Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Beyond Calmness and Signs - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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Beyond Calmness and Signs - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jomon: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:26
  Jogen: I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha. It is lovely to be here with you on a peaceful summer evening. Hogan Roshi asked me to teach on signlessness and interbeing, as have been themes of this book by the very venerable Thich Nhat Hanh.
• 1:00
  And so I'm going to do some of that. It seems important to me to emphasize that calmness is not liberating. Okay? And we can easily take Zen practice to be a means of developing a little cocoon of calmness that we come and refresh on Tuesday night or Sunday night. But if it's only a cocoon of calmness, guess what happens when you visit your in laws?
• 1:34
  Or guess what happens when you get cut off? Or guess what happens when a war breaks out? Or you get diagnosed with this or that? That calmness goes away. So, the masters all said that seeing insight, seeing into the nature of this mind, of this experience, of this world was necessary to lessen our grasping.
• 2:06
  To, you could say, to be able to enjoy the flow of what is, to not be separate from the flow of what is. And in the Zen tradition, we could say traditionally that was done through koan, which are stories of the lineage made intimate that act on one's heart. It's done through shikantaza, which is a practice of stark presence, you could say, and also through dharma talks. I mean, if you read any of the old masters of Chinese, Japanese, Korean lineage, when they're addressing the assembly, they would often be asking questions. In fact, a long time ago, Fuho did a presentation on Maizumi Roshi, and he counted in Maizumi Roshi's writings just how many times Maizumi Roshi asked students questions.
• 3:04
  In other words, sparking the spirit of inquiry. Because that's a form of seeing, being curious about this. So, tonight I want to mostly do experiential and conceptual contemplations with you. But let's start with something from the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh. Okay.
• 3:32
  On signlessness. When we look at an oak tree, it may be difficult to imagine that it grew out of an acorn. Is that acorn still alive? If it is, then why can't we see it? Or does the acorn no longer exist?
• 3:52
  If it died, then how come there is an oak tree now? The teachings on signlessness help us break free from our tendency to put things into boxes. We usually try to fit life into one of four categories. Is it alive? Number one.
• 4:11
  Number two, is it dead? Number three, is it still in the realm of being? In other words, does it still exist? Number four, has it passed into the realm of non being? Does it no longer exist?
• 4:25
  The truth is that we can't fit reality into the categories of existing and nonexisting. Once we've touched the ultimate truth, we see that even the categories of alive and dead don't apply, whether it's to a cloud, an acorn, an electron, a star, ourselves, or our beloved ones. Just as we need to liberate ourselves from the idea of a self or a human being that's separate from other living beings, we also need to liberate ourselves from the sign and appearance of a lifespan. Your lifespan is not limited to seventy, eighty, or one hundred years, and that is good news. Your body is not yourself.
• 5:08
  You are much more than this body. You are life without boundaries. Often in these kind of teachings, and I know Thich Nhat Hanh likes to talk about birth and death. And we often hear those terms and we think birth. Okay.
• 5:26
  He's talking about a baby comes out of an egg or yoni and all of a sudden that's birth. Or a body stops breathing or a heart starts beating and that's death. But take your fist right now. Look at that fist and open it. That's birth in Buddhism.
• 5:48
  Close that fist. That's death. But the interesting thing is this open hand became this closed fist. What was birth became death became birth. Where is the boundary?
• 6:07
  One moment arises, how is it connected to the previous moment? We're going get curious about these kind of things. So, signlessness, we could say the ground of signlessness is this basic practice of zazen where we experience without adding anything extra. What does that mean? First of all, tune into your body, mind, and senses right now, and see what it's like for you to not do anything with that experience.
• 7:00
  Don't try to adjust it, improve it, and see if you can even withdraw your analyzing or labeling of it. Don't touch this moment's experience, but let it present itself. Tingling in your toes, sounds in the ears, beating of heart. Don't touch them with your mind. Let them present themselves.
• 7:50
  And then notice that nothing in your experience comes with the tagline, I'm good or I'm bad. Feeling in your chest or the texture of your belly or the shape of your hips are not saying, I'm to this or to that. Right? So observe that there's a naked is ness to your experience and that you're free or the mind is free to evaluate that. To compare it to how it could feel, to how it did feel.
• 8:48
  But practice right now that you don't have to indulge or pay attention to that aspect of the mind. Each thing presents itself. It doesn't even present itself as belonging to you. There's just experience. And I'm going to kind of shift this contemplation and emphasize different things.
• 9:22
  Come into some vividness of your experience. Make your experience through whatever sense gate, make it so vivid that you're in the knowledge that this is the only moment there is. Be so alert, so immersed in the feeling of your butt or the sound of the air conditioner. That nowness really shines for you. Cut off before and after.
