I'm grateful for the opportunity to talk this morning. I appreciate Sogen Roshi's invitation. Thank you very much. It's a different experience to speak from the depths of Seshin, as it were, and so I'm going to talk about an aspect of the Platform Sutra. And first just a little history, my history with the Platform Sutra. I think it was one of the first, it was also one of the first Buddhist books that I read and as far as I can recall, we had it or part of it in an Oriental Humanities class in college. And I think this is the translation that we had. And I don't remember much, I don't remember much about college.

[01:07]

College was sort of a haze of marijuana smoke that suffuses like incense smoke. I'm not sure if that's the wisdom incense or the stupidity incense. But when I started to practice seriously, and I think Sojin Roshi was teaching from this at various points, because it seems like it's a core text for him, and I read it early on, and the autobiography was very, that was familiar so I must have read that and it really resonated with me and the rest of it didn't make a lot of sense. It was way over my head and I set it aside and a few years ago a number of things came together and I picked it up again. One of the things that came together was just a

[02:08]

being witness to a dialogue between Sojan Roshi and Ekan Roshi where they were discussing the chapter that Sojan Roshi has been teaching on Samadhi and Prajna and they had a different perspective characterize it, curiously, it seems to me that Akin Roshi was sort of coming from, they were talking about it generally, not in terms of the Platform Sutra, but if I think back on it, Akin Roshi was more coming from the Shenshu position of the Samadhi being the kind of the necessary precondition for prajna and Sojan Roshi was asserting the unity of samadhi and prajna and they kind of I think ultimately sort of agreed to disagree although there was a lot of respect essentially between them.

[03:25]

And, but it, I think it was working on Sojin Roshi's mind, as he called me up on the phone, which he doesn't do, the next day, which was, I think it was a Friday, you know, and he said, could you come down? And he had this, that chapter open on his desk, and he said, see? And that made a big impression. I went back and I read it and I did see, I understood what he was saying and it sort of, that kind of opened the sutra to me in some critical way. And then a few years later, a few years ago, I was reading the sutra and thinking about it a lot and there's this thing called National Novel Writing Month. Has anyone heard of that? Well, I wrote a novel. during National Novel Writing Month. It's a great, I really, this is a totally great thing to do.

[04:30]

You're supposed to come up with a 50,000 word novel and you could write the same word 50,000 times and that would win the prize. Because there is no prize. But I wrote a novel that involves a fictionalized version of the autobiography of Winang. and how that intersected over history with a character in the cultural revolution. And where it intersected, I'm not going to go into this. I was gonna read you the chapter because I actually wrote a chapter about Shenshu and Wining meeting later and practicing together as Dharma brothers and the sweet quality of that, which was very interesting. So I thought I would show you, I don't know if people have seen, has anyone been to Wining's temple, Nanhua? You have. Did you see the mummy?

[05:33]

So this is a picture of Wen Ning's mummy. And what they had, they had this practice in China for some illustrious figures, not just Zen masters, but also great leaders. When they died, they dumped their whole body into a vat of lacquer to mummify them. And that's what they did to Winem. So you can see his body, yeah. Yes, they did recover his head. Actually, that's in the novel too. They recovered his head and they glued it on really good. Somebody was sent from Korea to steal his head, because that's where wisdom resided, I guess. But they did recover his head. What? In the head?

[06:36]

In the head. The Koreans wanted wisdom, so they stole the head. I'm not getting to what I want to talk about here, you notice that? Anyway, I'm not going to go into the novel, but it's really amazing. You can see this mummy. I would like to see it one day. And it was smashed about a bit in the Cultural Revolution, which figures in this novel, but they put it back together. Yes? Yeah, but I think that monks often wore, some monks wore red robes, wore saffron colored robes. I don't know what they wore. I don't know, and we don't know what Bodhidharma's robe that he gave to Hungren, that Hungren gave to Wenin was.

[07:43]

It may have been, yes. Yeah. Anyway, so what I wanted to talk about today was this chapter, the next chapter, which is in a piece, just a particular piece of it on repentance. So in the previous chapters, What you've covered, if you think about it, is two of the three essential elements of practice. We talked about samadhi and prajna, and then this chapter talks about shila, the precepts. So those are Generally, those are the three core aspects, shila, samadhi, prajna. If you think about the Noble Eightfold Path, that can be divided into those three dimensions of practice which make up an entire life of practice. So this chapter on repentance covers Sheila.

