Ancestral Stories: A Dharma Gate of Intimacy with Our Lives

Thank you for listening to UPIA's Dharma podcast, an extraordinary series of talks from some of the finest teachers in the world. I'm Joan Halifax, founder of the UPIA's End Center, and we're happy to make these podcasts available to you. Please consider making a donation so we can offer these recordings freely. You'll find a donation button on our podcast page. And thank you so much. This is Dharma Podcast at DharmaPodcast.org. This is episode number 2673. It was recorded on October 7th, 2026. And it is titled, Ancestral Stories, A Dharma Gate of Intimacy with Our Lives. The speaker for this episode is Cynthia Kair. Before I get started, I'm just kind of curious, how many people... So we're in a practice period right now and our theme is Zhao Zhao, who was a Chan master, and we're talking about his koans and also about the period. How many people have some familiarity with Zhao Zhao? Let's start there. Overwhelmingly a minority. And how about Chan, the period of Chan? Okay, even less. Well, I'm not going to talk about either. No, I'm just joking. It is a big topic and it is kind of a particular piece of history, particularly of our Buddhist experience, where a lot of forces come together. It's kind of a sweeping time, these vast, vast landscapes, all of this political turmoil. But this is all happening in a period of what we call Chan, which is about... I'm going to roughly say 600 to 900 common era. And Zhao Zhao is living toward the end of this period. It's simultaneously like the height of great Chinese civilization in terms of art and literature and culture. But there are also these incredible pockets of violence and disturbing warfare and lots of political upheaval. So it's a really interesting confluence of events that are happening. And so out of this period of time, Buddhism, as it has come from India along the Silk Roads, arrives in China and kind of brings a special and unique flavor, not only from India, but also because of what it is encountering at the time, which are Chinese culture and civilization, Confucianism and particularly Taoism. And the invitation, if I may use that word, of the Chan Buddhist practice at that time is for each and every one of us, just like the invitation is for us today, I think, to have a direct experience of our own lives. Something that is direct, that is immediate, that feels authentic, that gives us a sense of intimacy. I want to start by reading two brief paragraphs from some contemporary teachers. Many of you have heard of Suzuki Roshi, I dare say. And in his recent collection of his essays edited by Juryu, and I guess also by Mel was involved, the title of the book is Becoming Yourself, which is part and parcel of the journey toward having a direct experience or an outcome of having a direct experience of our lives. And he says, Suzuki Roshi says, sharing the feeling we have right here, right now, is the fundamental thing for Zen practice. Zen in a word is to share our feeling with people, with trees and with mountains wherever we are. That is Zen practice. Usually our mind is filled with something like ice cream or bananas or how much soap costs in one store compared to another, or by looking at the newspaper and seeing an ad for sale. This is my interjection, or by reading the news, that's going on, right? And having that cause a reaction in us. So it's almost impossible to share the actual feeling we have where we are right now. Our life is going on and on, endlessly filled with rubbish, rubbish at first. At some moment it is important for you, but not necessary to hold on to it past that point. It is the same with our everyday life. Because we have so much useless rubbish in our minds, it is hard to share our feeling with people, with things, with trees, or with mountains. Even though we are right in the middle of the woods, it is still hard to appreciate the feeling of the woods. When we can really appreciate the feeling of the woods, that is zazen. And I would say that is our direct experience of our own life. And then a book that I have come to deeply love called Through the Forests of Every Color, Awakening with Kowans by Joan Sutherland, she says, "'We set out our lives shaped like wandering.' "'In the beginning we're looking, "'perhaps for some kind of answer, "'an answer to the shared questions about life, death, "'and meaning, or to the question uniquely formed "'in our own lives. "'The thing that aches on some days "'and causes a sudden pain on others, "'something heavy with a sharp edge "'that we're carrying next to our skin, "'or we're propelled by intimations of another world "'inside this one, "'a soft glowing world in which the defining characteristics "'are not limitation and repetition, "'but something more spacious and at ease.'" How do we get closer to that? Perhaps we have both kinds of questions at the same time, which barely leaves energy to pack for the journey. So thinking of these, the feeling