Our first talk this morning is Tiger Dan Leighton, Sacred Fools and Monastic Rules, Zen Rule-bending, and the Training for Pure Hearts. Tiger Dan is a Soto Zen priest and Dharma heir in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and a disciple of Rev. Anderson. Tiger first studied Buddhist art and culture in Japan in 1970. Tiger began formal, everyday Soto practice in 1975 at the New York Zen Center. He was an award-winning documentary film editor before going to work full-time for the San Francisco Zen Center in 1979. He has practiced and lived at the San Francisco Zen Center, Tassahara Monastery, and Green Gulch Farm. Tiger lived for two years in Kyoto, Japan from 1990 to 1992. He is the author of the Bodhisattva Archetypes and is co-translator of several Zen texts,

[01:05]

including Cultivating the Empty Field, The Wholehearted Way, and Dogen's Pure Standards for the Zen Community. He has contributed to many other books and articles. Tiger teaches at the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union, at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and at St. Mary's College. Tiger leads meditation groups in Molinas, San Rafael, and San Francisco. He is currently chair of the board of the San Francisco Zen Center. I think all monastics are interested in bending the rules. And I think this will be both an entertaining and profound paper. It's a great, great honor to be here. Pleasure. So what I want to talk about this morning is to bring some examples from East Asian Buddhism,

[02:19]

mostly East Asian Zen Buddhism, of the pure heart. So the question is, what are the qualities of a sincere, pure-hearted addict? And how does training in monastic communities or semi-monastic communities help to develop this? And just to start out, part of my inspiration in this paper was my sense early on, in my experience of my community in San Francisco Zen Center, that the very senior people, the most experienced practitioners, were the most particular, particularly themselves, often accepted, quirky, not some homogenized mold. So, how did they get there? So I have three parts to this paper, at least three papers, I'm trying to cram into one.

[03:23]

I want to talk about Dogen's monastic rules and some things about that. And I want to talk about the archetypal bodhisattva Maitreya, the enlightened being or bodhisattva who is predicted to be the next future Buddha, and how he represents in various ways an aspect of, an example of, a model for the pure heart. And then some of the practices particularly that he represents as a figure. And then the third part is to go a little bit into the motif that recurs throughout Zen of the Zen fool, and to bring some examples from that. So, starting with the monastic regulations. So, Dogen, A.A. Dogen, who was the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, has already been mentioned somewhat by Dr. Neal Hagen yesterday, is known particularly nowadays as a great writer, philosophical and poetic writer of spiritual teachings.

[04:36]

But actually his writings were basically unknown until the last century, except by a few Soto priests. What he's really most important for historically in a lot of ways is founding a monastic order. So, he devoted the last ten years of his life, from 1200 to 1253, to developing A.H.E., which is still one of the headquarters temples of the Soto Zen school. And he wrote a book called A.H.E. Shingi, which I translated as Dogen's Pure Standards for the Zen Community. And so he's really, in doing this, was translating the Chinese Buddhist, the Chan monastic tradition for Japan. He brought this to Japan. And a lot of what he has in there is verbatim from the vidya, and from earlier Chinese Chan monastic regulations, including the Chagwang Chinkuyen, which he quotes verbatim often.

[05:39]

And I had in the paper, I want to try to skip as much of the paper as I can so that we have some time for discussion, but I'd make some general statements about Buddhist monasticism. And maybe I don't need to say so much about that here. Just briefly, the communal institution of the monastic order was founded by Shakyamuni Buddha 2,500 years ago in northern India. And Buddhist monks are officially designated as home leavers, and there's the physical aspect of renunciation and entering the monastery, but of course the inner work of freeing oneself from ensnarement, from social and psychological conditioning, is part of that home leaving. So in actual monastic practice, it's obvious that there's so much in monasticism, it's common to all traditions, but in Zen there's great emphasis on taking care of all activities with wholehearted positive energy.

[06:42]

Dogen particularly is, well before I get to that, one aspect of Mahayana Buddhist monasticism, which is worth mentioning, is there's this sense of an oscillation between periods of training in the monastery and then going out into the marketplace. So not all Buddhist monastics spend their entire life as monks in the monastery. Often there's this going out, traveling around to visit other teachers, testing oneself. This was the pattern in China and Japan, and now somewhere in America. In Japan still, after a period of monastic training, monks or priests go out and become parish priests, so to speak, take care of temples. So this kind of movement between monastic enclosure and the marketplace is at least one aspect of Mahayana Buddhist monasticism. Maybe less so in China, but anyway, sorry to mention that.

