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Guided Meditation: A Small Boat on the Open Ocean

Well, good morning. Welcome. As some of you know, my name is Fu Schroeder, and I'm a visiting teacher from the San Francisco Zen Center who, for a few days anyway this week, is sharing the Dharma seat with your teacher Gil Fronsdal, and also Paul Haller from last week, also from the Zen Center, as part of a three-week intensive that we're calling The Harmony of Zen and Vipassana.

This week of our intensive is focusing on the Buddha's teaching of right conduct. The previous two weeks we focused on meditation, samadhi^[1], and on wisdom, prajna^[2]. Yesterday morning, for those of you who joined, I talked about the precepts, which are the cornerstone of right conduct. Precepts are given to us in order to connect us to one another, in order to bring harmony to humankind through connecting practices—ones that we all know, like kindness and generosity, patience, and wisdom.

Zen Center's founding teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, taught that receiving the precepts is a way of understanding what it means to just sit. The integration of precepts and meditation is the foundation for all of the practices and activities of our daily life.

For this morning's meditation, I'm going to remind you briefly about the points of your posture that will help support just sitting. After that, I'm going to read you a small passage on silent illumination by a 12th-century Chinese Zen master named Hongzhi^[3]. Silent illumination practice is considered the hallmark of this living branch of Buddhism on which I happen to be sitting, called Soto Zen.

So please first find a nice comfortable position for your legs and your torso. Then bring your awareness slowly up from the base of your spine toward the top of your head. Take all the time you like, allowing each vertebra in your spine to lengthen upward along the way. The lower back has a nice deep curve going into the abdomen, which allows your chest to raise and open. There's another slight curve outward between the shoulder blades, which themselves drop down as though there are little pockets in your back you can slip them into. There's another gentle curve at the neck going in toward the throat, and then let your head balance slightly on the top of the spine, the chin pulled slightly downward, the ears in alignment with your shoulders, and the nose with the navel.

Keep your eyes slightly open with a soft resting gaze at about a 45-degree angle from your eyes to whatever surface is in front of you there, the floor or table. Let all the tension in your body begin to melt away from the top of the head. I like to imagine cracking a raw egg on the top of my head and letting it run down the back, the arms, across the shoulders, and then softly across the belly and down to the floor, carrying with it all of that tension. Now gently inhale two or three full breaths through your mouth, and then out. Again. After which you can just return to normal breathing.

One traditional technique for quieting the mind is to count the breaths from one to ten. On the impulse to inhale: one. I like to notice that impulse in my abdomen, way low down, and then fully exhale. On the impulse to inhale: two. Three. And so on. Once you reach ten, you start over with one. If you forget, as we all do, simply go back again to one. It's like riding in your breath a little bit, like a small boat on the open ocean, up and down with the waves.

Your arms can rest on your knees or be brought together into the cosmic mudra, which is clearly visible on many statues of the Buddha in seated meditation. The left hand is on top of the right with the fingers overlapping. Your thumbs are lightly touching at the tips making a nice oval shape with your hands, like a little cradle. Sometimes I imagine resting my mind in that cradle as I sit. When your mind is agitated, it's recommended that you bring your attention downwards, so the hands are a nice place to hold an agitated mind. If you're sleepy, the instruction is to bring your attention up to your forehead, here at the third eye.

As we continue to settle ourselves into a comfortable upright posture, I'm going to read you a teaching from the Zen ancestor Hongzhi. He was a master of the meditation that we call silent illumination, the model of practice that is enacted at a pivotal juncture between meditative absorption and skillful activity of our life in the world.

Here is Master Hongzhi. This short essay is called Drop Off Your Skin and Accept Your Function:

"In daytime the sun, at night the moon; each in turn does not blind the other. This is how a patch-robed monk steadily practices, naturally without edges or seams. To gain such steadiness, you must completely withdraw from the invisible pounding and weaving of your ingrained ideas. If you want to be rid of this invisible turmoil, you must just sit through it and let go of everything. Attain fulfillment and illuminate thoroughly. Light and shadow altogether forgotten, drop off your own skin and the sense dusts will be fully purified, the eye readily discerning the brightness. Accept your function and be wholly satisfied. In the entire place you are not restricted, the whole time you still mutually respond. Right in light there is darkness, right in darkness there is light. A solitary boat carries the moon at night; it lodges amid the reed flowers, gently swaying in total brilliance."

Reflections

Welcome back to the world of shared language and innumerable meanings.

For those of you who are just joining, I am Fu Schroeder from the San Francisco Zen Center, and I'm a guest of Gil Fronsdal, who, along with Paul Haller and myself, are offering a three-week intensive called The Harmony of Zen and Vipassana.

This morning is the second day of our week-long study of the teachings the Buddha gave on right conduct, shila^[4]. To begin, I'm going to share with you a teaching story from the Pali Canon about the source of what is called the bodhisattva vow, or the vow to live for the benefit of all beings. This vow underlies not only the tradition that we endeavor to practice here at Green Gulch Farm^[5], where I'm sitting right now, but wherever humans are conducting their lives for the benefit of others, as I know so many of you are doing right now on the front lines of this pandemic, for which all of us are deeply grateful.

