Good morning, or good evening, good afternoon. I don't know where I am. Can you hear me in the back? Yes? Okay. So we are having our fourth session on Dogen Zenji's Shobogenzo Raihai Tokuzui. We've been working with the translation by Stanley Weinstein at the Soto Zen Translation Project at Stanford on their website. I apologize in advance. And this is the fourth section in which we will conclude this study. nothing will be summed up or concluded. The more I study, and I've been studying between every one of these breaks, the more questions arise for me, and a fresh bunch did this afternoon, which that's kind of

[01:19]

I'm beginning to see that's kind of my way, in general, that given the limitations of my understanding, the best I can do is to raise questions. So I don't have the right answers, but if we're lucky, I have good questions. I always remember this verse, I think it's from the translation we used to have of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, the meaning is not in the words, it responds to the inquiring impulse. So just asking questions is a powerful practice. So I wanted to say something first. we concluded this morning was talking about the issue of purity and Ken was recounting some of his reading in the Greek tragedies and we were talking about purity in religion and so I was looking in, this is

[02:42]

book called Dogen Kigen, Mystical Realist, by Hee Jin Kim, K-I-M. It's dense, but it's very rich. If you put in your time trying to really understand what he's saying, you're very rewarded. So he talks, he has a whole section on purity and purification in Dogon. And I'll read you this section. As you bathe, even the four elements, even the five skandhas, even the indestructible dharma nature can be clean and pure without exception.

[03:51]

This should not be understood only to mean that undefiledness is attained after you cleanse the body with water. How can water be originally pure or originally impure? even if it is originally pure or impure, you do not say it can make clean or unclean the place to which water eventually flows. Only when practice and enlightenment of the Buddhas and ancestors are maintained has the Buddha-dharma of washing and bathing been imparted." So the emphasis that he's placing is on the practice. As you practice and confirm bathing, according to this principle, you transcend purity, surpass impurity, and cast off neither undefilement nor defilement. Thus, in spite of not being defiled, in other words, even though your body is originally pure, you bathe your body.

[05:05]

although you are already supremely pure, you cleanse yourself. This truth is preserved only in the way of the Buddhas and ancestors. None of the heretics knows it." Do you understand what he's saying here? No. It's just like Suzuki Roshi saying, we wash the windows to wash the windows. Whether they are clean or so-called dirty, but here we're talking about your body and it's a radical stance that is pretty different from what Denise was talking about this morning when she was talking about all of these practices and sort of classical early Buddhist texts which talk about deconstructing the body and reviling the body, hating the body.

[06:13]

This is actually a very strong thread in early Buddhism. Hating it, reviling it. Saying your body is going to decay, it's a collection of blood and pus and piss and shit and mucus and how could that be attractive, you know, why would you be attached to that? I'm not sure the sense of that is reviling. In reviling, the sense of it is more a study of our illusions about our, you know, our personhood. Which, you know, if you have experience like in a medical setting and things like that, and you encounter bodies in this way, I'm not sure it's a reviling of the body. There are two different things here, because strictly speaking, what Denise was talking about is a tactic to counteract an attraction by saying, well, you're getting carried away here, let's look a little more carefully at this, and maybe this will

[07:32]

have sometimes where actually the material is evil and spiritual is good. I understand that and I understand both these points and in some sense I see that as true and in another sense I see it as playing into, it plays into the question that we're looking at here about women. For instance, Duncan Williams, I was talking about this yesterday, he was talking about the Blood Pool Hell Sutra, the Ketsubonkyo, the 15th century sutra, That was extant until the 70s or early 80s.

[08:41]

And what Duncan Williams writes was, all women, regardless of their station in the world, inevitably fell into this gruesome hell because of the evil karma accrued from their menstrual blood and that of childbirth, which was thought to soil sacred beings after seeping into the water supply. These are his words, not mine. But I think it's really, I'm not sure it's appropriate to draw an equivalence between that and the practices of meditating on the nature of the body. I mean, I'm really not sure that's fair because I think those are really deep practices that people do seriously to really experience death and impermanence and the limitations of the physical body. Yeah, I'm not making that equality. What I'm referring to, if I had time, each of these questions leads to an interesting bifurcation of investigation, but what I am recalling in literal terms are texts where a woman

[10:00]

a living woman is deconstructed to a monk as breaking down into all these elements, therefore that should be the antidote to your being attracted to this thing that's fundamentally disgusting. Not disgusting, impermanent. It's a comment, it's a teaching on physical attraction. If you're physically attracted to something and you look at it and you realize that it's just blood and piss and lungs, where is your physical attraction? It's not that women are inherently disgusting. It's that an attractive human being is inherently an illusion. And if you study it from the point of view of impermanence, that's what you see. I've encountered those texts and they're about lust. They're not about hating women. I think the effect of them, this is where we can get into argument, I think the effect of them is to generate misogyny within the tradition.

