In case you didn't notice, today was a wonderful day. We were blessed here in this little temple, and we also blessed this little temple. Thank you so much. So I brought up these ten vows and ten practices, do you remember? And I put quite a bit of emphasis on the first vow, the first practice, paying homage. And also paying homage as a formal practice is to offer incense and prostrate. And let's see, one story which I'll share with you is about a western woman.

[01:08]

I believe she's German. She went to Japan to study Zen, and she did study, and she did prostrations. But she felt uncomfortable and resistant to doing the prostrations. And one time when she was doing prostrations, she thought, somebody here is really resisting the prostrations, and really questions whether this is an appropriate thing to be doing. But somebody else is bowing very wholeheartedly. So now comes the ten cakes story, which wonderfully relates to this issue.

[02:23]

It's a story about a Buddhist monk who we often remember by the name Dragon Pond. We don't have too much time, so I'm restraining myself from telling you the whole life story of Dragon Pond. I'm just going to tell you about when he was a boy. He was from a family in China, Tang Dynasty, and his family were tea makers or tea bakers.

[03:29]

And these, excuse me, tea cake bakers, cake bakers, they made cakes. Now, there's a tradition in southern China called dim sun, and dim sun means dot heart, or dot the heart, or hit the spot. And most of you may have had dim sun at some point, right? So this tradition is quite old, to make these cakes. And so, as part of his job, he was a delivery boy for his family. And his family and he made offerings to a Buddhist priest named Tian Huang Da Wu. And he probably was called Tian Huang because his hut or his temple was in front of a large monastery called Tian Huang Si.

[04:34]

So this boy brought this monk an offering of ten cakes. I'm not clear whether it was daily or weekly, but anyway, he brought him ten cakes and gave him the ten cakes as a service. The priest was not paying for these cakes. And so he gave the ten cakes, but every time he gave them, the monk gave him one cake back and said, This is for your descendants. And the boy thought this kind of strange. And one day, he questioned the monk. He said, I bring cakes everywhere.

[05:39]

Why do you give me one cake back? And the teacher says, since you bring cakes everywhere, what's the problem of me giving you one back? And the boy thought again, hmm. And he somehow had a new understanding of his life. And I think he went home and asked his parents if he could retire from the cake-baking business and become a monk. And they said, OK, I guess. And so he went and started to study with Tian Huang Da Wu. After some time, Da Wu said to him, I'm going to give you now a Buddhist name. And you have respected me and trusted me,

[06:44]

so I'm going to give you the name Respect and Trust. Chong Hsin. And then Chong Hsin, the young monk, continued to be with Da Wu and serve as his attendant. It doesn't say in the standard record, it doesn't say, but maybe Da Wu said, you can stay here and practice with me, and I will teach you the pivot of mind, or the pivotal mind. And the word for pivotal is usually translated as essence. So in most translations it says essence of mind, or mind essence. After a couple of years,

[07:52]

the still young monk said to the teacher, Da Wu, well, I've been here for quite a while, and you told me you would teach me the pivotal mind, but you haven't taught me anything about it. And Da Wu said, I have done nothing but teach you about it. And Chong Hsin said, well, how have you taught me? And Da Wu said, when you brought me tea, I received it and drank it. When you brought me food, I received it and ate it. When you formally bowed to me, I lowered my head. I have done nothing but teach you the essence of mind.

[09:01]

And I'll stop there temporarily and say, these interactions, the student bowing to the teacher, and the teacher lowering his head to the student, that interaction, that homage and receiving the homage, person bowing, person bowed to, their nature, empty and vast. Person bowing, person bowed to, that's the pivotal mind of the Buddhas. That's realized in the practice of paying homage. That's the pivotal mind in action. Student teaching, student serving, not trying to get anything, just giving the teacher food, teacher receiving food, this interaction. The student, the third practice of Samantabhadra,

[10:10]

making offerings. He made offerings to the teacher, and he came and practiced with the teacher and continued to make offerings, and the teacher received them. This is the pivotal mind which he was teaching, which he was enacting with the student, but the student didn't see it. Then the teacher says, the student says, well, how have you? And the teacher demonstrates and reminds him, and then the student stops. I think he lowered his head for quite a while. And the teacher said, look directly at it. If you think about it, you'll miss it. And the young monk realized this essential mind,

