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Talk Notes
So in my first talk here a couple of days ago, we explored Keisei Sanshoku valley sounds, mountain colors under the aspect of the world offering itself to us. We spent time with Su Dongpo as he was hearing the sound of a stream and awakening to something beyond his usual way of seeing. We also explored Dogen's teaching of practice realization and reflected on the possibility that the world has been offering itself to us all along. And today we will try to approach the same world from a slightly different angle.
The fascicle we are looking at this morning is mujo seppo usually translated as insentient beings speak dharma.
And it is built around the question that had already been circulating in the Zen tradition for centuries. Do insentient beings preach dharma? Do mountains preach dharma? Do rivers preach dharma? How about walls, trees, roof tiles, and stones?
For Dogen, this is not even really a question. Yes, the insentient preach dharma. The speaking never stops.
The mystery is not whether they can preach. The mystery is can we hear it?
To understand what Dogen is doing in this fascical, it helps to look at one of the stories he includes in that essay. Dong Shan, who would later become the founder of the Caodong lineage from which our Soto tradition descends, was still a student studying with his teacher, Yunyan. Dong Shan asked, "Who can hear insentient beings speak dharma?" Yunyan said, "insentient beings hear insentient beings speak dharma."
Dong Shan said, "Do I hear it, sir?" And Yunyan replied,
"If I heard it, you could not hear me speak dharma." And Dong Shan responded, "Then I don't hear you speak dharma." Yunyan replied, "You haven't been hearing me speak dharma. How could you hear insentient beings speak dharma?" Let me repeat that one more time because it's seems to be simple on the surface.
Who can hear insentient beings? Insentient beings speak dharma. Insentient beings hear insentient beings speak dharma. Do you hear it, sir? If I heard it, you could not hear me speak dharma.
Then I don't hear you speak dharma.
You have not been hearing me speak dharma. How could you hear insentient beings speak dharma?
Afterward, Dong Shan composed this verse. How splendid, how wondrous, inconceivable, insentient beings speak dharma. The ears never hear it, only the eyes do. I love this exchange because every attempt to clarify seems only to deepen the question. Dong Shan wants an answer. Instead, he receives a koan and yet if we stay with it, something begins to emerge. Dong Shan is not asking whether the insentient preach dharma. Neither he nor Yunyan question that.
The question again is what kind of hearing is capable of receiving it? When Dong Shan says, "The eyes never hear it. Only the eyes do." He's obviously not making a statement about our anatomy. I think he's pointing toward a mode of knowing that is more intimate than our usual way of experiencing the world. A way of knowing that does not depend on standing apart. that arises through our participation. There are things we understand long before we can put them into words and sometimes we will never able to puts word to put words to it. Truth we recognize without hearing a lecture. A parent looks at a child. A friend sits beside us after our loss. We stand at the bedside of someone who is dying. There are no explanations and yet something very important is communicated.
Sesshin points us in this direction. We spend so much time sitting in silence because some things cannot be grasped through words alone. And then the bell rings, the body breathes, and light moves across the floor. Wind moves through the trees, shaking the leaves and making the shadows dance. There are no lectures in this. And yet the insentient continuously expounds the dharma. impermanence, interdependence, causes and conditions, reality revealing itself exactly as it is.
So this far into it, I would like to offer a definition of sentience. We've been talking about insentient. We all know the word. But I actually looked it up and the result inspired me to actually talk about it more and to define it in terms of this dharma talk.
When we hear the phrase sentient beings, most of us think exactly we know what it means. Buddhists chant about sentient beings all the time. We bow to save them. We dedicate merit to them. But if I asked for a definition, I suspect we would get a lot of different answers.
In ordinary English, sentient usually means capable of feeling, perceiving, or experiencing. A sentient being is one that has subjective experience. It feels pain and pleasure and responds to the world. So, humans are sentient, dogs and whales are sentient. A bee probably is. But how about bacteria? How about trees? So we can argue about the edges of sentience. But the basic idea appears clear. Sentience means capacity to experience.
