Shosan Victoria Austin began practicing both Zen and yoga in 1971. In the Soto Zen tradition, she is a Dharma heir of the late Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi, in  the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki.  Shosan is an international priest of the Soto School, and a Dharma teacher at San Francisco Zen Center. She trained in the U.S., in India, and in Japan. In the Iyengar tradition, she is certified as an Intermediate teacher.

In addition to working with the yogic needs of meditation students around the country, in diverse settings including workplaces, institutions, and homes, Victoria teaches public yoga classes at San Francisco Zen Center and online, ethics and teacher training at the Iyengar Yoga Institute of San Francisco’s Teacher Training Program, and serves as an assessor of the next generation of Iyengar yoga teachers.

She trains regularly with senior yoga and Zen teachers, the Iyengar family, senior teachers in the Iyengar tradition, and other practice modalities that support inclusion, accessibility, and the right use of power. Victoria’s practice goal is to wake up in a way that benefits beings. Her teaching goals include transmitting Zen Buddhism as a yogic path and Yoga as a path of awareness. Keeping faith with each tradition, she offers classes and workshops accessible to a wide variety of abilities and circumstances.

Full Transcript

Anyway, I feel thank you for inviting me. I feel honored to be with you today. And what I'd like to do if it's okay is to go into a little bit more and collect a kind of eclectically somewhat. Some of the studies that you've been doing in the Platform Sutra. And so I'd like to take a slightly angled approach to that to see if we can begin to understand it a bit together.

Okay, we will never understand it. We will never understand it and we'll never understand any of the other Sutras that are the basis of the intellectual and lineage basis of its teachings. And the reason we'll never understand them is because as soon as we understand them, we don't understand them. So it's a built-in problem. And it's been this way since the beginning of our practice. And it's likely to continue this way and only get worse as we get more adrenalineized by the state of the world.

So it's a hopeless situation. Every time I give a Dharma talk, I feel like I'm, you know, it's not even imposter syndrome. It's more like the, you know, like the practice itself is booby-trapped for lecturing about. It's a real problem. I was once talking with Aiken Roshi about "Yeah, what are you going to do?" He said, that sounds like a summary statement. He said, "Yeah, it's a summary of a problem. A problem that I have." And he had it too, but he was more experienced and used it in a way that led to peace. And same with Sojin and so many of the other teachers who I've had the privilege to learn from.

And so I'd like to show you pretty pictures and do some body practices if that's okay with you. Do I have your consent to take me off the screen and try to put the Dharma on the screen? Thank you. So let's see if I can manage this. I've prepared some documents for you today about horizontal and vertical transmission in our school. And so the first one I'd like to work with is the one that gets short shrift in our lineage transmission. And that is horizontal transmission.

And it's sometimes hard to see horizontal transmission in the Vimalakirti Sutra because he was such a know-it-all and put down all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who came to ask him questions. And for that reason, they were all scared to talk to him. So there was a high status, low status thing going on between Vimalakirti and the other Bodhisattvas. But the practices that he teaches are the practices of horizontal transmission. And I want to uphold them or uplift them in our hearts and minds because they're practices that we really need to study today.

So like India a thousand years ago, we were in a situation in which we have great Dharma riches available to us in all of our communities, wherever we happen to live today. We have people of all different lineages and traditions to practice with. And we have access to a wealth of teachings that's unprecedented through the internet and through our connections. So horizontal transmission is exceptionally important now. And it's really important for Santa Barbara Zen Center members, if you are interested in bringing your affirmation of welcome into real life.

So you say, I mean, just even the first two words, embracing all. That's an incredible kind of aspirational phrase, embracing all. Think about what that means, embracing all. Embracing and sustaining all. And embracing all is one of the pure precepts in Tenshin, Reb Anderson's translation. So I can't remember the exact words, but it's something like, I vow to embrace and sustain right conduct. I vow to embrace and sustain right practice. I vow to embrace and sustain all beings. I vow to embrace and sustain all good.

So we say in Sojin's tradition, we say, stop doing bad, do good, and live and be lived for the benefit of all beings. So this is one of the pure precepts, is to embrace all and to affirm the fundamental connection of all beings by affirming the fundamental being of all beings. And this was actually Suzuki Roshi's great, great talent and transmission to actually look at any person and see Buddha. And when he did that, guess who answered.

