Good morning. Good morning. Another beautiful Saturday morning. I don't wonder why you're here on such a beautiful day. Is this working? Well, several times a week here, in the morning and almost every night, evening service, we chant the Heart Sutra.

[01:23]

And it begins with the name Avalokitesvara. Now, Avalokitesvara, Avalokitesvara, is what is commonly known as bodhisattva, which is sometimes translated as an enlightening being or enlightening beam. These are in the Mahayana. There are many bodhisattvas. And they have traveled and done the training. They're ready to enter nirvana along with Chakyamuni. but they have decided not to go beyond until all of us go with them. They say they will not enter nirvana until all beings enter nirvana. So Avalokiteshvara has a characteristic which is known as compassion.

[02:35]

Sometimes the name is translated as meaning one who looks down with compassion on the suffering of the world. Another meaning I've seen written is that he hears the cries of the world, the cries of suffering of the world. Or you could say he's the cry hearer, the enlightening being who hears. I sleep in this building up on the third floor. My window overlooks Page Street. And many mornings, usually around 3 or 4, when I've probably gone to sleep, I hear a woman out on the corner calling to the passing automobiles. And sometimes I hear it as a cry of suffering, and I think of Avalokiteshvara and wonder if he's hearing that also, his calling to the cars passing by.

[03:50]

Sometimes I get angry about it, being awake, you know, woke up with this call, should I go away or something like that. And then other times I think of it in this other way, So usually I say, well, I'll probably go back to sleep. Let someone else help me. Because I don't know what to do. Well, that was the beginning of the line of the Heart Sutra. Avalokiteshvara was practicing deeply the Prajnaparamita.

[04:58]

Sometimes it's translated as coursing deeply in the Prajnaparamita. I like that. It's like cruising through this. The Prajnaparamita is the wisdom, the wisdom that has gone beyond wisdom. So this cry-hearer enlightenment being was practicing this wisdom, hearing the cries, and looked down, as Jesus said, looked down and saw sometimes translated as five heaps, which in Sanskrit says, so five skandhas. Skandhas is translated as heaps. And these five skandhas in their own being are empty.

[06:00]

Now these heaps are usually what we say make up a personality or a person. These five skandhas or the five senses, the hearing, touching, thinking, tasting, seeing, and this is usually what we say is, I, I see, I hear, I taste, I touch. And Mabalokiteshvara looked at this and said, In their own being they are empty. There is no person there. And then it says, he was saved from all suffering and distress. So he tries to pass this on to us. That in this suffering, who is suffering? You say, I'm suffering. I say that woman is suffering on the street corner, calling to the cars.

[07:07]

But I read this, I hear this sutra, which we chant a lot. I've been doing it for 20 years. And we say, there is no one there suffering. It's just a bunch of collections of things, stuff, feelings, perceptions. But there's suffering. Recently, we finished a practice period where we were reading the stories of the ancestors of the Soto Zen lineage. And one of them, I don't know the exact number, the 50th one, they start with Shakyamuni. And it tells a story about this one ancestor. And when he was a young boy monk, little monk, he heard this heart sutra and he heard the section which goes on later.

[08:12]

It says, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue. And he said to his teacher, he said, teacher, I have eyes, I have ears, I have a nose, I have a tongue. So what is this? And the teacher said, I can no longer teach you. You have to go to another teacher. So this little boy said this, you know, this great teaching, and he said, Greg, what is this? What do you mean? So he went on and did other things. But his teachers realized that this young boy really is onto something here, and he better go study with someone else. So we chant this over and over. And I can say to myself, I can say to myself, you're not there.

[09:15]

That doesn't work. But I can look at, when a thought comes up, And I said, well, what is this thought? It's a thought. You examine it. You can try to find. I hear the sound of the motorcycle. I hear the sound of the motorcycle. It's just sound. Not there anymore. Now there's no sound. So what is this?

[10:16]

Sometimes we say, what is it? And we can say, it is it. You go, cut it up. So we sit. Follow the breath. You say, who is breathing? Your breath is breathing. So Avalokiteshvara was practicing deeply the Prajnaparamita.

[11:29]

And the Prajnaparamita is the wisdom that has gone beyond wisdom. It's also sometimes referred to as she. Prajnaparamita is sometimes called the mother of all Buddhas. Recently there was an art exhibit out at the Brundage from Indonesia. And it had a lovely statue of the Prajnaparamita as the mother. Very beautiful. There's postcards around of it. And tomorrow's Mother's Day. I thought this might be a good time to think about that.

