Listen With Your Eyes - Kisei Sensei

0:00Hello and welcome. This is the Zen community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddha Dharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week. Good afternoon. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. And I take refuge in Sangha. I'll start with a poem this afternoon. Have you ever sat down with a tree and said hello as if greeting a friend and then listened to her story? Have you ever gazed into the face of a flower with wonder and

1:11delight and asked how are you today? Have you ever laid down on the earth and kissed her dry grasses or soggy soils and let her kiss and hug you in 10,000 different ways? Have you ever held open your heart to the sky in astonishment of their vastness and then let them fill you with their roaring absence? Have you ever quieted your mind and listened to the birds song, how it accompanies the wind as the grasses leaves flowers and trees all add their music?

2:14The natural world speaks in a voice before human words. It is our native tongue. Listen and you can almost remember how to hear it. This sashin and I would say all of Dharma practice is an invitation to remember. It is an invitation to remember who we really are. We get confused. That s the nature of human beings. It s confusion. We get confused in this

3:15world of ideas and other people s dreams and goals for us. We get confused in the pressures to succeed and the various standards for what that even means. We get confused by various impulses that arise seemingly out of nowhere. And so we forget. We forget who we are, truly who we are. We forget what we are. We forget or we overlook this silent interconnected life. This life that s always right here. This life of breath, body, earth, aliveness. This life of song,

4:18plant, tree, wind. It s a world of being, interbeing. A world rooted in the roaring silence of ancient stones and the 50 shades of green. The founder of the Soto School in Zen is often attributed to Zen Master Dongshan and one of his students. And this was in early Tong dynasty in China. Dongshan, so this is our lineage. This is at least one stream of our lineage, the Soto School. So the founder of our school of Zen is Dongshan. Dongshan was really curious about this kind of

5:21listening, the listening of to the natural world, the listening from our being to all being. And when he was a student, one of the Dharma inquiries, one of the teachings that really caught his attention was this question about hearing the insensient beings preach the Dharma. So there is a teaching in the Avatamsaka Sutra, one of the Mahayana Sutras that says the Earth expounds Dharma. The Earth expounds Dharma. Then it says living beings expound it throughout the three times, which is past, present, and future. Everything expounds it. So the Earth expounds Dharma. Living beings expound it throughout the three times, everything expounds it.

6:23And that was one of the teachings about the insensient or the Earth, speaking, preaching the Dharma. Dongshan, what we know of him as a student, we know a few interactions that he had with various teachers through his life before he became a teacher, which we don't know that about all the teachers in our lineage. So it's precious, I find, to know who a teacher is when they were a student, to kind of get a sense for their mind, the things they struggled with, the ways they engaged with Dharma practice. Oftentimes we have the recorded teachings of a teacher after they become a teacher, so we don't know as much about who they were before that. But we do with Dongshan. So Dongshan as a student, he seemed to be the kind of person based on the couple of accounts that we have,

7:24that he heard a teaching, and then he would look at his own experience. And his questions often came from, well, the teaching says this, and this is my experience, and they don't seem to match. What's going on here? So the first recorded question that we have of him as a student is he was young, probably a teenager, maybe even younger, and he was receiving a teaching on the heart sutra. And the heart sutra is the chant that we chanted during morning service. We'll chant it in Sino-Japanese tomorrow, but we always chant the heart sutra in the morning. So it's a very primary Mahayana teaching. And they were, they got to the part where the teacher was talking about, there's no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no minds. And Dongshan was like, why does it say there's no eye, no ear? I have an eye, I have ears, like right here. What does that mean?

8:25So that's that's part of Dongshan's kind of questioning. Like, okay, the teaching says this, but this is my experience. And so he was, you know, he was curious about this teaching of emptiness. Well, that's he didn't know what that meant yet. What does it mean? No eye, no ear, no nose. Maybe you have that question, right? Like, what is that referring to? It is this mind, this progenial paramita mind that's before we identify these organs of the senses before we identify anything. So he has this question. And I don't know how that one got resolved. But later, in his life, when he's now going around and studying with different teachers, which is often in the the teachings of our our chan lineage teachers, they often would travel from time to time and

9:32ask different teachers questions or study with different teachers at different times. So he started asking teachers another question. He said, I heard this teaching from the Avatamsaka and other teachers talk about how insensient beings speak the Dharma. How the natural world speaks the Dharma. How stones and rocks and rivers speak the Dharma. And then he's like, but I can't hear it. Why can't I hear it? There's again is that, okay, there's the teaching and here's my experience. And he's looking into that. He's wrestling with the teaching. Those part of practice is we hit these these teachings, whether there's something that you're chanting or something that you've heard in the Dharma, or just some question about the nature of reality. And it's like, okay, this this is the teaching or this is what people are saying and and here's my experience.