So I want to bring these practices, the horizontal practice, to light as a kind of a roll up your sleeves kind of practice spoken about in the Tenzo Kyokan as the activity of the Tenzo, you know, is manifested by rolling up his, her, or their sleeves and to say, what is the work of a bodhisattva? So we were talking about Shukyo, but I want to talk about Shukyo. What is the work of a bodhisattva? Okay, Gyo just means going, you know, so how does a bodhisattva fair? What is, what do we do? You know, and, you know, lay people do need priests, horizontal transmission does need vertical transmission to keep it kind of, you know, aligned with the narrow path. And priest work does need lay practice to keep it open, to keep its heart open to everyone and everything. So it's worth the same anyway.

So what is the work of a bodhisattva? And this is Bob Thurman's, I used Bob Thurman's translation because he's funny. And he's a fanatic, right, about this stuff. So, and about the spirit in which these teachings are taught. So I wanted to think a little bit about the Vimalakirti's work life. You might not be able to see this. Let's see if I can zoom it in just a little bit. So zoom in. So this might not actually show in the tape, but I'm sorry.

So if you look at the first point, having integrated his realization with skill and liberative techniques, he was expert in knowing the thoughts and actions of living beings. And one of the work practices that we can do in this regard, since we don't know the thoughts and actions of the people we work with, is to work on our curiosity, our openness to see them as Buddha, and to draw a connection between what these we see them do and the potential causes and conditions that they're doing it.

So I remember one time when I was complaining to Mel about something and he would regularly fall asleep in Dogasan with me, probably not with you, but with me, right? I don't think he ever fell asleep with Pat or Gil or any of those people, but he fell asleep with me. And then I said, are you sleeping? And he said, no, I'm not sleeping. And I said, well, and he said, Vicki, could you try to live your life in a way that's a little less horrible to you? And I said, excuse me, teacher, how would I do that? And he said, by understanding that everything that happens is a product of causes and conditions, and not only is a product of causes and conditions, it's a manifestation of causes and conditions. So look at the person in front of you and see the causes and conditions. And this was a practice of Vimalakirti that Sojin was trying to teach me.

And so having the second one, having applied himself energetically to the Mahayana, he understood and accomplished his tasks with great finesse. So the word finesse, right? So anyway, you're on your own for that one. What is finesse at work for you? He wore the white clothes of a layman, yet lived impeccably like a religious devotee. And Suzuki Roshi said, not lay, not priest. So I want just to point to that. Okay. He was honored as a businessman among businessmen because he demonstrated the priority of the Dharma, honored as a landlord among landlords because he renounced the aggressiveness of ownership, honored as the official among officials because he regulated the functions of government according to the Dharma. Okay.

So maybe I'll just send you this attachment. I'm not going to try to explain that, but what I would suggest that you do is look at your roles. Okay. And see if you can see if everybody in who you were working with in that role were Buddha and including you, how would you be an X among Xs, a Y among Ys and a Z among Zs? And so I just ask that as a question.

And so, Vimalakirti's work life came about because of his worldview. And so basically you'll see in this trio of practices, ideas for our own practice. So if everybody's Buddha, everybody and everything is Buddha, but manifesting in ways that show causes and conditions all the time, then we can choose to take positive action based on the fact that the world shows itself to us in its causes and conditions. So we can see the situations that arise to us as manifestations of the koan. Okay. And the koan does not stop, you know, it doesn't magically begin at the outline of our body that we call our skin. Right. So the koan includes our own sickness, our own old age, our own death, our own bad knee, which we might want to look at how we label, you know, and so on.

So I just want to point that out. And one of the things that this is important to understand is that our practice is one of ownership and responsibility for our world and what's in it. It's not that we own it. It's not that we're in charge of it. It's just that we, the only part of it we'll ever know is the part that's filtered through our perceptions and our current perceptions are based on our past perceptions and our present motivations. So we're entirely conditioned by what we've done. And the next thing that we do will determine who we will be. And so we have to take ownership. And that's one of the ways in which a Buddha can manifest skillfully in the world more on this later.

And so I don't want to go too much into Buddha nature. I just want to say these wonderful things that Vimalakirti said just to acknowledge that when we see people as Buddha, we see how they're not born from the past, not passing to the future and not abiding in the present. So the idea that someone else or the world is inflexible and can't be made malleable and subject to our attention and the attention of other people, that idea has to drop away because it doesn't hold up under scrutiny. And the same with all these other factors. And so everything that can be sensed is of the nature of the magical creation produced for liberation. And that's a form of Buddha manifesting in the world.

