Our final session on the Jewel Mirror Samadhi with Kanho Chris.
Stream audio:
Talk Notes
Good evening my friends
It's good to see you here. I'm always worried that if I give a talk and there's a sequel, you know, that people are going to run out on me. But so, thank you for coming back. Let's begin the way we have each week and that's by chanting the jewel mirror samadhi together. I think it's on page 29.
Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi
The teaching of thusness has been intimately communicated
by buddhas and ancestors.
Now you have it,
so keep it well.
Filling a silver bowl with snow,
hiding a heron in the moonlight -
Taken as similar they're not the same;
when you mix them, you know where they are.
The meaning is not in the words,
yet it responds to the inquiring impulse.
Move and you are trapped;
miss and you fall into doubt and vacillation.
Turning away and touching are both wrong,
for it is like a massive fire.
Just to depict it in literary form
is to stain it with defilement.
It is bright just at midnight,
it doesn't appear at dawn.
It acts as a guide for beings,
its use removes all pains.
Although it is not fabricated,
it is not without speech.
It is like facing a jewel mirror
form and image behold each other –
You are not it,
in truth it is you.
Like a babe in the world,
in five aspects complete;
It does not go or come,
nor rise nor stand.
"Baba wawa" –
is there anything said or not?
Ultimately it does not apprehend anything
because its speech is not yet correct.
It is like the six lines of the illumination hexagram:
relative and ultimate interact -
Piled up, they make three,
the complete transformation makes five.
It is like the taste of the five-flavored herb,
like a diamond thunderbolt.
Subtly included within the true,
inquiry and response come up together.
Communing with the source, travel the pathways,
embrace the territory and treasure the road.
Respecting this is fortunate;
do not neglect it.
Naturally real yet inconceivable,
it is not within the province of delusion or enlightenment.
With causal conditions, time and season,
quiescently it shines bright.
In its fineness it fits into spacelessness,
in its greatness it is utterly beyond location.
A hairsbreadth's deviation
will fail to accord with the proper attunement.
Now there are sudden and gradual
in which teachings and approaches arise.
Once basic approaches are distinguished,
then there are guiding rules
But even though the basis is reached and the approach comprehended,
true eternity still flows.
Outwardly still while inwardly moving,
like a tethered colt, a trapped rat -
The ancient sages pitied them
and bestowed upon them the teaching.
According to their delusions,
they called black as white;
When erroneous imaginations cease,
the acquiescent mind realizes itself.
If you want to conform to the ancient way,
please observe the sages of former times.
When about to fulfill the way of buddhahood,
one gazed at a tree for ten eons,
Like a battle-scarred tiger,
like a horse with shanks gone gray.
Because there is the common,
there are jewel pedestals, fine clothing;
Because there is the startlingly different,
there are house cat and cow.
Yi with his archer's skill
could hit a target at a hundred paces.
But when arrow-points meet head on,
what has this to do with the power of skill?
When the wooden man begins to sing,
the stone woman gets up dancing;
It’s not within reach of feeling or discrimination –
how could it admit of consideration in thought?
Ministers serve their lords,
children obey their parents;
Not obeying is not filial
and not serving is no help.
Practice secretly, working within,
like a fool, like an idiot.
Just to continue in this way
is called the host within the host.
It's hard to believe that this is our final evening together with the Jewel Mirror Samadhi. And yes, it is a text that is not easy to penetrate. And when we try to understand it on a purely intellectual basis, we are lost. It's not an easy teaching. It's poetic, subtle, paradoxical, beautiful, and yes, frustrating.
At times it can feel like it opens something in us and at other times like it slips right through our fingers. I think perhaps that is part of its wisdom. Dongshan is not trying to hand us a philosophical system. He's not trying to explain reality in neat conceptual terms. Rather he is inviting us to become intimate with reality, intimate with experience itself. So tonight I want to spend our final seminar with three passages that to me feel deeply practical. They feel like teachings not just about Zen understanding but how to practice and how practice actually ripens in this human life. How we can live this how we carry this strange and beautiful teaching into ordinary existence.