[11:08]

That's the way I think about it. I think irrespective of what the intention was, I'm also looking at the effect and I'm conversations that I've had with monks about the difficulty that they have with these texts and how they feel that's been promulgated through their tradition. But both of those positions are true, yes. I understand it as just pointing out these elemental natures that doesn't necessarily have a It doesn't necessarily have this energy of reviling, but I think it's had that effect in the tradition. Well, let's assume that your interpretation is correct, and those texts are reviling women. How do those texts explain

[12:13]

in terms of those texts. Well, how do they explain men? They don't. They don't. The interesting thing in the myth of the Buddha is he had sort of a Christ-like birth, or parallel. I mean, he was born from his mother's side. you know, now it could have been a Caesarian, you know, but she, she had a pretty, she, well, she didn't have it easy because she died about three days later, but she reached up and grabbed onto a limb of a tree and the Buddha sprang forth from this Velcro opening in her side or something. No blood, no mess, no fuss. And then he got up and walked and he spoke. It was pretty amazing. You know, anyway, I'm being tendentious, I know that. But I just wanted to read that, what I think Dogen is saying about purity, which is contrary, is we are originally pure.

[13:38]

And the activity, it's just like the end of Genjokon, where he's talking about fanning. You know that the nature of wind is permanent, reaches everywhere, therefore you fan. You know that the purity and the essential nature of each of us is undefiled, therefore we bathe ourselves. There's not a strict logic there. but it's the logic of practice. This is our activity. In order to actualize our purity, we have to act in it. This may be obvious, but it seems like when we talk about greed, hate and delusion, we're talking about being defiled, being poisoned. So basically,

[14:42]

desire is one of those things which poisons us, that feeling of desire. When we give in to that feeling of attachment and desire, which we do sometimes in a lust situation, then we become impure. Well, yeah, what's interesting is that the word that's used in Pali is klesha, which means covering. So it's not that we're impure to the marrow. There's a covering. We become impure temporarily. Right. Which we can uncover. Yeah. So when we see it for what it is, then we are no longer in that state. Yeah. I think that's right. That's also part of the looking into cause and effect and looking into karma. There was one other story I wanted to tell you which is not in this text but is in the Vimalakirti Sutra and I don't know how many of you know that but it's one of those occasions of humor.

[16:07]

in the dharma. So the frame of this story of the whole sutra is Vimalakirti is this layman who's awakened and he's a teacher and the Buddha says, the Buddha recognizes him and Pimla Kirti says, well, I'd like to kind of mix it up with these bodhisattvas and arhats and disciples, and so I'm going to become ill. And the Buddha sees that he's ill and sends all of these great figures to visit, and they are reluctant to visit him because he's rather fierce. But in this case, this is a story This is a story about a goddess and a certain goddess who lived in Vimalakirti's house having heard this teaching of the dharma of the great heroic Bodhisattvas and being delighted, pleased and overjoyed manifested herself in a material body and showered the great spiritual heroes, the Bodhisattvas and the great disciples with heavenly flowers.

[17:29]

When the flowers fell on the bodies of the bodhisattvas, they fell off, they slipped off and fell to the floor. But when they fell on the bodies of the great disciples, the arhats, these are not bodhisattvas, these are practitioners of the Theravada or Pratyekabuddha, they're arhats, but they're pre-Mahayana. When the flowers fell on their bodies, they stuck to them and did not fall. The great disciples shook the flowers and even tried to use their magical powers, but still the flowers would not shake off. And then the goddess said to the venerable Shariputra, we know Shariputra from the Heart Sutra, right? Shariputra is the foremost disciple of wisdom. She says, reverend Sariputra, why do you shake off these flowers?

[18:32]

Sariputra replied, goddess, these flowers are not proper for religious persons and so we are trying to shake them off. The goddess said, why? These flowers are proper indeed. Such flowers have neither constructural thought nor discrimination, but the elder Sariputra has both constructual thought and discrimination. I'm not going to read this in all the detail, but Reverend Shariputra, see how these flowers do not stick to the bodies of these great spiritual heroes, the Bodhisattvas. That's because, basically it's because they don't, are not caught by their judgments, essentially is what she's saying. They have eliminated constructual thoughts and discriminations. For example, she says, evil spirits have power over fearful men, but cannot disturb the fearless. Likewise, those intimidated by fear of the world are in the power of forms, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures, which do not disturb those who are free from the passions inherent in the constructed world.

