By Duncan Williams
Zen Buddhist Priest
Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Southern California
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, April 14, 2024)
I'm very happy that Reverend Matt did not ask me to give a sermon on the Luke passage. He told me... I have no idea. So, he told me I could find a Buddhist text that maybe resonated from my understanding of the text, with the passage from Luke we read. And my simplistic mind thought, "Maybe it has something to do with people not recognizing. The disciples didn't recognize Jesus, the risen Christ." And so not recognizing what's right in front of them. And then through some talking and a meal, some interaction, some recognition, and from that recognition, salvation.
And that kind of flow of things, we have something in Buddhism. And the passage that was read first, the first lesson, from Genjokoan, Actualizing the Foundational Point, by a Zen master called Dogen, who lived in the 13th century Japan, it's his text that is the kind of executive summary of what does it mean, to practice Buddhism? And in it, he says, and let me just repeat to remind ourselves, "To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the 10,000 things. When actualized by the 10,000 things, the body, mind of self and other drop away, and no trace of enlightenment remains, and this no trace continues endlessly." I don't know why, but I chose this one, this passage, as my Buddhist way of understanding what the Luke was trying to say.
So, in Buddhist way of... Sorry, we just provide some commentary on these lines, see if we can open our minds to what is trying to be said. "To study the Buddha way is to study the self." So, this means that to study Buddhism, to open up into the path of Buddhism, begins with a question. Who am I? And that's a koan, or that's a question we keep with ourselves all the time in Buddhism. To investigate the self, to study, "Who am I?" leads to a lot of things. When I was growing up in Japan, my mom is Japanese from Buddhist family, my dad is from the UK, so we'd also go to St. Alban's church in Tokyo, there's Anglican church. And I questioned, who am I? Am I Japanese or am I British? Am I Buddhist, or am I Christian? So, Buddhism felt very comfortable path when I was in my teenage years, when I first heard this sentence from Genjokoan. "To study the Buddha way is to study the self."
But one of the things that Buddhism teaches about the study of the self is that you can't become free if you don't see things clearly. If you aren't honest with an assessment of who am I? And Dogen, in another text, provides a metaphor for understanding this verse. It's called the Tenzo kyokun. In English, it'd be Instructions to the Cook. And inside of the monastery, in a Buddhist monastery, the different divisions like meditation, people that teach that. But then there's a cook, the kitchen. And it's a very important division inside the monastery. And the main instruction that Dogen gives to cooks, how do you become a zen cook? He says the following.
Number one, you should know the ingredients in the kitchen pantry. And number two, you should cook in such a way with those ingredients for the sake, not just of the physical nourishment of all of the people you're cooking for, but also their spiritual nourishment. That's a basic lesson of that text. And, of course, there's a metaphor also, right? It's true, too. You have to do those things in the kitchen, but the kitchen is your self. And sometimes you have great ingredients, seasonal vegetables, good ingredients, but you can also have too much harvest of radishes and they're starting to rot. What do you do? Maybe you pickle them. You have to do something, even with the rotting ingredients.
And the difference between just a regularly good cook and a Zen cook is that you have to take those things that are not so good in the kitchen pantry, and transform it into something that's helpful, not just for yourself but for other people. That's what a Zen cook is. And so when they say to study the self, it means we have to have a mirror to honestly assess, "Oh, this part of my personality is okay, but I've had some things not so good, also." But not to be frightened about that. To investigate it, to dive deep into how do we transform even the things that are not so good about our selves? So, that's line one.
Line two, four lines. "To study the self is to forget the self." What does that mean? So, one thing is that in the Buddhist tradition, when we talk about the self, we don't talk about it in the way that maybe, in other traditions, we think about the self or soul as being permanent and independent. But rather, we talk about it as being impermanent and interdependent, meaning that our self is always dynamically changing, and that we think we are autonomous, independent being selves, but actually, we're interlinked with everyone.
