On Saturday November 6th 2021, Santa Barbara Zen Center welcomed Rev. Busshō Lahn as our Guest Teacher. His topic was "Where Does the Bread Go?"

Rev. Busshō Lahn first came to Soto Zen Buddhism in 1993, was ordained as a novice in 2009, and received Dharma Transmission (authorization to carry the lineage and teach independently) in 2015.

He is a teacher, speaker, retreat leader, spiritual director, and an Interfaith Fellow at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. He serves the Flying Cloud Zen Contemplative Spiritual Practice Community, as well as the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, Aslan Institute, and the Episcopal House of Prayer.

Bussho’s teaching focuses on contemplative spirituality, 12-Step work, interfaith dialogue, mystical Christianity, and marrying spirituality with both Western and Buddhist psychology.

Full Transcript

So let's do the gata and then we'll turn it over to him. Thank you. ["Gata and Opening the Sutra"]

Thank you very much, Monica. What a warm introduction. It's always good to see your face. Yes, Monica and I have bumped into each other many, many times over probably quite a long time if we were actually to do the math. I bet it's like quite a long time that we've crossed paths. At MZMC, I think, almost exclusively at Minnesota Zen Center.

So good morning to you all. Thank you, Santa Barbara Zen Center for this kind invitation. It is lovely to sit in this circle with you all. I'm grateful for the invitation to practice with you. And in this particular expression of practice, I move the mouth part of my face and you listen with the ear part of your head. This is just part of the ritual that we call a Dharma talk.

What I really appreciate about the spirit of the opening the Sutras verse, you have a different translation than the one I'm used to. There are many different translations, of course, of many of these verses that we're accustomed to in our Zen practice. But I love the implied onus of learning being placed on the listener and not on the speaker. When I first heard it, I thought, like deep and subtle and profound. Oh man, has that put a lot of pressure on the speaker until I kind of listened to a layer or two beneath it and went, no, it's happening now and it's everywhere. And it's what you're breathing and what you're seeing and what you're hearing. So no, it's entirely up to me as the Dharma talk recipient to find it because I've just been assured it's here. It's not that knucklehead's job to give it to you. It's already here. So I kind of like that. It always helps me relax as a speaker.

Before I jump in, I'm wondering if for about a minute or so, I wonder if I could have co-host status or the ability to screen share. If not, it's okay. I'm giving this to you here. I don't want to put you on the spot, but if that's possible, I could do a screen share of my fun starting point here for my talk and if not. Try right now, Busho. Let me see if I can't hear. Aha! There we go. Can we all see that? What a wonderful place for a Dharma talk.

So for those of you who can't see it or whatever, I'll describe it to you in a minute. But for those of you who can see it, I'll give you just a minute to take in the glory that is Calvin and Hobbes. That's one of my very favorites. Okay. Everybody have it? That's her. That's the question we're going to engage with and refuse to answer today. Where does the bread go? So there we go. It's just the sweetest darn thing. I tell ya.

Okay, so. Here's what I have in front of me. Here's my notes. I'm gonna try to be a good boy today and stick to them. I'm sort of famous for, in fact, I don't know if Monica was part of this conversation or not, but I was sitting in a group of teachers at some point at MZMC a number of years back and we were talking about the way we create Dharma talks and do you bring into the Zendo with you just kind of bullet points, things you wanna cover because you're a little more extemporaneous? Or do you write out every word and every sentence or how do you go about it? And people had, of course, differing styles. And I learned about myself that I'm one of those people who will write the talk out every comma, quotation mark, complete sentence is the whole thing. And then I have it in front of me and then I promptly ignore my notes and go off script. How those two things have continued to happen very consistently for many, many, many years now, I do not understand, or if the patterning of my consciousness.

So as you just saw, there's a beautiful Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where Calvin asks Hobbes if he wants to see something weird. "You wanna see something weird? Watch," he says, putting bread into the toaster. "You put bread in this slot and push down this lever and then in a few minutes, toast pops up." "Wow," Hobbes puzzles at this. "Where does the bread go?" "Beats me," says Calvin. "Isn't that weird?"

So I ran across this strip, I think online someplace. And then I had it out for my run, my daily run. And as I was, you know, the way we think differently, like when we're in the shower or raking leaves or at the gym or whatever, the way our brain assembles information, all of a sudden I went, oh, that's like Dogen's passage on firewood and ash. So that's what I'm gonna play with today.