What else is sentient? A rock does not seem to have experiences. A mountain doesn't seem to have feelings. And the chair does not worry about its future. The bread knife does not feel lonely when I put it back into the drawer. We call these things in because they seem not to possess awareness. Okay, so far so good. But let's notice what I just have done. I've divided the world into two camps.
Over here are the things that matter more because they experience. Over there are the things that do not matter so much.
We may not say it out loud, but this distinction quietly organizes our world. Then Dogen walks into the room and starts to cause trouble because once we have established the distinction, he asks a question that sounds absurd.
If insentient beings do not possess awareness, how can they preach dharma? How can a mountain teach? And how do rivers, tiles, walls, and pebbles reveal the Buddha way?
And rather than answering the question, Dogen begins examining the assumptions hidden inside it. He sets up the real issue not whether rocks are secretly conscious and have deep thoughts about us, but whether the division between the aware feeling subject and the merely inert object is as solid as we think. Right now as you sit here, where exactly is the boundary between the sentient being and the insentient world? Is it your skin or your breath, the cushion, the sound of the birds, the floor supporting you?
At which point does this you end and not you begin?
And now we are standing at the door of mujo seppo.
One thing I appreciate about this story is that Dogen clearly never finished with it.
Long before he wrote mujo seppo, he concluded the same exchange between Dong Shan and Yunyan in the Shōbōgenzō, his collection of 301 koans. That tells me something. It was not a story he understood once and then set aside. It was a question we continue to live with and I do understand why. When I first encountered this exchange, I assumed the mystery whether insentient beings really speak dharma. Now I think the mystery lies elsewhere.
Notice that Dong Shan never argues with Yunyan. He never says, "that can't be true". Instead, he keeps on asking about our hearing. Who hears? How do they hear? Why can I not hear? What kind of hearing is this?
The conversation slowly moves us away from the ordinary understanding of hearing. We usually imagine hearing as something that happens between a separate listener and a separate sound. I am here. The bell is over there. The wind moves through the trees and there is hearing.
The world expresses itself and there is hearing. And before we divide into the experience into observer and the observed, something is already happening. This is one reason I think Dong Shan eventually responds with a poem poem rather than another question. The poem is not the answer. It is a recognition. Dong Shan is beginning to glimpse a world in which hearing is no longer a transaction between separate things. The ears never hear it, only the eyes do.
This raises an interesting question. What do we mean by teaching?
Most of us assume teaching is a transmission of information. Someone knows something, someone else does not. Words and understanding move from one person to another. Understanding increases. Certainly that does happen. We would not gather for talks. We wouldn't go to school. We wouldn't listen to each other if it was not the case. But some of the most important things we have ever learned arrived in entirely different ways.
We did not learn compassion from a book or because someone defined it. We learned compassion because someone was compassionate towards us.
We did not learn patience because someone explained it. We learned patience because life refused to move at the speed we preferred.
We did not really learn impermanence because a teacher described it.
We learned it because everything changes.
Reality itself has always been teaching us.
This is one reason why sesshin can feel so powerful.
At this point in sesshin, many of us feel a little bit more raw inside, more exposed than we usually do. Distractions have largely fallen away. After having sat for long hours, we encounter ourselves over and over again. We discover choice we had overlooked and pain we thought we had outgrown. We discovered something new that broke open inside us. Grief that had been waiting patiently for our attention. strongly arises and brings tears to our eyes. The world just came a little closer. The bell sounds different. The taste of a meal becomes more vivid.
The movement of light across the altar catches our attention.
The cry of a bird seems strangely intimate. It's not that these things have changed.
They have been there all along. The difference is that we are more available to the world.
And yet Dogen reminds us that this is not the whole story.
The bell does not speak dharma just because we notice it or because it sounds different. And the mountain does not speak dharma because we appreciate it.
The world speaks whether we hear it or not. And the speaking is not dependent on us. It is not created by our awareness or produced by our appreciation. It is not the result of spiritual experience.
This brings us back to practice realization. In my last talk, we explored Dogen's teaching that practice and realization are not two separate things.
We don't practice now so we can awaken later.
We do not practice now so we can awaken later.
Practice itself is awakening expressing itself.
If awakening is something we achieve in the future, then the world becomes background scenery. Practice happens here, world happens over there, and awakening is sometime in the future. Consider practice awakening to be true. Then the whole world participates.