that I get from both of these readings, as they relate to this particular theme of our practice period, is that in the time of Chan, these questions, these desires, were the same as the desires and the questions that we have right now. How can I get inside my life? How can I kind of move closer? How can I be more intimate and more relaxed and have this sense of direct experience? And the Chan masters, I think, very wisely understood that one of the obstructions that we all have then and now is our beautiful minds. Our beautiful, beautiful minds that love words, that love stories, that loves conceptualizing and produce so many wonderful gifts, and also can be an incredible hindrance to us at the same time. So in response to this awareness that they had, they developed a different type, a different style of Buddhist practice. You know, you probably have heard of some of the Zen masters who would suddenly just shout at you. Wake up. What does that feel like? Where are you? Are you here? Right? Some would strike their students. I will not do that. Everyone here is safe. And a big piece of the Kowan practice is actually using the same thing that can be an obstruction to our freedom and to our experience of our direct life, which is to use words. It gets very, very tricky, right? I think that Thomas Merton in his, if some of you were here last fall practice period, and I think Kathy was here and Chinzan, I think, talking about Chan as well, right? In the book The Golden Age of Zen, Thomas Merton has a beautiful introduction, which I think is a pretty nice description of Zen. And he's talking about the inherent problem, or kind of this conundrum that we have as humans loving words and being so word-based evolutionarily. Just they're such an important tool for communication. And yet, as I said, they can also be an obstruction. So he says, this is Thomas Merton, even while using words, right? He says, Zen. However, resolutely resists any temptation to be easily communicable. And a great deal of the paradox and violence of Zen teaching and practice is aimed at blasting the foundation of ready explanation and comforting symbol out from under the disciple's supposed experience. So this violence, I mean, whether it's the shout or whether it's inherent in terms of how the words are constructed, there is a desire to really shake us up, to get us out of the rut of just assuming that we know what's happening in life. We're kind of our life is direct experiences over here, and we're over here in our minds. Thinking about our life is not the same thing as being inside our life. I very, very poignantly remember this experience for a long time in my life, especially late adolescence and early adulthood. Just having this sense of, where is my life and how do I get on the inside of it? What is it really like? It felt like I was just kind of pressing my nose against the window pane of my real life, unable to somehow get through and really feel like I was in it. So much of the pattern that I experienced in my own behavior, heart and mind, was rehearsing the past, that which had already happened in order to make it more palatable to me or make myself better in whatever had happened, or rehashing the past or rehearsing the future. This is what I'm going to say when this happens. Never being right here. And I think for many of us, in part because of habit and energies, because of just the way the human mind works, we forget that life is what happens in between, before and after. So he goes on to say, in terms of talking about language, and I think articulating what some of the problem is, but also where some of these koans are trying to come from, the language used by Zen, and particularly by these Chan masters, is therefore, in some sense, an anti-language. And the logic of Zen is a radical reversal of philosophical language. The human dilemma of communication is that we cannot communicate ordinarily without words. But every ordinary experience tends to be falsified by our habits of verbalization and rationalization. Virginia Wool said, coming out of her front door, she said, no matter what I write, however I try to describe the color green, it will pale in comparison to this ordinary shrub right outside my door. The convenient tools of language enable us to decide beforehand what we think things mean and tempt us to easily see things only in a way that fits our logical perceptions of our verbal formulas. So it's almost, I mean, it's a challenge for us, right? It's not easy. It's not like we're failing. I think we all have this kind of experience where even as the situation is unfolding, even as the moment of our life is unfolding, the story starts to be told about what is going on. And again, the story and the idea is not the same thing as the direct experience. And that is what the Chan masters are trying to do. That is what Zen, to this day, is inviting us to do, to get beneath the surface and really to feel and inhabit our lives, kind of like Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Your Life. Instead of seeing things and facts as they are, we see them as reflections and verifications of the sentences we have previously made up in our minds. We quickly forget how to simply see things and substitute our words and formulas for the things themselves, manipulating facts so that we only see what fits our convenient prejudices. Zen uses language against itself to blast out these preconceptions and to destroy the specious reality, quote unquote, in our minds so that we can see directly. And I think that when we arrive at the shores of our Zen practice or maybe something else, some other time in our life, we arrive with this deep longing and yearning to have more intimacy, to have more intimacy with ourselves, to have more intimacy with life, to kind of get out of this way of living where, for myself at least, decades of this is where it was all happening. Above the eyebrows as opposed to a fully embodied experience of what's going on. The good news, the very good news about all of this is that we're an excellent company. Apart from being in each other, all of us having this similar experience, one of our key people in Zen coming later than Sean is Dogen. And he writes very beautifully in a fascicle called Gyo Butsu Eiji, if I can find the quote. Ah, yes. What being attached to Buddha means is that a person has formed an intellectual concept of enlightenment and then becomes attached to this concept and in their understanding of it. Because this view accompanies them through each moment, they do not look for the opportunity to let go of this concept and understanding. And so they uselessly hold on to this mistaken view. I recall my own indulgence in conceptualization as my tying myself up without a rope. It was a fetter at every moment for the tree of self, all this discursive thinking and conceptualization, had not fallen and the wisteria vines of my entanglements had not withered away. This was simply my passing through life while meaninglessly imprisoned in a cave of ignorance on the periphery of Buddhism. And I love that image. I mean, I'm a big Dogen fan, but I love it when he is so self-revolatory. And I can really, really relate to him. It's like, oh yeah, I do that too. It's so encouraging, right? So here he is having this concept of what direct experiences of how to manifest our true nature, how to live out of that. And he's saying, I did this too. I tied myself up with ropes, and I buried myself in a cave. And I was just feet from the real thing, from Buddha, right? So good news, he was able to get out of it, and so are we. So the Chan masters are really trying to shake us up and to wake us up from this type of root-nised thinking, this habituated thinking and feeling. In a certain way, a little bit of sleepwalking, although that might be too drastic and too dire a way to explain it. And so they come up with these koans, these stories, that emerge out of conversations with each other. So we think of them right now, perhaps, as riddles, that the ancients knew, these ancient masters, they were so much wiser. They were speaking in a particular type of language that seems, sounds foreign to us. But actually it was just in their everyday language. And they're trying to, in these conversations, the master is trying to always point the student out of this conceptualization. So let me give you a, well, let me first tell you a couple of formal definitions, especially for those of you who may not be as familiar with koans. Thomas Cleary writing a book on meditating with koans, he says, the answer to a koan is not a sentence or gesture, but the change in the learner's mental state brought about by working with the koan. So this koan itself is not about finding a true answer, but something shifts in us. Something shifts in our perception, in our ability to hold paradox and contradiction. That actually maybe opens up our space, makes us more capacious internally. Doesn't even matter if we ever get back to that paradox, that koan, maybe it just gives us more capacity to hold life as life is, life as our life is. In order to see into the a koan, we must go beyond the words and ideas that describe reality and directly and intimately experience reality itself. The answer to a koan is not a fixed piece of information. It is its own intimate and direct experience of the universe and its infinite facets. It is a state of consciousness. And that's from Dido Laurie. And then Joan Sutherland says, a koan does not seek to resolve an apparent duality by choosing one over the other, but by finding a third option that includes both in something bigger. So let me give you a couple of examples of these koans. And I think that we tend to think maybe of the koans as being particularly perplexing, obscure, but actually they come in a lot of different flavors, I think. And I think that Jiao Jiao offers us a great example of some different ways of working with koans and how the teacher and