• 10:23
  Now, often talk about the present moment as if there's some place or space or thing that we can isolate. But see if you experience moments that are discrete. So, for instance, use the exhalation. Experience this exhalation. Is it cut into different pieces?
• 11:04
  If it's cut into different pieces, how long is each piece of this exhalation? Again, focusing on the exhalation, what's the relationship between the very beginning of the exhalation and the end of it? What's the relationship between the beginning of the inhalation and the apex of it. Is this moment sectioned into pieces? What is your experience?
• 12:10
  Is the beginning of the exhalation separate from the end of the exhalation, like two distant points in time? Now I want to shift a little bit and go a little bit more conceptual. In this kind of exploring, we could say it's not the immediacy of direct experience that we're with, but we're using the mind to help us investigate and maybe break up some stale ways of seeing. So consider just this body that you are, have, however you think of it right now. Hair, bones, organs, flesh, feelings.
• 13:13
  K? Consider it as kind of different constituents. Right? We could take away each of those things I said and you'd kind of still have a body. Maybe not bones.
• 13:22
  That would be weird. But Now, think of some of the things that you've eaten, experienced, or encountered that constitute this moment's body. And if you continue with this, it would be infinite you couldn't possibly list all of the things you've eaten, experienced, or encountered that constitute this moment's body. But think of some you've eaten or experienced a lot of. Okay.
• 14:03
  Now ask yourself, why don't you call this arm blueberries? It's made of blueberries. Why don't you call this face sadness? It might be made of sadness. Think of this moment's body as the rushing to get here.
• 14:24
  Is that true? Is that still reverberating? Think of this moment's body as the air you breathed on an earlier walk. And we tend to think, there's my body that has this thing going in going on in it. Like, there's this body here that has this digestion going on because of the thing I ate.
• 14:47
  But, where's the boundary between body and what's happening with body right now? This body is what we experienced. Or is it? You could call that an aspect of interbeing. You could stop calling this a hand and call it pizza, pizza Captain Crunch kale.
• 15:15
  Typing? It's not very convenient for communication. Yeah. And you indulge me to go a little bit more conceptual here, and I think this is important because, interbeing, when we explore that, we're starting to talk a little bit about so called karma. So go I want you to go back into your childhood.
• 15:43
  Well, first of all, consider what people take to be a prime feature of your personality, whether you like that they consider you that way or not. Okay? You're shy. You're bossy. You're sweet.
• 15:55
  You're salty. You're smart. You're arty. Whatever it is, consider that and just choose one of them. I know you're not a thing.
• 16:05
  What's the source of that? If you're sweet, did you make yourself sweet? Well, if that was true, everybody would just decide when they're salty to be sweet if it's not convenient to be salty. Or if you are, arty, did you make yourself that? What's the source of that?
• 16:32
  Sometimes it's a response to people around us. If you have a trait that you if one of your traits you identified, ask yourself, Did I pick this up from somebody? Was it a resonance? Am I living forth grandpa's impatience? Am I living forth my cousin's playfulness?
• 16:58
  Was it a reaction for safety and acceptance? Did perfectionism arise in order to prevent a parent from scowling? Then that perfectionism and the parent are totally interwoven. Okay. I'm gonna shift gears again.
• 17:29
  Just giving like a taste of different styles of this contemplation. Openly consider how you are living on. So Thich Nhat Hanh, the Venerable said, Our body is boundless. And as many of you know, Hogan is fond of, you know, feeling beyond the edges of this body. Or in other words, feeling that we can't feel the edges of our body.
• 17:56
  Wonderful meditation. But there's other levels we could appreciate that. Consider how what you say and do physically permeates and happens within other beings. For example, right now, I am happening within all of you, and you are happening within everyone else. If you speak, you happen within them.
• 18:19
  If their your form meets their eyes, you happen within them. And maybe your form echoes on in their minds and you continue. Or maybe what you say echoes on in their minds and you continue, and then they say something touched by what you say in some way and it echoes on in other beings. Just think of that. Think of that.
• 18:43
  Every day, you're moving around with different beings and you are happening within those other beings. It's kind of an intercourse of existing that we're all involved with. It's not some mystical state. Wonder about how your way of being, the things you say and do, or the things you don't say or don't do echo in others. This is an aspect of your rebirth.
• 19:19
  And it's interesting if you think about the precepts in Tibetan Buddhism, they say that anger echoes on so strongly in beings because we are tender hearted at the core that you should do whatever it takes not to unleash anger. And I think of, relationships in my life where, I couldn't do that. I didn't I lacked the power of practice not to unleash anger. And that thing I said still echoes on in those people. And I know that because the relationship has never returned to the original quality of harmony.