10:35And I want to understand. So that's the kind of mind he's in. I want to understand why can't I hear it? And and so he's he's asking teachers this and he's also asking, am I the only one who can hear it? Like, can you hear it? And there was a teaching at that time that said, well, all sages hear it. So he was like, it says all sages here at hey teacher, one of his teachers was Gweshan. Hey, Gweshan, can can you hear it? If all teachers hear it. And and why can't I? And Gweshan answered him, well, you can't because you were born to a mother and a father. And Damsha said, though this this question kind of like seemed like a deflection, it actually deepened his understanding of what he was asking. So because you were born to a mother and a father, sounds a little dismissive maybe. But what is he pointing to? Oh, maybe because you

11:46were identified with this separate self, you're separating yourself from the insensient world. You think you're here with your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind and you're going to hear that river speak the Dharma. You're going to hear that bird if you put in the right effort or you do the right thing. And he's saying in a kind of subtle way, it might be another way. There might be another you who can listen to the insensient beings. Who is the you that wasn't born to your mother or your father? What if you listened with your unborn Buddha mind? What if you listened from the mind or heart of interconnection? So this opened a door for Damshaan, he said. And yet he still didn't feel

12:50like he understood. He still felt like he couldn't quite hear it. And so he continued to ask. And he came to his his root teacher who became his root teacher, Yunyan. And they have a back and forth. And Yunyan eventually answers him, well, if if I heard it, so he's asking him again, well, can you hear it? Like they say that the insensient beings speak the Dharma. I'll say, just can hear it. Can you hear it? And Yunyan says, well, if I heard it, then you couldn't hear me teach the Dharma. Kind of turns it around on him. But Damshaan, who's a little sharper now, maybe a little more immersed in or has tasted this world of emptiness, of openness, the unborn Buddha mind, he responds, well, I don't hear you. And then that's the opening. Yunyan says, well, if you don't hear me, then how could you hear the Dharma of rocks, grasses, trees,

13:55and the great earth? And so for Damshaan, those were the turning words. Those were the turning words. And he replies in poem, which we sometimes have in this untradition that a teacher has an insight and then they write a poem to express that, to express that understanding. This is one of my favorite poems. Damshaan says, how splendid, how splendid, how wondrous, inconceivable, insensient beings speak the Dharma. The ears never hear it. It's the eyes that hear it. So he gives us a little taste of how he understood and maybe even a way to practice this, insensient beings speak the Dharma. One of the reasons I love that poem is I just appreciate Damshaan's delight. He takes three or two stanzas just to celebrate this question that has been

15:02with him that he's carrying around that he's sincerely asking. How splendid, how wondrous, there is a delight in this practice. How splendid, how wondrous, these shifts in perspective, these openings that we have in the Dharma. These restylings and then seeing what's on the other side, getting a glimpse of our true nature, getting a glimpse of ease, or even on the first day of Sushi and getting a glimpse of what it's like to sit in a body and breathe, ah, how wondrous for a moment maybe. Ah, how wondrous, how wondrous, inconceivable, it is inconceivable, we can't make it happen. It just happens. A body relaxing on the exhale. The shifts in perception and understanding

16:11these openings into the mystery of life, they are wondrous, they are inconceivable. Now, I think maybe in modern times we might not have this same kind of question, maybe. But I think we wouldn't necessarily say that the grasses, trees, rocks, bamboo, wind, and sky are incensient, which means like without consciousness, not alive. Maybe, and that's, you know, part of perhaps Dongshan's question as well. Like, is there really this distinction between ascension and insensient beings? And I think that's part of what the teacher's responses are too. Why are you dividing the world that way? Why do you think your wiser than a rock,

17:15or a river, they're much more ancient than you, they probably know something about the Buddha way. About this mind, this silent, open, heart-mind. But here we are indoors, so that's the place we can make the distinction, huh? Like, oh, well, we were outside listening to the life speak the Dharma, listening to the birds and the feeling the sun and the grasses and the whole world alive and now we're inside. So, do the walls and floor boards, electric lights? Do they speak the Dharma? Are they sentient or incensient? And if so, if this life, which the Dharma says, is one life inside, outside, in between, one life,

18:24how can we perceive the teachings of the natural world? How can we perceive the teachings of the incensient beings in this room, the walls, the floor? Dungshan says, listen with your eyes, listen with your eyes, listen with your whole body, listen with your breath, listen from that place before identification, before label, thought. Even if thoughts are happening, we can listen before we get caught in them. Listen with your no ears from your unborn awareness.