[19:48]

So these flowers are sticking them, and he's kind of stunned, and he says, Sariputra says to the goddess, how long have you lived in this house? Changes the subject completely. The goddess says, I've been here for as long as the elder has been in liberation. Sariputra said, then you've been in this house for a long time. The goddess said, have you been in liberation for a long time? At that the elder Sariputra fell silent. The goddess continued, Elder, you are the foremost of the wise, why don't you say something? And Sariputra tries to slip around by taking the strategy of noble silence, which was to cover up the fact that he really was kind of stunned. He says, since liberation is inexpressible, goddess, I do not know what to say.

[20:52]

goddess. All the syllables pronounced by the elder have the nature of liberation. Therefore, Sariputra, do not point to liberation by abandoning speech. Why? The holy liberation is in the equality of all things, meaning you can say something. You know, silence is not enlightenment. Sariputra says, ìGoddess, is not liberation the freedom from desire, hatred and folly?î The Goddess said, ìLiberation is freedom from desire, hatred and folly. That is the teaching of the excessively proud. But those free of pride are taught that the very nature of desire, hatred and folly is itself liberation.î You got that? What he's saying is that within, the only way you're going to come to liberation is from within these deluded thoughts.

[22:04]

By purifying your mind, somehow getting rid of these deluded thoughts, you're not really going to wake up. You're just going to become kind of blank. But to wake up within them, So then she talks about living in this house and I won't go into that but he's just dumbfounded and finally he says, �Goddess, what prevents you from transforming yourself out of your female state?� The goddess says, although I have sought my, quote, female state for these 12 years, I have not yet found it. Reverend Shariputra, if a magician were to incarnate a woman by magic, poof, there's a woman, would you ask her, what prevents you from transforming out of your female state?

[23:06]

Shariputra says, no, such a woman would not really exist. So what would there be to transform? Just so, Reverend Sariputra, all things do not really exist." Now, would you think what prevents one whose nature is that of a magical incarnation from transforming herself out of her female state? Before he gets the answer, the goddess employed her magical power to cause the elder Sariputra to appear in her form. and to cause herself to appear in his form. Then the goddess, transformed into Sariputra, said to Sariputra, transformed into the goddess, Reverend Sariputra, what prevents you from transforming yourself out of your female state? Sariputra replies, I no longer appear in the form of a male.

[24:09]

My body has changed into the body of a woman. I don't know what to transform. The goddess continued, if the elder could change out of the female state, then all women could also change out of their female states. All women appear in the form of women in just the same way as the elder appears in the form of a woman. While they are not women in reality, they appear in the form of women. With this in mind, the Buddha said, in all things there is neither male nor female. Then the goddess released her magical power and each returned to their ordinary form. She said to him, Reverend Sariputra, what have you done with your female form? He said, I neither made it nor did I change it. just so all things are neither made nor changed and that they are not made or changed that is the teaching of the Buddha and it goes on from there.

[25:23]

Now why did I read that to you? So there's a one interesting problem that I encountered off and on in the last day and a half, is I was reading in a commentary on Raihai Tokuzi, the question to me is whether one can awaken in one's body, actually in one's body, and this I think is a fundamental question and problem in Buddhism. what Miriam Levering says about Moshan and Miaosheng, we talked about the stories from yesterday, they took students, Moshan was an abbess, in the form of, and there's a place where

[26:36]

Let me just read this because this is what she cites. Talking about these nuns, if one of them has a reputation of having acquired the Dharma, the court will grant an edict appointing her abbess of a nunnery. She will immediately go up to the Dharma hall in the monastery to give a lecture. from the abbot on down all the monks will attend and standing erect they will listen to or expound the Dharma. This has been the rule since ancient times. Since a person who has attained the Dharma is none other than a true old Buddha you must not wonder when you meet such a person who he or she was in the past. So the question that Miriam Levery asks So the question is, is this still a woman or is it a Buddha?

[27:47]

Do you understand what I'm saying? What's the difference between a woman and a Buddha? Part of the difference is a very strong literature that says one cannot be a Buddha in the body of a woman. So if one has acquired, this is what Miriam Levering is saying, her reading of this, not what she thinks, if one has acquired or one has awakened to one's Buddha nature and becomes an old Buddha, then in a sense, ipso facto, you are no longer a woman, you are something else. So are we trying to understand these early Eastern cultures and what they said about how women are lesser beings? Yeah, that's something I'm trying to figure out. And then we're going to laud Dogen for questioning that. Well, no, actually... What Levering is saying is, yes, he questions it, and there's a piece that he doesn't question.

[29:01]

in the sense of, I mean, he's talking about, he's very strong talking about non-discrimination against women, because women can wake up and become Buddhists. It's sort of a theological question, once you become a Buddha, are you a man or a woman anymore? That's the question Dogen was asking. That's the question, no, that's the question Miriam Levering is asking. That's the question. This kind of goes back, I'm sensing we're kind of going back full circle and awake to Alexandra's first question this morning. I think so. It was yesterday. Was it yesterday? Yeah. Time flies. So, yeah. So how is this little journey we're taking through, it's a question back to you, I guess. Through early Asian and all the cultural denigration of women, constant denigration of women, we sort of determined that's because For some reason, men have all this power and they fear women so they can sort of do this predominant thing.

