William Powell (trans.), The Record of Tung-shan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986. https://terebess.hu/zen/Tung-shanPowell.pdfBill Powell is a retired professor of Chinese religions, having spent his 30-year professional career at the University of California Santa Barbara. He earned a B.A. in Philosophy at the University of the Pacific, an M.A. in Chinese language at the University of Hawaii and his PhD in Buddhist Studies at the University of California Berkeley. He spent three years affiliated with Kyoto University as a research scholar, studying early Chan Buddhism and Song period discourse records under the generous and infinitely patient tutelage of Professor Seizan Yanagida. He began Zen practice in 1965 at the Diamond Sangha in Honolulu under Robert Aitken, Katsuki Sekida and Yasutani Roshi.

Full Transcript

I'm going to introduce Bill. Bill is our friend and also a retired professor of Chinese religions, having spent his 30-year professional career at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He earned a B.A. in philosophy at the University of the Pacific, an M.A. in Chinese language at the University of Hawaii, and his PhD in Buddhist studies at University of California, Berkeley. He spent three years affiliated with Kyoto University as a research scholar, studying early Chan Buddhism and Song period discourse records under the generous and infinitely patient tutelage of Professor Sezon Yanagida. He began Zen practice in 1965 at the Diamond Sangha in Honolulu under Robert A. Kenrochi, Katsuke Sekita and Yasutuni Roshi.

Thank you Bill so much for your offering. I'll start with "thank you my good friends," which is the way the Sixth Patriarch starts. And he's talking to his fellow monks and also to lay people. And in his particular congregation, there weren't any gods present, but who knows. So we'll start there.

And I was really kind of shocked by the few words that Doug just said about the event in Canon. And one of the things that I came across when I was thinking about how to talk about this is some of the things that were part of the Fifth Patriarch's teaching. And one of the things he emphasized constantly, and this came up when Doug mentioned this event, was time is short. Use all of your energy now in the time that you have. You're fortunate at this time to be among sangha friends and to be able to practice. And so you need to use that. I think these events that are happening in the world now remind us, who knows what the time is and what our future is.

With that aside, let's go to some of the approaches that I suggest we take to this. They're based on approaches I've taken to these texts. I've practiced off and on through the last 50 years. I've been a teacher. I've taught this sort of thing before. But I find this a unique opportunity to talk to a group of people that I've come to know very well and appreciate very much. And to know that they're also involved in the same sort of progress or process that I'm engaged in and that we have a lot in common. And therefore, I think we can learn from each other and gain a lot.

So the first question, which I point out is the obvious question. What the hell are we doing reading a text about my wordless teaching that goes beyond the sutras and has nothing to do with words? Well, I would point out that many people, scholars in Japan and other places have figured out that the most loquacious user of words in the Buddhist tradition are Zen Buddhists and Chan Buddhists. More publications, more words from Chan Buddhists than any other sect, any other group of Buddhists. Of course, the sutras are very large and larger than the Zen and Chan sutras, but the commentaries and the interactions. Zen Buddhists are talking all the time.

So nonetheless, the question remains. And Pamela, if you will put up number one. I asked Joel two days ago or a day ago, where did this particular koan or comment appear? He said, well, I think it might be in the Gateless Gate, the Wumen Guan. Right after I asked Joel that question and came home and was reading something else, I stumbled on it. My pure coincidence, or not. But there it was. There is the story I was looking for. And this is contained in Sekida's translation of the Gateless Gate or the Wumen Guan.

Question is to speak or not to speak? Name of the monk is Xiang Yan. And he said, it's like a man up in a tree, hanging from a branch with his mouth. His hands grasp no bow, his feet rest on no limb. Someone appears under the tree and asks him, what is the meaning of coming from the West? And it's assumed you're talking about it's obvious. Buddhist practitioner, we're talking about Bodhidharma. If he does not answer, he fails to respond. And then it's noted in many commentaries, as is the duty incumbent on all Buddhists. To spread the teaching. If he does answer, he will lose his life. What would you do with such a question?

So that's the conundrum. And that's the basic conundrum, a basic conundrum. That would be a conundrum. A basic conundrum, particularly for Chan Buddhists and Zen Buddhists. To give you of our age and from the 12th to 13th century on, it became even more important to deal with that question. How do we talk? How do we study the sutras? How do we communicate with each other? As Zen Buddhists.

So. Taking two stabs at this. Excuse me. The problem is, how do you speak about emptiness, which is ineffable? It's not a thing. And it's not something that can be expressed in words. That seems to be. It makes me think of Ludwig Wittgenstein. When he was talking about philosophy. And engaged in various forms of philosophy. Not about which cannot, one cannot speak thereof, one should remain silent. Sounds like our Xiang Yan comment here as well. Except the problem is, Wittgenstein wasn't silent. Neither was he. Neither was Wittgenstein silent. Neither was Xiang Yan. Both of them went on to answer their question.