19:29Another way you might say that or he might have said that is listen or enter the mind of the flower or the tree or the earth and listen from there. Listen from here. So, this is also something that we can cultivate intentionally practice. One of the things about the Dharma teachings is that they're subtle and we can get into habits around practice really quickly or just we bring our habit mind to practice and so it's all tangled up always. And so, you know, we can sit and be practicing with the breath but we can be like subtly following the breath from some idea of ourself in our heads or kind of from a disembodied

20:32number that we're counting. This invitation to listen with your eyes just invites us to play a little with perception. So, we can explore that. Like, you can take a moment and just let your eyes rest on the floor in front of you. And just notice what your ordinary way of seeing is. And then imagine that you can listen to the floor or just like bring that sense in.

21:35Included in your looking at the floor. Also listening. As if you might really hear something, if you listen with a close enough attention. You could even include the heart in your listening. Continuing to gaze in the floor but also becoming aware of the heart space.

22:42And just noticing without expecting anything radical to happen, just noticing if there's any shift and how you're normally engaging with the sense of seeing. This way, adding that invitation to listen. That can be a really interesting practice as we start going outside and breaking up into solo sits. If you sit with a being, you can sit and look and take them in and a receptive awareness. And then also imagine that you can really hear them.

23:44Bring in that sense of hearing or listening. That's beyond the ears but sometimes like bringing in that sense of hearing allows us to open to another kind of receptive awareness. So it's as we all know, the first full day of Sashin. And I just want to name it always takes time to settle. Many of you have done many Sashin. With some of you, it's your first. And even if you've done many, even if you're a resident here, it often takes time to settle, to really arrive here. We're used to thinking, being pulled around by the thinking mind, doing, engaging, exerting our will on things, attending to the various demands

24:50and responsibilities of our life. And so, you know, always when we come to Sashin, it takes time to arrive, to find our seat again, to let the body relax and breathe. So Miu has been emphasizing that the body naturally relaxes on the exhale. And you might be like, don't shun and be like, well, I don't feel that. But it's something to investigate. Oh, does that? What would that feel like? What does that feel like in your body? If you stay with the breath, stay with the exhalation.

25:52Are there subtle ways that the body relaxes? Each exhale. What happens in your body? And even a simple teaching like that, we may not have a lot of experience with it at first, but if we stay with it, it will open up. That's what happens during Sashin. We come, we're like distracted and restless and we're trying to get our spot and figure out the schedule and it's a different schedule and how do you get from your tent to the zendo in time? And then you start to find the practice. Or you have moments of finding the practice and moments of forgetting. And so the first day of Sashin, it's just invitation to start to simplify.

27:01To start to come home to yourself. And sometimes people find that when they arrive at Sashin, they're tired. And so the first day of Sashin may feel like, oh, just keep falling asleep. That's okay. That's part of the settling process. Some of us feel restless, some of us feel tired, some of us feel bored, some of us want to get out of here. Just part of the rhythm of this first few days of Sashin. So as we continue to arrive here in Sashin, I want to offer another invitation to support us in settling. And that is to notice contentment. To notice ease.

28:04Though it's similar to that, allowing the body to relax on the exhalation, we can start to tune into the natural ease or joy or contentment of being present, of really being here. So whatever practice method you've been using, whether that's the breath or listening to sound, you just see it in your experience. Can you notice contentment or pleasure? Is there a joy and simply hearing? And simply opening your awareness to the sounds of wind,

29:08bird, song, or just to feel the body in its seat. Is there an ease to being still? Is simply being aware. Even if the mind is restless, is there an ease to? And then how do you experience it? One of the aspects of contentment or ease or pleasure or joy is that we actually can only experience it now. So it helps us presence. We can't experience contentment 10 minutes from now.