[08:51]

And the model, so what you have in this chapter, you have a number of different stages. The first is he offers incense, Sheila incense. And incense is, interestingly, it's identified with morality and ethics. The smoke of incense is the character of our ethical behavior. That's what it traditionally characterizes in Buddhism, in almost all of the traditions. So actually when I was at Zuyoji, I don't know, Mary, were you at Zuyoji the other place? When we did the Bodhisattva ceremony, before we did the Bodhisattva ceremony, it was just like in, it was sort of like in this, we incensed our robes. The corners of the robes.

[09:53]

Yeah, so that's a very traditional practice in a monastic setting. So the first is shila incense and then the second part of this ceremony is the formless repentance. repenting just as we did last night. All my ancient tangled karma through body speech and mind I fully avow the formula is a little different but the essence is the same. Then he puts forward the four bodhisattva vows and that's I'm going to talk about one of them and afterwards offers what's called a threefold guidance, which is basically one version of the refuge.

[10:57]

We take enlightenment as our guide, we take the Dharma as our guide, and we take purity as our guide. And Sangha stands for purity, as in his comments later. Buddha stands for enlightenment. Dharma stands for orthodoxy, or rules and regulations. And Sangha stands for purity. And then refuge in the three bodies of Buddha. So I'm not going to go into all of this, but this is Huining's presentation of the precepts what he calls the formless precepts or in some translations the markless precepts or sometimes we call them I think in some of our ceremonies we call them pure mind precepts or the dharmakaya precepts. Yeah, but what he means by formless is that these are the precepts of what we've been talking about over the last few days of essence of mind.

[12:12]

Essence of mind you can think of as being mind. You could think of as dharmakaya. Sudra and I were talking yesterday again without going into a lot of technical Buddhism. There's a lot of reference in this Platform Sutra to the mind-only or consciousness-only Lankavatara school. In fact, Hung Rin was going to have scenes from the Lankavatara Sutra painted on the walls. It would be interesting to do that here. I don't know whose scenes, scenes from the life of Suzuki Roshi painted on the walls. Or we could have a poetry contest. What Winan is pointing to with this emphasis on essence of mind is something beyond

[13:19]

what's typically framed as the eight consciousnesses, the seven or eight consciousnesses in this mind-only school, the six senses, manas, which is kind of the controller and kind of ego consciousness, and then ilaya-vijnayana, the storehouse consciousness. Essence of mind is not a consciousness. It's something that transcends that. It's not it doesn't attach, it doesn't have any mark, which is why it's called markless or formless. And we can't quite get our, we can't get our minds around it to characterize it or define it in some way. And that's where he's talking about these precepts. That's why they're called formless precepts, because they are the precepts that arise from essence of mind. And they're offered here in the context of, you could say an ordination.

[14:28]

Some scholars call this an ordination. But it's more kind of an open initiation into Buddhism. So an ordination in his time would more typically involve Vinaya precepts, 250 or 270 precepts, and Tantra, cutting of the hair. And then in the Chinese tradition it would probably also involve receiving the Bodhisattva precepts. But this is a an initiation into Buddhism for anyone, not just for monks or nuns or priests. And actually, there's a ceremony like this in Japan, which is actually, it's called Jukai. where you receive the precepts, which is not quite the same as what we've been calling for years Jukai, which is actually an ordination.

[15:32]

It's a lay ordination. Jukai is just, you don't receive a Raksu, you don't receive a name or a lineage paper, you just receive the precepts, the Bodhisattva precepts. So this is kind of like that and as day this might be a model for the ceremonies that that we have our our ordination ceremony our bodhisattva ceremony weddings funerals whatever you got we got like one ceremony which is these precepts so okay to get to I think Winang was very creative and not bound by orthodoxy. So he he had a version of the Bodhisattva vows that is very it's subtly different.