[30:02]

I don't really get it, but... So, here we are now, 2012. Well, what I said this morning and what my feeling is, we're trying to free ourselves from historical archetypal, psychological, an underpinning of thought that we're not even fully aware of. We're still carrying it. I believe that we are. At least some people are. very strong current. You know, when you were talking earlier about the sacrifices people made and about being aware of the effects of karma, the sacrifices, that's an interesting side effect, were often animals.

[31:15]

So in order to purify, you had to shed blood and kill another being. But why do you have to purify in this context? basic belief is that, as you were saying, that there's something to purify. Now, if I believe I'm a bad person, then I have to purify. So there, in a way, the apple was taken and the distinction was made. And for me, historical or not, it's extremely encouraging if he says, in a way, there's no reason to feel guilty, because there's Why not look at these 84,000 possibilities? You're great. I'm having this, whatever it is, stream of energy. And Rogen says, yeah, that's there to acknowledge it without any good or bad, but just as you've been saying, looking from inside.

[32:22]

And then I can liberate. And I think this is beyond, this is female or historical text, that's very actual. I can only say for my behavior, a lot of self-belief was, probably still is, guilt-driven or was a basic belief that something is wrong about myself. just to say about sacrifices, one of the radical things about the Buddha within his culture was there are no animal sacrifices, there are no blood sacrifices in Buddhism. One of the really strange experiences I had about a year and a half ago, there are these Buddhist caves all over India which are quite extraordinary, and one set of caves, the Kala at the top of a hill, and the Hindus have re-Hinduized the caves by putting a temple, by putting a Hindu temple right at the entrance.

[33:33]

And the strangest thing is, so you go inside and you see these stupas, you see these carvings, quite beautiful, but when you walk, you have to walk our car broke down at the foot of the road and so the guys that I was with got me a ride in another car up the hill and it was a Hindu holiday and so I climb in the front and at my feet are three chickens and you know I said, so what are you doing with these chickens? and well their offerings and they were bringing them up to the temple and you know that was going to be they were going to be sacrificed there right at the mouth of the of the buddhist of the buddhist temple so uh that is a radical element of buddhism i think i'd like to move on a little bit because and we're going to come back to this

[34:44]

The thing you just said about with Miriam Levin, I mean, obviously I don't know what she's studied this much more deeply, but it seems kind of inconsistent from Dogen retelling the story of Moshon and her response that the person who dwells on the mountain does so without form, such as a man or a woman. And then she's asked, why don't you change yourself? And she says, I'm not a fox spirit. Why would I change? to me that is a very different message than the one you just gave us. Yeah, and I agree. I raised this because I was reading in this company, it's not that I actually think that she's right, but I wanted to I wanted to suggest what kind of complexities and problems might be considered, you know, even by somebody who I have a lot of respect for looking, looking critically at the material.

[35:47]

And this next one gets to another problem. So to read from where we were. Furthermore, this is in the text on page eight, nine. Furthermore, there is something laughable here in Japan called, places called restricted realms. Got it? Places called restricted realms are training halls for the practice of Mahayana that do not allow nuns or lay women to enter. This evil custom has been handed down over a long time and no one has ever questioned it. So here is Dogen actually really sticking his neck out because who he's talking about are some of the largest Buddhist institutions in the country.

[36:50]

He's talking about the practice at Mount Hiei, the practice at Mount Koya, the practice at Todai-ji. These are all huge monastic training centers where they were not allowing women to enter. And so for a relatively small-time monk to make these kind of public pronouncements really puts him at risk. And there's a good case to be made that ultimately he had to pay for that by getting out of town quickly in 1243. So what they mean by these restricted realms are actually grounds that have been purified and borders that have been set around these temples within which women were not allowed to enter.

[37:58]

and that was not so unusual. And what he says in the next paragraph, he gets to this argument, the great teacher Shakyamuni is one who has attained supreme and perfect enlightenment, yet within who today comes close to him, yet within the assembly of the Buddha during his lifetime, there were in all four groups, monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen. That was the Sangha, the fourfold Sangha. And in many ways, that definition of the Sangha has really faded. Certainly, when you speak of the Sangha in the Theravada countries, basically they're talking about one group, monks.