30:17Now we can have some idea of like, oh, if I only had and then I will do this and then I will get said contentment, usually that doesn't work. So this practice of Dharma is inviting us to open to the resource of well-being, of contentment, of ease, that actually is foundational to who we are. To start, to recognize it. Because we can recognize a lot of other things and really focus on those things. And the Buddha said, depending on what we decide to really focus on, that is the cause of suffering. Right, the mind has this tendency and we know this and it frustrates us. I'm going to say it again. The mind has this tendency to focus on what's not working.

31:17To notice discontentment. Oh, the pain of syshing, the pain of the body. Or the bad feelings that are arising, the emotions. Or it's too hot or it's too windy or the food isn't the food I want to be eating. Food's great, by the way. But you know, that's what we do. That's what the mind does. It can always think of something else. It can always find what is quite not right and focus on it and focus on it and focus on it. And that causes suffering. That is how we feed dissatisfaction. And then that can turn into blaming others, blaming ourselves, blaming the conditions. Scheming, planning. And then we're pretty far away from contentment. Seemingly, but it's actually still right here.

32:18Even in the midst of those dissatisfaction, spirals, blaming spirals, trying to get it all right spirals. If we catch the mind going down those thought streams, which for many of us are well-worn ruts, so it will happen. Probably a lot during sashimi, that the mind will start to find things it doesn't like. We can remember, oh yeah, is there contentment here too? Where can I look? Breath. It's the method. It's the practice method. Where can I look? Right? Where you return to. Right here in the sense world, which is also always in the present moment. So that's one of the real, I think, boons of being outside.

33:19Yes, there are many things that maybe we want to try to control or change, but also being outside, there's endless sources of contentment, beauty, pleasure, ease. Ah, the sound of the bird, the sound of the wind. Can you feel the ease of these natural sounds, the air? Just so gently caressing your body. We're moving the abdomen up and down. I want to introduce another ancestor practitioner. Her name is Da-Hung. Da-Hung-Soon-Im.

34:27She's a contemporary, although she's no longer alive, but a more recent Zen, Koreans and a teacher. And part of why I want to talk about her is that she really, her practice took place outside. And she discovered an affinity with the natural world. Actually, the natural world was a huge refuge for her when she was growing up. So when she was a child, when she was born, her father worked for the government, and they were pretty well to do. And then later in her life, when she was about seven or eight, her father lost his job. There was a change in the government, and he was let go of, and actually sent into a kind of exile. So they were, they left their home, their beautiful home in the city, and lived now in the country. And unfortunately for Da-Hung-Soon-Im,

35:28her father really became quite angry and resentful, and took a lot of that anger out on her. So she didn't feel safe most of the time to be at home. And she would start to, or she started to escape into the forest near their house, and spend most of her days in the forest. And while she was in the forest, she's a young child, and unfamiliar with the wilderness. And so she developed practices, what we would call practices, for her it was probably somewhat of a game-slash survival strategy, to work with her fear while she was in the forest. So she developed ways of sitting with it, and, and, and, and staying. Even though she was afraid,

36:30she was more comfortable in the forest than going home, so she kept staying with the fear that would arise while she was in the wilderness. And at, at some point, through that staying with discomfort, so it sounds very much like practice, through her staying with discomfort and staying with fear, she had what we would call a spiritual opening. So she's seven, she didn't really have that language, but she came to recognize the, what we would call equanimity, or the peace, the, the one who is not disturbed, the one who is not afraid. She came to recognize what we call the ground of being, or her true nature, and she felt held by this being like, wow, like, all this fear, I was feeling suddenly like, released into this stable presence,

37:38where everything is okay. And so she called it daddy, which is so sweet. It felt like love that, that coming home to herself. So it was throughout her life because she had that experience, and it was so powerful, and it became such a refuge for her. She was really practicing the Dharma for, from a very young age, because after that experience, she was just continuing to come back to that foundation, come back to daddy, as she says, in her biography. But she developed this deep faith in her true nature, in the, in perturbability of mind, that everything's okayness. And, and since she had experiences before she ordained and like got immersed in the Buddhist tradition,

38:40she has different language that she uses. So she calls it your center, or her center, or the foundation, or the great pillar of mind's nature, which has a zen flavor to it. But she continued practicing. So her life, you know, she lived during the Korean War, and and was really moved by the suffering that she witnessed during that time. And she had this deep question of why do we suffer? Why do we suffer? And so she spent a lot of her practice life walking and sitting in the forest with this question. And with this faith in the nature of her mind, with this faith in the practice, and her, her, her insight deepened. So I want to read a little