And the joke that we start with, this beautiful comic strip, we're now gonna ruin, I'm afraid, by dissecting it. And there's nothing that kills a joke quicker than dissecting it. But the joke implied in this sweet little comic strip is that both Calvin and Hobbes are failing to consider the bread to toast transformation as one thing changing. Right? They see instead bread and toast as two completely separate and unrelated things.

So our friend, the 13th century Zen master, a name I'm sure you all know, Eihei Dogen, who is not particularly funny, at least not in my view, and he's much more long-winded than Calvin and Hobbes are, would seem, at least on the surface, to agree, at least in some ways, with Calvin, and he gives a very similar teaching using a similar but different metaphor. In his classic essay, Genjo Kōan, again, I know a lot of you are probably familiar with that piece, probably some of you much more intimately familiar than I am. But here's the passage from Dogen:

"Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood is past. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes past and future, and is independent of past and future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death. Death is an expression complete this moment. They are like winter and spring. You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring."

Wow. So there's a lot in that passage. Causality and separation and non-self and time and all sorts of stuff. This is very Dogen, right? It's always a layer cake with him of all sorts of stuff. If this is new to you, this essay, Genjo Koan, spend some time with it. Look it up, it's easy to find online and it's beautiful. There's so much there. It's just beautiful.

So where do we wanna go today? "Ash abides," he says, "in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past." So we can say that bread becomes toast and it does not become bread again. Yet do not suppose that the toast is future and the bread is past.

So Buddhism teaches us that there is no separate abiding thing called bread, right? That moves through time. That's not the way it works. That's to separate time and things. And Buddhism does not do that, especially not Zen. There is no separate abiding thing called bread that changes into a separate abiding thing called toast. Bread is in the phenomenal expression, the Dharmic position of bread. Toast is in the phenomenal expression, the Dharmic position of toast. So bread is moment, toast is moment, firewood is moment, ash is moment. Tree, seed, earth, all moment.

So you right now, taking the breath that you are taking, feeling what you are feeling right now, moment. Your phenomenal expression, your Dharmic position. It's pretty abstract so far. I promise it starts making sense. Because since this is Buddhism, right? Pardon me. Since this is Buddhism, we always have to start with Dukkha. It always has to connect back to Dukkha. It always has to have some relationship with something practical. Why are we doing this? Why are we studying the nature of time or causality or separateness or self or non-self? Because it has a relationship with how we create our own suffering. That's always the bottom line with everything in Buddhism. It has to have some sort of practical application. The practice, the teaching, the idea, the worldview, the construct. How does it help? How does it help, right? We start with our suffering. We start with our relationship to our suffering. That's actually why this teaching is being given by Dogen, right?

So let's pretend this morning as you're listening to me, this morning as I'm talking with you, let's pretend that irritation is one of the things that you are mindful of the arising of. You notice along with what you see, what you hear, what you're smelling, the experience of your body touching your cushion or your chair back. One of the things you notice in the arising of moment is irritation. Let's just say that's plausible because it happens a lot, right? Because we're human beings. We're like, ooh, that's one of our companions. Irritation arises, right? You got caught off in traffic or your friend said something that didn't make sense to you, that or somebody coughed during your meditation or you're still rolling around a story in the back of your head about something that kind of tweaked you, right?

So you, in this scenario, you feeling what we call irritation is moment. Moment. So we can say, irritation abides in the phenomenal expression of irritation, which fully includes future and past. Or if you're not feeling irritated, if it's something else, busy mind, let's say. That's another common companion, right? Busy mind abides in the phenomenal expression of busy mind, which fully includes future and past. Or grief or contentment, hope, joy, fully abiding in their phenomenal expression, fully including future and past.

The fully including is what's interesting to me. Do you see sort of the pattern? The Dogen starts, but I'm kind of trying to make a little more explicit. All moments abide in this moment. That's the Zen understanding of time because of non-separateness. All moments abide in this moment. In fact, it struck me, who was I saying this to? I was just saying this the other day. I said, you know, I've been listening to these old recordings of, there aren't that many of Suzuki Roshi. Still around, there's a handful of recordings, audio recordings of Suzuki Roshi giving Dharma talks in Katagiri. Thank goodness the early MZMC members recorded hours and hours and hours of Roshi's talks. And they're on the website. They're part of our podcast at MZMC. So many, many, many recordings of that first generation of Japanese Zen teachers.