[39:04]

That's it. But Dogen is going back to argue, and it's stated again and again, talking about the fourfold Sangha in the early texts. Together they formed the realm of the Buddha that newly constituted the assembly of Buddha. In what assembly were there no nuns, no women, no group of eight? The group of eight, by the way, is protectors of the Dharma, includes gods, demons, dragons, snakes, and fabulous birds. And he's not clear about what the 37 are, and the 84,000 are probably the large assembly, the sort of Maha assembly. Anyway, together, in what assembly were there no nuns, no women, no group of eight? We ought not to seek to create a restricted realm superior to and purer than that of the assembly of Buddha when the Tathagata was living in this world, for it would be a realm of Mara, a realm of delusion.

[40:20]

The conventions of a Buddha assembly do not vary, whether in our realm or in other quarters, or among the 1,000 Buddhas in the three time periods of past, present and future. So at the end of this piece, he writes, this is on the last page, what is more, when the ritual of fixing the boundaries of restricted realms is performed, after the ambrosia is sprinkled, so that's how they do it, they sprinkle around the boundary of these places, there is a refuge ceremony and so on, until following the purification of the realm, there is the chanting of the verse.

[41:31]

this realm permeates the dharma realm unconditioned and purified. Have you, predecessors and old men who now always prattle about what you call restricted realms, understood the meaning of this verse or not? I do not think you understand that the all-permeating dharma realm is restricted within the restricted realm. Intoxicated by the wine of the śrāvaka, the hearer, you think your little realm is the vast realm. May you speedily awaken from your long-standing confusion and intoxication so you will not continue to misapprehend and distort the all-permeating realm that is the vast realm of the Buddhas. and may all sentient beings receive the benefits of the transforming power of the Buddhas.

[42:35]

So this is where he goes to. It's interesting because I think that one wonders how much was he speaking to his own Sangha? And how much was he speaking for a wider public consumption? I don't know. Certainly this is aimed at the powers that be in Kyoto. But how much those powers were manifest even within his own Sangha, I'm not sure. So I think what I'd like to ask in the time that remains is, come back to this question, what relevance does this have for us?

[43:44]

How do we respond to Domen's heartfelt arguments And where do they take us in relation to our practice? Because the question is, how does this help us practice? That's the whole point. If it doesn't help us practice, it's not useful. But how can it? You have the idea that we haven't already got this message. in our minds, you think? No, I don't really think that. Or I half think that. And I'm mostly reflecting on myself.

[44:54]

There are places where... In my own family relations, there are places where it has been pointed out to me that I act out of unconscious or unseen entitlements or privilege, where I'm not seeing the situation of my partner, and I'm not We're not looking at this as a critique necessarily of ourselves. As I've said a couple of times, I see it as a way of investigating and asking, is there something that I might need to investigate in myself?

[46:03]

And that every person, woman and man in this room and that we encounter is kind of in their own place of awareness. And some are pretty hip to what's going on and some are clueless. I think in general, this is a fairly aware group of people. It occurs to me, now that we're talking about this, that we haven't had a female Tonto since Mary Lee Scott. That's right. I wonder if we could ask ourselves the question, is there some residue of misogyny in that? Well, you know, I mean, I can't speak for the women, but I have certainly heard questions of that sort raised. We've also had six female Jusceuses come up. Right.

[47:07]

You know, we're not done with this. I mean, as I said yesterday, I don't think you heard here. If you look at some of the things that were in the public discourse over the last two or three weeks, you can see that we have not resolved these questions in society as a whole. you know, which is not, you know, I'm not saying this to point a finger at anybody here. I'm just, you know, it's like, if this, if they're relevant questions, if there's something to me, to read Dovian's words and really, this is the first time I've really studied them and think about them, it's something in our tradition that I find really encouraging. that I wasn't fully aware of. And I think it's useful to share. Is your hand up? It is up.

[48:10]

Yeah, you know, I find it encouraging. I think that some of the things that I'm getting are, you know, as we kick around all these ideas and everything is that with any suppressed body, you know, people are creative and they're going to create. And so I want to see what you've done is create some interest in me to see, drawn into some of these stories about these women, what their creative works were, what did they write. I want to read what these women were creating. Yeah, I recommend, I do recommend Grace Shearson's book, I'm forgetting the name, what is it? Women in Zen. Women in Zen, there's a catchy title. What's the name of Amelia Leverant? I can send you, if people ask... No, I just would like to write it down. I don't know the name of the article. It's an article. We have several shelves of women's books. We have a women's section in the library. That's true. And there's still so much work that hasn't been done in proportion.

[49:16]

But there's a lot there to study. Yeah, Helen. I thought it was very valuable what David said yesterday. So he's kind of saying what you're saying, and that it was less enlightened or whatever. This message was really useful for him to hear. So there might be an element of you're preaching to the choir here with this group of folks, and maybe a slightly grumpy choir. And there would be some other people who another group of folks, maybe at a higher level, people who maybe don't have the same views about women's equality within Zen leadership, that this would be really interesting for them to be exposed to. Yeah, I actually feel pretty good about Soto Zen in America. by and large.