[16:34]

So what he says is the sentient beings of our minds are limitless. We vow to save them all. Let me see what the translation is in here. Something like that. So, learned audience, having repented of our sins, we will take the following four all-embracing of Bodhisattva vows. We vow to deliver an infinite number of sentient beings of our mind. We vow to get rid of the innumerable defilements in our own mind. We vow to learn the countless systems of Dharma in our essence of mind. We vow to attain the supreme attainment, the supreme Buddhahood of our essence of mind. So we take these, at the end of the day, we, actually at the end of the day, we vow that we take the refuges.

[17:35]

At the end of lecture, we take, we say beings are numberless, I vow to save them. He's adding this phrase, and it's interesting because some translations have this and some don't, but I think it's incredibly useful. The sentient beings of my mind are limitless. I vow to save them all. I've spoken on this before. It resonates with me with something from Whitman's Song of Myself. Yeah, Tamara. Well, I'm going to go into that. We'll go into that. Whitman's Song of Myself, there's a verse that says, do I contradict myself? very well then. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.

[18:38]

Dan Whitman says, I concentrate towards them that are nigh and I wait on the door slam. To me this is very much recognizing I am large, I contain multitudes, I contain all these sentient beings and I concentrate towards them that are nigh, which means I turn towards these beings that arise or come forth in mind and I wait on the door slab. I turn to them I don't get, as again, as Satyagraha was saying yesterday, you have to reserve something of yourself. You don't get entangled with these deluded beings, with these suffering beings, but you keep turning towards them. So, I will get to mind, but first,

[19:42]

Let's think about what these sentient beings are. Huining says, learned audience, all of us have now declared that we vow to deliver an infinite number of sentient beings. What does that mean? It does not mean that I, Huining, am going to deliver them. And who are these sentient beings within our mind? They are the delusive mind, the deceitful mind, the evil mind, and such like minds. All these are sentient beings. There's a commentary by the wonderful Zen teacher Soke An who talks about this verse. First he says, sentient beings, this means beings that have desire, those that live from morning to night to accomplish their desires.

[20:51]

In that verse, those which abide within my mind are numberless. Sentient beings within my mind are numberless. I vow to save them. In Buddhism, there is no particular ego within you. You yourself are an aggregation of the elements of beings within you. Elements of insects, fish, pigeons, and all varieties of animals. They are the sentient beings. Each individual possesses a city of sentient beings within herself. So this could sound like multiple personality disorder. But I think that the work that we're engaged in here in Sesshin is examining our mind and our body very carefully. you see the different states of mind that arise, and your states of mind are not the same as my states of mind, but I'll bet that each of ours is every bit as wild and

[22:05]

awful and wonderful as each other's, although quite individually different. We observe our bodies too. I'm sure, well perhaps this is my obsession, but I'm much more attuned to my rhythms of bowel movements and hunger than I normally pay attention to during the day. We get very finely attuned to things. We get attuned to the things that we handle and how we handle them. All of this is what he's framing as mind. Mind and body are not separate. But I think that a couple, so within that, what I noticed, there is this individual sense of mind. And what I've been thinking about in the course of this session is

[23:10]

how various states of mind, I notice various states of mind arise and they can be quite absorbing and they can be distracting, they can be distressing, et cetera. I can get, as we've talked about in other contexts, you can get very obsessive about what someone else is doing, how you feel about the way they breathe, how you feel about the way they serve. You can get obsessed about the food, what's right with it, what's wrong with it. So all of these are kinds of arising of sentient beings. At the same time, mysteriously, what I've been noticing, particularly in this session, is irrespective of how distracted or unconcentrated I may think I am at any moment, as the koan says, there is one who is not busy.

[24:18]

Even with that, Samadhi, if you follow the schedule, if you do the activities, if we do everything together, there is something else that is evolving, that is holding, mind that is holding and taking care of all of these other beings in a very general sense. We may not think of it, we may judge ourselves, we may have all kinds of opinions about the inadequate character of our practice and you know I hear this a lot talking to people but yet the feeling in this room deepens right day by day it deepens and so there's also the sense which there's one who is not busy and despite our busyness the activity of co-creating

[25:23]

this this session there are 30 to 40 beings who are not busy in this room 30 to 40 beings creating some mysterious mind together so if you think as we understand from the Buddhist teachings that we can't draw some clear boundary between self and other, then the mind that arises is intimately connected to all of the other minds that are practicing together, functioning together. We can see that very clearly, I think, in the context of Seshin. I wish I could see it more clearly in the world at large, and yet I actually have faith that that exists, this common mind that pulls in all these different directions.