[12:30]

The mother of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The way we chant the Heart Sutra, we don't have an invocation, which in the ancient times, there was an invocation before chanting these sutras. And this book here, which is translated by Edward Homsday, he has the invocation. And in the Sanskrit, you would say this before you started the sutra itself. You go, am namo bhagavat yaya, arya pradnya paramita yaya. And he translates it as, homage to the perfection of wisdom, the lovely, the holy. We think a lot of the Heart Sutra.

[13:44]

We even have it on the altar here in that brocade box. It's all on a scroll. No, it's on sort of a fan form in Chinese or Japanese, I'm not sure. We keep it in our presence. When you first, or when I came to Buddhism, of course I came from a Christian background, and one of the first things that seemed to come up in conflict is the idea of a self, an entity, everlasting soul, you might say.

[14:52]

So you have to kind of work that out because that's basic to Buddhism. In Syria they call it anatman. The atman in Vedanta and Hinduism is the self that is part of God. So there's sort of a duality in there. And Buddhism says there is no Atman, there is no everlasting self. And that's pretty basic. Over the years I've tried this, you know, condensed on what is Buddhism, through a few lines. And many people will give to me, well, that there's no soul, there's no self. Another one which I tend to like a little better is that not harming is basic to Buddhism. By himself, no harm. That's pretty good.

[15:58]

But you could say that's also in Christianity, maybe. But when you say no soul, that's pretty basic. The other one, which I won't go into now, the theory of rebirth. That's something else I like to play around with, but I won't get into that right now. But then in that early times when I was studying this and trying to sit and looking at Buddhism, I came across a little book that was edited by D.T. Suzuki, and it was called, I think, Mysticism, Buddhist and Christian. That book helped me get over whatever that barrier was there for me now, with the self and oneself. The Christian part of it that he quoted a lot was from the writings of Meister Eckhart, this German mystic.

[17:00]

And I had heard a quotation of Meister Eckhart years before that I even heard of Buddhism, which really stuck with me, which for me probably means I was ready to go on the path that hit me so strongly. There was a radio show down in Southern California on this station, kind of like KPFA is up here. In fact, it's the same thing. And there was a show on mysticism. And the guy used to start out his program with a quotation from Meister Eckhart, which goes, if I can remember, sort of, the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. And it's kind of neat that there's a play on eye, eye, the eye, eye, eye with seeing eye, the eye self. And I said, wow, I never thought about it in that way, God in that way.

[18:08]

So then this program came on. And then later on, and I'm reading B.T. Suzuki. Oh, and by the way, I'd like to... put in a plug here, which I think Paul was going to do anyway, but this afternoon we'll have Bernard Foer from Stanford University. He's giving a seminar here in the dining room from 1.30 to 5. And the title is called Zen Coming to the West, something like that. And he's going to look at the early beginnings of the Zen Buddhas moving into the West and some of the theories and misunderstandings that came the people who were bringing it over, D.T. Suzuki being one of them, and also some of the early Christian missionaries to Japan. They were the ones who brought Zen to the west, or the ideas of Zen to the west. And Bernard's going to talk about that early time. I think it's going to be a very interesting afternoon, in the hopes that some of you can stay for that. It'll be 1.30.

[19:13]

So this idea of the eye seeing God being the same eye, usually the big difference in Christianity and Buddhism is what's called duality. Where in Buddhism you don't have this separation, you don't have this God figure and then you. We all supposedly have Buddha nature. And one of the things I was drawn to to start practicing was that it wasn't a matter of just reading this stuff and saying, oh, yeah, okay, I have faith in it. You sit down on the cushion and do it and see for yourself what happens. This is what Shakyamuni did. He sat there under that tree. And I said, now you do it too. So that was kind of repealing to me. Recently I've been rereading the Hindu philosophies, because that's where I came from, because I came to Buddhism, and looking at the Atman theory again, because I guess I haven't really finished with that yet.