[50:18]

I mean, there are difficulties around gender, there are difficulties around race, around class perhaps, but by and large, the people that I know, and it's a pretty equal number of women and men, they're pretty aware. I don't know, but I thought about that, the question, that phrase came to mind, preaching to the choir. Often my feeling when I give a talk is that first of all the primary audience is myself and to figure out what is it that I learn from investigating this kind of teaching that can help me manifest the Dharma.

[51:18]

In this case, I don't think of it so much as preaching to the choir, although other people may feel they're being preached to. I'll address that. Yeah, Paul. I want to know if Dogen, with his controversial views at the time that he expresses so much of it, I've heard that he got in trouble at some point with the And he was semi-banished, and that's why he went off into maybe a heiji or mountain, you know, sort of, he went into seclusion. And was it for this kind of, for his talk about women? Well, no, it wasn't for talk about women. I don't think it was for talk about women so much. But we talked about this a little yesterday. So in 1243, He left very quickly and moved to the wilderness, basically.

[52:34]

But over the next 10 years, set up a rather large practice place. But the implication is he kind of had to get out of town. But it was for other reasons. No, it was the whole thing. Right, but it was mostly because he was taking on, he was criticizing the monastic powers, not just in Rinzai Zen, in Tendai and Shingon. And so he was making some powerful enemies. Have people seen that movie, Zen? Have you seen that, Paul? It's called Dogon. It's called Dogon? Yes, we saw it. Don't you remember? I don't remember the reason. You know, where they give him... You know, where he has enlightenment and he goes up in a flower and everything? Right. I'm beginning to forget how to write that.

[53:36]

Anyway, there's a scene, and I don't know how historical it is, where the monks come and attack and they burn down his temple. That kind of shit happened. It really happened in that era. It wasn't for his defending of women's rights. I don't think so. Not in particular. Not in particular, but in aggregate, I think. Yeah, part of it. That end of it. Yeah. Yeah, come on. You know, actually, what is interesting for me is the distinction we make between priest and lay, right? as Dogen would say, a lay person can be as enlightened as a priest. We said that in one part of his life. Right. But I mean, it's the same argument that you can make that if a woman can be enlightened, a lay person can be enlightened. It's a similar type of argument that enlightenment is not confined to form or costume. And there's also all this interesting imagery around priests being purer than lay people.

[54:41]

And even in some places, like in the Zen center, there's a door for the priests and a door for the light people and everything. There is? Yes. At least there was. I mean, I don't know Zen so well. Is that true? But I seem to remember last time I went there, which was a while ago, that there was a door that you weren't supposed to go in to get into the Zen do unless you were a priest. Oh, that back door? What place? Where the lay person is giving a Dharma talk? Yeah. Priests don't just wear a... Is that true? No. Really? Please. It's announced in the morning, you know, such and such. I mean, you can listen to it on tape. So, like, the slave... Well, we're going to have to... ...is giving the Dharma talk, and priests... We'd better change things here, then, right? ...and they say, Brahmins will only go to priests. Really? But also, when you give, it's not, don't act surprised. I mean, So when you fully transmit the dharma, you don't transmit it to someone who doesn't wear a pokesa.

[55:49]

So I mean, the thing is, I guess I see if we're going to, it seems to me you could take this argument and change a few words and put it forward in exactly the same way. And I even think there's some of the same undertones in terms of some people being pure and other people not being pure. Priests put down their zagus so their heads don't touch the floor and things like that. And a priest doesn't eat fallen food. There's a lot of little things like that that have that same resonance of somehow the lay life being impure. And as lay people, we are impure in a way that priests aren't. And having a job or having a partner, even though now a lot of priests have jobs and partners, is some kind of defilement, which makes one unsuitable for really attaining the dharma realm. Right. Well, I would be a fool to argue with that in this particular surroundings because I'm the only priest. But actually, what I feel is that's a live question.

[56:51]

Right. It's really a live question and that is part of what I wanted to base. Ross, you wanted to? Yeah. We also don't have priests attending lay people when they give talks here. That's a clear distinction. So the Jisha is always a lay person, or a priest, or a lay person. It's never been reversed. Oh, Mel said that when he was ordained, His friends came up to put their arm on his shoulder and congratulated him because he took their arm off of his shoulder because he was very OK, you know? And there's a sense of, like you were saying earlier today, I think, the thing about when women are ordained, they're no longer a man or a woman.