Here's a story about a yogi named Sumedha^[6] that illustrates the origins of the bodhisattva vow. Please keep in mind that it's just a story.

Countless eons ago in a city called Amaravati, there lived a brahmin named Sumedha, a son of good family. When Sumedha was still quite young, his parents died, and the minister of state showed Sumedha the wealth accumulated for seven generations that he had now inherited from his parents. The family treasury was filled to overflowing with gold, silver, gems, pearls, and other valuables.

When Sumedha saw the treasure, he thought, "After amassing all this wealth, none of my ancestors were able to take even one penny with them when they passed away. Can it be right that I should seek to take my wealth with me to the end of my days?" And then he told the minister of state to give all of this wealth to the poor.

When he saw how a life of transmigrating within samsara—the cycle of birth, sickness, aging, and dying, moment after moment—was suffering, he wanted to find the path of deliverance that would lead to extinction, to no more rebirth. So he left home and entered a forest in the Himalayas to practice as a hermit. Because he was a person of great integrity, over time he attained superhuman knowledge and supernatural powers.

One day Dipankara Buddha^[7] appeared in the world and began to teach. To prepare for the Buddha's arrival, the people of the town began to fix the road which had flooded and to decorate it with flowers. Sumedha, who lived nearby, heard of the Buddha's visit and flew to the town, offering to help with preparations. The people were so excited because they knew that Sumedha could fix the road with his supernatural powers just in time for Dipankara Buddha's arrival. But Sumedha wanted to do so with his own hands, and so he started to carry the soil by hand.

Unfortunately, Dipankara Buddha and his assembly arrived before his work was done. Sumedha did not want the Buddha to walk through the mud, so he loosened his matted hair, lay down on the ground, and with outstretched hands asked the Buddha to walk on him.

Lying there in the mud, Sumedha looked up at Dipankara Buddha and he thought to himself, "If I wanted, I could now enter the Buddha's sangha and free myself from deluded states of human desire, becoming an arhat, and then at death I would at once attain nirvana and cease to be reborn. But this would be a benefit to myself alone. I want to help all beings as Dipankara Buddha is doing right now, and I am determined."

And then he made a vow: "I vow to attain what Dipankara Buddha has attained, anuttara-samyak-sambodhi, the complete perfect enlightenment of a Buddha, for the benefit of all beings."

When Dipankara Buddha saw Sumedha lying in the mud, he understood that the young man had vowed to become a Buddha. So he told his assembly that in the distant future, Sumedha would indeed become a Buddha named Shakyamuni. Hearing this prediction, Sumedha was overjoyed, believing that his vow would be realized. Thus Sumedha became a bodhisattva, meaning a Buddha-to-be, vowing to remain in the realms of suffering until all beings had been saved.

This is our inheritance as well, all of us, as a gift from Sumedha and our own Buddha Shakyamuni, who came here to this earth looking for suffering beings that might be saved—which in Buddha's world means to be awakened. This vow to live for others is the true heart of our human life, whether we know it or not, say it or not, believe it or not. Still, some part of our mind turns towards this thought of awakening, the bodhichitta^[8], the thought of enlightenment, and some part of our body turns toward the image of an awakened being, toward the possibility of becoming an awakened being ourselves. And so we sit like a Buddha, we study the Buddha's teaching, and we endeavor to act like Buddha over and over and over again.

On the morning of his awakening, what Shakyamuni Buddha saw was his own miraculous face appearing as the morning star, as the branches of an overhanging tree, the bodhi tree, as a lovely young woman carrying water in a jar on her head, as bees and flowers, as grass and flowing water, just as we're all seeing right now. And for the first time in his many lives, he knew he wasn't separate from the world. He knew he wasn't alone. There was nothing outside of himself.

What the Buddha then recommended to his many disciples was an opposite world where each of us is devoting ourselves to the welfare of someone else, or maybe to everyone else. In his search for liberation from suffering, the young prince had undermined his own self-concern, self-love, self-conceit, and ignorance—a radical act that diverted the flow of his ambition away from accumulating more cargo, more wealth, to preserving the precious resources of this life-giving planet for everyone and everything that depends on it.

When we take this vow to live for others, much like in a marriage, it's done before witnesses in our family, our friends, our community. And for a brief moment or two, we see into the heart of creation itself, herself, himself—into the great wholeness of being, our own true body, and our own true life. Basically, the precepts are like a trellis to hold ourselves up as we undertake this very same journey, lifetime after lifetime, moment after moment need be, that led to the awakening of a young prince.