The aching knee participates. The weather participates. The bell, the floor, the person next to us. Nothing stands outside the field of practice because nothing stands outside reality.
This resonates with Dogen's famous line from Genjōkōan. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things. The myriad things actualize us.
The sentence becomes more and more astonishing the longer I look at it. It has moved from something I didn't understand at all to something that changed the way the world and I see each other.
Usually we think of ourselves as the ones doing the actualizing. We observe the world, interpret it and assign meaning to it.
Dogen quietly reversed the relationship. The myriad things actualize us.
Reality itself participates in our awakening.
The dharma is not confined to words, teachings or the 84,000 dharma gates. Its expressions are immeasurable and limitless and every phenomenon participates.
When we loosen our grip on a separate self, we begin to discover what Dogen means. When he says we are actualized, witnessed by all dharmas, by all experiences,
There is another story from our tradition that has accompanied me while working with this fascical. When the great teacher Nāgārjuna learned that a gifted practitioner named Kana Deva was coming to see him, he asked an attendant to place a bowl filled with water before the visitor. No words were spoken. Kana Deva looked at the bowl, took a needle, placed it in the water, and presented it to Nāgārjuna. No words. Yet both understood. As you can imagine, this story has attracted many interpretations over the centuries. Some see the bowl as representing the vastness of the dharma and the needle as representing penetrating insight.
Others read it differently. What interests me is much simpler. Nothing needed to be explained. No doctrine was discussed. No philosophical position was defended and yet something was communicated.
The story reminds me of Dong Shan's poem. Let me read it to you one more time.
How splendid, how wondrous, inconceivable, insentient beings speak dharma. The ears never hear it. Only the eyes do.
There are things we understand long before we can put them into words.
And sometimes we cannot put it into words at all. Truth we recognize without hearing a lecture. Reality is already expressing itself be before we begin talking about it. The bowl expressed something. The needle expressed something just like the river and the mountain.
The question is not did expression occur. The question is whether we have become intimate enough with our lives to receive it.
I appreciate the steadfastness of the non-sentient.
The river simply flows. Gravity pulls. Seasons change.
Reality remains faithful to itself. The speaking never stops.
I love the way Dogen concludes this fascicle with an exchange.
Tusi was once asked by a monk. What is insentient speaking? I'm sorry. What is insentient being speaking dharma? Tusi replied, don't badmouth them. One more time. Tusi was once asked by a monk, what is insentient being speaking dharma? Tusi replied, don't badmouth them. Dogen comments, "What Tusi says here is indeed the dharma standard of the old Buddhas, the settling point of the ancestral teaching. Insentient beings speaking dharma and the speaking dharma of insentient beings are equally beyond bad mouthing.
After all of our effort to understand the preaching of the non-sentient, Tusi leaves us with a warning. Do not reduce the sermon to your opinions about it. Do not talk over it. Do not replace the preaching of the insentient with your own explanations. The world speaks and the speaking never stops. Don't bad mouth that either.
So Tim spoke yesterday about non's writing and how sometimes it is very hard to understand and I totally agree. But I did find something that I could hear and it is in his book Nature.
Build your universe. Live in it according to the purity of your heart. The world will then conform as matter conforms to spirit. Everything disagreeable will soon vanish. All sorts of pests, poisons, enemies, wars, inequalities, disrespect, mad houses, named and unnamed will no more be seen as if problems to be eliminated.
All that seems disgusting and out of place will dry up in the sunlight of the serene mind imbued with love. Summer comes, snow banks melt and the face of the earth creams. So shall spirit gently roll aside the baleful effects of a long debacle of disharmonious action, rendering the colossus of its horror as the purr of a house cat, pleasing and tender as a song. You'll see beautiful faces, wise hearts, pleasing discourse, heroic acts. Evil will become quaint, for no one will be confused by it. Nature will enter her kingdom all at once, beyond the dream of God, and with more wonder than a blind man gradually restored to perfect sight. And all these words will be known to be words miraculously performed by human minds that sway in the music causing human hands to grasp the real and unreal handles of cosmic tools that prepare a perfect world.