[57:58]

They are older than. They're holding the robe, yeah. I have thoughts and feelings about both of those things that you cited, and I think maybe I won't go into them right now, but the question is, we have an ongoing question of what shape, what's the shape of Buddhism going to be in America? Yeah, Lisa? We're a little clearer on this, but I recently was reading a book called Zen Master Who by James Ishmael Ford. And he's trying to get at the shape of Buddhist practice in North America. And he made some point that by Japanese or Asian standards, priests in our environment are more

[59:03]

are really more lay than they are a monk. They are really not monks. They're not monks. I never call myself a monk. Right. But there's a really fundamental distinction in the mind of somebody from Asia that basically we're practicing without real lineage holders in some sense because we're not We're not carrying forward the monastic practice. What we're not carrying forward is the Vinaya, the Vinaya ordination, the 227 or 256 rules that constitute full monastic ordination, both in Mahayana and Theravada tradition. Now, one thing that happened was Dogen, very decidedly broke that tradition when he went to Japan.

[60:11]

When he ordained monks, and I think he was not alone, what evolved was a Bodhisattva precept ordination essentially, like the 16 precepts that we take, and sometimes the 48 minor precepts, but they don't take the Vinaya rules, and that was the first place in Asia where the notion of monasticism was abrogated, and so I spend a fair amount of time in Asia and I don't call myself a monk, because it does not it would be, it would really look weird and would, you know, it would be putting on airs. So, yes, that's true. What James is saying is, you know, that's true.

[61:15]

And that's why I think, I mean, this is sort of, Tamara is kind of pushing the question a bit further, but as I said, it's a live question for us. If we go back to the gender question, go within this, back into the gender question again, hold that for a second. So what we're trying to do now is sort of see what we're still holding of the misogyny and how can we deal with that now and how can we help each other with that now through our current form of Zen practice. So the idea is we can throw it out as a group and, I think, have insights together. Because there are many brilliant minds here, I think, who are really holding this question really deeply right now.

[62:20]

It's maybe women need help with this question and maybe men also in general and also in practice need help with this question. Well men do. I mean this is one of the things you know I've done some teaching on gender in India and what I realized was I really didn't need to talk to the women very much but I actually needed to spend a lot of time with the men because in that particular cultural context, they really didn't see it. So we see maybe a little more, or more, a lot more. And Dawkins saw quite a lot. Dawkins saw a lot. Where he evolved to, which scholars are arguing over, who knows. But at this point in time, in 1240, he was saying a lot. Something has slipped by me, something towards the beginning that I wanted to respond to, but maybe I will let it go and see what else comes up for other people.

[63:39]

Dan? Well, just following on what Shalini said, I think that what I get from this reading is a reaffirmation about how really revolutionary Zen Buddhism is. and that it really looks in minute detail at social conditions and questions them. And I think that's what we're doing here in our group and among each other. And it's a very powerful Dogen was doing that here. It's a very cutting-edge kind of stuff, I think, that he was doing. And so was Huda. Right. But, you know, yesterday Ken was talking about Brian Victoria's book, Zen at War.

[64:47]

And the case of that book, which is very, which is deeply troubling... I read that, and I totally I agree with that. The contradictions exist within Zen and within Sojo Zen as well as everywhere else. Right. And when I spoke with a Rinzai teacher who I consider a master about this, who is Japanese, what he said, which was not a fully satisfying answer, but reality was they just couldn't see it. The cases of Japanese Buddhists promoting aggression, promoting Japanese imperialism in the first half of the 20th century.

[65:55]

and advocating it, you know, sending their, actually going out to the battlefield themselves. And this being really advocated by senior people who were quite famous Zen masters. Suzuki Roshi went to Korea. He did. With the Japanese and Korean War. Is it Radha Roshi? So Radha Roshi, yeah. And he said they just couldn't see it. They couldn't see beyond their own cultural setting. What should they have seen? I'm not sure that there is anything... I want to ask the question, is there something inherent in our Zen practice and philosophy? But there is the first precept.

[66:59]

Don't kill. But you're not killed by the cave, so they say nothing can be killed. Exactly. That's what we were talking about this morning. Is this the influence of the samurai culture in the Zen, or the Zen going into the samurai and coming back? Yeah, it's more the latter. It's the interpenetration of the two. But it's also What happens when, to me, it's what happens when religion and the state are conflated, any place, not just in Zen or Japan. I wanted to come back to the first paragraph. And he says, when one practices supreme authority, one of the most difficult tasks is to get a guide and a teacher. And if you read this paragraph through, It sounds more like the dogon that we study than the rest of the fascicle, because it's hard to get a hold of.

[68:03]

And the starter came alive for me this morning when Shelly asked about sometimes the grass and the stones are my teacher, and then sometimes I look on another human as just an object to meet my own needs. But as she asked that, I knew that something in her knows the difference. something in her knows the difference between that one mind and the other mind. And that is our teacher. And that, in some way, Dogen is pointing to that, that we have that, you know, we need to make obeisance to the true teacher. Right. And there will be a true teacher who will be outside of us, but the real true teacher is the one, this one, who doesn't see priest or laywoman or man or stone. That's what I think that points to. And then the whole fascicle, which is sort of shocking to his contemporaries, is kind of trying to be an example. At one level, it's a specific argument.