the, he has a teacher brought forth koans. So sometimes they can just be completely paradoxical, designed to kind of get us off our pins of thinking that we know what it is. And always I'm always touched because the student comes wanting on the one hand too, perhaps appear like they're so sincere by asking a really big question. So this monk says, what about it when I seek to be Buddha? And the master, Jiao Jiao in this case says, what a tremendous waste of energy. The monk said, what about it when I'm not wasting energy? The master said, in that case, you are Buddha, right? Paradox, we want things to go A to B, B to C, C to D, right? And this is just getting us out of that habitual way of thinking so that we're not locked into such a small mental or emotional experience of our lives. Sometimes they can be confounding. And I reference and refer everybody back to Shenzhen's wonderful talk that you gave last Wednesday on probably Jiao Jiao's most famous koan. Does a dog, a monk asked Jiao Jiao, does a dog have Buddha nature or not? And Jiao Jiao replied, moo. That's not moo like M-O-O. That's moo in a sense of meaning no or nothingness. Shenzhen had the wisdom not to give any direct answer to what the koan means. I'll follow in that tradition. We all get to figure them out ourselves. But just kind of like a confounding thing. Does a dog have Buddha nature? Moo, right? Okay, sometimes they're just about getting right here and having this sense of immediacy. Pay attention. A newly arrived monk said to Jiao Jiao, I have just entered this monastery. Please give me some instruction. Jiao Jiao asked, have you eaten your porridge yet? The monk replied, yes I have. Jiao Jiao said, then go wash your bowl. At that moment the monk was enlightened. So the student comes to the master. Please give me some instruction. I've traveled, I've pilgrim so far to be with you, old master. And then Jiao Jiao says, go wash your bowl. What does he mean? What is this experience? What is it in our lives to just go wash our bowl? Right? And we can think about washing our dishes. Tick-Not Han beautifully points to this as a way of practice. Do we wash our dishes just to get through them? Or do we wash our dishes in order to have a direct experience of what our life is in that moment of doing something even as mundane as washing dishes? To feel the temperature of the water, the contour of the cup or the fork or the spoon. The silkiness of the soap suds or whatever. We, in our conceptualized mind and thinking, we just numb out. We make an immediate judgment that that's not really worth my attention. And what are we saying? That's not my life. I'm at a point in life where when I, I look in the rear view mirror and there's way more road than there is when I look through the windshield. Nothing is to be wasted. And you don't have to wait to be my age to wake up and realize you don't wanna numb out, right? The sense of immediacy is part and parcel of having our direct experience. How am I doing on time? Pretty good. So here's another one. Zhouzhou asked a newly arrived monk, have you been here before? The monk said, no, master. Zhouzhou said, go have some tea. He then asked another monk, have you been here before? That monk said, yes I have, Zhouzhou. And yes I have. And Zhouzhou said, go have some tea. The monastery director said, master, you told the one who hadn't been here to drink tea and you told the one who had been here to go drink tea, why do you give them the same answer? Zhouzhou looked at him and said, director, go have some tea. So, you know, there's a lot that is to be unpacked in all of these. You know, this one I think particularly points to non-discrimination. Zhouzhou is not going to treat the newcomer versus the person who has been here before in a different way. And it's not even going to treat the quote unquote, you know, director in a different way. And what is that to go have tea, right? Instead of having instruction, go have tea and taste something and experience your life. Through all your senses, right? Just a few more. A monk asked, and I know this has traveled around through several people already in the practice period. A monk asked, what is the practice hall? Like our Zendo, right, where we sit. The master said, from the practice hall you have come, from the practice hall you will go. Everything, everywhere is the practice hall. There is no other place. So this is particularly, I think, pertinent for those of us in Zen who are inclined to think, you know, with all of these beautiful, you know, this beautiful form and altars and Buddhas all around, that I need to be a particular place in order to practice. But wherever our foot hits the ground, that's our practice hall, right? Everything, non-duality. Don't just think because you're here this evening that you're practicing. When you get in your car, when you go, you know, shopping, sand and line at the express checkout lane and somebody has 20 items in their basket versus 15, everywhere is