So one of the ways I approach this is. Through my studies with Edward Conze on the Perfection of Wisdom, I spent two or three years on that as well. Is this little excerpt from section 10 of the Diamond Sutra. So, Subhuti, what do you think? Does a Bodhisattva create a harmonious Buddha field? Buddha fields. Which is to say, does he lead all beings to salvation? The Buddha field is a place where beings can learn the Dharma. Study. So Shakyamuni answers. No, world-honored one. He does not. Why? Because one, to create a harmonious Buddha field is two, not to create a harmonious Buddha field. And three, therefore it is called creating a harmonious Buddha field.

So what's going on here? This is a rhetorical strategy that we're going to find all through Zen, koans, discussions, and philosophizing. It's a standard trope. It's a very straightforward rhetorical strategy. Buddhism and the beginning of the study of anything actually begins with a normative statement. Here's the truth. I'm going to tell you the truth and here it is. And here's what you do. There's suffering. You're ignorant. There's a path. The path is the eightfold path. All very straightforward.

The second step in this rhetorical strategy is to introduce the theory of emptiness. The understanding of emptiness. Emptiness does not mean the absence of something. It means the condition in which things exist are not what we understand. Things exist but not in the way we understand them. So the second step is to introduce the emptiness of the mind. Introduce the emptiness component into the discussion. This is deconstruction of the normative statements. We'll see this again and again in koan practice and other places.

But the third step is really the important one. We'll see this in the sixth patriarch. In the poems. Therefore it is called creating a harmonious Buddha field. Notice the word called. We can still talk about it. But we go through the first two steps before we're able to talk about it. First we establish a set of principles. A normative statement. Then we transcend that statement with a deconstruction. And if we stop there, like the man holding on to the branch with his teeth, we fail to act as well as bodhisattvas but as human beings. We're conditioned to think and talk about things. So we come back and we talk about it. But when we come back and talk about it, we're no longer the person at the beginning of stage one. We've gone through the process. We come back and the corners have been sanded down.

The hard corners of the true Zen, I remember in Berkeley, watching Zen students probably from Mel Weitsman's Sojin Center walking on campus with their cushion under their arm. I am a Zen practitioner. I follow the discipline. I do exactly what I'm told. And then Mel will tell them at some point, well, okay, relax. Get a little lazy. Come back and think about that again. Let's talk about emptiness. I think that I'm transmitting Mel. I don't know that he would say that. I hope I'm transmitting Mel. He was someone who would say, just come on, kick back, relax. Let's be serious. But let's be serious lightly.

You're transmitting Mel. And I think that's the third stage. To be serious lightly is to be able to talk about these things. Knowing on the one hand that they're a process that works and two, that they're not what we think they are. They're empty. They're conditioned by everything else around us. So this is the way I take sutras. This is the way I read sutras. This is the way I think we all can read sutras without getting attached to them. Perhaps it's skill in means. The Zen Buddhists by the time of the Sixth Patriarch completely rejected the notion of skill in means. And we'll get there when we read the Sixth Patriarch. So you know, this is not legitimate. But nonetheless, that's what the Fifth Patriarch called it. That was his skill in means.

So. Are we together so far? Any questions about that? Presumably, I invite you to jump in at any time.

I'll jump in right here. In the email that you sent out previous with the questions, had the same section 10, but none of the questions were answered. So I'll jump in right here. The questions had the same section 10, but number three was listed as "known as creating a harmonious Buddha field" instead of "called". Can you talk about the distinction between called and known as?

Leave it to you to find the one little change I make in that. I am an engineer. Come on. The word in Chinese is ming, which could be either a verb or a noun. What is your name? What is your name? That's how the word is used in modern Chinese. And in the translation of the Diamond Sutra, the Chinese translation of the Diamond Sutra, that's the word that's used. So in other words, when I call you, I call you by your name. Now is your name who you are? Maybe not. Well, most certainly not. It's a moniker. And so described as I thought was going a little too far. That's the way I'm not sure whether it's Red Pine or one of the other translators does it. But I went back. This is what comes the translation as from the Sanskrit. From the Sanskrit. It's not called. So it's a verbalization. I like the fact that it's a verbalization. I called this a Buddha field. Whatever it is, I'm going to call it a Buddha field. The teaching is a Buddha field. And we'll call it a teaching of the Buddha field. Problem is to understand what the Buddha field. Problem is more complex and that's the place to start.