[69:06]

At another level, it's an example of what you should not be fooled by when you're in touch, so to speak, with your true teacher. Yeah, I thought that's what I was saying this morning. And I'm in complete agreement. I think this, what's one thing that's interesting in the fast flow is that it breaks in half. The first half, I think, is really emphasizing that. And the second half changes gears. My supposition is it changes gears and becomes very specific about a few particular sets of conditions because he didn't feel like he had was really getting through to the people he was talking with. That's my supposition that may or may not be the case. or they thought this or that.

[70:17]

And there's one angle that makes complete sense is that we look back and we say, what can I get out of this? Did somebody have a good idea back there that I could use, or that corrected an impression, or something like that? And that, of course, is completely legit. So people are saying, well, now is this going to help us deal with gender issues or something? But that can also play into a kind of simplistic, moralistic kind of thing. Idealistic. Like, OK, Dogen is OK because even if he had some shortcomings, he did this good stuff. And so we can sort of yay yay for our guy Dogen back there and some of these other guys. and that and we're still in this kind of team thing like if you're watching sports or something that okay there were some of these good guys and then these others if you're looking at it in that perspective I think you're remaining naive because you're then saying oh but these other people were just horrible how could they have thought such oh you know and to me part of the value is going back in

[71:41]

is that little by little, you get used to the idea that humans are a big, messy, chaotic bundle of stuff. And no humans, no culture is not full of this kind of thing. So to me, if you go back and you say, oh, back in the 1800s, people thought women were doing this, or people thought black people did this, if you're only saying shocking, I can't. How could they have done this? Listen, if you were back there, you would have done the same thing. That's right. You know, not one person here would not have done all those things. Maybe a little less here, a little more there. And when you get a little more familiar with this kind of stuff, I think and hope that one becomes a little more detached. Right. You just look at it. And you say, oh, yeah, back then people tortured enemies, captured in war, and they had slavery, and they had all this.

[72:55]

Of course they did. What do you expect? If you know anything about societies back then, it's the most natural thing in the world. There's nothing that weird about it. We can, of course, say, yes, we don't want to go there. This is horrible. But if you really want to learn about it, you don't go back and say, oh, well, that must be bullshit, because they didn't treat women nicely in the Iliad or something. Well, just look at it in its context, and you can see a whole other wonderful things in there that kind of neutralize things a little bit, so that you're not in this kind of, I'm for this, I'm rooting for this. and just you can learn about what people, you know, are like, because we're like that. Well, that's exactly... I mean, somebody a hundred years in the future... I think we got the point.

[73:59]

You know, and think, gosh, how did those people have such ridiculous ideas? And like the Japanese person that you're talking about, we don't see it because we're inside it. Exactly. We're kind of struggling engroping here, so maybe we're a little more enlightened than somebody else over there or something. But in general, people make lots of mistakes, they're deluded all over the place. And the sooner we get used to that, I think the better we'll deal with it. Well, that's the whole point of this. And exactly, we are swimming in this sea of delusion. It's not, we're better, it's actually, what is it that we do and don't see about our own lives? If we're not using this as, if we're not, and not holding up some idealization, there are parts of this that are encouraging, there are parts of it, you know, when I, you know, I was trying to bring up this question about woman's body and Buddha, you know, to say there's parts of this that we really don't understand the context of,

[75:08]

And it's not about idealization of Dogon. It's really about how are we practicing in the world? How are we living on this planet? How are we living with each other? And Denise, we have to end in a couple of minutes. I just want to say really quickly, I'm guessing that the samurai were really important to protecting the temples and the farmlands around temples. And that there was probably this, I'm just guessing historically, that there was this of relationship with them, and that they were important. And just as a temple would look to protect, I think they had marauders that would come in and try to wipe out villages with their, you know, well, anyway, magnificent seven. So I'm guessing that in those days, earlier centuries, that that marrying happened for good reasons, partly for protection. And then later, it may have gone Well, humans, it could be good reasons.

[76:10]

Right. It could be good reasons. I mean, I think what I'm hearing can say it could be really mixed reasons. You know, there are people who crave power, people who crave wealth. And even within that, there's also sometimes something wholesome, creative that is arising as well. The question for me is, what do we want to do? Is there anything else that needs to be said, recognizing that this is unfinished? Well, I'd like to thank you all for this weekend, and I'm happy to talk about any of this stuff more, one by one, in small groups, whatever. If we stirred the pot, fine. And if there's stuff that floated to the top that's ugly, you can wave your magic wand and purify it.

[77:22]

Right. Dive into it. OK. Thank you.

[77:26]

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