The first passage I would like to talk to about tonight is the one that's like the most meaningful. Not the most beautiful, but the most meaningful to me. I return to it again and again because it to me it is the experience of practice.
Ye with his archer skill could hit a target at 100 paces. But when arrow points meet head on, what has this to do with the power of skill? So Ye was an legendary Chinese archer. He was famous for being incredibly precise. He could hit the target from an immense distance away. Imagine someone with near perfect mastery whose discipline and skill have been refined over decades.
So, Dongshan is acknowledging something important here. Skill does matter. Training matters. Practice matters. We do not stumble accidentally into a life of wisdom and compassion. We sit zazen. We return to practice. We study. We stumble. We stumble again. And we try again. We cultivate attention. We practice ethical conduct. We learn to notice ourselves, more honest. All of that really matters. But then Dongshan suddenly kind of changes the narrative. He says, "Yeah, hitting an a target at 100 paces is great, but how do you get it to happen that arrows meet point to point? What does it have to do with skill?"
So, two arrows meeting midair is something incredibly rare
and Dongshan's question is can this be explained by mastery alone
and this feels important because consciously or unconsciously many of us myself included sometimes approach spiritual practice as a self-improvement project. If I meditate enough, understand enough, read the right book. I still need to get it, but once I get that book,
eventually I'll get it. And we may not say it quite that way, but the assumption can quietly sit in the background. We may not even notice it all the time that we have this gaining mind that enlightenment is like a reward for the spiritually competent. I don't know
there are things in life that effort alone cannot produce. We cannot command that we are now intimate with reality that it happens now. We cannot schedule our profound spiritual breakthrough for Thursday afternoon.
And yet there's a paradox that I find deeply moving. No, I cannot make it happen. Let the arrows meet midair. I can't make it happen.
But if I do not take up that bow and I lose that arrow, it's not going to happen. Period.
It will never happen. So you matter. Your practice matters. Zazen matters. It matters that you return after failure of what you perceive as failure. Showing up matters.
That arrow flies every time we sit down on our cushion. Every time we come back after drifting off. Every time we choose kindness instead of reactivity. Every time we apologize. When we resist the temptation to abandon ourselves or someone else.
That arrow is flying because of our practice and our commitment and our sincerity.
Perhaps many of us have had moments like this. Maybe they were not traumatic at all and not mystical. But maybe you've had a moment where grief becomes strangely intimate rather than something we want to push away. A moment when the sound of rain suddenly feels complete in itself. A moment where for no particular reason the heart the heart boundary between ourselves and the world really softens. Not fireworks, not transcendent, just the unmistakable sense of being intimate.
And then the next challenge of course is not to turn those moments into trophies. You can't hang it on the wall. As soon as you try to grab for it, it is gone.
Don't say now I'm finally getting somewhere. Just like I'm asking you not to be down on yourself when you want to say ah this did not go right. It's all part of the journey.
Zen invites us to come back to being humble. Practice wholeheartedly. lose the arrow fully but do not hold on to the outcome. The archer continues to practice and the arrow gets released. We still show up for our life.
Don't go for the result.
So the next passage is something that might feel a bit uncomfortable to our ears. Ministers serve the Lords. Children obey their parents. Not obeying is not filial and not serving is no help.
I imagine that some of us hear this and immediately feel resistance. And honestly, I can totally understand that, especially in modern culture where authority is fraught and family relationships are complicated. If we hear this as a simple endorsement of blind obedience to government and parents, I think we miss something really important. It helps to remember that Dongshan lived in a deeply confusion culture. Family obligation mattered enormously. Respect for elders was important. Ancestor reverence shaped much of Chinese social life.
People understood themselves as existing within webs of relationship and responsibility.
But even knowing that I do not think Dongshan is merely given moral instruction here. I think we can hear this more as Zen language almost like a koan call and response. Life calls. How do we respond? A student bows. The teacher bows back. The bell rings, we stand. Someone is grieving, we listen. A friend tells us something difficult and we do our best to hear it. A aging parent needs care. A child needs protection. What serves this moment?