What kind of answers that I would say if you call the dog's tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? The answer is four because you can call a dog's tail anything you want, but it's still a tail. So you're going to call it a Buddha field. Fine. But you know, it's still a Buddha field.

Great. Okay. Yeah. I hadn't heard that. I hadn't heard that. But you have a great, great analogy.

So, okay, I'm going to go on to the next comment that was sent out. And tell you how I think Wallace Stevens is repeating the Diamond Sutra. And that's something you had in the hand, in this paper that was sent out. What he says is the final belief, that's stage three, is to believe in a fiction. That's stage one. To know it's a fiction, that's stage two. And the exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. That's the middle path. That's arriving at the end of it. Now, I know Wallace Stevens had read some Buddhist literature. This sounds very similar to the Diamond Sutra, it seems to me.

So to read it again, the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction. This is an important line I left out. There being nothing else. There is only fiction, fiction of who we are, fiction of the teacher, fiction of a bodhisattva, fiction of a Buddha. They're concepts, they're all fictions. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction. And that you believe in it willingly. And that you believe in it willingly.

I haven't read much Wallace Stevens, but I guess it's incredibly profound in this part. His poetry is, I've read some of it, I like his poetry, not a lot. Aitken Roshi was very fond of Wallace Stevens. And he's the one who quotes this from Wallace Stevens, I hadn't seen it before. I got this from Robert Aitken.

Yeah, come on. Okay. I had been reading the material and within a day I found a quote from Maya Angelou. Boy, there are a lot of bodhisattvas out there. She was.

I talked to a Japanese member of a tour group that had just gone to China and were traveling around. This was during the Cultural Revolution or after the Cultural Revolution and when things had gone really bad in China. But the Japanese were some of the first Buddhists allowed back into China to visit Buddhist sites. This particular priest, as he was arriving in China, he looked at, this was in, I think in, I'm not sure what city, Ningbo, I think.

He looked up in the mountains behind Ningbo and it was covered with these large rocks all over the mountain standing up like pillars. And the Japanese priest bowed and said, "Ah, so many bodhisattvas in China." So that comes to another question that we're going to get to later because this is part of the Chan tradition. This first of all the statement that all sentient beings have Buddha nature, but the second jump which became controversial for 30 years, for three centuries and still is, I think, new non-sentient beings have Buddha nature. And the Japanese priest obviously was taking the latter course. So yeah, there are a lot of bodhisattvas out there and some of them are stones. And I agree.

And here's one that I didn't send you. I'm going to read one more because it plays into the patriarchal system and genealogy and lineage that we're going to get to with Chan tradition. This is a very interesting book I discovered about 25 or 30, 25 years ago on the recommendation of a good friend of mine who's French and the author is French, Paul Vane, V-E-Y-N-E. And the title of his book is "Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?" And here's just part of the introduction that kind of summarized where Paul Vane will go with this, but it'll also say something about where we'll go with language history.

Instead of speaking of beliefs, one must actually speak of truths and that these truths were themselves products of the imagination. We are not creating a false idea of things. There was a time when poets, I like that, and historians, Herodotus, for example, invented royal dynasties, all of a piece, complete with name and each potentate and his genealogy. They were not foragers. They were not acting in bad faith. They were simply following what was, at the time, the normal way of arriving at truth.

So we should, is that, you need that again? Are we okay with that? Anyway, there are enough quotations and apparently we're still finding them outside. So that's the answer, it seems to me, to the second question I posed to you. I could have asked you to answer it, but I thought I'd usurp your privilege at this point and throw all these quotes out. That would have been my answer.

So we read the fiction of the Six Patriarchs and even more of genealogy, the genealogy that we recite on a regular basis in Zen temples, Soto temples everywhere and the other Buddhist temples is a fiction. And there's ample evidence of that in the production of the texts and so on. Why do we do it? And I think that was the answer. That was the answer that Vigdans, or that Vane and all these other people were giving.

So the next question that we should ask at this point, is any fiction acceptable? Is it completely arbitrary? So Pamela, if you put up number four, which is the photograph of the Sutra, I think it's number four. No, not that one. Not that one. Not that one. It should be a JPEG. Yes, that's it.

So the interesting thing about Sutra of the Six Patriarchs is that it's called a Sutra. Actually, the name of the text that we now have as the Platform Sutra, Platform Sutra, was not called a Sutra at the first time it was published in some of the early renditions. It was just the teaching of Huineng. After several decades, the title of classic or Sutra was attached to it. And the question I asked, is it arbitrary? What fiction one brings up?

