DHARMA SPRING

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   A high-ranking samurai was also a serious Zen student. Fighting broke out all over Japan and he was wounded in battle; in spite of the pain he galloped to a temple to see the teacher there. A tea ceremony was going on, and the teacher put a cup in front of him, asking, “How are things?”
   The warrior immediately crushed the cup under his foot and said, “Heaven and earth completely broken up.”
   The teacher asked, “When heaven and earth are broken up, what’s that like?”
   The warrior stood with his hands crossed over his chest. The teacher hit him, and he involuntarily cried out from the pain of his wounds.
   The teacher said, “Heaven and earth not quite broken up yet.”

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   One day, when Nanquan was living in a little hut in the mountains, a traveling monk visited him just as he was preparing to go to his work in the fields. Nanquan welcomed him, saying, "Please make yourself at home. Cook anything you’d like for your lunch, then bring some of the leftover food to me along the path that leads directly to where I’m working."
   Nanquan worked hard until the evening but the monk never showed, so he returned to his hut very tired and hungry. The monk had cooked and enjoyed a good meal by himself, then thrown away all the leftovers and broken all the bowls and utensils. Nanquan found the monk sleeping peacefully in the empty hut. He laid down his tired body nearby, whereupon the monk got up and left.
   Years later, Nanquan shared this story with his students and commented, “He was such a good monk, I miss him even now.”

Commenting on this koan, Hakuin quoted a poem:
      “Two streams of tears run down a lady’s jeweled pillow,
     partly because she loves him, partly because she resents him.”

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A student asked, "What is buddha?"
   Touzi answered, "Buddha."
   "What is the way?"
   Touzi said, "The Way."
   "What is Chan?"
   Touzi said, "Chan."
   The student then asked, "What about when the moon isn’t yet full?"
   Touzi said, "I swallow three or four-tenths."
   "What about when the moon is full?"
   Touzi replied, "I spit out seven or eight-tenths."

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The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment says:

At each moment, don't raise delusive thoughts.
And don't suppress your delusive states of mind.
When you find yourself in a realm of delusive thought, don't add knowledge.
When you don't know, don't think that's the truth.

Book of Serenity, Case 45

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   Someone asked Zhaozhou, "What is meditation?"
   Zhaozhou replied, "It isn't meditation."
   "Why isn't it meditation?"
   "It's alive!"

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This talk is from the summer of 2019, when Open Source Zen teachers and communities gathered together for a week-long meditation retreat. Here's the koan that accompanied us throughout the retreat:

   Mujaku was widowed at thirty-two. She couldn’t get over her grief and became a nun. She came to the teacher Bukko and asked, “What is Zen?”
   Bukko replied, “The heart of the one who asks is Zen; you can’t get it from someone else’s words.”
   At that moment a deer at a nearby stream gave a cry. The teacher asked, “Where is that deer?”
   The nun listened. The teacher shouted and asked, “Who hears?”
   At these words Mujaku had a flash of understanding and left. At the water pipe from the stream she picked up a lacquered wooden bucket that was full of water. She saw the moon’s reflection in it and composed a poem, which she presented to the teacher:

The bucket catches the stream,
and the pure moon behind pines
appears in the water.

   Bukko glanced at the poem and said, “Take the Heart Sutra and go.”
   After that, she had interviews with the teacher, coming and being sent away, until in the end the bottom fell out of the bucket, and she presented another poem of this realization:

The bottom fell out of my bucket,
and now there’s no water,
no moon.

   After Mujaku’s death, the nun Nyozen of Tokeiji meditated on this poem. When she grasped the essence of Zen, she presented her own poem to her teacher:

The bottom fell out of that humble woman’s bucket,
the pale dawn moon caught in the rain puddles. 

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This is the final in a series of Dharma Talks being posted here, from a retreat held in 2017 entitled Realizing the Way  with the Great Woods Zen community in North Carolina, working with portions of Song of Realizing the Way by YongJia Xuanjue. Here is an excerpt:

One Nature pervades all natures;
one way encompasses all individual ways.
One moon is reflected in many waters;
all the reflected moons are that one moon.

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This is the third in a series of Dharma Talks being posted here, from a retreat held in 2017 entitled Realizing the Way  with the Great Woods Zen community in North Carolina, working with/from the first chapter of the Daodejing:

The  way that becomes a way
is not the Immortal Way
the name that becomes a name
is not the Immortal Name
no-name is the maiden of Heaven and Earth
name is the mother of all things
thus in innocence we see the beginning
in passion we see the end
two different names
for one and the same
the one we call dark
the dark beyond dark
the door to all beginnings

(Red Pine, trans)

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This is the second in a series of Dharma Talks being posted here, from a retreat held in 2017 entitled Realizing the Way  with the Great Woods Zen community in North Carolina. Case 19 of The Gateless Gateway is the koan this talk is centered around:

   Zhaozhou asked Nanquan, "What is the Dao?"
   Nanquan said, "Ordinary heart-mind is the Dao."
   Zhaozhou asked, "Should I try to direct myself toward it?"
   Nanquan said, "If you try to turn toward it, you go away from it."
   Zhaozhou asked, "How can I know the Dao if I don't turn toward it?"
   Nanquan said, "The Dao isn't subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is blankness. If you truly reach the Dao, you'll find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can we talk about this at the level of right and wrong?"
   With these words, Zhaozhou had sudden realization.

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This is the first in a series of Dharma Talks being posted here, from a retreat held in 2017 entitled Realizing the Way  with the Great Woods Zen community in North Carolina.  This is the talk from the first evening, working with one of Baling Haojian's Three Turning Words koans:

   What is the Way?
   A clear-sighted person falls into a well.

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