[26:38]

So the beings of our mind that we vow to save and decision is both oneself and everyone in this endo. It's the mind that cultivates and allows samadhi to arise. It's also the mind of joy, lust, jealousy, ideas, trauma, all of that. mysteriously share. But I think another implication of this verse for me, the sentient beings of our mind are limitless, applies to what I've come to understand or think about birth and rebirth. In our Zen tradition, we don't talk so much.

[27:44]

The last time I heard him talk about it, Sogen Roshi was saying, well, I don't know about rebirth because I haven't been there yet, or I don't remember. Something like that. But we're reborn moment by moment. And this is also a traditional understanding in the Theravada tradition. Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, a Thai teacher, writes about dependent origination and rebirth, grasping and attachment will give rise to becoming and birth. So in that moment of becoming and birth, which takes place in our mind, I would say what is born is a sentient being of our mind, somewhat very close to us that we have to take care of. can be born in any one of an infinite number of realms or characters, as infinite as the beings are on this planet.

[28:53]

Buddhism sort of generally outlines these six realms, which we've talked about before. Lower realms of the hell realm, which is marked by hatred and aggression. The hungry ghost realm, which is marked by kind of insatiable hunger and greed. The animal realm, and this is, my apologies to, I don't think this is really the animal realm, but in Buddhist cosmology, the animal realm is depicted as, animals are depicted as stupid and prejudiced. It's like, I don't think so. But, what? Well, and Andrea's dog, and Sojan's dog, and you know, everybody else's, and Alexandra's birds, and you know.

[29:56]

I didn't make this up. And then the three higher realms, the demigods, who are fighting demons, and the devas, which is supposed to be the inhabitants, this is sort of a heavenly realm where the inhabitants are very complacent and self-centered and addicted to their pleasures. We don't know anyone like that. And then the human realm, which is where we can wake up. It's our temporary realm. So, but they're actually an infinite number of realms. And, you know, I'm thinking about, so Monday, I don't know what's, you know, why things happen or how things happen is mysterious to me, but Monday, second day of Sashin, I don't know about you, but sometimes entering Sashin is hard. There's, kind of the tethers to daily life are not, they're still pulling at me.

[31:02]

I just was really irritable. I was, you know, by way of confession, which is part of it, you know, I was irritated at how Ron was running the work meeting. I thought it was taking forever. You know, and it's like, why is he doing that? You know, it's cold. And then I found myself rushing, Is Deborah here? Yeah, I felt like, I didn't lay this on you, but I felt like I was rushing around the Berkeley Bowl to get all this stuff for cooking, and it's like, and then I did something, I was trying to work out something with Paul, with the pots, the cooking pots, because I needed a cooking pot, and I really spaced something out that upset him. And I just had to stop and think, what's going on here? Who is this being?

[32:03]

And how do I take care of him? I don't know exactly what realm you might put that being in, but at a certain point I realized he needed attention. And so I turned my attention to him. because I didn't want to, it was no fun to carry around that irritation and it wasn't necessary and I couldn't actually, Ron wasn't doing anything, the Berkeley Bull wasn't doing anything, Paul wasn't doing anything, it was all me. Why? I don't know why, but what do I do? So, This is the question. The question is, how do I save them? What do you mean by save them? What I mean by save them. OK. What a good question.

[33:05]

So Dogenzenji talks about Roshin or parental mind. The mind or attitude of a parent how a parent, irrespective of difficult circumstances or poverty, loves and protects a child. Ideally, that's what it's supposed to be. So, with children, as with ourselves, I think there's an attitude, hopefully, of unconditional love and acceptance. You love that being, but you may not like its behavior, right? But you don't stop loving it. You set boundaries. You turn towards it. You may turn towards it with just an embrace.