And part of the answer to that, I think, is illustrated by the term itself, Sutra. Before Buddhism came to China, the word meant classic. The classics of Confucianism, classics of Taoism, the classic of the Wei and the Laozi, they were all called classics. Sutra in Sanskrit means thread. Some people suggest that it was the thread that held the pages together once they'd been written. Other people say, no, there's a thread. That runs through the Sutras and the classics.

So in the 500 BCE, approximately, writing of this particular character, the one you see on the top is the modern form. Actually, it's the form that's been in existence for the last thousand or so years. But 1,500 years before that, it looks pretty much the same, but it's a little bit more revealing. On the left side is the radical for silk. And it's an image of a skein of silk, a wrapping of silk on a stick or something before it's woven into a tapestry. The right side of the character is the image of a loom. You can see that better in the 500 BCE representation of that character. It's actually a loom. And the three vertical lines in the upper part, most people would say represent the warp of a weaving process. The warp are the threads that go horizontally from beginning to end of a piece of tapestry. They start at the top and they go all the way to the other end. The woof are the threads that are woven in between each of the works.

So the tapestry maintains a norm that runs throughout history. At least answered. Somebody says, is there an essence to Buddhism? Yeah, I think there's always an essence. I think that was analyst, it's there. But the essence is emptiness, so we don't see it. What we don't see is literal form. But it penetrates the tapestry from beginning to end. I think this is a great image. I'm elaborating on what I see in this character, but I think it's an excellent representation of what a classic is.

So a classic is not something, a classic is a tapestry that is not arbitrary. It changes over time as different threads are woven across. Interpretations change, colors change, designs change. But there are central threads that run through the entire text. So if you take that as a legitimate understanding of what Jin is, it comes to mean the norm, the classic, the thread that penetrates the tradition from beginning to end.

And I go to my last illustration, which may be the most abstruse of them all, so bear with me. This is Immanuel Kant talking about myth. Did you realize that Immanuel Kant talked about myth? That was a hard-headed rational argument. He talked about many words. This is what he says. Myths with built-in presuppositions. To me, those are the warps that myths carry for us. Regulative ideas. They hold the tapestry in place. They hold the commentaries in place. We can't see them once the tapestry is woven, but they hold it there. Built-in presuppositions. Certain understandings. Buddha nature. Buddha, bodhisattva. We all have presuppositions of what those are. We don't ask about that. We accept them. And they're part of the tapestry. And those presuppositions function not as descriptions of how things are. That's the myth. Not as descriptions of how things are, but as conditions for the intuitive apprehension of the X. Myths are the conditions for the intuitive apprehension of what's a truth. Or whatever you want to put in there.

So the sutras are not arbitrary. Not any story will work, although sometimes you read Dogen and you think maybe he's changed the story completely. He hasn't. I think the strings are still there. And with Monica we just discussed Katagiri's teaching. Why is he on another flight? He's weaving a totally new tapestry. But it's connected to the central threads. If you think about it very much, you can go tracing the thread back to the teachings.

So this is something I see in a lot of the Zen teachings. These wild flights of imagination that are weaving new textures into the basic work threads that make it dynamic and appropriate in every new period and every new set of conditions. Sutra is not a dead text with an absolute truth that was finished 2500 years ago when the Buddha first taught it. It's a dynamic, evolving process that still contains some sort of essential lines that we can trace through it.

So that's the end of my pontification on myth, sutras, fantasy myths, hyperbole and so on. Now let's go to the myth of Huineng and how we do it on time.

I really appreciate this discussion and I couldn't help but think about the sutra being, forgive me, a metaphor for our own human experience of the self. That it is kind of a way of examining our ever-changing truth. That it's right a parallel. That it only exists in relationship to what's happening just like the sutra can keep changing and that it is not arbitrary. It is arising out of unknown causes and conditions. This self, what we conceive of this self and that it is also a myth. What we think this self is. So it's very helpful this examination of this thread. Thank you.

I appreciate your comments on that as well. Applying it to the self, it's the moment to moment of the self. It's a different self in every moment and somehow the threads have to apply. That's the way we deal with it. The big problem philosophically that arises for Zen Buddhists is the relationship between practice and principle. Practice is meditation. Practice, we'll see, is many other things in this early period of Chan. Undeniably, it's meditation. Incidentally, the fifth patriarch taught nothing else but meditation. He didn't teach recitation of sutras. He didn't teach morality or ethics. His entire corpus of his work are lectures on meditation. Specific forms of meditation. That's all he taught and that was Huineng's teacher. That was Huineng's patriarch. So yeah, personal and every moment and throughout history. Now and forever, before and after. That sounds like it comes right out of the gospel actually. I don't know where I'm going with this. Some of my threads are showing.