And so I just wanted to go into causation a little bit and to look at this is the middle of a tanka that I've kept in my place since I was about 18. And so these are the 12-fold chain of origination. And these are the realms of existence or the gati that are part of the cosmogony of early and various countries Buddhism. And this is greed, hate and delusion. And this is mahakala, a terrifying aspect of compassion. And so you see that all of causation is held up for the purpose of compassion, for the purpose of liberating us. And so that's important to know because ignorance is for the purpose of liberation. Chaitanya, karma producing volition is for the purpose of liberating us. Our limited consciousness is for the purpose of liberating us and so on. And the chain can be broken everywhere just by entering that or suspending disbelief in the liberative quality of whatever arises.

And this image, this editing of this image was by Jindo Kohan as part of his tree leaf zendo offerings online. And so this is from I think this is Jindo Kohan's again, but there's basically what it does is it breaks down the noble truths into the three into Skandhas origination and the eightfold path. Skandhas are just a shorthand way that the Buddha presented the fact that we're not fixed in our selfhood. And the chain of causation is what we just saw. And the eightfold path is what we can do about it. Okay, and I'll give this to you. But basically, it's just read this chart is just reinforcing the idea that Nirvana and samsara have the same basis.

So when we talk about what's unlimited, what's unlimited is any dharma on the in the dharma chart of 75 dharmas or over 100 dharmas or whether it's whether we're seeing our life as Skandhas or as or as perceptions or what is perceived or doesn't matter. But any one of these things is part of the path. Any one of these things is impermanent. Any one of these things can be applied to any of our teachings. So that's really important to understand that Vimalakirti is just presenting a world in which we can dig deep into anyone we meet, and anything we see, anything that we're born with, anything that happens to us, or anything that we've previously done. And it then becomes malleable and workable for our yoga practice that unites emptiness and form. So important.

So if this doesn't arise, that doesn't arise, is just a feature of causation. So that positive action, we can study how the Buddha taught it and do it, you know, put it into action, right? It's simple. You know, it's simple, but it's not easy. So I once asked Okasana, you know, I used to go over to her apartment in the morning for breakfast. And Mrs. Suzuki, Mrs.

Mitsu Suzuki was my sewing teacher and my tea teacher, but also a life teacher because she stayed around after Suzuki Roshi died, to see if she could teach the barbarians how to function in a sangha in a way that actually realized the teaching in everyday life. Mrs. Suzuki always had me cut the grapefruit because Suzuki Roshi cut the grapefruit so she wouldn't cut the grapefruit. And she always served this East West breakfast, which had different pieces in it. But one of the pieces was always miso soup. And her miso soup was incredible, just incredible.

One time I looked at what she was doing when she was making her miso soup, and she was just using the same old, like boiling water and miso and green onions that I used. So, um, Sensei, what do you put in your miso soup? It's so good. It's simple. They said mine doesn't taste that way. And she said, not easy. Simple. So this is that kind of teaching that we have all the ingredients, and they're always right in front of us, but it doesn't taste good. How come? What can we do? Oh, it's simple, right?

So that's what Vimalakirti is saying. And that's why all the bodhisattvas just couldn't stand him until the Buddha was born. And so that's why I'm so proud of him. Until they practiced with his teachings and thought about it for a long time. And so I wanted to give you some homework in case you wanted to do it. You could connect with a buddy to talk about how to work in a Vimalakirti like, you know, in a way inspired by Vimalakirti's teachings, that you could pick an issue that's severely troubling or pressing you, that you're willing to study from several points of view. And that you could try on at work, I will establish myself as a temple, manifesting, we'll go into Zazen and Sokishinzei Butsu as part of our school's teaching in a moment, by radically accepting duality. Duality means the world of causes and conditions, the world in which bills and deadlines appear, and so on. So I'll do this by developing my one skill of response. Okay, so that's the beginning of this. That's section one of this talk.

Section two of this talk is something else again. So I wanted to talk about, you know, Sojin was a big, he loved the platform sutra. He just loved it. And he loved teaching the platform sutra and kind of putting it together with the Sando Kai and the Hokkyo Zanmai, those teachings to study as the basis of our transmission. So I thought I would look at a little bit right now, well, how did he present it as the basis of transmission? So I totally did not check this out with him, but it's okay. I'll just say that this is what he taught. Because I can do that because he's dead. I mean, he would, I'm doing my best to be faithful. I really am.

And, you know, why I want to link it this way is because in the first act of dharma transmission with Mel, he had postponed my dharma transmissions many, many times. So I used to help him with dharma transmissions, and I helped him with about 40 dharma transmissions in all, over about, I don't know, 20, 30 years or something. And so I did a lot of the work of trying to understand the teachings in the, like the denbo shitsunai shiki, the ceremonial instructions for transmitting the dharma in the room, the room, meaning the dokkosan room or the teaching room. And so, you know, I did my best and he was really interested in making those instructions accessible, especially since there was a history in our lineage of kind of spiritually bypassing the lineage aspects of transmission and kind of making it up ourselves. So he was really interested in faithfulness.