39:54from her, again, like I told the story of her more as a student, and here's her now as a teacher. So here's how she, you know, how she teaches her, her students, or how she used to teach her students. This is from a book that's called Like Lions Learning to Roar, which is all of us, we're like lions learning to roar, finding our voice, finding our true power, true source of power. And this one's called Hold On to Your Center, and Let Everything Flow. She says, people tend to make all kinds of judgments based on what they see or hear. But you really shouldn't tie yourself up and fix views like this. When Shakyamuni Buddha wanted to save an insect, sometimes he became that insect. He had to first become one with that creature's mind, and then it wouldn't resist his help. Years ago when I was walking through a forest, I came across

41:01a crawfish sitting in the middle of the trail. It had ended up quite a ways from the nearby stream, so I bent down, intending to pick it up, and carry it back to the water. But as I reached for the crawfish, it held up its claws, waving them at me as if to fight me off. As soon as I saw this, I knew what the Buddha had meant. In order to save a crawfish, you have to become one with it. Even a crawfish. Although we ourselves now have a human shape, we're filled with consciousnesses of every kind of level. These unenlightened consciousnesses give rise to every kind of feeling and thought. Sometimes they make us happy, at other times they cause us to feel miserable, and at still other times they cause us to feel angry. But they're deceiving us. Those thoughts are arising from inside us, so we mistake them for me, thinking they are my feelings. We act on

42:07them and make choices based on them. And this is how life becomes suffering. Yet the Dharma says there is no suffering. This is because every single thing you do and experience keeps transforming every instant. So that's something we can also notice during Sashin. Is that true in your experience? Is every experience that happens transforming moment to moment? She says it's all flowing like water or like clouds gathering and then drifting away. So those are great analogies to investigate. Is experience flowing like water or like clouds gathering and then flowing away? You know, sometimes clouds can be dark and stormy and kind of hang around for a while, but then eventually they flow away. But here we are insisting that things should be like this or people should be doing that

43:14as if we had any control over any of it, as if we could catch the clouds and grab water in our fists. How could trying to grab hold of such things lead anywhere other than to suffering? If you're wise enough to just let these things flow past, you can avoid so much unnecessary suffering. There's not a single thing anywhere that's fixed or stationary. All of it is ceaselessly changing and transforming and flowing away. Thus it's called empty. So that's what we mean by empty. We can't hold onto it. Even the eye doesn't exist. Within your body, eye is a collection of cells and lives that are ceaselessly flowing and changing. Outside your body, this eye is also part of a ceaselessly changing

44:14hole. So this body mind that we call eye, me, ceaselessly changing within the space of the whole world. That's also ceaselessly changing. That's an expression of interconnection. Each aspect is flowing and transforming with nothing stationary that we can separate out and label. It's all empty. Thus there is no stationary place for illness to stick to, nor any place for suffering to stick to. There's no place for karma, no place for sadness, no place for even joy to remain. So she's not saying that there's no place that these things shouldn't arise. She's saying there's no place for them to stick to forever. They arise. We feel sad sometimes. They arise. We feel joy sometimes.

45:16It's wonderful. It's one of the wonderful things about being alive, right? That we get to feel all these different waves of experience. But that's something that we can really come to notice during this sushine, how experience changes. It's so ordinary. It's so much a part of our moment-to-moment experience that we overlook it, but it's actually quite liberating to notice. Oh. Do you remember what you were feeling when we started this drama talk? Then she uses the analogy. It's like going to a movie. It plays for a couple of hours and then it's over and the curtain comes down and then before long the next movie starts. Our lives too are like this. So regardless of what kind of role you're playing, go forward holding fast to your own upright center. All you truly need to do is just hold

46:26on to this. So you we could say that what she's pointing to is all we need to do is hold to our practice. Hold to our practice. Everything else is flowing. Thoughts are coming. They're going to grab us. But all we need to do is come back to that practice. Come back to our method. Body, breath, sound. And that's centering. Come back to our center right here. So please entrust yourself to this, to this practice. And before we end, maybe notice is there contentment right here? How do you know?

47:38Thank you. 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 zendust.org. Your support supports us.