If I could, if I could, excuse me Monica, can you just reflect on what you said about the tapestry? And I have the idea that the, I'm not sure if it's called the warp or the horizontal part of the tap. The crossing lines are the, are the woof. The woof. So that's what's woven in. That's the weaving terms. Right. So just say that the horizontal are the ones that are in place and then as a teacher or as an individual, we might add our imagination and our style by being the warps. Yes, exactly.

I just wanted to add too that I was reading an article recently and talking about how Buddhist teachings are transmitted differently today than they were in previous times or different cultures based on cultural norms and what is relevant to our time. And they talked about relevance and resonance. And it seems to relate very much to what you're talking about. The resonance is the resonance to the core teachings is the warp. And the relevance is what we need to hear at this moment in time in our lives versus say, you know, in India when they believed in reincarnation and that was a big part of the teachings about the next life, that's not very much what we hear about in our centers now. But there's different threads that are relevant to our time and to our place but also not unconnected to the original teachings, the resonance with the original teachings. So I found that those that resonated with what you were saying about the original or the progression of the term Sutra and what you're saying about what's brought forth based on what we really need to hear.

Absolutely. And I think one of the ways that we get at this is the next step is we look at how it was processed before and then we can see how we might process it going forward and not become attached to reincarnation whenever idea is the current idea. Accept it, yeah, there's reincarnation. I'll take that. That's a useful fiction maybe. It may work sometime. Feed and resonate with what's happening.

The genealogy of Zen Buddhism and of going back through the ancestors. Zen and Chan are the most adamant about that. Other traditions have a lineage as well. But the difference between the Chan lineage and the other ones is it's linked back to the Buddha through Mahakasyapa as being the one and only true teaching. Everything else is commentary. It was a very exclusivistic position at the time that the lineage chart came into existence. Zen found itself, Chan found itself on the liminal edge of mainstream Buddhism. In fact, Buddhism, mainstream Buddhism is what continued in China and much of the Asian world right up until the modern period.

The people who were talking about these ideas were a very small group within the sangha, educated literati unlike the six patriarchs. This is part of the rhetoric, I think, of the six patriarchs. He's dealing with a bunch of intellectuals. That's what most of the sutra interpretation was in Buddhism at the time he was there. The fact is the six patriarchs was very well educated. He knew the sutras. So it's kind of the diamond sutra again. There are teachings but they're really empty. That was kind of where... We'll get to that. That's part of the myth and we'll let you play with that actually. But in any case, it was a rhetoric that was very appropriate to the eighth century in China, the six patriarch sutra. And that doesn't need to concern us too much because I think it still works today in its own way. But we'll come back to that.

So what I call this is, and not only me, other people have called this, reimagining Buddhism. I think there's the first imagination of Buddhism which was the teaching of the original Buddha. The first reimagining was in the first century BCE with the Mahayana sutras where they introduced the notion of emptiness and created an entire new discourse on practice and truth.

The next reimagination that's important, relevant to our own discussion, was the Six Patriarch Sutra which was the summation of all of the thinking that had gone on among a small group of monks, primarily monks, starting in about the sixth century and culminating in the Six Patriarch Sutra in the eighth and ninth century. This was a major radical shift in the way Buddhism was taught, practiced, and understood in some sections of Chinese culture. It came to dominate a lot of the intellectual culture.

India was an oral culture. When the Buddha taught, it was only Ananda who remembered, but he remembered verbatim and spoke the sutras. No one copied them down at that point. In the early Sangha in India, various factions of the monastic community were assigned responsibility for memorizing entire sections of what Ananda, according to the tradition, was remembering the Buddha said so that you had Vinaya sections, people who remembered all the Buddha's teachings on the Vinaya. It was an oral tradition.

It came to another advanced culture, China. It was the first, it was the next advanced culture that it met. It went through Central Asia, but that was a different story. China was a writing culture, contrary to what Red Pine says, that the vocal and oral transmission of the teaching is the important one. If you're Chinese, you would say the written transmission of the sutras is the important text. And there's a tradition of literati, Confucian tradition, preserving the tradition and passing it on to the sutras.

These were the people who collected in the fifth and sixth century around the second patriarch, Huike, and began to create the story that we now read as the Six Patriarchs story and the Bodhidharma story particularly. It was a mixture, the first Zen Buddhist, this is really a proto-Zen, Proto Chan, were a small group of monks in northern China surrounding the figure of Huike. Most of the biography of the second patriarch is mythical as well, but there was a Huike and there was a Bodhidharma. It's just that most of what we know about him is what adds up to what other things emerge as revealing.