[07:48]

There's also the aspect of the monastic institution as not just an opportunity for individual development and spiritual awareness and training, but also as an instrument, as a kind of counterculture to the world out there. This is familiar, I think, in all monastic traditions. So, Dogen, in his monastic regulations, although he quotes the Veda and previous monastic regulations, his clear emphasis is on the attitude of practice. So a lot of his monastic regulations does deal with very particular procedural forms. One of the big differences between East Asian Buddhism and South Asian and Tibetan and Indian Buddhism is the communal monk's hall. So in the model that Dogen has translated for Japan, basically the monk's hall is a meditation hall and also the place where food is taken, informal ritual eating,

[09:04]

and that one's place, one has a massage seat where one meditates, eats, and also sleeps. So I had the opportunity to do one practice period in Japan in this mode. It's very powerful. And a lot of what Dogen talks about in his regulations are very particular forms of how to take food, the layout, the formal layout of the monk's hall. There's a particular place, a particular form for that. I don't know if you can see it up here, but there's a particular way that food is taken and the rituals for taking food. There's a particular set of bowls and they're unwrapped. There's a very formal way of moving around the monk's hall and procedures for that. He also has a section on the rules of etiquette and how juniors should address seniors. So a lot of very particular rules and etiquette and procedural forms. And yet what was most remarkable to me in translating this, as I was going, is the particular exemplar.

[10:06]

So the longest section of the work is called the Chi Chi Shing, the pure standards for the temple administrators. And Dogen very much emphasizes the role of those in the monastery taking responsible positions. The Ino, the director of the meditation hall, the chief cook, the Tenzo, the director, the treasurer, the work leader. So Dogen very much emphasizes the importance of those roles and the responsibility for taking care of the community and for being exemplary in practice. And what struck me very much was that of the 20 or so exemplary anecdotes or koans that Dogen cites of great masters and how they took care of those monastic rules earlier on, maybe half of them involve actions in which the exemplar did something that would be seen as improper from the point of view of conventional morality.

[11:10]

And were violations of monastic regulations even. So a number of them threatened to beat up their teachers. One of them actually did. Or some other practitioner. One set fire to a monastery. This was Jiaozhuang. Another throws away some of the community's food. A few of them were shunned or even expelled from the community. And then after each of these stories, the protagonist is praised by Dogen for his sincere spirit of inquiry and dedication to practice and commitment to the monastic community. So what's going on here? Actually, the paper had a couple of stories of this. But I'll just go into one of them. Fushan Faliwan lived 1981 to 1067, was chief cook in the story. For background, Dogen says,

[12:11]

especially we cannot fail to study the Tenzo Fushan Faliwan's faithful heart, which can be met only once in a thousand years. It is difficult to match for both the wise or foolish. However, if Tenzo did not experience dedication like Fushan Faliwan, how can their study of the way penetrate the innermost precincts of the Buddhist ancestors? So the story begins. There's a little background. Fushan was traveling with another monk comrade, Tianyi, who later also became a noted master. And they visited Sheshan Wishan, who was a master who was famous for his cold and severe style of training. He was very tough and frugal and feared by the monks. So Fushan and Tianyi arrived. They entered the Tambario Hall, where you sit for some period before being admitted to the monastery. And they arrived in the middle of a snowy winter. And there were other monks there. Guishan just kind of abused them and squandered them and said nasty things to them and threw cold water on them.

[13:18]

All the other monks left. It was very cold. It was snow outside. And the other monks left. But Fushan and Tianyi stayed. And then Guishan said, if you do not leave right now, I'm going to beat you. And Tianyi, Fushan's brother, said, the two of us have come a thousand miles just to study Zen with you. How can we leave with just one scoop of water dumped on us? Even if you beat us to death, we will not go. So this is the attitude that's presented at the beginning of the story, this kind of very rigorous training. So the story later on, Fushan became the Tantra, the head cook. And I'll read you a little bit from Dogen. The assembly suffered from the coarse and pure quality and quantity of food. One time, Guishan, the teacher, went out to the village. Fushan finally stole the key to the storehouse and took some wheat flour to prepare a special flavorful gruel. Guishan suddenly returned and went to the hall. After eating, he sat in the outer hall and sat for the tenzo. When Fuyuan came, Guishan said, is it true that he stole flour to cook the gruel?

[14:19]

You could tell from eating it. This was not the ordinary food. And Fushan admitted it and implored Guishan to punish him. Guishan had him calculate the price of the flour and sell his robes and bowls to repay it. Then Guishan struck Fuyuan thirty blows with his staff and expelled him from the temple. And the story goes on to talk about how even though he was expelled from the temple, Fushan's remainder nearby in town went on begging around to support himself and kept asking for re-admittance to the monastery. He asked his brother Huang and was just dismissed. Fushan and Guishan would not allow him that. Finally, even Guishan saw him begging near a building that belonged to the monastery and said, how come you're standing near here? You should pay us rent and made him beg further. Finally, though, Guishan went to the town and saw Fuyuan holding his bowl. Guishan returned to the assembly and said, Fuyuan truly has the determination to study Zen.

