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New podcasts every Tues, Thurs and Sat. Here you can find talks from various teachers involved with the Zen Community of Oregon. We share talks from our retreats, as well as our different weekly offerings between Great Vow Zen Monastery and Heart of Wisdom Zen Temple.
Zen Community of Oregon's purpose is to express and make accessible the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha’s teachings, as transmitted through an authentic, historical lineage. To support and maintain Zen Buddhist practice in order to realize and actualize our Buddha nature in everyday life.
For more information, please visit zendust.org.
Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
Kisei:So tonight, I want to circle back to the koan from last week, which was Koan 25 in the hidden lamp, Miyozan's pale moon of dawn. And then we'll also talk about case 33, which is today's Koan, Bodhidharma's Flesh. Well, let's start with Nyozin's Pale Moon of Dawn. The nun Nyozin of Tokeji used to meditate on the enlightenment poem of Chiyono as her theme for realization. With this and that, I tried to keep the bucket together and then the bottom fell out.
Kisei:Where water does not collect, the moon does not dwell. Later, Myo Zen grasped the essence of Zen, and she presented this poem to her teacher. The bottom fell out of that bucket, of the bucket of that woman of humble birth. The pale moon of dawn is caught in the rain puddles. So in this koan, Nyozin is studying or practicing with as a koan, like we're doing with the with the hidden lamp, she's studying this, poem by another woman ancestor who lived about a hundred years before she did.
Kisei:And, Chiono, we didn't talk about Chiono, but her case is is in here. It's on page 37. Let's see what number is the case. It's case seven. And it's a great story.
Kisei:Just a little I'll just say a little bit without reading it. So Shiono worked at monastery. She was basically a servant at a monastery, a nunnery, at the time that she was alive and she really wanted to practice. She had a sincere aspiration to practice, but just the rules of the monastery were like she had to fulfill this job that she was assigned. And so she gathered, carried water, that was one of the jobs.
Kisei:She did cleaning and cooking at the monastery. And at one point she goes to one of the teachers or senior nuns, and she was really distressed and said, well, like, I can't practice, so how can I get enlightened? And the teacher said that you're not understanding it right. Everybody, everybody has Buddha nature and you can awaken it. You can awaken to your true nature just like anyone else.
Kisei:So she gave her this simple practice of looking back at the source of thought, which is simple and not so simple, but she said you can do this practice anywhere. And so Chiono really took that up and at some point when she was gathering water in her bucket that, you know, from the way that the poem sounds, it sounds like she had patched the bucket together, probably quite literally, and the bottom actually fell out of the bucket. But also, that's a really interesting analogy for how we create the self. We patch this bucket of self together with thoughts and stories about who we are and, you know, particularly in this koan, like, one of the beliefs that is revealed in Chiono's story is a belief in not being good enough, you know, for whatever reason. And a lot of us have similar belief of not being good enough, not being worthy, and then we patch together a sense of self based on that belief.
Kisei:And when that belief falls out or we see through it, suddenly that bucket doesn't work anymore. This bucket that we thought we were that was really grounded in a certain belief. So, you know, that sometimes happens in our dharma practice where we start to uncover something that we've been telling ourselves that and we start to see that it's not true or not the whole truth. Maybe served us in some way as we were growing up to try to make sense of the world, but it isn't actually serving us anymore. It isn't it's actually preventing us from being our wholeness.
Kisei:So that's part of the analogy of Chiono's poem, but, you know, there's more there. So in the commentary, she talks about the moon. And the moon it's interesting. In in Zen, we encounter the moon a lot, but we encounter the full moon, which the moon's only full one or two or appears full, like a few days of the month, and the rest of the month, it's waxing, it's waning. And actually, now, it's a dark moon.
Kisei:We're still in a dark moon. It was a new moon just a couple days ago on Friday. But they don't write about the dark moon so much in the zed stories. They always write about the the bright moon. But it's interesting in this story, Chiono's got this moon in her bucket, and the bottom falls out, and the moon, you know, isn't there anymore.
Kisei:She doesn't see the moon anymore because there's no water collected in a bucket anymore. So in some ways, that's like the dark moon. You don't see it. But let's let's talk a little bit more about that moon because it is a really beautiful poetic image that we encounter a lot. In in the Zen tradition, the moon is often refers to our awakened nature.
Kisei:And the image of the moon reflecting in the water you find throughout the Zen tradition. So in the Genjo Koan, which some of you are familiar with, it's in the Great Vow Chant book. If you've come to a Sashin, sometimes we chant that chant during the lunch service before lunch. In one of the lines in that chant or in those prose are, The whole moon and the whole sky is reflected in a dewdrop in the grass, in one drop of water. And this is, you know, it's a poetic image, but it's literally true.