So there is a group of people, a sangha in the fifth and sixth century, really sixth century, in northern China on a mountain called East Mountain for some reason for it, it's not important. It's called the East Mountain teaching. There were Confucians, there were wandering ascetics who weren't necessarily Buddhists, and there were monks. And so the early teaching of Bodhidharma that we take as Bodhidharma was really probably the production of this group of East Mountain ascetics, monks, and Confucians that we've now received and that Red Pine has translated very beautifully by the way, the teaching of Bodhidharma. But it's not part of the genealogy. It was a group of sangha people teaching each other, working together, coming up with the teachings of Bodhidharma. A person like Bodhidharma may have taught some of those things we don't know, but it was a group effort. And that's what happened. That's the original transmission story was from Bodhidharma to Huike, but that was all it was. There was no suggestion of a transmission from the Buddha at that point. That comes much later.

I may be, why am I talking so much? I may not be able to talk in another meeting, so I better round this off with the story. I'm not going to go through the traditional story of Bodhidharma. I think most of you know it in a few high points, and I won't go into them in any extent. I'm sorry, Kavi isn't part of the group because the earliest record of Bodhidharma was that he came from Persia, not from India, South India. That was a later story. He came from Persia. Persia was the country of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is very similar in many ways to the sorts of things we get in Bodhidharma's teaching. But that be as it may, the Persian story fell out and Bodhidharma became an Indian monk.

He met Emperor Wu of Liang. That was impossible. Emperor Wu was already dead when Bodhidharma arrived in China. Emperor Wu asked, I've built monasteries. I've done a lot of things. Did I get any merit? And Bodhidharma says, no, you didn't get any merit. There's no merit. Emperor Wu says, how can you, who are you to say something like that to me? And Bodhidharma's response is, I don't know. And he left. He crossed the Yangtze on a reed and went to the north and ended up at Shaolin Temple in central China. And he went instead of following monastic practice. He found a cave. I visited his cave, by the way. He found a cave on Mount Song. It's a very drab place and full of garbage because so many people go up there to see Bodhidharma's cave. You have to look through all of the signs and the markers. This is Bodhidharma's cave. And sat there for nine years, wall gazing, a lot of dispute about wall gazing. This is a story that doesn't appear until about the ninth century, by the way. The story of Bodhidharma in the cave and Mount Song.

So he sits there. Huike comes. He wants the Dharma. He cuts off his arm because Bodhidharma won't talk to him. He keeps looking at the wall. The earlier story was that he'd lost it to bandits. A later amendation of the story was he cut it off as a show of endeavor. What else can I tell you about that? Oh, he says, my mind is troubled. Huike says, trouble. Please help me, Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma says, show me your mind. Huike says, everywhere I look, I can't find it. Bodhidharma says, there, I've pacified it for you. That's a very late story. And it responds much to many of the teachings that come in Huineng. It's a response to some of the things Huineng teaches. Those are added on post-hoc.

Now, one of the most interesting parts of the story is we get the first instance of an encounter dialogue. And that's the story of Huike and Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma says it goes to his teacher or a sage and says, I have a problem. And there's an interaction between the two. And the problem comes to a solution. It's a very simple form. That's the earliest representative we can find in the literature of that kind of interaction. This becomes the primary form of interaction by the 11th century, interaction between two people and eventually between members of the sangha with each other.

So final comment before we open up to the sutra itself. So, my perception of the origins of Chan Buddhism is that it was a communal project that took place over 300, 400 years and resulted in a literary representation of the primary values and teachings that this small group of outsiders were arriving at by the 8th and 9th century. This is a literary text, not a historical text. It's a they're mythic texts that contain truths. It was the way truth was transmitted at that time. And therefore, I think we read these, read the encounter dialogues and the Six Patriarch as a literary text from which we find meaning, we extract meaning in the way a tapestry gains meaning by seeing it in different periods of time and contextualizing it in different bodies, our own bodies and in bodies of the sangha with which we're identified. And that's our job. And that's what we do with these texts. That's what teachers do with these texts.

And so I will come back in later sessions to two or three of the relevant teachings from the other five patriarchs as we deal with Huineng's teachings. But let's close with your or let's finish with one last question. Does Shenxiu, that's the way you pronounce it, Shenxiu, as in show but it's Xiu, Shenxiu, does he lose? Does the Six Patriarch win? What do the two poems mean? And I'll shut up. I'll be silent. I want someone else to be vocal. Maybe we should read the poems. Does anybody have a copy of the poems right there? Yeah.