[15:23]

And he was re-admitted. So, a number of points. It seems that even though this was a violation he stole from the monastic community's storehouse, he did this out of his caring for the monks. So that's one point. And also, there's also this dedication to his own pursuing the way, which seems to be central in a number of these stories. The sincerity and dedication and intensity of his own inquiry into the way and his own intention to find out. So, many of the stories have this quality. And it seems like these rules, the monastic regulations, were being used by the teacher not for the sake of moral propriety, but to test and more fully mold Guishan's commitment. So the rules were part of the training, but the point wasn't to just follow the rules exactly. So, as a historical footnote to the story,

[16:35]

Fushan became the Dharma heir of his teacher Guishan in the later years of the Silent Age. But my Dharma brother Miao told a story yesterday about Tosu Iching and Fuyang Dokai, the teacher who hit the student with a whisk. That teacher was a student of this fellow who was, I think they had cooked, Fushan. And there's an example here of inter-lineage cooperation. So, we're having here a Christian and various Asian tradition dialogue. There's also going on dialogues within tradition. So, Norman Fisher and Miao and myself are from Suzuki Roshi, lineage of Soto Zen. Reverend Hongshu is from the Chinese Chan tradition. And Father William and Father Tom Hand are trained in a Japanese Renzai lineage.

[17:38]

So, we all have different Buddhisms in a way, different orientations. I would say the hard is, of course, the Zen. But Fushan gives us an example of inter-lineage cooperation because the Sado-Soto line was about to die out. The former teacher Dayang had some Dharma heirs, but they died before him. And he met Fushan and they had a total accord. But Fushan had already received transmission, Dharma transmission, apostolic succession, whatever, from the Renzai lineage and did not want to take on the Soto lineage. But he held it for Dayang and passed it on to Toso Ichin, the teacher of the other story. So, this is a remarkable example in our lineage of this cooperation between lineages. I just thought I'd mention that as a kind of footnote that this can happen. It actually has happened very often in the history of Buddhism,

[18:40]

where there's meeting between people on different lineages and cooperation. So, that also is an example for us. Anyway, there are many other stories about this kind of rule bending. I want to very much stress, though, that I'm not bringing this up to support an erroneous or misleading stereotype of Zen iconoclasm. So, in the initial quotation of Zen to America, writers such as Alan Watson and D.T. Suzuki have emphasized the image of Zen wild men. And there are these stories here and there in the tradition. But Zen is very much a tradition of decorum and faithful dedication to the monastic venture. I'm not talking about relevant individualism that I was talking about yesterday. But it's worth noting that Dogen, who is sometimes considered kind of fussy and cranky about the forms

[19:49]

and spent a lot of time talking about the forms himself, talked about these examples of great dedication and sincerity and pursuing the way, even when it meant bending the monastic code. So, it seems like what he's emphasizing... And all of these monks were steeped in conventional monastic practice and decorum. But he's emphasizing the development of, first of all, kindly concern for the whole community, which Fushan exemplifies in his sympathy with the hungry monks, and his sincere intent to persist in inquiry into the mysteries of awakening. And somehow, it seems like the monastic rules in some of these cases were used as a way of developing that, even when the rules were bent. So, that's the first part of the paper, and we can talk more about that. Actually, there's a lot to talk about in Dogen's monastic rules, which I'm sure will be quite interesting.

[20:52]

But I want to go on to Maitreya, who is the great archetypal bodhisattva in all of Buddhism. Actually, he's in the Theravada school, too. Maitreya is his name in the Theravada school, and a poet. His name means loving one, so there's the practice of maitri, or in Pali, netta, that is associated with him. But one of the main things about Maitreya is that throughout the archetype, he's kind of foolish. So, a number of the accounts describe Maitreya as a novice disciple of Shakyamuni Buddha, relatively junior disciple, and when Shakyamuni said, this monk Maitreya will be the next future Buddha, the other monks were quite surprised, because he was kind of foolish,

[21:53]

he wasn't a particularly learned monk, he wasn't a particularly rigorous practitioner, he was kind of naive, you know, what? This person? The next future Buddha? But the thing about him was that he was very kind, particularly noted for his loving kindness. So I think he represents a kind of Buddhist model of the pure heart. And there are three particular... About his foolishness, another story about that, just very briefly, from the Lotus Sutra, early in the Lotus Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha emits a great light from his forehead, and Maitreya Bodhisattva says to the Bodhisattva, What's going on? What is that light? And Manjushri says, Don't you remember? Many lifetimes ago there was a Buddha, and he gives the name of the Buddha, and the name of the Buddha field, and there was a similar light, which was the announcement of the preaching of the Lotus Sutra,