Kisei:We sometimes see that in a single drop of water we might see or, you know, sometimes there's mornings I remember in Sashin, where there were dew drops on all of the grasses and you really could see the moon reflected in those dew drops. Or then it continues. This is a puddle an inch across. Whole moon and the whole sky are reflected in a puddle, an inch across. Hung Zhi, two generations before Dogen Bunge, he used this analogy of the the moon.
Kisei:The consistent conduct of people of the way is like the flowing clouds with no grasping mind, like the full moon reflecting universally, not confined at anywhere, glistening within each of the 10,000 forms. So that's, you know, that's the analogy of this moon is that it's in everything. The moon of awakening, our awakened nature, the moon of wisdom is in every single being. That light is reflected in all of us. Whether we're a puddle or a dewdrop, that awakened nature that's reflected in us is equally the same.
Kisei:So we're talking about the moon and in a lot of systems of thought, the moon is connected to the body, is connected to the feeling world. Whereas the sun is often associated with activity, the ego, sometimes a warrior or the king, personality. The moon is often connected with the body or the feeling world, the feminine. And this other koan that I wanna look at today is called Bodhidharma's flesh. So it very much has to do with the body.
Kisei:And let's let's look at that koan, and then we can and we could talk a little bit about how these two koans intersect or are in communication with each other. This is called Zhongzhi and Bodhidharma's flesh. This is case 33. Master Bodhidharma had four students, four senior students, three monks and the nun Dzongzhir. When the time came for him to return to India, he gathered them together.
Kisei:He said to them, the time has come, please express your understanding. Dao Fu said, the path transcends language and words and yet is not separated from language and words. Bodhidharma said, you have attained my skin. The nun, Zungshir said, it is like the joy of seeing Buddha's paradise just once and not again. Bodhidharma said, you have attained my flesh.
Kisei:Dao, you said, The four elements are originally empty and the five aggregates are non existent. I see nothing to be attained. You have attained my bone, said Bodhidharma. Finally, Weka made a bow to the teacher and stood aside in silence. Bodhidharma said, You have attained my marrow.
Kisei:So one point of comparison, like right from the beginning about these two stories is that Nyozan is meditating on a poem from a teacher a student meditating on this poem of Kyunos, that's a poem that was written a hundred years ago or a hundred years before Neo Zen encountered or Neo Zen was born or was practicing Zen. So there's this, like, distance of time and space between her or, you know, the way we relatively think about time because that's something I wanna explore together. You know, what is time? But, you know, relatively, the way we think about time is Nyoza never met Chiono. She had these words.
Kisei:She probably had a story like we do about Chiono and her life and her practice and where the poem was, kind of, the source of the poem. But she was meditating on these words and had a realization, Which is very different than, in some ways, is very different than Dzongzhir, a Bodhidharma student. There's a really beautiful account of Dzongzhi that's more fleshed out in Sally Tisdale's book, Women of the Way. That's a picture of the book. And what Sally Tisdale does is she takes the stories from maybe about 25 of the women ancestors, and she really fleshes them out.
Kisei:So she gets as much historical detail and accuracy as she possibly can, and then she breathes life into them, like making them more human, not just some details that we know, like, oh, they were born this day and did this and that. She gives Zhongshir a little more of a a personality or, you know, fills in some of the gaps that we don't have. Critical embellishment, Some people would call that, but you know, she gets as many details as she can that are historically accurate. But in this, in her account of Zheng Zheng Zheng Zhongzi Zheng Zheng was raised in a pretty well-to-do family, money, had choice in her life. And when she decided to ordain, her parents asked the emperor, so they had like a closer relationship with the emperor.
Kisei:The emperor was very happy about that. And she was sent to a nunnery and she practiced there for a fair number of years, but she just had this urge that she needed to travel on foot. And it was there that she ended up meeting Bodhidharma and was more of a kind of like a mendicant nun, which wasn't very common in those days, at least as far as we know. So she was studying with and living with or living alongside of her times her teacher and these other two practitioners who are also following and studying her teacher. Like at that time in China, what Bodhidharma was doing was pretty radical.
Kisei:Most of Buddhism was happening and was quite popular in monasteries and people were learning sutras and learning the decorum, but Bodhidharma was just meditating and he was kind of like roughing it in some ways, like he lived in a cave. And then, you know, they went and traveled on foot. So she was very much exposed to the elements. And so this, you know, this quality of body, like, in some ways, Bodhidharma's disciples were very embodied. They were connected to the earth.