[34:11]

You may turn towards it with kind of a rule or boundary, but that doesn't impede the love. And sometimes what you do, you don't do anything, you just watch it. This is what Suzuki Roshi talks about in the control chapter of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. He says, to give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him or her. So it is with people. I would say so it is with the sentient beings of our mind. So it is with everybody in Seshin, if we think of it as one mind. First, let them do what they want and watch them. That's the best policy. To ignore them is not good. This is, I'm quoting Suzuki Roshi, that's the worst policy.

[35:15]

The second worst is to try to control them. The best one is just to watch them. Just to watch them without trying to control them. We talked about this on the first day of Sashim. Somebody asked a question about forms and correction. Who was it? Was someone here? Luke, right. And we're talking about the same thing. Well, first, what I've learned to do, because I have a propensity for correcting, is first I try to watch. If I see something wrong, I don't try to fix it immediately. I try to watch and feel where this is coming from. But the distinction that Sogen Roshi made was a distinction between helping and correcting. So when people come in the Zen Do, new people come, and you see they have some confusion or they don't know where things are in the Sutra book, you help them.

[36:26]

You don't correct them because this is the right way to do it and it's like first time they come in and say, no, you have to hold the book this way. No, you just let them find their way. And when they're comfortable with finding the Sutras, then they may want to see what the next step is. But if you correct them, then you're going to midwife the birth of a sentient being in their mind. And so I think that this parental mind that Dogen is talking about is is what we have to do. And we have to be very patient for ourselves. It's a way in a sense of reparenting ourselves. And so when a sentient being arises in my mind, or when a sentient being arises in our community, we have to take care of that sentient being for its entire lifespan.

[37:35]

Now, if it's a being of my mind, that lifespan, if it's something that stems from a trauma, may be very long and very deep. And you have to hold it very tenderly, not with a kind of sharp force of correction. But if it's a state of mind like the kind of irritability that I was talking about the other day, it tends not to last very long. But if you try to force it in one direction or another while that being has its life, then you'll get pushback. Notice? You confront somebody in some way that they're behaving, they will push back. If you just watch and let the, what I think about, let the neurotransmitters ebb, a bit, then you can work with that.

[38:38]

So for me, if I'm irritable, that means there's various chemicals going around in my body, aside from ideas or beliefs. While they are there, I really have to be very, very patient with them. When they start to taper off and their life seems like it's ebbing, then I can move them more gently in one direction. This is kind of an abstract way of talking about yourself, but it's, I think it's what we do, and I think it's what we do momentarily in Zazen, that we watch the methodology of our Zazen, of Shikantaza, is just to allow feelings and emotions to arise, Allow them to flow through. Watch them. Don't try to control them. As soon as you try to control them, you're injecting a lot of energy into that mental and physical system.

[39:44]

And when you do that, you'll create something. Something will be born. Something will arise. That's not necessary. Sometimes, in Sashin, here we are, what, day six? It's kind of getting to be a blur to me, but, you know, if your legs are really hurting, or if there's something that's really aching in your soul, you really have to put your attention on it. You may have to, you may have to actually focus and bear down on it. Not in a forceful way, but just really watch. Put a lot of attention on it. But you want to put just enough. You don't want to put so much attention on it that you give it life and feed it. You want to let it flow, let it go through. But sometimes if something really hurts a lot, you have to turn towards it.

[40:47]

And you may have to embrace it for a time. But don't get caught there. Don't get caught in that embrace. in the same sense that if a person is drowning, you don't want to be pulled down with them in the embrace, in the attempt to save their lives. So it is with our thoughts. But often, I think Zazen is this kind of laboratory in which we can actually experience the rising and passing away of thoughts that may, in a momentary sense, have a lot of vitality, impact, and yet they are transient also. So I think I'm going to stop there. It's 11. I'd like to leave a few minutes for questions or comments.

[41:49]

And Sojourn Roshi will continue from somewhere tomorrow. So comments or questions? Ellen. So when you say save all beings of the mind, do you mean love all beings or do you mean save them from suffering? I mean love all beings. but in the sense of Maitri or Agape in the Christian sense of unconditional love. There's a piece that I like by Martin Luther King Jr. called Love Your Enemies. It's a sermon that he used. He said, I'm not going to like everybody. But this unconditional love is a kind of acceptance of their essence, that they are partaking of essence of mind.