[11:13]

which was being taught him all that time. He saw it without looking for it. The teacher just pointed him to their relationship. And then the boy, the young monk said, how can I take care of this now? He said, well, just live your life and remember it, and don't look anyplace else for it, and that's how you'll take care of it. And then he kept living and maturing into a very wonderful bodhisattva who was the teacher of other wonderful bodhisattvas, but I'm not going to get into that today. He had wonderful disciples who he helped in lovely, interactive ways like that, of people who came to serve him, and he served them,

[12:14]

and in this way they transmitted the bodhisattva path, sometimes called the Zen path. So that's the Ten Cakes part, which particularly relates back to homage number one practice and number three practice. Is there anything you want to tell me? Yes?

[13:15]

Discrimination that you did this morning, and discernment? Yeah, I think Sonja asked me that a while ago. I think, you know, a baby can discriminate between mine and not mine. Usually they're discriminating mine most of the time. Mine, mine, mine, mine. That's a discrimination. Everything's mine. And gradually they, with the kindness of their family members, they start to open up the possibility that somebody else might have something too. So then there's mine and yours. That's a discrimination. But discernment might be used to discern that you're making a discrimination. So discernment might be used, you could say discern this and that,

[14:24]

that's kind of discernment, but we might also use discernment for like some insight into noticing, oh, I'm making discriminations. I'm discriminating between myself and others. Everybody does that, but not everybody notices, oh, I'm discriminating between me and you. So I think discernment's a little bit, tends to move up the ladder a little bit towards wisdom. Discernment is part of the way you move from just discriminating, and usually without discernment you get stuck in your discriminations. So you could also use discernment to notice, oh, I'm kind of attached to what I think's going on. I might use discernment for that, but discernment's one of the main things that you might make discernments about are discriminations. And by carefully studying your discriminations

[15:26]

you become free of your discriminations. And part of the careful study is to be respectful of your discriminations and other people's, because we can get stuck. We can be disrespectful of other people's discriminations and then we get stuck in a way. Either way, self or other, whoever's making the discriminations, by studying them, we, compassionately, we can not get stuck in them. And as I often say, as Mr. Zekiroshi nicely said, in English, his English was quite good sometimes, something like, non-discrimination, which is wise discernment or wisdom, non-discriminating wisdom is not not discriminating.

[16:31]

It is studying everything. Everything. When we're stuck in our discrimination, we study some things, but not others, like we study math or English literature, or we don't study comic books, because we discriminate against comic books. Or we study other people and examine other people, but we don't examine ourselves, because we're caught in the discrimination. But when we don't discriminate, everything's interesting. Everything's, yeah. Last week at Gringotts, we had a class on Monday, and I showed a piece of calligraphy written by a a wonderful Japanese scholar of Zen. And one of the things I noticed about this scholar,

[17:37]

oh, and the calligraphy was a picture of Bodhidharma, and next to the picture it said, wall-gazing in the back of flower blooms. So wall-gazing is another term for the withered tree. So you're sitting in meditation, but what's going on with you is that your mind's like a wall. Your mind's like a wall that's gazing. You're gazing at the wall, that's normal, but when the tree withers, your mind is like the wall, so your mind is like the wall-gazing. And then in the back, because you're facing the wall, in your back this flower blooms, up over you like this, this great lotus flower. He wrote that calligraphy and gave it to me one time

[18:41]

when I was visiting him in Japan. A wonderful guy. And he also came, you know, I proudly report that the only time he left Japan in his life was to come to the San Francisco Zen Center. We wanted him to come, but he never left Japan because he was a great guy, but he was somewhat concerned that foreign food wouldn't work for him. But with the aid of one of the Zen Center's friends who said, No, the food's really good at the Zen Center, you'll be okay. It's not hamburgers and bacon and whatever. And he came in and the food was all right. And I noticed this thing about him which the Buddhist scholar Carl Bielfeld tipped me off to. He said he has something of the Zen Master in him. So he's a Zen priest also,

[19:43]

but mostly he was a scholar at the university. But he has something of the Zen Master in him. And what was that thing? The thing was he actually found everything interesting. Not just really amazing Zen literature from the Tang Dynasty in Chinese, but every little thing he was kind of delighted to study. I think he seemed to have realized this non-discriminating wisdom where he discriminated between Green Gulch in Japan, between the zendo and the farm, between the plants, and I think we had chickens at that time. He discriminated, but he was interested in everything. It was really a kind of ... He wasn't a stuffy old scholar. He was a brilliant scholar, but he didn't let that get in his way to appreciate each person, each situation.