[22:57]

and now we're going to hear the Lotus Sutra again, and then Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Lisbon, goes on to say that at that time I was a Bodhisattva named such and such, and you were a Bodhisattva. Maitreya was a Bodhisattva in that past life named Fame Seeker, who was named such because he was always seeking after fame and gain, and was also noted for never being able to remember a single line of his scripture. And yet, even then, he was very kind to me. So all the negative things about Maitreya in some ways emphasize this love and kindness that is all through the stories about Maitreya. So there are three particular strands of Buddhist meditation that Maitreya is associated with, and I think we can take them as one example of practices leading to this kind of love and kindness, leading to this pure-heartedness of Maitreya.

[23:59]

So the first one is the practice of love and kindness itself, called metta in Pali, and there's a particular practice associated with this, a particular meditation, which is emitting or wishing, sending out thoughts, kind thoughts, loving, kind thoughts, to particular people. And the practice involves starting with people with whom one is already close and intimate and feels this, and thinking of them, one way of doing this practice is with the inhale, to inhale their pain, to feel their pain, and with the exhale, to send out loving, kind thoughts. And after one has done this practice for a while with people for whom one already feels kindly, then one thinks of some group of people for whom one has neutral feelings, maybe a large group of people, and does the same practice. And then eventually one comes through this practice to think of people who one might consider one's enemies, or who one sees as causing harm to them, and actually do the same practice of sending loving kindness to them.

[25:06]

So this is one of the three modes of Maitreya's practice. The other, which has come up already here in this conference, is patience. So Maitreya specializes in shakti paramita, the perfection of patience. It might also be translated as tolerance or forbearance. And the ultimate practice of patience in Buddhism is amitpatika dharmak shakti, the patience with the uncreated, unworn, ungraspable nature of all things, of all dharmas, with the ineffable tolerance of that. So the story about Maitreya, sometimes he's depicted as the future Buddha in the distant future, sometimes he's depicted as the bodhisattva who now sits up in the meditation heaven, pondering how to save all beings. He's already predicted to be the future Buddha, we know that,

[26:09]

and yet now he's just a bodhisattva trying to figure out how he will become Buddha. And the best-known images of Maitreya are these very delicate Korean and Japanese statues of Maitreya pensively sitting with his finger to his chin, wondering how to save all beings. I don't know if any of you have seen the statue of Koryu-ji in Kyoto. There's another one, Shibu-ji in Nara. They're wonderful, sensitive statues, and delicate. Maitreya also sits Western-style, he sometimes crawls up with his legs down, not in a lotus position. So part of the reason why Maitreya really has to become an expert in patience is that we know he's going to be the next future Buddha, but we don't know when. So some of the sutras seem to indicate... There's one that says 4,456 of the common era that Maitreya will come. But usually there's longer periods, 30,000 years in the future,

[27:12]

and one of the major texts says that Maitreya will come 7,560,000,000 years after Shakyamuni. So... So... And yet, the history of Maitreya, I call it, which is fascinating, and I won't go into it now, we can get into it in discussion maybe, but there's been this continual, particularly in Chinese history and Korea also, there's this continual yearning for Maitreya. There's still graffiti-printed scrawls in Hawaiian rock saying, Many rulers and political figures in Chinese history have claimed to be Maitreya, or avatars of Maitreya, Empress Wu included. And there are persons active in the world today who claim to be Maitreya. There's a fellow in England who's been out here in California. Have you met him? No, but his son's a plasterer over at GTU. Yeah, yeah, and we don't know. Maybe he is Maitreya.

[28:16]

That's right. We don't know. We just don't know when Maitreya's coming. So, this not knowing is a very important aspect of the practice of patience. We don't know. So Maitreya, as he sits up in the meditation heaven, is looking to the future and considering future generations. Not just the next seven generations, but centuries and centuries to come. So part of this practice of patience and part of this practice of not knowing is just to bear in mind the future, that what we do as monastics, as practitioners, as spiritual people today, in some sense has great implications for many generations in the future. So Maitreya's practice of patience is not passive.