Turning toward the thought of awakening is a natural thing for us to want. Something that sounds so wonderful, like enlightenment, although wanting something for ourselves alone is perhaps the very thing that blocks our way. Fortunately, we really have no other choice but to start from where we are, and most often, if not always, we will find that we are starting from selfishness, one of the four defiled ways of thinking that block our view of Buddhahood. These four are called the kliṣṭamanas^[9]. Kliṣṭamanas means defiled thinking. The first is ignorance, which along with desire is the cause of human suffering. The next is the belief in a self, a separate self. The third is the conceit about that self. And the fourth is the love for that self above all else, basic narcissism.

And yet right there is our first opportunity for a taste of liberation by studying the self that we believe that we are, and then by telling the truth about what we see. "I see that I am selfish." Already in that recognition and acknowledgment, the precepts suddenly appear, beginning with what, from my point of view, is the most important precept of them all: a disciple of Buddha does not lie. Not to oneself and not to others. And that very truth will set us free.

Which reminds me of another amazing story, also from the Pali Canon, about the power of telling the truth.

A young boy is bitten by a poisonous snake. The distraught parents stop a passing monk and ask him to use his medical knowledge to save the child. The monk replies that the situation is so grave that the only possible cure would be emphatic statements of truth.

The father then says, "I have never seen a monk that I did not think was a scoundrel. May the boy live!" The poison left the boy's leg.

The mother then said, "I have never loved my husband. May the boy live!" The poison retreated to the boy's waist.

The monk then said, "I have never believed a word of the dharma but found it utter nonsense. May the boy live!" And with that, the boy rose completely cured.

Such is the power of the truth.

Telling the truth, also called the practices of confession and repentance in the Buddhist tradition, is intimately connected to the bodhisattva vow. They are two sides of one practice or one coin, and that's because our vow of saving all beings is endless, and therefore will never be complete. We just can't do it. Our awareness of the incompleteness is in itself a kind of repentance, as in, "I am so sorry, but I just cannot finish this job." Even the Buddha said this very thing when he could no longer stay in his painful human body: "Gotta go."

I think you've all seen the enso^[10] that Zen masters draw as a demonstration of both their unique personalities but also of their understanding of this universal truth of incompleteness. The circle will never be closed. This truth is the same for all who undertake the bodhisattva vow and practice. And at the same time that our task is unachievable, it's also important to reflect honestly on our personal shortcomings as part of entry into a life that's devoted to vow. Such reflection sets up a resonance between the enormous task and ourselves as limited beings endeavoring to undertake it. It's harmonics.

Shantideva^[11], the 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and scholar, and an adherent of the Middle Way philosophy with its primary focus on the emptiness teaching, said, "One law serves to summarize the whole of the Great Vehicle: the protection of all beings is accomplished through the examination of one's own mistakes."

This kind of honest self-reflection helps to motivate us and to inspire us to continue finding our way. Oftentimes we back away from looking at our mistakes, and instead we lead with a string of justifications, good stories. I've always appreciated the practice of the Zen Center. When one of us misses a bell or is late or does some other unskillful thing, we simply bow and apologize without bringing in a lot of extra information, better known as excuses.

It's also part of the Mahayana tradition, when entering into a relationship with dharma practice and in particular with the bodhisattva vow, to acknowledge not only the impossibility of completing our mission and our current mistakes, but also our previous mistakes, our previous way of life, our selfish life from which we are in recovery. Which is exactly why we chant every morning during service following our meditation, "All my ancient twisted karma, from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow." Meaning, I now fully accept I did it, and I'm very sorry.

Being conscious of our errors and being concerned about the effect our behavior has on others is essential to our life together in community, both locally and globally. As we hippies used to say, "Think globally, act locally."

In a citation to a sutta, Thanissaro Bhikkhu^[12] tells us that throughout ancient cultures, the terminology of music was used to describe the moral qualities of people and of actions. Discordant intervals and poorly tuned instruments were metaphors for doing harm. Harmonious intervals and well-tuned instruments were metaphors for doing good. In Pali, the term sama, meaning "even," describes an instrument that is tuned on pitch. The term samana^[13], meaning a monk or a contemplative, also derives from this same word sama, "evenness," referring to the greatly admired characteristics of those human beings who have developed in themselves the quality of being in tune with what is proper and good, and most importantly, for everyone around them.

Tomorrow morning, I will be talking about the verses known as the Three Refuges that we recite also each morning following meditation:

I take refuge in Buddha. I take refuge in Dharma. I take refuge in Sangha.

The Three Refuges, also known as the Triple Treasure, are the first three of the sixteen bodhisattva precepts. Without the Buddha, his teachings the Dharma, and without the people who came to study with him, the Sangha, there would be no Buddhism, which is kind of obvious. Less obvious perhaps is that none of us would be here this morning to talk about it. There would be no us, no it, no way of life.

Taking refuge in the Triple Treasure, as Suzuki Roshi said, means that you adore the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, and that for you, taking refuge is an act of adoration. So before declaring our adoration to the Triple Treasure, it might be a good idea to consider just what each of those refuges means to you, and that's what I'm going to talk about tomorrow.

Thank you all for your kind attention. Please take care. Stay safe.