[20:48]

It was wonderful. So that's non-discriminating wisdom which is more like discernment. That story and the T.K. story both remind me a little bit of a religious story about a young man who can't accept a gift for being given to him. It takes him a while before he learns how to accept. Which story is that? The one about the young person who runs away from home, gets lost. Oh, I see. Oh, yeah, right. He gets lost for 50 years and winds up back home and his parents are still alive and they see them and they're very happy and they're extremely wealthy and his father sends his elegant and gorgeously dressed servants down to bring his son up to the house, but when he sees them coming he can't accept their gracious invitation

[21:52]

and he faints because he thinks they're going to put him into slavery or something because he's such a miserable person because he has for so long denied his home. Yeah, it's like that story. And that story is sometimes said to be about us. That's a certain phase of all Zen students is that we just can't accept our Buddha nature. It's just too wonderful. Give me a break. Yes? With picking up the third Chinese ancestor, the Great Way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing. And I've always wondered about that because it doesn't seem consistent with discrimination versus discernment. Yeah, right, yeah. So when he says avoid picking and choosing,

[22:54]

I could give him the benefit of the doubt and tell you what he meant. When he said avoid picking and choosing, he meant avoid getting stuck in picking and choosing. Pick and choose has a dance. We're doing the pick and choose dance. One, two, three, pick! One, two, three, choose! Rather than pick and, you know, so I think in that way, I need to be careful. But to avoid picking and choosing again would be like having a lobotomy. But even with a lobotomy, you still might be picking and choosing what you eat. Yeah, so I think avoid picking and choosing.

[23:54]

The other way is, he's saying, another way to give him credit, the benefit of the doubt about this statement would be, he's just saying, if you want it easy, have a lobotomy. You want an easy life? Just take off your discrimination. Equipment, and it'll be easy. But the Bodhisattva path is not to try to have an easy way. It's not to like avoid picking and choosing. The Bodhisattva path is like, oh, the way is not easy. Just avoid picking and choosing. Bodhisattva says, I'm not looking for the easy way. I'm looking for the way, not necessarily the hard way. I'm looking for the way that liberates all beings, which might mean I have to go in some really difficult situations. I'm not looking for the easy way. I'm looking for the way that benefits all beings. And if that means I have to do something hard,

[24:55]

I'm up for it. Or at least I vow to be up for it. And if I'm not up for it, I confess my shortcomings, because I want to be up for doing whatever helps people. Not looking for the easy way. Like, it would be easy not to pick and choose between people. But you don't do that because it's easy. You do it because you're free of discrimination. Then you don't pick and choose. So that's an interesting thing to meditate on. And by the way, the Third Ancestor, who might not have written that text anyway, but still, the story is that he was a leper. The Third Ancestor of Zen in China was a leper. So of course he was not like Mr. Popular, you know,

[25:59]

and he wasn't on, like, talk shows and stuff. He was kind of like, he was kind of like, you know, a reject of society that probably kept him away, probably couldn't mix with ordinary people. But he could mix with his teacher. His teacher could. His teacher worked with him and saw that he was really a sincere student. His teacher wasn't pushing him away. A lot of other people did. And somehow he still, when most people were pushing him away, he did find a successor, a wonderful successor, who we call the Fourth Ancestor. I've been trying to make a link or a bridge between the Withered Tree and the blooming, and then you spent a lot of time on the Samantabhadra's ten vows.

[27:01]

And I was, which I mentioned to you, I was thinking that there's positive and negative attachments and we align, if I think about it, as alignment to the vows. Which is kind of an alignment, it's kind of an attachment, but that actually leads to liberation. That leads to some kind of blooming. When you start doing, when you start paying homage, when you start aligning yourself, at the beginning, you might be attached to the homage. Right. Which seems wholesome, as far as I'm proposing, maybe that's wholesome. That might be wholesome, yeah. Which leads to the Withered Tree.