[29:16]

We need to learn in meditation. We sit and wait. Sometimes we just wait for the bell to ring. But we have to sit and wait. And this practice of patience is a kind of active aspect of it. So this is the third aspect of the meditation offered by the Maitreya archetype, which is the phenomenological study of consciousness. This goes back to the Yogacara branch of Buddhism that Mother was mentioning. So Maitreya is associated with Yogacara school of Buddhism, of early Mahayana Buddhism. And it's very complicated and I won't go into it in detail, but I did want to offer a little bit from Yogacara or Mind-Only school. We've had a number of discussions from Sister Vrashrakana and Sister Pasqueline and other people have talked about models of consciousness and what do we do with thinking.

[30:21]

So just very briefly, first of all, Yogacara psychological teachings are yogic teachings, the name Yogacara. So these are teachings that came out of meditation and that one uses as meditation. These are meditation instructions. So there are many aspects of this, but the one I'll mention is the eight consciousnesses, which is part of the Yogacara system. And the first six are the senses, the dhatus. So there's eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, physicality, and mind as the sixth sense. And then there's a whole discussion of how that works. There's the eye, the eye object, and then subconsciousness of the visual object. So there's three aspects to each of these. But the sixth consciousness is interesting because it's the mind, mind objects, i.e. thoughts.

[31:29]

And then there's awareness. So I think it's helpful in meditation to think of this as a sense faculty, to think of our cogitation and the thoughts that come up as sense objects. So I think we're used to identifying with our thoughts. And many meditators get very upset when they find out they can't control their thoughts and that there are all kinds of thoughts coming up. But to see that as part of the scenery, just like the visual field, just like the sounds around us, I think it's interesting for meditation that Uchiyama Roshi, a modern Soto master who actually Hongshu began his practice with before he found his Chan master, Uchiyama Roshi has this example, which I like a lot, that while we're sitting in meditation, the stomach continues to secrete digestive juices.

[32:30]

He says, in the same way, the brain continues to secrete thoughts. So the practice then is just the thoughts are there and we're aware of them, like we're aware of sounds or visuals, the floor, the wall, whatever. So this is, for me, a very helpful model of what we do with our thinking, which is the thoughts are just more sense data. And we don't have to hold on to them. Now, there are times where the technique of cutting off thoughts are useful, but in this way of looking at this particular practice, just to let the thoughts go. So this is maybe one difference between Soto and the Renzai style. Anyway, I just wanted to throw that into the discussion of what to do about thinking. So those are the first six of the eight consciousnesses. Then the seventh is Manas, a different use of the term.

[33:33]

This is the faculty we have for imagining ourself as separate from the other. So this is described as part of the human consciousness apparatus. We see a self separate from you all out there. This is something consciousness does. And it's inculcated very deeply in our language. We talk in terms of subject, verb, object. So our language enforces this aspect of our consciousness, which is to see the world out there as a bunch of dead objects. And we're trying to manipulate them. We're trying to verb all the objects to get what we want or to get rid of what we don't want. Or we feel like objects being verbed by subjects out there. Trying to protect ourselves. So this is the seventh faculty. There are possible transformations of this. But the eighth consciousness, very important, a lot of it is now in the storehouse consciousness, is another description of how karma works.

[34:37]

So we've had a particularly appreciated Sister Varshaprana's description of karma. And samskaras are, in Buddhism, the aspect of consciousness or the aspect of ourselves, this aggregate of stuff that we are, that has held on to tendencies and predispositions. And based on our karma, based on everything that's ever happened, based on what we've ever done, body, speech, or mind, our thoughts and our speech, and so forth, we have particular potentialities. We have a range of possible responses to the world. And some of those are wholesome, and some of those are unwholesome. And we can act to support the wholesome ones and strengthen those seeds for... Or we can act to strengthen the seeds of unwholesome conduct.

[35:43]

So this, a lot of it is now in this eighth level of consciousness, which is, of course, just a metaphor for some aspect of how it is that we are aware. It provides us with a model for looking at how it is that we're caught in the world of conditioning, how it is that we're influenced by our habits and our dispositions, and how to work with that. So, this caricature of psychology, again, was developed out of contemplation, and is, we can see, as the activity of patience for Maitreya. So Maitreya, again, there are many stories, a whole lot about Maitreya associated with the Yogacara school, but the emphasis here is that the aspect of meditation that is self-study, is yogic study of awareness, of consciousness, of who we are. So, Dogen later talks about this in terms of...