[20:25]

It's still somewhere in me, I have this. Because the Atman theory is not bad, it's kind of neat, you know. It means that you're part of the all. And sometimes I argue with myself, say, well, what's good in nature? Anyway, you know, we do this bowing, and this came from India. In India today, they still bow to each other. People only see each other in the street. And I was told by an old teacher of mine that this is bowing, you're bowing to the Atman in the person. It's not bad. We do that. The Japanese do this too. The Buddhists all over the world do this, in a sense, in many religions. Push palms together. But I was just reading this kind of a story about the teacher. one of the Vedanta teachers, I believe, in that system, was talking about the Atman and telling his student who the Atman was and saying, that's God in you.

[21:36]

You are God. Part of you is God. So the student went out, and he's walking down the road, and here comes this great elephant coming down the road, bells ringing. They tie bells on him to warn the people to get out of the way. There's a little rider up on top sitting there. And this guy's walking. They say, well, my teacher just told me I'm God. The elephant's God. So why does God have to get out of the way of God? So I'm going to keep walking. And so it keeps walking and the elephant's coming. And then just when the time for the collision, the elephant gets a chunk, picks them up, pops them off on the side of the road. It's kind of, not too gently, plop. And, you know, this little driver, he said, get out of the way, get out of the way, you know. I don't know where they dropped him on the side of the road. So the guy goes back to his teacher all covered with dust and breezes. He says, you know, I met God on the road.

[22:38]

And God just threw me right off the road. Why did that happen? He says, you didn't hear God on top of the elephant. God's saying, get out of the way. You didn't listen. It's kind of a neat story. But it seems like I'm leaving the Buddhist and I'm talking about Atman, which is not a bad theory. The Hindu religion is pretty good. Anyway, maybe it's time for me to read a poem. I like to read poems. I have two today. One is by... They're both by Japanese, one a native Japanese, written in 1922, I suppose. The other one's more contemporary. It was written by a third-generation Japanese-American. I'll start with the early one, with respect to age.

[23:42]

This one is called November 3rd, and it's... It's written by Miyasawa Kenji, who wrote in the 20s and 30s. He was, what do you call that profession that you work with the land? Basically, he was trying to get the rice farmers to improve their crops and how they become modern. He died young. Well, this November 3rd, became really kind of adopted officially by the Japanese government. And I'm told that almost all Japanese schoolchildren know this poem by heart. I would have read it in English, of course. It kind of gives the feeling of the Bodhisattva. Kenji was, he practiced, not Zen, but I'm not sure whether it was a Lotus Sutra type or Nichiren, which would be the one.

[24:49]

neither yielding to rain nor yielding to wind, yielding neither to snow nor to summer heat, with a stout body like that without greed, never getting angry, always smiling quietly, eating one and a half pints of brown rice and bean paste and a bit of vegetables a day, in everything not taking oneself into account, Looking, listening, understanding well, and not forgetting. Living in the shadow of pine trees in a field in a small hut thatched with my cancers. If in the east there's a sick child, going and nursing him. If in the west there's a tired mother, going and caring for her bundles of rice. If in the south there's someone dying, going and saying, you don't have to be afraid. If in the north there's a quarrel and a lawsuit, saying it's not worth it, stop it.

[26:02]

In a drought, shedding tears. In the cold summer, pacing back and forth, lost, called a good for nothing by everyone. Neither praised nor thought a pain somewhere like that is what I want to be. That's not bad. The other one I just want to bring is more up to date. I knew I should put a bookmark. This one is by, his name is Lawson Fusawa Inada.

[27:07]

I just recently discovered him for myself. He's a very interesting person. He teaches now somewhere in Oregon in a university. His background, of course, his childhood was in the camps. There's a picture of him and his mother and father in some camp in Colorado. But what made me interested in him, he also, when he got out of the camp and started becoming a teenager, he became interested in jazz, which was my adolescent also. And he had a good feeling for jazz. This poem I wanted to read is just... He had a Tibetan Vajrayana teacher. He dedicates it to the Venerable Lama Shoji, who I'd never heard of. I think he had a teaching for a while over in the Marin in Fairfax. So we went from the Buddhist, the Japanese Buddhist, native, 1920s, now this is more up to the 1970s, 80s.

[28:12]

Lightning arises in the stillness. A wave arises in the stillness. A snake unwinds in the stillness. The fountain freezes in the stillness. The fountain flows in the stillness Dogs are warm in the stillness. Form is emptiness in the stillness. Emptiness is form in the stillness. Watchful awareness in the stillness. Realize the essence in the stillness. Dharma is blameless in the stillness. Dedicate the merit in the stillness. Thank you, Rinpoche, in the stillness. May our intention...

[29:57]

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