[28:04]

Maybe. But it's not, it's not the homage that, what do you call it? The homage, the Withered Tree is the homage where you're not attached to the homage. That's the Withered Tree. But when you first start doing the prostrations, you might be attached. You might even be trying to get something. Hmm? Yeah, you might be trying to get withering. So that's okay. We can work with that. Like again, that seems, I don't want to do the vows, but somebody else does. When you first start doing it, I don't want to do the vows, or I do want to do the vows. I do want to do the vows, but there's somebody else who's not really wanting to do or not wanting to do the vows, who's just doing the vows. They're free of their like and dislike, picking and choosing. They're just bowing. But there's somebody else who's choosing to bow,

[29:07]

or bowing but resisting the bowing. That often is the beginning. But the tree is still, to some extent, the tree could actually be getting a little bit more vigorous from that kind of bowing. You could start getting more arrogant, like, I'm bowing so much more than anybody else around here. I mean, I'm like a superstar of bowing. And I've heard about some bowing superstars, and they got in big trouble from being so good at bowing. They really put themselves above the below-average bowers, and the below-average bowers like, said, oh, you're just amazing. And then they started to bow to the one who was above-average and who thought he was better than them. Now we have a big scandal. Well, the virtue of the prostration is that

[30:11]

even if you start being attached to getting something from it, if you're attached to, like, getting wisdom or getting fame or getting profit or getting freedom, or you're attached to helping people, wanting to help people is wholesome. Being attached to it is not wholesome. But still, it's still somewhat wholesome to try to help people, even if you're attached. But the attachment is not wholesome. It's somewhat interfering with the good intention. But it doesn't mean that there's nothing good about it anymore. It's just that it's being kind of like defiled. It's being constricted somewhat. It's still a good thing in itself, but it's unfortunately being confined by various kinds of grasping. But as we do it more and more, we start to notice the grasping and see, oh, this is actually,

[31:14]

it's kind of optional. That last bow, I didn't even try to get anything. That was kind of a relief. Let's try another one of those. Oh, now I tried to get it again. Okay, and I tried to get it again, and then suddenly you forget to try to get something and you do one without trying to get it and another one without trying to get it. Now you're bowing and you're not trying to get anything. And, yeah. And then you start to see, oh, wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow. Person bowing, person bowed to. Their nature, empty and vast. Oh, me and Buddha, we're not two. Oh, wow. But not because you're trying to get that, but you're just bowing. You're just paying your respects, paying your respects. And you're now, after lots of bows, after lots of bows, you get over counting your bows and you start to, and you're just bowing. Yes?

[32:19]

I was also trying to put things together and I was thinking about your ten takes story and pivotal lines and wondering why is that story important? What is important about that story? And what is the pivotal line? And how does it connect to everything else that you've been talking about? And so what I think is the pivotal line is like the wind bell moving with the wind. It's an appropriate response. That's one way of thinking about it. The pivotal line is an appropriate response. And that it connects to the rest of it because one of the things that gets in the way of the appropriate response is attachment to our discriminating mind. Yeah, it'd be like a wind bell that was ... the chimes were attached to the tree. You tied all the wind bells to the tree and the wind's blowing,

[33:21]

and it's kind of ... Or that somebody's out there holding the wind bells and trying to keep them apart or having certain ones touch and not others. That's interfering with the natural relationship between the wind and the bells. Or somebody else is ... the wind's blowing and the bells are moving but not enough. So somebody comes and blows them so they'll hit each other. Well, that's okay. The wind bell can accept that. The one who's blowing them is being like a wind bell, though. The wind bell's okay when the wind's very gentle and the chimes are not touching. The sound it makes when the wind is soft is like ... And then when the wind gets a lot stronger, it makes this nice sound. And when the wind gets really strong, it makes kind of a sad sound of the wind bell falling on the ground and breaking. But that's wisdom, too.

[34:24]

It doesn't have any idea. It's not clinging to idea of what a wind bell should be doing. And we can be like that, too, if we hang out in the wind long enough. We'll become the appropriate response to the situation. Thank you for the another lovely day.

[34:51]

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