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This pencil right here, I'm just picking up, it's made of wood. And if you look into this pencil, you can see the clouds, you can see people that work in forestry. This pencil isn't just a pencil. You need clouds for rain, for trees, and you need people in the forestry to make this pencil. So, this pencil's interlinked with so many things in our world. That kind of idea, that to study the self means that we are open to understanding how our selves is interlinked with everything else, and how our selves are always dynamically changing. So, we have to forget any kind of preconception of what we think about who we are.
And so to forget also means... It's an instruction from Dogen about how do we do our spiritual life, whether you're Buddhist or... As much as our spiritual life is about, let's say, attaining a sense of peace and equanimity, of cultivating qualities like compassion and patience, as much as it's about attainment, this kind of... We have to open the hand, we have to let go. And the main idea of forgetting the self is to let go, not just of preconceptions, but let go, let go, let go. Because actually, already, freedom and liberation is there. We don't recognize it, but it's already there.
So, let me take this next, third line. "To forget the self is to be actualized by the 10,000 things." 10,000 things is just, in classical Chinese or Japanese literature and poetry, it just means everything, the myriad things. Your self is made up of myriad things, it's like the pencil. But we have a different metaphor, it's called the jewel net of Indra. It's like if you imagine a tennis court net, you know those little knots in it? And in each knot, there's a jewel. And this court, it's not like a tennis court net, in the sense that it's infinite. It expands in every direction, with lots of these little knots where they have jewels. Those jewels, that's our selves.
But these jewels are cut in such a way as if the surface is like a mirror. So that when you look into one jewel, when you look at one's self, when you look at your self, your father, your... Any particular jewel, you can see reflected all the other jewels. And because all of the other jewels are also all reflecting other jewels, we see each other in each other. We're interlinked. It matters, every one of us, what we do. Whether we like it or not, it also matters what everybody else does, because it's interlinked to what we are.
Let me go to the last line. "When actualized by the 10,000 things, the body and mind of self and other drop away, and no trace of enlightenment remains, and this no trace continues endlessly." [Japanese 00:11:21], drop away. It's letting go. Freedom comes somewhere in between self and other. When the self and other drop away, that in-between space is where creativity is, imagination is, possibility and hope and freedom. And we see that when we can see each other, and we can see what it means when we acknowledge and recognize what is actually in front of us, to the sides of us, behind us.
I'm going to end with a little anecdote. It's just a casual story, but I think it'll illustrate what I'm trying to say. It's about Joshu Sasaki Roshi, one of the Zen teachers that ended up coming to the United States. But, as many people, I was ordained when I was... 30-some years ago. When I was 22. But typically in Japan, many young boy, you enter the monkhood or priesthood when you are a young person. 11, 12, 13, like that. He was 13, Joshu Sasaki, when he first went to the monastery.
And it's quite scary to go to monastery, and there's so many things you have to learn. And the most scary is you have to meet the abbot, the Zen master, the teacher of the place. And you have to do these formal bows, three bows. So, he was like that. He went in with two other kids around his age, he was 13. And the Zen teacher tried to help them not be so anxious and said, "Have some cup of tea." And as they're having tea and maybe feeling this not so stressful, he said, "I'm going to ask you boys a question, and let me know your understanding at this point." And he said the question was, "How old is the Buddha?"
And the boy to Joshu Sasaki's left, he said, immediately, "I know the answer. The Buddha is 2,500 years old." Teacher's like, "That's pretty good. The Buddha purportedly lived, historical Buddha, about 500 years before Christ. And so, roughly, that's pretty good calculation." Then the boy to the right, he was asked, "Do you have anything to add?" And he said, "The Buddha is timeless." "Not bad, for 12-year-old boy. The cosmic Buddha, without time, beyond concepts of human constructions of time, not bad." And then he was like, "Do you have anything left to say, Joshu?" So, the boy in the middle, Joshu Sasaki, said, "The Buddha's 13." "Not bad, for 13-year-old in a pressure-filled situation to come up with that answer." And of course, the Buddha is both 2,500 years old, is timeless, and 13. So, when do we recognize our selves? How do we study our selves? How do we forget our selves? How do we become actualized by everything and everyone? So, I leave you with, look to your right, look to your left, behind you, in front of you. The Buddha, the Christ, is not far away.