Kisei:They were connected to each other as sangha. And, you know, they knew something about the practice of, like, putting your body into it, putting your body into zazen, feeling the elements through your body. And so it in some ways, it makes sense to me that the way that Bodhidharma transmitted the dharma to his disciples in that final encounter was to affirm that they had attained his body, to give them his body. And in some ways, like, that is very much part of the training when we're when we're living and practicing together. We We shape each other.
Kisei:We learn from each other. And probably you all have had this experience if you've been in a practice container like sashin or even if you've gone to the temple for one of the nightly sits or been to the monastery, you pick up things. People say things, and often the training actually, Enkoo and I were kind of joking about this on, last Monday. Often the training is, like, quick and here are some pointers and then you just do it with your body and you watch others and you get feedback as you go. So we're often picking up a lot of the Zen, what's transmitted in Zen is through the body, is through being with other bodies doing the practice together.
Kisei:I mean, there's something quite miraculous or amazing to me even, you know, through Zoom of when we're sitting upright with other bodies, whether it's in the same room or even over the screen, like, it's really different than when we're sitting alone in our houses. Same posture, but like it's those other bodies that we're being taught, something's being transmitted through body, body to body. So that, you know, that can sound really different than Nyozin's meditating on a poem. And in some ways, you know, we do both here, and she did both too. Like, she was living in a monastery.
Kisei:And what I imagine so a little bit more history about Tokeji, which is where Neo Zen was training. For the first eight generations of Tokeji, and I don't know how long a generation lasts, but there were eight female abbots who were abbots who were living there, as the guiding teacher for the nuns. And then at some point, there were no more abbots, and they had to go so the nuns still trained at Tokeji, but they had to go across the street to Enkokuji, which was a male monastery. They were still, like, separated by gender in that binary way, And that's where they did Sansen, or that's where they had interview with their teacher. So I'm imagining that Nyozin was practicing at a time after the eight generations of abbots living or teacher guiding teachers living in the monastery where she trains.
Kisei:And what what often happened so Tokeji developed this where they developed their own koan curriculum, and we'll we'll talk a little bit about that next week because we'll we'll read one of the original koans that came from their curriculum, they had a giant mirror in their zendo and they would meditate on this mirror and then the first eight abbots wrote a poem expressing their realization and other practitioners also wrote poems expressing their realization. But the first eight abbots, their poems became part of a koan curriculum. So their descendants would work on their poems as koans, and they would work on them and present them to the the guiding teacher at Nkokuchi, who was their guiding teacher. They didn't live with him, they would go over to the monastery that was across the street and present those koans that they were working on. So I'm imagining Nyozin was part of that and she's working on this poem from Chiono.
Kisei:We only know so much about the Koan curriculum that they developed. We know it included these eight poems, but now also maybe it also included Chiono's poem and maybe other women ancestors. That would be interesting. I wonder if anyone is ever going to get to do that research of what was that Koan curriculum that developed. In the commentary, the teacher who wrote the commentary, she talks about how rare it is actually to have a woman practitioner studying a woman teacher's poem having a realization and then writing her own poem.
Kisei:There's another book called Zen Echoes, which the first teacher is Miao Zong, and then two nuns from the seventeenth century are reading this thirteenth century woman's commentary on, I think, 43 koans that are taken kind of miscellaneously from other koan collections. Not all of them are koans about women ancestors, but she writes this fourteenth century female practitioner writes poems, and then they write poems in response to her poems. It's a great collection if you're interested in this niche of women practitioners learning and being influenced by other practitioners throughout the centuries of the Zen tradition. One of the things I loved in the commentary is that let me see if I I don't remember her name. Let me look it up real quick.
Kisei:Kua Minogu. She talks about taking these poems now, Nyozins and Chionos, and bringing them into retreat and working on them with people in retreat. Then she presents at the end of it, she presents her poem, which is, Moon. Ice crunches on the garden path. The pale moon of dawn opens the zendo doors.
Kisei:Snowflakes melt in the heat. But that, you know, that's something we could try. We could spend the next week reflecting on these poems as the moon starts to get a little fuller, our moon, our moon in the sky, and, you know, see what comes forward in you. Maybe write it down as a poem in response. That's part of what we're doing by studying the hidden lamp is we're beginning to internalize these stories, these poems of awakening, and bringing them into our own practice.
Kisei:Even a practice of noticing the moon is a really beautiful practice. Some people I know who every full moon take a picture of the moon. So I'll end there for now, and I'm curious if you have any reflections or thoughts about either of these koans. They had some interesting questions included in the book. When your body no longer holds together, where will your Buddha nature go?
Kisei:That's one to carry around. When your body no longer holds together, where will your Buddha nature go? How can the moon be caught in a rain puddle? How can one person's enlightenment light another's?
Jomon:Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendest.org. Your support supports us.