[42:56]

So love comes from that. But it may not be the same as, you don't have to like everything, and you don't have to accept everything that anyone does. So this, how do you, that's a koan. How do you do that? How do I enjoy it? Sometimes I enjoy it. What I came to on Monday was just thinking, oh right, this is the second day of session. This is just Alan being Alan. It's so familiar to me. It's like all I could be is bemused. I wish that I didn't, I wish I hadn't done something that irritated Paul. You know, and I apologize for that, but there's no point in holding on to that, but I'm generally, if I'm not really hurting somebody, I can cultivate some, I can bring up some feeling of amusement tomorrow.

[43:56]

Right. That's right. So do I. Yeah. I think that is the function of it. Yeah, and this is just a practical approach that Winé was laying out in the context of saving all beings. And your original question was, what is mind? And so, to me, all beings are co-creating essence of mind. To save the sentient beings of our mind means it works in both directions. We take care of what's really in front of us within ourselves, and we also have to take care of what's in front of us in the world.

[45:22]

Our practice has some mysterious impact. I don't know how it works, but that's kind of what I have faith in. I think from what I've heard you say, I think you have faith in that, though. Jin. Yeah. I've never, I'm, you're the first person that's ever said anything like that. Anyways, and what, in my practice, especially when you were teaching me how to sit and, And I was noticing when I was doing my really serious planning, I had really, really tipped my pelvis a lot. And it was really, really weird. I'm like, I'm tipping already.

[46:26]

And as soon as I went back to the balancing, I knew, so I thought, OK, gently. It all just, like, I realized, OK, hold on. I'm almost there. That was one noticing thing. The other thing is, I have a question. I complicate, in my dealing with my job, I also have to learn to do a lot. I have a mother who used to be a fighting demon. Really difficult and barbed comments designed just to catch me on her little, there's like a little beauty hook on there. And I've learned by my pregnancy, and catch on to that barb. So that's one of the things. I was wondering, the hungry ghost is an insatiable craving person, right? And what is the barb common?

[47:29]

What is a distinctive something that you see in that person? Something that you don't want to get tangled up in there. They need you to do that because they really feel something very, very painful is missing in them. And they think if you did such and such, then they'd feel okay, which they won't. And how you meet that is, I don't know the answer always. But to recognize their need and to figure out how to understand what their true need is. And they may not be ready to accept, if you're capable of meeting that true need, they may not be ready to accept that, but you have to look for what that is.

[48:33]

Maybe one or two more. There was something I had implicit in what you were talking about. You were talking about being irritable on the second day. And you said something like, you know, and I realized I needed to give that being some pretension. And not that you weren't trying to figure out why. I wasn't trying to figure out why. But implicit in that, I've been talking about the big field and so on. It seemed to me that there was something and I just wanted That's my reading of what Suzuki Roshi is saying. You watch. You don't watch. You're not like a dispassionate observer. You watch because you are connected to that being and I watch because I'm trying to understand what's going on.

[49:45]

But I'm not trying to figure out why, I'm just trying to understand what's going on. That's my sense of it. I don't know if you have anything to add to that. How do you watch? And... Well, you know, it's interesting answering Ellen about love.

[51:31]

This is bizarrely for me, this is my Christian side coming out, which I don't. That's right, I don't have a Christian side. It's like, what side is that? But that's how I understand, what I understand from reading King is actually the manifestation of love is respect, is really respect for the individual integrity of each being that he meets. And just, to me, to give your horse or cow a wide field, means also implicit in that language is, oh, but there's a fence around the field. A field, it's like they're not totally free range cows. There's a fence. There's a fence, there are walls around this room. So sometimes those walls are really narrow, sometimes they're really wide, but there's always something there.

[52:34]

Last one, Courtney. I think it's a recognition and not a rejection or invalidation. It's not embracing or rejecting, it's here it is. Right, that is a particular theological position which actually is called inclusivism. That's what King was. He was inclusivist, not a pluralist, and not an exclusivist. Not everybody subscribes to that, but it sounds pretty good to me.

[53:43]

Thank you very much.

[53:45]

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