Phrased like this, we see response, not obedience.
It feels alive. Not what serves my preference,
not what protects the image I would like to project, not what allows me to be right. The question is what serves?
There is an old Zen koan where the national teacher calls his attendant three times and three times the attendant answers.
Finally the teacher says I thought I had transgressed against you but actually it is you who has transgressed against me. Oops. What happened here? Aren't we supposed to respond? The student did answer, didn't he? He did what was expected. And yet somehow something intimate was missed.
Zen keeps asking, are we responding from conditioning, from habit? or because we are intimate with this moment. But again, this is a Zen story, no fixed outcome. Don't think that not answering makes you right. Because sometimes what serves is saying yes, and sometimes it's saying no. Sometimes compassion looks warm and and comforting and sometimes compassion will look like boundaries
and saying no.
Sometimes what serves is speaking honestly and sometimes what serves is silence.
reality itself.
So the Jewel Mirror Samadhi keeps dissolving the hard lines between self and the world between observer and the observed, subject and object. Perhaps filiality in a zen sense means being intimate with conditions. A willingness to participate appropriately in the life that is asking something of us. Winter comes, we wear a coat. Life calls, we answer. Not because someone told us to obey, but because we respond appropriately.
There is another Koan in the Blue Cliff Record. The monk's name is Hui Ch'ao.
And so the monk comes to the abbot and says, "What is Buddha? And the teacher simply replies with a monk's own name. You are Hui Ch'ao.
Zen often points us back to something astonishingly close. Perhaps we should consider that life is always calling our name. And the question is not whether we know the right answer, but if we are actually here enough to respond at all.
The end of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi I find really humbling and sweet. Practice secretly working within like a fool, like an idiot. Just to continue in this way is called the host within the host.
I like this passage. Because after all the subtle teachings and the luminous images, Dongshan lands somewhere that's really so ordinary and so deeply human. Practice secretly. Work within. Continue like a fool, like an idiot. Don't don't try to be like the showoff who's got it. No, just within yourself
because zen has always had a healthy suspicion of spiritual sophistication. The person who appears the most spiritually impressive is not necessarily the wisest. The person with all the right language may not be awake. Dongshan turns us to something very quiet and humble. Continue your practice without fanfare, without being performative, without trying to become special, without telling everybody how hard the sesshin was and how it almost killed you. I was totally guilty of that in the beginning. just continue. And I think mature practice often becomes surprisingly ordinary. We keep sitting, we wash dishes, we notice our reactivate reactivity a little sooner. We become kinder,
slightly less fooled by our own stories, slightly less defended.
Often nobody notices. Often we don't notice ourselves.
And there's something really beautiful about that. The dharma is maybe not asking us to become extraordinary.
Perhaps it does the opposite. To become ordinary and to fully inhabit our own life.
So after this appeal, I'm going to get geeky again. I'm sorry. So the phrase of the host within the host goes back to Dongshan's five ranks and it specifically addresses the fifth rank.
Now according to what I said there is no ranking like the first rank is the worst and the fifth is the best even though you could come to that conclusion but it's a very profound teaching all on its own. But one way to to hear all this is realization does not stand apart from ordinary life.
Realization does not stand apart from ordinary life.
Realization does not stand apart from ordinary life.
Care for someone who is difficult. Pay taxes. Sit beside grief. Laugh with friends. Wash dishes. Begin again and again and again.
So the Jewel Mirror Samadhi in the very end is not pointing at this luminous perfection that says like woohoo done it.
It points towards being intimate with your own life exactly as it appears. With painful joints and whatever else that happened.
So let me see what time it is. Yes. So I would like to take a little time for us to meet in triads again and reflect on this together.
The question I would like to ask, did you find anything in that teaching that means something to you personally? Or is there a phrase or a sentence in there that comes really alive for you? or how could we integrate these teachings into our life? What does it mean not to understand this teaching but to live it? So basically what I'm asking you is to talk about what this Samadhi or part of it means to you personally