• 20:01
  Wonder about how your way of being, the things you say, do, or don't say, echoes in you. So as we sat here today and as we, let's say, move through this week, echoes from past versions of us that were sent forward because that's what doing does arose. I encountered my own transmission, and you encountered your own transmission among many other transmissions. The people in your life, the environment, the culture, maybe even lives beyond this one. Wonder about how others' way of being, the things they say do or don't do, echo in you.
• 20:56
  This is the place we're usually the most sensitive because we can make this into blame. You do things that echo in me, therefore. Just wonder about how you've been imprinted in different ways. Think of the positive actually. Why in the world are you sitting here in a meditation hall doing something at least I regard as pretty damn beneficial when you could be out having fun.
• 21:27
  You could be enjoying the summer. This is Portland for God's sake. This sky is gonna go away before you know it. You're in a room. You're in a dark room.
• 21:39
  Why? What being, what force is echoing in you that you're doing this today? Right? For me, my grandfather was a kind of new age hippie. And when he died, I cleaned up his library and I found meditation books and these meditation electronic goggles that put you in trances.
• 22:07
  And I, an irreligious, impure 16 year old, tried out meditation. Grandfather is the reason I'm here. Or we could say Maizumi Roshi, or we could say Dogen Zenji, or we could say the Buddha, or we could say oxygen or iron or any of the elements or the sun or cosmic radiation is the reason we're here. It's not me. I didn't get this good idea.
• 22:33
  If it was up to me, I definitely would not have ended up here. And wonder about how vast this is. Now we can't know how we echo on totally, but we can look at our friends and loved ones and we can see how we're echoing in each other. When I was younger especially, I I would always take on the speech patterns of certain friends of mine and it would really irritate them. And they'd be like, that's my word.
• 23:03
  Don't use that word. Or earlier when I was studying very closely with Hogan Roshi, I would make all the Hogan Roshi, mudras and gestures and I would tell people, have deep faith. And I was like 26. I didn't have any, you know, reason to be able to say something like that. This is interbeing.
• 23:29
  It's actually not abstract. This is the precepts. The stakes are actually fairly high or we could say the ability to creatively shape life is really wonderful. And lastly, I'm gonna shift gears again. I know I'm kind of doing a buffet of contemplations.
• 23:49
  Maybe one of them will kind of stick and you'll go deeper into it. Let's come back to immediacy. And first tune into the experience of seeing. And the first thing I want so notice colors and forms. They fill your vision even if your eyes were closed.
• 24:17
  And first of all, notice how there's no experience called seeing. You're not having an experience called seeing. There's color and shape. And next, notice you're not doing this. There's no little button you're pushing.
• 24:41
  There's no twitch you're doing in your brain. There's no low maneuver that's making this experience of color and shape happen. It's just happening. Really notice that there is no self in you doing seeing, that it is not something you can lay claim to. There's just an intimacy of forms and colors.
• 25:17
  You could do this with your with sound as well. First of all, notice that there's no experience called hearing. You can't experience an experience called hearing. And yet there are sounds. The experience of sounds is present.
• 25:39
  Even if you plug your ears, you still have the experience of sound. But I say you are still having that experience but that really doesn't make sense. There's just vibration. You are not doing that. It's true with thinking.
• 26:02
  There's no experience called thinking a thought. You are not doing that. It's true with feelings in body. There's no experience called feeling the body. There's just feelings here and now.
• 26:24
  And so, notice how you're woven into the environment. What we are is a weave a wovenness into the environment. Vibrations are hearing you. Forms and colors are seeing you. Pressure and tingling, hot and cool is feeling you.
• 26:49
  Is there any control at all over any of this? And yet somehow we we chart a course through all of this happening. So in a way, if we I I guess, I believe if we do zazen, that is not just making a cocoon of calm. Right? Hongzhi, the old master, said that zazen is a balance between serenity, so kind of coming to rest with attention, and brightness, alertness.
• 27:30
  If we do that, all of this kind of stuff unfolds organically. It unfolds spontaneously in its own way, mysteriously. Also, some of us are inclined to more directly contemplate. I know some of you have taken up koan and some of you can take these kind of contemplations to heart and practice them in your zazen and find fruit with it. Because, honestly, the ideas of interbeing are not gonna help you when it comes to somebody disrespecting you.
• 28:07
  The ideas of suchness are not gonna help you if you get diagnosed with a tumor. All the hard knocks of life and all the beauties of life, we're not gonna be get brought close to it by conceptual knowledge. It will be our own let's call it wonder, it will be our own wondering about this life that opens our joy and our ability to flow with things as they come. At least that's my belief.
• 28:53
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