business day by day for the rest of my life and avoid torturing my mind.

[11:03]

Sadly, he left his son. and coming to Nanyang, Nangaku, Nanyang's monastery, where the remains of the national teacher, were buried. This national teacher, there's always a national teacher, or there was in China, selected by the emperor. And Chu was apparently a disciple of the Sixth Ancestor, Hui Nong. So, sadly, he left Isan and coming to Nanyang, where the remains of the national teacher, Chu, were buried, he took on the self-appointed job as gravekeeper. I'll just take care of his monument. In this spirit of dejection, he found this humble task best suited him.

[12:08]

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they are freed from their own deluded egos. So, one day when he was sweeping the ground, a stone struck a bamboo. This is a very famous story, right? It's always used as an example. One day he was sweeping the ground and a stone struck a bamboo. like that. The sound echoed through his mind as the sound of a falling nut rings through the empty valleys and hills at midnight." Oh, you know, it's just that cartoon. The cats, right? Bonk. Something like that. This was the intuitive I'm sorry, this is the intuitive, now the author here likes to talk about the first and second and third nen. Nen means a moment of, one conscious moment.

[13:12]

One singular conscious moment. We say moment after moment or thought after thought or something like that. This is nen, one nen after nen. One complete moment. of now as men. So, he talks about three Nens. So, I will read that. It's a little, it's, it is related. So, I just point my place. One day when he was sweeping the ground, a stone struck a bamboo. The sound echoed through his mind as the sound of a falling nut rings through the empty valleys and hills at midnight. This was the intuitive first nen, ringing through his cleared mind and making a direct pure cognition of the object."

[14:16]

So he's trying to explain his awakening. Kyogen stood speechless. forgetting himself for a while, then suddenly bursting out in loud laughter. He became enlightened. So then he says, enlightenment is consummated when pure cognition is reflected upon by the purified action of the third nen, which is henceforth the master of the mind. So I'll talk just a little bit about the three nens. The first man, I characterize like the child sees the emperor's true clothes. Everybody else, there's a big parade, you know about the emperor's clothes. The emperor, you know, the ultimate in haberdashery.

[15:17]

The emperor had his seamstresses making all these wonderful robes and stuff. And in the end, I'm trying to remember exactly why, but the ultimate close is no clothes. That's great. You know, the ultimate close is nakedness. So, for some reason, he's got this big parade and he's showing off his new clothes. But he doesn't have anything on. And everybody's saying, what wonderful clothes, what beautiful clothes. And then this little kid says, you know what, how come the emperor doesn't have any clothes? So this is true seeing. This is the first Nen. is seeing that the emperor has no clothes, seeing without any thoughts about it, just direct perception, without any mental construction.

[16:28]

just this, the first nen, just this moment's reality, seeing the reality. When we say seeing something as it is, that's the first nen. The second nen is when you elaborate on the first nen and start thinking about it, and then you name it and you think about its characteristics. The third nen is elaborating on the second nen, which is further thinking. The second NEN and the third NEN take you away from the first NEN, the direct perception. But when you're enlightened, the second NEN is also the first NEN, and the third NEN is also the first NEN. The problem we have with delusory seeing is that we see something, we start elaborating on what we see before we accept the reality of a thing as it is.

[17:43]

So that's how we get confused. because we don't see the reality or the thing as it is before we start elaborating on it. So we get so used to seeing the world according to our ideas without seeing what it actually is that we create problems. And some people, after they grow up a little bit, only see through their idea And so our habit energy creates the idea of what something is, and we never really see it as what it truly is until we're ready to die. And then we say, oh my God, what's this? So when we really pay attention to the first man, we're ready for dying, and we understand what it is to some extent.

[18:49]

So when we realize that everything is only a flashing moment after moment, and we follow the reality of things as it is, then by the time we are ready to let go of this world, it's not so difficult, hopefully. So, we get back to the koan. So Kyogen Osho said, he's talking about himself. He's talking about his experience. That's what the koan is about. That's why I read you the biography, because this koan, he's setting up this koan. He said, this is what I discovered.