And this is just anecdotal because this is based on what I have, the talks I happen to have heard, but I'm amazed how often they say moment and not the moment that they drop the article. That's interesting to me. So I know that English wasn't their first language. So perhaps that was an unintentional choice, but I'm also aware that the first generation of their heirs, their students that became teachers and taught also have this kind of verbal habit of saying, yeah, return mind to moment without the article. And I kind of thought, you know, there's a Dharma to that. I don't know that I've ever heard Katagiri Roshi or Suzuki Roshi refer to present moment. Perhaps it's in the books I'm just forgetting right now.

Where it takes me though, is the idea that they just use the one word because there is only the one thing. To even say present moment doesn't kind of make sense because it sort of suggests past and future, which aren't happening and can't happen. And so therefore just moment. And even the "the" becomes unnecessary because there aren't several amongst which to choose. There's just moment, right? All moments abide in this moment. All moments abide in moment. All moment is moment. There are all kinds of different ways of saying this, right?

So it makes sense that we would be able to touch all the forms that our Dukkha takes, our anger, all the forms experience takes, grief, confusion, stillness. Contentment, greed, right? All the paramitas, all the poisons. Right now in this phenomenal moment. To me, the practical dimension to this is, what makes sense is that I can only meet my sadness with my compassion right now. And to do that is to do it for all time. I can only meet my delusion, my misunderstanding with my clarity, my wisdom. Now there is literally no other moment in which to do that. So my karma didn't happen, it's happening in its entirety, all of it. Right, when else could it happen?

So this idea of something abiding and permanent and separate, moving through this separate thing that we call time, Dogen just doesn't do it. Like, nope, nope, nope. The practical part of this kind of heady idea for me is the noticing that I have during Zazen, during my daily activities, of wanting to escape the phenomenal expression of this to go to what I imagine was that or what I imagine will be that. Right, I know we all know this. All of us have said Zazen, even if you just did it this morning for the very first time, already you figured out the brain likes to pull its ideas about the past and pull its ideas about the future into what we call the present, that's what it does. Of course it does. And usually that's about some idea of escape.

You know, so we're on the cusp right now of a season change in Minnesota, that's a pretty marked line. Takes place over several weeks, but it's kind of a dramatic change to move from summer to fall to winter. And many of us try to escape, either physically by getting in a car and driving to Arizona, which a lot of people in this part of the country do, or we do what human beings do, right, we constrict. We constrict, we resist, we create dukkha. I wish it were different than it is. I want to escape the phenomenal expression of winter and try to get to the phenomenal expression of summer. And of course it doesn't work that way, does it? I try to escape the phenomenal expression of irritation to try to get to the phenomenal expression of happiness. Welcome to Zazen, right? The watching of that happening is Zazen.

So to me, this is about relationship actually. I appreciate that that first generation of Zen teachers sometimes would use the word intimacy in the place of enlightenment, that there was some sort of implied either similarity or even an implied identity between those two ideas. That relationship is enlightenment and enlightenment is just relationship, right? And what I'm aware of is our teachings in Buddhism about what actually causes suffering, as opposed to just pain, is my refusal to relate. I need it to be different. I do not accept you right now. I don't accept you irritation. I don't accept you fall. I don't accept you car horn outside of my door or pain in my knee or grief at the loss. I don't accept it. My heart is in a state of no. I don't accept toast. I want the bread back. It's what we do. This is so familiar. I know it to all of us, right?

Suffering is caused by a refusal to relate. And the beauty of what Dogen's saying is when we can see it is suffering is caused by a refusal to relate to the only thing that actually is. Moment. As it is. That's it. It's very Zen, right? That's all that there is. That's all that I can actually rely on. This moment, exactly as it is. There's the object of our faith in a sense. There's the stability of our practice. We can rely on things as it is, moment as it is. And so, wow, the idea that, oh, my suffering is just caused by a refusal to relate to it. I just will not accept it. I desperately need for it to be different in order to be intimate with it.

It's why we sit. It's why we give talks. It's why we listen to talks. It's why we do kin-han. It's why we eat oriochi. It's why we do all the stuff that we do. Just invite ourselves over and over, be reminded of the infinitely open door of you can actually relate to this right now. You can be intimate with it. I promise you have that capacity. And you can cultivate that capacity. You get better at doing it. There's your enlightenment.

Of course, it makes sense that there's a part of us that doesn't wanna feel the sad or the anger or the confusion, the dukkha, right? Because that part of us always believes there's a better moment to get to.

There's an ash moment it wants to get to or a summer moment. Some sort of life experience is better than the stupid toast moment that's showing up or the firewood moment or whatever it is that we're defended against. It's a very simple thing, actually. It's a very simple movement. It's not easy, but it's simple. I think when we do zazen long enough and we start to really see this dynamic within our consciousness, we get good at watching the switch kind of get flipped. Like, oh yeah, I just said no. Boom, because suffering just immediately arose. We can sort of see the relationship there, right? Does that kind of make sense? To folks, yeah, me too.