[36:44]

He says, to study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all the myriad things, and then the body and mind drop away. And this body and mind dropping away is Dogen's expression for full awakening. So, it's interesting that this Maitreya figure who is noted for being foolish has this very sophisticated psychological practice. So, this yogic study of awareness, yogic study of our interaction with the world, our interaction with our thoughts, the point in the meditation practice, in our lineage anyway, is just to sit upright and be present with all, and to face it, and to remain still. And there is definitely a kind of power, and kind of both concentration and insight that comes from being willing to be present with all the stuff,

[37:47]

to be patient with it all, to not know what to do, and just to keep sitting. So, Dogen talks about body and mind dropping away, but the starting point is to study the self. To study the way is to study the self. And that's really enough, I think, for us. Just to study the self. So, Dogen also says, and this is my paraphrase, but he says, deluded people have delusions about enlightenment. Enlightened people are enlightened without their delusions. So, I'll move on to the third part of the paper, which is this motif throughout Zen history of the Zen fool. And this is a direct link to Maitreya, because the first person I wanted to talk about is Uday in Chinese, Hotei in Japanese. And you've all probably seen him if you've been to Chinese restaurants.

[38:50]

Do you have any statues of him at your temple? Every Mahayana monastery in the dining hall. The central image in the dining hall is the fat, happy, laughing Buddha. So, this is based on a 10th century actual historical Chan monk. There's a little picture of him in there, but I know you've all seen it. This is the fat, jolly, laughing Buddha. I use the Japanese word Hotei more because it's very interesting that in Chinese temples, correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that he's not called Uday, his name is called Hirohei, Maitreya. Formally, he's considered an incarnation of Maitreya. So, here's one image of him. Anyway, he apparently was an historical 10th century Chan monk who wandered around the streets. I guess he'd been in the monasteries and trained and so forth, but he wandered around the streets with his big bag full of candy and toys

[39:55]

and played with the children. Anyway, this is kind of scruffy Buddhist Santa Claus. Some of you know the Ten Akshara pictures. The final picture usually shows Hotei pulling his big bag and returning to the marketplace with empty, blistered, pastel hands is the name of that picture. So, anyway, Hotei apparently, just before he disappeared into the skies and destroyed ghosts, said some poem about how he's not appreciating Maitreya. Maybe we could pass him around, just to warm him a little. There's no guarantee that rubbing his belly will bring you luck. Take your chance. We will neither confirm nor deny. So, anyway, I could say more about Hotei, but I won't right now,

[40:56]

just to mention the connection to Maitreya. There's a long tradition of often hermit, recluse monks, former monks outside the monastery. Another example is Hanshan, the famous Cold Mountain, whose poetry is well known in the West. He apparently wasn't ordained as a monk, though, but he was a layperson. But he hung out near the monastery. I won't say so much about Hanshan, but just this image of marginal people in the monastery, around the monastery, who remind us of why we're here, I think is very important. And I was going to quote Thomas Merton, who talks about the marginal role of the monk. The monk is a marginal person in this very eloquent way. And I don't know if... My own experience in a variety of Zen monasteries in America and Asia is that, you know, these people are around. And they're very helpful.

[41:59]

But I wanted to focus in terms of this last part and try to conclude with saying a little bit about Ryokan. It's another example from Japan, lived 1758 to 1831, Japanese Soto Zen monk. And after he finished his training, he went back to his home village and lived in a little hut outside of town and lived by a renegade practice doing all this begging. And quite an interesting fellow. He was a very skilled meditator, a very elegant calligrapher. His calligraphy was very prized and very valuable, even in his own lifetime. Great poet. And he took for his spiritual name Daigu, or Great Fool. And there are many stories about him which confirm that. He was also lepotated when he wandered around playing with the children. He always carried balls or other toys in his robe sleeves. Frequently broke from his begging rounds to join the children's games.

[43:01]

So there's so many stories, but I'll just tell a few. One night he was playing hide-and-seek with the children. It got late, and the children were all called to dinner. The next morning, a farmer entered his barn and saw Ryokan hiding. And he said, what are you doing there? And Ryokan said, shh, be quiet, the children will hear. So maybe he was so absorbed in samadhi that he was unaware of the man's passage. Being very foolish anyway. There's another famous story of Ryokan sitting in his hut, looking through the holes in the roof at the moon, or maybe out the window. And a thief comes in, and Ryokan has nothing. He gives him his blanket, that's all he has, and then writes a poem afterwards saying, I wish I could have given him the moon. Another story, more interesting, more challenging, is that Ryokan in the morning used to go out and sit in the sun outside his hut and take off his robe.