And when I walked in, and after my transmission had been delayed by really a long time and many other people had been kind of snuck in ahead of me because he had heart attacks or he wanted my help for them, and there's so many different reasons. I was young, I was younger than everyone else who he was doing this with, so he thought there was time and so on. So it was 1999 and my transmission had been postponed for five years. And a lot of ceremonies and each one hurt more. But I, you know, I was suspending my doubt and trying to live life in a way that was less horrible for me and say yes and all of those good things, right?

And so I walk in to do the transmission ceremony and there's some ceremonial stuff that occurs. And then on your way out the door for that first ceremony, you do a lot of bows and Mel stopped me and he said, the rice, he just looked at me, is long cooked. And we both burst out laughing, right? So he cared enough about the dual platform sutra to introduce it in my Dharma transmission ceremony. So I thought I better pay attention to this, right? And I better pay attention to how that links with the transmission.

So you should know that in our transmission, you know, in a period of time after the one that the class you just had was talking about, a lot of the monks started using the Sando Kai and the Hokyo Zanmai, which were poems that were given on the attainment of specific Dharma skills. And they started passing them around like, you know, like this sometimes happened in the Koan tradition too. You can imagine how the monks were saying things like, did you get it? Did he give it to you? You know, and I understood this one, but I didn't understand that one. I probably wouldn't say that. I got this one, right? So that's something that we do. We have a grasping mind in relation to these teachings.

So Dogen Zenji and friends decided to do a graphic version of the transmission in the form of documents that would be given instead of the Sando Kai and the Hokyo Zanmai. And we received those documents today and everyone receives the first one when we receive the precepts in this particular lineage. So if you look at your Kachinyaku, and you've probably never, you've probably been told never to open it up because it's folded in an origami way with the little origami envelope and so on. But if you happen to disobey those instructions and look at it, you'll see that there's a round circle, round red circle at the top, and then there's a red line that if it's an English one, it goes like this because that's how we write. And if it's a Japanese one, it's in little groups like this, up and down, top to bottom. And it has the names of the Buddhas and, I'm not going to say patriarchs, ancestors on it. And it's the transmission, that one is the transmission of the bloodline from Buddha to us and then back down through our feet and our life, back up to the understanding of Buddha.

Okay, so this is an important document and it's important to understand that in Japan, the form of the ceremony for receiving the precepts is the most like dharma transmission form of any other ceremony that I have ever been part of. And so there, that's the form that's used today and it has a history of about a thousand years of development and includes some of the main tenets of our school established in a somatic form. So it's important to understand that our transmission is a somatic apprenticeship in the skills that we're speaking about. It's not just an intellectual, it's beyond words, a teaching beyond words and letters and all of that stuff. But what it means is that long ago in our tradition, we decided to encode many of the main Buddhist teachings through physical practices in our family style and that that practice continues to the present day.

And so let me share another document if I can find it. Yeah, here it is. Okay, so sorry it's a picture of me, but that's what I had at home. And so there you go, zazen. So there's me trying to say zazen. You could please substitute your own picture. Okay, so we're gonna look at zazen as the embodiment of some of the main tenants of our school. And so I wanna point out that in the Soto school, I took these phrases, this phrase from the Soto schools translated rules and regulations. So it gives a little mission statement. Abiding by the true Dharma is singularly transmitted by Buddha ancestors. Realize for oneself, shikantaza and sokshinbutsu.

Okay, so on your ketchimi-aku, another thing that you're gonna see if you open it up against all instructions is that you'll see that there's a little story about the one great causal condition of our school being transmitted through the various mountains of all the teachers. And then you'll also see your teacher's transmission story on that same document. And you'll see that there's a little statement there that Rinzai and Soto transmissions are the same. They all transmit the one great causal condition. And so that is transmitted by putting our bodies into the shape of Buddha. And these are the two halves of our zazen practice. These are the two halves of our zazen practice and they have to unite.

As a matter of fact, when Dogen was first ordained as a kid, he was ordained in the Tendai school. And the old Tendai name for zazen was shikan, which we inherited as shikantaza, I think. I think that's how that came to us. Shi, this is Shi. This character is Shi. You see, it has a lot of right angles in it. It looks just like somebody going like this, right? If you squint. And this is, this Shi is part of this sign, the form of which we recognize. And that's exactly what it means. And kan, the word kan has an I in it and it means to see. But in the way it's being used here, it's a bigger seeing, a seeing in, a penetration. So stopping and seeing, contemplation and penetration and so on. There's many translations for shikan. Okay? And so, this is the shikan. Okay?