In Monica's kind introduction, she mentioned that I'm a spiritual director, which is true. I've been doing this for a number of years now. In our tradition of Zen, we know that meeting with a teacher, sitting down with one other person and talking really deeply about our practice life, our spiritual life, whatever words we want to use to describe that is very central to Zen. You know, Dharma talks and classes and this kind of practice periods are really good at giving us insights into scriptures or teachings or ideas, but by definition, they have to be kind of broad brushes. We're talking to a large group of people and all that kind of stuff. Whereas that sort of one-to-one dokusan, if it's formal, that kind of container gives us an opportunity to bring something very specific, kind of like karmically unique about our own life that we get to offer to our teacher and say, this is how the dukkha shows up for me. This is where I'm caught. Is there something you can help me with?

I love that work. I love meeting with my own teacher in that capacity, but I also love being able to sit with people one-to-one. It has a lot of meaning for me. But it doesn't take long doing that, meeting with a number of different people of different faiths, ages, skin colors, genders, traditions to realize, to really realize, oh yeah, humanity is just wired like humanity. The people I meet with are wired exactly like I am. They wanna go to the thing that they like and get away from the thing they don't like. I'm laughing just because of simplicity. It's like, well, of course, duh. Of course, we just see how tenacious that is. We see how hardwired we are. What a deeply human tendency. This fundamental dukkha that Buddha talked about 2,500 years ago, this no. No to how things actually are and the desire to wanna move back to the bread moment or head to the toast moment if we're attached to toast.

And we forget, we haven't been exposed to the idea that moment includes all moment, fully includes future, fully includes past. To me, the beauty there is that there is no place to go. That sounds like a constriction. That sounds like a limit, right? It's like Pema Chodron's beautiful book titled The Wisdom of No Escape. We hear no escape and we think, oh no, trapped, claustrophobic. It's the opposite. It's really the opposite when we realize there is no other moment to go to. We abide in our phenomenal position. The phenomenal position of this. The no escape, think of the energy that that saves. I just don't need to be constantly trying to use this to escape from the thing I can't escape from. And so now there's no arena for my compassion, but this, there's no place for it to go other than right here, the suffering I can feel and I can taste, right? There's no place for my wisdom to land, the light of my kind awareness to land other than right here and whatever delusion is arising right now, right?

There's no phenomenal expression of Buddha other than you right now. That's the phenomenal expression of Buddha. Has to be, right? That's standard Zen. What else could it possibly be, right? That means no escaping from Buddha. No escaping, no escaping from ourselves as Buddha. And because we're Buddha, right? That's, we're Buddha, we're Buddha nature. That is our fundamental identity, consciousness, right? Because that is true, we have actually no choice, but to relate with kindness and with clarity to whatever dukkha is arising, because that's what we are, it's what we do. It's what Buddha does, you shine the light. You meet suffering with compassion, you meet delusion with wisdom, it's what you do. Here's the phenomenal position of Buddha right here. Dukkha arises, Buddha arises, boom. Right, we have no escape from our Buddha nature.

So we relate to every dimension of moment. Everything that we imagine is separate in it. Individual sensations, thoughts, emotions, ideas, all of it we get to relate to, all of it we get to relate to with profound acceptance and deep love. It's Buddha nature. So no escaping actually means complete freedom. There's just no energy spent on wanting to do anything other than that. So it's just doing what feels so natural, right? I trust we've all had just little moments of this, maybe big moments of this, but I'm trusting as I'm giving you this idea that this is something that you probably can touch with your own felt experience. I'm hoping that that's true.

So we're getting close here. I wanna just switch and use another voice. I think it's cool to get the same teaching in a couple of different voices because sometimes something lands in us in a different way when we hear it. So the other voice I wanna use is Mary Oliver. A lot of us know Mary Oliver. She is not in fact a Dharma teacher, but boy, she's quoted a lot by Dharma teachers. She's actually quoted a lot by Christian pastors and my Islamic friends are like, oh yeah, the American imams are always quoting Mary Oliver. I'm like, oh, she's kind of like our Rumi. We all think she's ours.