[44:03]

And he would carefully pick the rust out of his robe and gently place them on a nearby rock. When he was finished, he would just as carefully put on his robe and place the rust back in. So I heard that story first from Donald King, who had a wonderful master in Japanese literature, the master of our century of Japanese literature. In Japan, it's considered so as well. And he told this story in a course in Japanese literature and said that no Westerner could take seriously such a person. But this love and care, even for insects, even for animals, is part of the Maitreya motif. There are many stories of not just vegetarianism, but extreme care for animals in the Maitreya lore. Thank you. Okay, so finishing up, another more comfortable human example of Ryokan's love and kindness practice

[45:03]

occurred when a relative asked Ryokan's help in dealing with his developing son, who was becoming an elinquent. Ryokan visited the family and stayed the night without saying anything to the son. The next morning, as he prepared to depart, Ryokan asked the boy's help in tying up his sandals. As the lad looked up from doing so, he saw a tear roll down Ryokan's cheek. Nothing was said, but from that time on, the boy could do it for him. So this concern for the younger generation, for children, this playfulness is part of this motif. I just wanted to read some poems by Ryokan. These are translations I did with Kazutani Hashimoto. Without desire, everything is sufficient. With seeking, myriad things are impoverished. Plain vegetables consume hunger. A patched robe is enough to cover this bent old body. Alone, I hike with a deer. Cheerfully, I sing and indulge children. The stream beneath the cliff cleanses pioneers.

[46:06]

The pine on the mountaintop fits my heart. Another one that describes his practice of his bathing rounds. Spring rain feels rather soft. Leaning amongst staff, I enter the eastern town. So green, willows in the garden. So restless, floating grass over the pond. My bowl is fragrant with rice of a thousand homes. My heart has abandoned the splendor of ten thousand carriages. Yearning for traces of the truth, step by step I walk, begging. So in his very simple life of voluntary poverty and reclusion and meditation, Ryokan also talks about his loneliness and the difficulties of it. So one last poem. Rags and again rags, wearing rags all my life.

[47:08]

I somehow get food at the side of the road. My hut is left to overgrown mugwort. Gazing at the moon all night, I chant poems. Getting lost in flowers, I don't come home. Since leaving my nourishing community, mistakenly I've become this horrible horse. So in conclusion, my own approach to the Buddhist-Christian dialogue is not to try and bring up so much from the other side, but to present one side and hear the echo. But just to mention a couple of examples that seem very powerful from Christianity. Of course, St. Francis and his simplicity and so forth, voluntary poverty. I'm sure most of you know a lot more about I than do about St. Francis.

[48:09]

Another example from America I wanted to say a little bit about is John Chapman. He lived 1774 to 1845. And maybe he lived around where you live, Sister Mary Margaret. He was in Indiana and Ohio and western Pennsylvania. You've all heard of him as Johnny Appleseed. And so he fits a lot of the Maitreya motif. He wandered around living in the wilderness and wasn't attached to he could have made claims for the land that he used to grow his apple fisheries, but seemed to not be possessive of that. Also famous for playing with children and his extreme kindness to animals. There's stories of him nursing an injured wolf or carefully extricating from his pant leg a yellow jacket that was stinging him.

[49:11]

Warning a rattlesnake, he killed unintentionally. And he was also a vegetarian, which was quite unusual in that time and place. And even though he's known as kind of foolish, his attire is also kind of simple, he was actually a Swedenborgian preacher. And I don't know so much about Swedenborgian theology, but apparently there's a lot of visionary aspects to it. And he helped to establish a significant presence in Frontier, Ohio, of the Swedenborgian church. And he fits in many ways the Maitreya archetype, including just the basic thing of tree planting. So, consider him for the future. Which is also an all-Buddhist practice. So, I can sum up. But I won't go just yet. By the way, there's another abstract or crazy up here

[50:18]

from Mark Herhonen's paper. If I could, I'd like to begin with a poem by Thomas Merton. And this is not just any poem that happens to fit the question. I know from a friend who's writing yet another biography of Merton that this came out of an affective crisis. It's called One in the Soul of the Serene Disciple. One in the soul of the serene disciple with no more fathers to imitate, poverty is a success. It is a small thing to say the roof is gone. He has not even a house. Stars as well as friends are angry with the noble ruin. Saints depart in several directions. Be still, there is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind that blew away his halo with his cares.

[51:20]

A lucky sea that drowned his reputation. Here you will find neither a proverb nor a memorandum. There are no ways, no methods to admire where poverty is no achievement. His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction. What choice remains? Well, to be ordinary is not a choice. It is the usual freedom of men with odd visions. Oh, wow. Merton had the last word. I don't know, it was given to me just like that. Don't you know what year that was written? No, I don't. Before he went to HM, or Africa. Oh, yes. Yeah, that's right. I don't know what year.