[19:52]

He said, it's like a man up in a tree. Or it's like a person. It's like a person up in a tree hanging from a branch with that person's mouth, teeth, mouth. Her hands grasp no bow. In other words, the hands are not, there's nothing for the hands to hang on to. What is the, and, The feet are not, in other words, just the mouth, right? Yes, just the mouth. Someone appears under the tree and asks, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West? So, we think this is crazy, but this was a great question in the Tang Dynasty, and after, of course, but the famous question, why did Bodhidharma come from the West?

[21:00]

Because Bodhidharma, of course, brought Zen to the West, to China, from India. answer that question, why did he come? What it means is, what is the essence of Zen? So, that's the meaning, but it's expressed as, why did Bodhidharma come from the West? So, what is the essence of Zen, basically? So, here's an example. If he does not answer, he fails, or he falls. No, if he doesn't answer, he fails to answer the question, if he doesn't, if he keeps holding on. And if he does, if he does answer, he will lose his life.

[22:03]

So what would you do in this situation? The one thing that we don't want to do is lose our life. But you have to do that. No matter how much you try not to, you have to do that. So basically, it's like, don't wait. Do it now. But what does it mean to lose your life? Basically, what do we call our life? What we call our life is our ego. That's what we identify ourselves as our life. It's our ego. When you think about it, consciousness, we don't want to lose consciousness. I don't want to have to explain the transformation of consciousness into wisdom.

[23:09]

I might have to. I have done it before. The transformation of consciousness into wisdom. But I want to continue here. So, life equals ego. We identify our life with our ego. And so in Zen or in Buddhism, the main thing about Buddhism is to let go of our ego so that we actually can express our life in a true way. So ego is what keeps us from expressing or understanding our true life. our essence of mind, so to speak. So, what happens when we do let go?

[24:19]

So, how do we answer the question? The question of Why has Bodhidharma come from the West? So, in order to answer that question, we have to open our mouth. You can do it by keeping your mouth closed. But we have to open, as Kadagiri once said, his name is in his book, right? You have to say something. Dogen adds, there's a thousand foot cliff. This tree is on a thousand foot cliff. So, you know, everything is metaphor. If you take everything literally, you can't understand thin. The tree is our life. And we're hanging on to life with our teeth.

[25:26]

with our mouth. And if we open our mouth, we lose our life. I remember reading in Zen books, die now and forever live your life, receive your true life. But Christianity is the same, right? in order to live, to receive your life, you have to let go of it. So, but I was always scared of that, you know, like, wow, you know, what will I do if I lose, if I lose my ego, what will I have? I have nothing. So, in Zen, we always talk about nothing. What nothing, the problem we have is that we fall into one side or another, this is the big problem of our life.

[26:32]

That's why we're always given the koan of oneness and duality. Duality means that we split our life in two. It's either nothing or something. But nothing is something, and something is nothing. We talk about emptiness, but emptiness is fullness, and fullness is emptiness. And unless we let go, we don't understand this. And this was Kyogen's problem. He understood all this intellectually, but he didn't experience it because he depended on his intellect.

[27:35]

This is why we said Dazen. Dazen is letting go of our dualistic thinking and just becoming one, as well as two. But experiencing the oneness of duality, that's Dazen. People say, well, we said Zazen to peace of mind and so forth. Yeah, well, peace of mind means the oneness of duality. But it's so hard not to fall into duality. That's why we have all these questions when something comes up. Whenever something comes up, we should always look at the other side. include the other side. But this is, you know, war and peace. Peace contains war and war contains peace.

[28:36]

But it's hard to see that because we fall into one side or another. Of course we all want peace, right? We all want peace. Some people just all want war. When you're a little kid, like as boys, I always wanted war, but some people never grow out of it. You grow up and then you realize you don't, you know, you can't. Love starts to come in and then you are taken over by love and peace and so forth. But we have both of those in us and we have to reconcile both of those. That's the tough part. But, you know, we're peaceniks, most of us. That's great. But it's still one-sided. So it's really hard, life is difficult, to reconcile the dualities.