So anyway, Mary Oliver, I trust you know who that is. She actually has a similar idea at the end of one of her poems that I was reading because it's called Fall Song and it is fall. That's autumn season here. And as I said, in Minnesota, that's a pretty dramatic shift. So she has a lovely short poem from her book, American Primitive. Again, easy to find online, but Fall Song is a beautiful, beautiful poem and it ends with I think the same idea again. So I'll read it for you. Mary says:

"Another year gone, leaving everywhere

Its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

The uneaten fruits crumbling damply

In the shadows, unmattering back

From the particular island

Of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

Except underfoot, moldering

In that black subterranean castle

Of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds

And the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure

Painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

Flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing

To stay - how everything lives, shifting

From one bright vision to another, forever

In these momentary pastures."

So I spent a lot of time with poetry in my life, mostly reading, some writing. I first read that poem, I think shortly after it came out, American Primitive I think was the early 80s, like 83 or 84 or something like that. I was still in high school. I'm dating myself. That last line, "forever in these momentary pastures." I read that whole book and that line, those five words stuck in my head like glue. They've been in the back of my head rolling around for 30 plus years. Forever in these momentary pastures. It's absolutely fascinating to me, that line, because I can just feel the teaching. And again, I don't know that this is intentional. I'm not claiming that Mary Oliver is a Buddhist or trying to give us some sort of Dharma here. She's just writing a poem.

But "forever in these momentary pastures." Here we have forever. The idea of forever, eternity, right? Non-time, whole, right? Forever, eternity is whole, not separate, complete. Right? And momentary. Momentary pastures, impermanent. Pastures, discrete, separate. Boom, boom, boom. Separate, eternity, time. Non-separateness, separateness. Forever in these momentary pastures. If I'm just positive, Dogen would have been like, that's awesome. It's like the symbol of the cross, right? Here we have the vertical axis. Eternity, the absolute. Buddha, the Dharmakaya, outside of space and time. And then right where it meets, boom, that point where it meets the horizontal axis, karma. Cause, effect, time, change, linearity. And here we are. All of us in the phenomenal expression of moment that fully includes. Wow, that whole teaching is right there. Oh, Mary. Thank you so much.

So, I got to wrap up here. I think our takeaway here past all of the kind of heady... I kind of like any abstract foolishness, but I'm actually a disciple of the practical. So, despite all of the heady abstract foolishness of our friends Mary Oliver, Dogen and Calvin today. What I am left with when I sit with this idea, this teaching of always living here in the center of time and eternity containing all moments. The invitation that Zen offers me of can you meet the entirety of this moment with just kindness. That's all you got to do. Just to be alive is enough. Just meet it with kindness. That's it. Don't get too nuts about this.

The reason all of this has stayed with me, the reasons these things did kind of a Gestalt. The Mary Oliver poem and the Calvin strip and Dogen's crazy Genjokoan. My takeaway, the reason I'm offering you what I'm offering you today is because when I sat with all of it and it kind of did the gelling that it did in my heart. I realized it felt good. That's how it felt for me. I actually felt warm and connected and I realized. At least to some extent, this is a realization that will deepen. I'll have to sit with this. I'm sure the rest of my life, like all of our teachings, we just ripen and ripen and we understand deeper and deeper layers. But the good for me came from the sense from the sense from the physical felt and emotional and mental sense. And I'm not separate from anything. I'm really not. Holy cow, Dogen's right. Mary's right. Sure, this is a momentary pasture. That's also forever. This is my dharmic position. It will always be this. This is it. It's no different than yours. It's no different than Buddha's. This is the moment. This is the this is only this is the moment.

And so, wow, my meeting in this moment, my meeting of my own sadness and ambivalence with kindness is everything. All the bodhisattva bows, all of them happen. Wow. Right. This is actualization. It's like the Tathagata. Thus come, thus going. Wow. Like it's infinite ordinariness. Just me sitting here on this crazy cushion. Infinitely sacred at the same time, non-separate. It just feels really good for me to know that I can actually care for my entire life right now. I can care for my entire life right now and that that's actually your life, too. There's the feeling for me. You can care for your whole life right now. Just care for the thing that's showing up. Boom. Right. I can care for the entirety of my whole life by making toast. Just by making toast.

So let's close with words wiser than mine. I'll give you a couple of sentences from Genjokoan again, from our friend Dogen to end. Again, I know a lot of you know these passages because indeed these paths have been well trodden.

"Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dew drops on the grass, or even one drop of water. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon."

That's the medicine that I need. And I thank you. I thank you very much for your engagement with this and for your practice and for listening to what I offered today. Thank you. And my understanding is now we all get to share with one another comments and questions and expressions and all sorts of stuff. Is that right? Is that what we do now?