And so, I've written down a few notes on what Shi is and what kan is. And so, we know that zazen unites them in body, in speech and in mind. And so, I'm not gonna go through all of them right now, but basically, shamatha is all of the practices that settle us down. And vipashana are all of the practices that kind of stir things up and allow us to see them in new ways. They refresh the way we see and hear literally. They refresh the way we sense literally. So I wanna say that zazen, another name of zazen that Taigen uses that I really like that name is Buddha Mudra, that all of zazen is Buddha Mudra. It is a seal of Buddha. And so, shikan united. And there's a long lineage of uniting shi and kan of the kind of purification practices that we use and of the positive meditation practices we use and then of the renunciation of those practices that we call insight. Okay?

And I believe that this shi practice, this shamatha practice needs to change in its definition now because the teachings of shi have been taught in ways, have been offered in ways that fit like 18 year old male bodies with a certain kind of hip structure. And we need to understand what does shi mean in our world, in our bodies and in the range of abilities and circumstances in which people are now, because our world is bigger now, it includes more now. How do we settle our world now? And how is settling the world and settling the self completely interconnected in such a way that one can't be settled without the other being settled? That's what all beings, that's what embracing all beings means.

So I wanna say that, I could say a lot more about it, but I wanna talk about our transmission today and this formulation, this is the three treasure seal. So you could see an old script, it says, well, it's backwards, I'm sorry. It says, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, treasure. Okay, so this is the seal on your Kachiniyaku if you've received the precepts. And this is Dogen Zenji's formulation from the Kyoju Kaimon. And so Suzuki Roshi talked about this and you can look up Suzuki Roshi and you'll hear some incredible lectures about this. But basically it links, it's basically Huineng's idea that Dogen Zenji took and explained more about so that we would be able to understand. And I forgot to include where single-bodied was ultimate, near Manakaya or manifested was relative and maintained his skill. So I forgot to include my own practice of this as the ultimate teaching. This is the relative truth or teaching. And this is the, like everyday skills. So this includes what had been taught before as the five ranks and the Hokyosamai and the Sando Kai and so on is included in this idea about what Buddha is.

So basically in the single-body triple treasure in the, like when we realize, when we're in the world of insight, Anattara Samyaksambodhi or unsurpassed complete awakening of everything is Buddha. And it's virtue, it's character of purity and freedom from dust is Dharma. So the Dharma of something is not just its name but also its suchness. So the character of Dharmakaya, the character of ultimate reality is purity. It's a purifying view. And its virtue of peace and harmony is Sangha.

In the relative world, the historical world, Nirmanakaya is the body of Buddha as it appeared historically as a person or as it appears in our lineage. Realization of Bodhi in one's own manifestation in one's own body and mind is Buddha. That which is realized is Dharma, and learning Buddha and Dharma is Sangha. Our monastery is a Nirmanakaya form of Buddha. Our sitting group today is a Nirmanakaya form of Buddha in which we appear as Buddha, and the whole thing altogether is Buddha.

Sambhogakaya relates to the integrated level of reality like Sando Kaya and Hokyo Zonmai. This integrated level is Sambhogakaya, but we could also call it practice or skill. In this, Buddha is the practice or the act of edifying heavenly beings and humans alike, appearing in vast openness or in dust as required. The act of transformation is Dharma. We can follow how one takes in the reality that's presenting itself to us in the form of the other person, like in an argument for instance. Then we have to transform into an ocean storehouse or into a sutra written not just on shells and leaves but written in a Holocaust survivor family's body or in a white body or a black body or a United Statesian body or whatever. We can trace this process of transformation as the Dharma. The impact of relief of suffering and the result of being free is Sangha.

When we go into a temple or light a stick of incense, that reminder we feel is a realization practice. It's not something we do to represent realization. It's a realization practice. Practice and enlightenment being one and the same thing is part of our transmission. If you were stuck on a desert island and you were a lay person, you would need to be able to recreate, in the midst of these crayfish and palm trees, how the Dharma arises on this spot here, hand in hand with the beings here. If you were a priest, your main focus might be on this desert island: how does the Dharma that I've been taught, that was taught to Mel, that was taught to Hoitsu Suzuki Roshi, that was taught to Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and so on, how does it arise? How do I create that form so that it can manifest to the crayfish and the palm trees and manifest again on this earth?

Now I will shut up. You're welcome to comment or say whatever you want or ask, and I hope this is the right time to do that.