[29:42]

When we sit in Zazen for a long period of time, we have pain. But what we want is comfort. But when we give up our need for comfort and accept the pain, then we have comfort. If we cannot accept the pain, we don't have comfort. Comfort comes from the conciliation of pleasure and pain. Within pain there's pleasure, within pleasure there's pain. You cannot get out of it. This is called the Saha world for some reason. The painful world. Look what's going on around us. Painful world. But in order to have pleasure, we have to accept the pain.

[30:46]

You cannot have one without the other. So, and the only way you can do that is to let go. So, we're always dealing with this egocentricity, our self-centeredness. When we can let go of ourself as the center, then we become a part of the universe, an element of the universe, and the universe is the center. our universal self, our cosmic self, then we have comfort, because we can accept everything as it is, the first and end. So, Mu Man's comment, Mu Man, of course, is the who collected the koans, he also has a comment.

[31:49]

Even if your eloquence flows like a river, he's talking about Kyogen right now, it is of no avail. Although you can expound the whole of Buddhist literature, it is of no use. Even if you solve this problem, I'm sorry, if you solve this problem, You will give life to the way that has been dead until this moment. What he means by dead until this moment means your delusions. Living the delusional life is what he calls dead life. And destroy the way, I don't like destroy, I would say let go, the way that you have been He says, if you solve this problem, you will give life to the way that has been dead until this moment, which is your enlightened life.

[33:03]

and destroy the way that has been alive up to now, which is your delusional life. Otherwise, you must wait for Maitreya Buddha and ask him. So Maitreya Buddha is supposed to come five billion years from now. Or, you know, they give different numbers. And Maitreya, you know, is the Buddha of Maitri. which is love and kindness. So Zen, Master Muman has a verse, Kyogen is truly thoughtless. So that's a kind of interesting phrase. Thoughtless usually means, you know, unaware or ignorant. but here it means without thinking, without delusive thinking.

[34:18]

He's thoughtless. Dogen says, the art of Zazen is think not thinking. Think not thinking. What is think not thinking? It means beyond thinking and not thinking. It doesn't mean there's no thought. means true thought. Not thinking means true thought, not delusive thought. His vice and poison are endless. He's talking about Mumon, right? He's talking about… It spreads this poison around, right? It means the poison to kill the ego. I don't think we should kill the ego. We should put the ego in its rightful place.

[35:19]

The problem with ego is that it depends on, our ego depends on our dualistic thinking. We have to think dualistically because we live in a dualistic world. But we should not be driven by, or we should know the difference between true thinking and delusive thinking, between complete thinking and partial thinking. Partial means dualistic. You divide into parts. That's necessary. This is, you know, we're all sitting here at different parts of the same thing. We're all one piece, but we're all different pieces of the same piece. Unless we realize that we're all one piece, it's dualistic. It's nothing but dualistic thinking. That's delusion. So he stops up the mouths of the monks.

[36:23]

Well, that goes back, I think, to hanging by your mouth. He stops up the mouths of the monks, but it really means stopping their delusive thinking. And devil's eyes sprout from their bodies. It gives them a big problem that squeezes their eyes. You ever see these little rubber things, you know? Anyway, that was before Mu Man. I mean, after Mu Man, yeah. So, Dogen says in his comment on this, he says, Only if you lose your life before you answer, can you help others. When, you know, I always say to people who give a dōkasan or practice instruction, they say, well, how do you answer somebody's questions?

[37:27]

And I always say, find your bottom line. When somebody gives you a question, where do you go with that question? Well, you go to the bottom of yourself. You don't answer from here. I mean, it may seem like you're answering from here, or from here, or from someplace, but actually, the true answer is going to the bottom of yourself whenever you're asked the question, and that's where your response comes from. And so you actually let go. You lose your life before you answer. Because if you don't, then it's just coming from your dualistic mind. That's the difference between just answering people's questions or having a conversation and doing dokasan or practice instruction.

[38:32]

And of course, we should be doing that all the time. People say, well, how can I carry the practice out into the world? Well, that's how you do it. You're always coming from your essence of mind, which is called dying. And then you come to life. That's true life. That makes you happy all the time. People say, what is joy? Joy has the various levels, but true joy is coming from your essence of mind, which is like a river that's subterranean river that is not subject to circumstances. Because it's always there. It's always available.