[52:21]

To introduce our next talk, the title is Mystical Experience as Text, the Literary Expression of Transcendent in the Cloud of Unknowing and the Platform Sutra of the Six Patriarchs. Paul IX is often called the greatest classic of Western Christianity, and the Platform Sutra is certainly one of the greatest of the East. So it's a very important question. And our presenter is Father Nicholas Haas, a monk of St. Vincent Archabian Patrol of Pennsylvania, who was assigned to St. Vincent's Priory in Tapei, Taiwan. He did graduate studies in the heritage literature, emphasizing Chinese-Western literary relations. His research interests are Chinese, American, and English fiction, interdisciplinary study of literature and religion, and Western narratives of China.

[53:37]

As a Benedictine, he is involved with the Benedictine Commission on China, and also with the Organization of Benedictines in East Asia. Father Nicholas teaches at Julian Catholic University in the English department, and teaches comparative literature in the Comparative Literatures Program. Father Nicholas. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sister, for your kind introduction. I've passed out copies of the text that I'll be discussing. There weren't quite enough, so a few more copies are being made. They should arrive shortly. I've also passed out Chinese copies for those who need Chinese. Does anyone else need a Chinese copy? I'm sure. You have a copy?

[54:38]

Yeah. So, Heche Kwanbongbong, how good it is to be here. I've often heard of the place. In 1966, I passed by Route 1, and looked up this mountain, and saw the buildings here. It's a great honor for me to be here today. The Hermitage, to me, is very much a place of dialogue. And, to begin with, I would like to thank the community of the Hermitage for allowing your Father Joseph Wong to participate in the dialogue with the Church of Chang'e. What he is doing as an individual monk is so extremely impressive. Last year, someone who visited the seminary in Shanghai told me, you should see how the seminarians pray now. It's just like Benedictines. So there was a teacher there this past semester,

[55:42]

and he taught the seminarians how to pray. So I knew that they were referring to Father Joseph. So his influence will spread throughout China, just in this one way. And the Church in China speaks about how great the need is for the Chinese Church to learn how to pray. Father Joseph is playing a very important part in teaching the Church of China this. On the topic of dialogue, my first night here, I woke up in the middle of the night, and there's a large window in our room. And I saw the stars. I'd never awoken from a sleep before to see the tens of stars before my eyes. So my room was filled with starlight,

[56:43]

and I saw stars. And it was a completely new experience for me to awake in this situation. But then in thinking about the stars, I started to wonder, are these Buddhist stars or Protestant stars or Catholic stars? And then I realized they're simply stars. And then in the morning, I came here for the first day, and I started to think, am I looking at Buddhists or Catholics or Benedictines or Chinese, or who are these people? So I decided just to see you also as stars. They're not necessarily representatives of one tradition or another. And perhaps this is what dialogue means, that eventually we come to see each other simply as other creatures of the new

[57:45]

that Norman was speaking of. The theme is purity of heart. I'd like to begin with a few comments about purity of heart. But for me, this is very much a monastic term. And it does not refer to a virtue, but it's more an interior disposition with external manifestations in action and demeanor. I think in my years of monastic life, I've seen senior monks with purity of heart. I can't define it, but if I see it, I think I know what it is. And it's something that's manifested in the action and demeanor of a monk. And what is special about it is that it's not a single instance,

[58:48]

but it's something that is seen year in and year out. And so part of this purity of heart is the fact that it can be maintained over a long period of time. So in my talk today, I'd like to look at the Chinese monk, Hui Yang, and ultimately see, can we speculate as to whether or not this Chinese monk had what we call purity of heart? Hui Yang was a monk of the 8th century from the Tang Dynasty. The text that deals with him was created before the age of printing. So it's a text that exists originally in manuscript form. I think you all know manuscripts of the same text can differ considerably.

[59:49]

This is because the copyists would not necessarily copy a text exactly the same. A great deal of editing and redaction occurred to these texts. The Platform Sutra is one of the important texts for Chan Buddhism. Some people say it's the only sutra in the Buddhist canon, but it's the most important sutra in the Buddhist canon produced in China or written in Chinese originally. The text that I'll be looking at, the version of the Platform Sutra, is the one from the Dunhuang Collection. Dunhuang is a place on the Silk Route. In this century, many manuscripts from I think the 9th and 10th century were discovered in a cave there.

[60:51]

It's very similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls. So for over a thousand years, no one had access to these texts. Even though this text is from the 9th or 10th century, the tradition itself began three centuries before. So there was ample time for redaction, editing, rewriting. My approach to the text is highly influenced by my familiarity or my reading of biblical studies. I am not a biblical textual scholar, but I'm very influenced by what biblical scholars have done in the past two centuries. I'm also interested in the structural analysis of the work with literature. So I've been influenced by people like Vladimir Propp and Gerard Genet. What I'll be presenting is my reading

[61:52]

of one section of the Platform Sutra. This is my reading before I've gone to look very carefully at the commentaries.

[62:04]

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