Oh, while you're looking for the poems, I'll tell you a little bit about the true history of Shenxiu. He was related to the royal family and was one of the most respected intellectual, Buddhist intellectuals of his period until the time he died. And he died before the Six Patriarch Sutra was produced. So he was regarded as one of the foremost metropolitan teachers of Chan Buddhism right up to the time of his death. He was one of the two Buddhist monks who were invited into the court of the only female empress of China. The last one that we had in the Qing dynasty is something else. Empress Wu. She trusted Fazang, the teacher of the Huayan and Shenxiu, the teacher of Chan Buddhism. Those were her two Buddhist advisors. He was incredibly intelligent and insightful. He wouldn't have said the stupid thing it says he said in the poem, except the poem has a bit of resonance that we can get to. But he was much smarter than that. It's a straw man in here, but we can kind of cut through the straw and get to the essence of what Shenxiu would have said and get to the essence of the teaching. So now the poems.

So I'm never going to get the name right. Just say the fifth Patriarch. Oh no, he's not. It's not. Tadmon or whatever. The body is a Bodhi tree. The mind is like a standing mirror. Always try to keep it clean. Don't let it gather dust. Can you stop there? Thank you. I want to say something about that. Red Pine and many translators are translating that line wrong. So one line there. It's like a standing mirror. That's not what Shenxiu says in an earlier text when he's actually giving lectures. He's saying mind is like a mirror stand. And then he goes on to relate the mirror stand to the manas of Yogacara, the perceiving sensual mind. Not the clear mind. Not the mind of the mirror. But the senses. The five senses plus the intellect. That's the stand on which the clear mind stands. So that's what Shenxiu would have said. He actually did say that in the Chinese thing which is the word in line two. Okay. So I leave it at that. Go on.

Okay. That's great. I'll just put in. I don't know. Anyway, okay. Shakespeare has Hamlet say that theater holds up a mirror to reality. And that's relevant but it's all the same things. So just what I throw at that. It's Hamlet's advice to the poet that the prayers hold up a mirror to essentially reality. Anyway, that uses similar metaphors. I don't know anything more.

So the sixth ancestor has two poems. The first is, Bodhi doesn't have any trees. This mirror doesn't have a stand. Our Buddha nature is forever pure. Where do you get this dust? Great. And then he composed a second one. The mind is the Bodhi tree. The body is the mirror's stand. The mirror itself is so clean, dust has no place now. Okay, does Huineng? Neither of them does. Jim?

Yeah, could we say that there's a complementarity between the two? Go on with that, develop that. If the fifth patriarch is, represents a metaphorically our Buddha nature, then within that we have these coinciding complementary aspects as shown in the different poems. It reminds me a little bit of the parable of the, I can't remember the name of it now, blanking. The errant son who comes back. Oh, the prodigal son. The prodigal son. And the two sons have these complementary aspects that are within the father. That's a kind of psychological take on it. That's good. Yeah, and Lise?

I think it goes back to the need for practice and the understanding of the underlying principles. So you need both. So that's my take on it. That the way that the eightfold path is a path of practice and of understanding. And that's what I got out of it. Yeah. Doug?

I really like this notion of the tapestry, the warp and woof and thread. I've always wondered, what is the meaning of the word, the tapestry, the warp and the thread? Warp, woof and thread. I've always wondered why each time I go back and read and reread a sutra, it's different. And it must be our mind connects to the different threads and takes us such different wonderful places. And it just indicates the vitality of the sutras. I'd like to go back to, at the beginning you brought up about the threefold process brought up in section 10 of the Diamond Sutra of creating a Buddha field of, therefore it's not a Buddha field and therefore it's called the Buddha field. And it also touches on the Sanskrit word, Nama Rupa, right? That part of form, you have form and emptiness, but part of form is its name. And usually I've thought about it as Rupa and not naming it, but it sounds like this, what it is known by, what it is called. Maybe that's part of the myth that we willingly believe in and also are flexibly discard as necessary. Is that how it goes? Anyway, I've really enjoyed this.

You know, you brought it home, Doug. You brought my conceptualization of it home. First I'll say, the first thing you said, I can tell you from experience right now, every time I do a class, but particularly this, lead this discussion, I go back and read the material and say, wow, I never understood that before, now I understand it. And I know in another year I'll look at this again, and I know in another year I'll look at this again and say, wow, now, oh, what was I thinking back then? Well, it worked then. Doesn't work now. So that's Gautier in his finger.

He holds it up and his student thinks, what's the meaning of the Dharma or Bodhidharma? Holds up his finger and the student says, oh, I think I understand now. So the next time somebody asks the student, he holds up his finger and Gautier cuts it off. These are these great Zen stories. And he said, why did you do that? Says, you're just copying me. So then he said, well, okay, Gautier, what is the meaning of the Dharma? Gautier holds his finger up. So it goes back and forth. He says, that was then, this is now.