[39:36]

Always available. So someone said, this world is a tree and a person climbs this tree and must leave his body to this world. she must abandon the human standpoint. We think that the universe revolves around us. I think the world revolves around me. It seems that way. We thought that the sun revolved around, we used to think that the sun revolved around the earth, right? Now we know that the earth revolves around the sun. That's a big change in ego. And so, who, you know, we're not, we're earthlings who revolve around the sun.

[40:44]

So we're just part of things. We're not, you know, there are things that revolve around us. Our life does revolve around us, but... We are not the center of the, we are the universe, but at the same time, we're not. It's difficult. The thing is, we can let go of our dualistic thinking and our ego and still survive. And, but we hold on so much. We need something to hold on to. And that's our problem. In the National Geographic, the last one that I got yesterday, it's the end of, you know, the nomads of Iran, you know, traveling

[41:56]

Having no particular home, but knowing where they're going, is that an end, right? Because people are establishing their immovable homes. And monks have no home, right? It's very similar in a way. So, it's like they have to be awake and alert and understand the earth and the movements of the seasons and the sky and feel it, you know, the vibrancy of immediacy all the time and relate to the animals. But we're gradually pushing all that away, covering it up. Too bad.

[43:00]

We need those examples. Because we want to feel safe and secure. And, you know, it's great, but we're not. We have to understand that we're not. So as a partner, And then the people in the Amazon, a great article about the last people in the Amazon who live in the Garden of Eden. No clothes. And their children play with the animals. And their grownups play with the animals. Anyway, the question here is, what would you do in such a situation?

[44:03]

Because that's where we live. We have this situation all the time. It's not like sometimes you're holding on with your teeth. We're always holding on with our teeth, our mouth. let go, because eventually, if somebody said to me, I'm dying, you know, I have this and that. And I said, we're always dying. We're living and dying at the same time. How do we die so that we can live? in a true way, because everything is, as soon as it appears, it's gone. Do you have a question? Okay, John.

[45:05]

People expect me to have a handle on life, to be grasping a reality, know the truth about what I'm a professional in. And of course, I like that. I like to be the guy who knows, I like to get paid for it, and so on like that. Given that this is how we work every day, you know, if somebody comes to me for a consult It depends on what you mean by the house. It's like leaving home doesn't necessarily mean you move out of the house.

[46:10]

This is the home. So you have to get it down to where is the true home? They may be thinking about the house, but you have to take them down to the home. Where is their true home? So in other words, Yes, no professionalism. No. People think, you know, well, this person's a priest, and like, he wears this robe, and I'm just a person. I don't know why I do this, but it was laid on me, and so I carried on. When you first said it, I thought, well, I'd just jump off and say, whoopee! Yes, whoopee. Which is not answering, because I'm not answering.

[47:13]

It's not an answer. It's not an either or answer. It's just... You have that ability to take on, to let go, and find your way. You do have that ability. I went and you know you got hooked up to something and you took one step at a time behind all the other people and pretty soon you were at the pit at the door of the plane.

[48:16]

And then you just walked off. And it was that feeling of letting life happen. And that really is every step. For me, it takes some kind of faith, faith in the ancestors, faith in the practice, faith in whatever did you say. Yes. Yeah. You know, when somebody asks me if I'm doing Dogasan, I don't have any thought in my mind about anything. Just open mind. No ideas. I know who this person is, but when I see this person, I don't think about that I know who this person is.

[49:19]

I give them the opportunity to not be known by me. In other words, I don't know who you are, even though I know who you are. I can't not know. my experience with you, but that doesn't mean I know who you are. I think we don't know anybody, because we all have so much in us, but our essence of mind meets essence of mind. That's knowing. Yeah.

[50:31]

Yes. Yes. Yes. He had to, who am I at this moment? Yes, really. Yes. And she had let go. She just, this is, you know, I don't know why I had to do this. It's just, I don't have anything else, no agenda. It's just that this is what I did. This is what I have to do. And that's, you know, real courage to let go of her safety. It's time. Thank you.

[51:22]

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