Or as my friend, Chinese historian sent me a, this is a bit of humor, sent me a pad, a marking pad. That was then, this is now. Zen is not, let me read it. That was Zen. This is Tao. So, time changes. But you brought it home where I wanted to bring it home. So maybe it's time to bring it home. Go back to the Diamond Sutra.

Before I go to the Diamond Sutra, let's go to Bob. The key word I'm getting on these three poems is tree. I'm becoming a tree. And his first poem is, the body is the Bodhi tree. Then another poem is the mind is the Bodhi tree. And then another one, Bodhi doesn't have any trees. The papala tree or the Indian fig. I mean, the tree figures prominently in this story. I'm gonna leave it there.

So that's where Zen goes a lot. How do you talk about Zen? You talk about it in terms of metaphors, poetry, myths, and so on. But I'll end it with my, and I don't know how much time we have, Pamela, coming close. So what Doug was pointing out, and where I would have gone and will go, is to the Diamond Sutra. Shreve, Shanshre, enunciates. There are Buddha fields. There are practices. There is expression of the practice. Wayanang invokes emptiness. Wayanang could not have said what he said. If Shreve, Shanshre had said what he said, because it's merely a negation of the normative. He adds nothing, which is emptiness. The interrelation between the two.

And you come back to the third stage, which Doug pointed out, where you call it, what it is, and you no longer take it either as absolute truth or simply emptiness. It's the meaning of the two simultaneously existing. And you don't become a fundamental fanatic, saying there is only the normative or there is only the emptiness. Lagarjun has said, emptiness is like a snake. The theory of emptiness is like a snake. Be careful when you pick it up. If you pick it up from the wrong end, it'll kill you. It'll come back and kill you when you get attached to it. Make sure you pick up emptiness on the right end.

So what it does is it softens, it takes the corners, the edge off, the extremism, this potential in any religion, and adds to it. It adds much more, not only softens those two, it creates a whole new way of looking at practice and principle, which Elise was talking about as well. So I think everyone is picking up on those. So it's a literary piece in which the two pieces are presented to the reader. Not as though one wins and the other loses, although at the time of the Sixth Patriarch, there was a debate going on. He had to be legitimated. For other reasons, we won't go into it. But it left a truth, I think, that still is a part of Zen practice.

Yeah, Joel. Yeah, this is amazing. It occurred to me that, I mean, there's these three stages in the Diamond Sutra thing, and certainly the body is a Bodhi tree, first stage of, you know, I'm asserting something. And that Huai Neng offers two gauthas, which I'd never known before. And the first Bodhi does not have any trues. The third one, the mind is the Bodhi tree. You know, so, and then the second line works well too. This mirror doesn't have a stand. And the second, the body is the mirror's head. And it's at least not literally, I don't know if you can carry that through the last two lines, certainly not literally, but it just struck me that maybe, clearly Huai Neng's first gata is emptiness. It's no, like in the Heart Sutra. No, no, no. And I wonder, I don't know, to the extent to which maybe the third of the three poems is more like the third stage in the Diamond Sutra of bringing them together. At any rate, the mind is the Bodhi tree, is an assertion. Whereas in the second poem, Bodhi doesn't have any tree. Well, it's a negation of an assertion. Anyway, it just struck me that way. That that was a possible thing. Certainly those three pages of the Diamond Sutra formula are a real big thing. Anyway, so that occurred to me.

Yeah, I think that's the struggle that Chan and Zen will have for the next thousand years is putting those two together and making sense of that reality. That's the rhetoric, the three stage rhetoric. The problem is putting that into existence. The Fifth Patriarch has a very explicit way of putting that into practice. But I'll talk about that in the next lecture. I'll talk about that when we talk about practice next week. Or no, in two weeks. I'll talk about Huynh's, not Huynh, the Fifth Patriarch. Is there something else before I step back?

Okay, so thank you, good friends. Thank you. We're gonna close with the dedication, a merit. And I'm hoping, Bill, if I put up the Chinese, that you will do it for us. Hang on a sec. I mean, the Japanese. Let me, I have so many documents open. Again, too many windows open. Okay, here we are. That's what we started with. That's what we started with. And I will do the merit, Bill, if you will do the vows, is that fair? That's good. I'll kind of whistle it. Okay.

May our intention equally extend to every being in place with the true merit of Buddha's way. Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Desires are inexhaustible. I vow to put an end to them. The dharmas are boundless. I vow to master them. The Buddha way is unsurpassable. I vow to attain it.

Shujo, Suhonsui, Gandho, Dango, Mujin, Seigan, Dan, Humon, Muryo, Seigan, Raku, Mutsudo, Mujo, Seigan, Jo.

Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Desires are inexhaustible. I vow to put an end to them. The dharmas are boundless. I vow to master them. The Buddha way is unsurpassable. I vow to attain it.