(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - Brothers in the Dharma. So we've called this retreat, and I'm told it's one of the longest ever titles of a retreat, entering the tiger's cave, tangling eyebrows with Zen masters. And it was my idea to have a retreat on this theme. And I must admit, I think that I must have been out of my mind when I suggested the theme to Padma Dhaka. What was I thinking? Well, I wasn't thinking particularly. Padma Dhaka kept asking, well, what's the theme going to be? And in the end, I just said, I'll just do it on this or something like that. Not quite sure, not quite clear what that would mean. Yeah, so what was I thinking when I suggested that we devote ourselves this winter to a search for the tiger's cave, the tiger's lair, the abode of the Zen master. The tiger's cave. Human footprints lead there, but no human footprints are coming out. Men have gone in, but apparently no men have returned. They've disappeared, presumably consumed by the tiger. To liken the Zen master to a tiger is very striking indeed. As you all know, tigers are immensely powerful, dangerous, immensely dangerous, incredibly dangerous, huge, and also incredibly beautiful, orange and black. Those incredible eyes. Huge, prowling with immense dignity, tremendously agile when they move, marvelously tranquil when lying at ease with all that latent power. So it's quite something to liken the Zen master to the tiger, the tiger in his cave. And this was brought home to me quite strongly a few weeks ago, I was visiting my mum and there's a lot of TV on. And fortunately there were quite a few sort of natural history programs, which I find are often the best programs to watch. And this one was about Bill Ody, the ex-goody, for those of you who know that, but who's now a quite well respected natural history person. And he was, he'd gone to the Jim Corbett National Park in Northern India, this incredible, or jungle really, which has been preserved. And he was going there looking for tigers, but he was incredibly shaky and nervous. And eventually, you know, very, very shaky, wanted to see a tiger, but he was very, very nervous about it. And eventually he told this story, story of a friend of his who many years before had been visiting the park with, you know, walking around it with a guide and a party. And as I think we're going back to the camp, they saw huge paw prints in the mud. And the guide said it's a tiger. And the tigers nearby, there's a tiger nearby. So they were going back to the camp. And Bill Ody's friend said, look, I want to go back and take a photo of a particular bird, quite a common bird. I noticed when I want to go and photo the bird. So he went back and suddenly the, it was quite a bit of time, but the guide and the party suddenly heard this cry, this shout, they ran back and they found Bill Ody's friend, dead in a clearing, mauled by a tiger. What was peculiar was when he was taken home and they brought home his effects, they developed his film from the camera. And the last shots in the film are the tiger coming out of jungle, walking around the clearing, he's taking shot after shot. The last shot is of this huge face. The mouth open, the paws up, that was the last shot. You didn't see the photos, he described it incredibly vividly, but that was the last thing he did. It was extraordinary hearing him relate this tale. And Bill Ody thought that his friend had actually returned not to photograph this bird, but to photo the tiger, photograph the tiger. He really had courted danger and he didn't return, but you have this weird photographic record. So Bill Ody was actually very scared, but obviously fascinated too. He obviously wanted to see a tiger, but terrified at the same time. They're going around on elephants and they see the remains of carcasses, where tigers have been, deer and so on. And at the end of his stay, at the end of his visit, there's a kind of disturbance and a tiger's come up to the compound. And then they just, you just see a shot of this tiger in the distance, in the grass, walking away, looking the other way they move, the way they walk. It's just so, it's so incredibly beautiful, fascinating and dangerous. And he was really stirred up by this. So this, when you start likening a zen master to a tiger, and of course, the Chinese knew what tigers were, knew what they could do. Well, you're making a very, very strong statement indeed. And of course, this sort of fascination and this sense of danger can be like that for us in the spiritual life, in the Buddhist life. Maybe even you feel this way about this retreat. This retreat may have seemed fascinating to you. You know, you've drawn to it. Feel that there's something that you need here, whether or not you noticed it was on zen masters. You know, you felt, well, there could be something very good here, something important. But maybe at the same time, maybe it's a little bit scary too. I know people sometimes feel like that way when they come on retreat, come to Papaloka. They're kind of attracted, but a bit scared at the same time. There's all those, you know, new people, maybe weird people there. You know, and you're doing all that practice living in a different way. It's kind of attractive, but at the same time, feels a bit dangerous. And I have to admit, I feel a bit that way myself when it comes to retreat. So even though I've been doing these things for years and years and years, I feel that way myself, a very attractive, very interested too. In a particularly with, you know, following a theme like this where I'm a little bit out of my, you know, usual areas of thought, let's say. And I'm going to be meeting new people, different people. I don't quite know where we're going. I don't know all of you. I don't quite know where we're going. I've got an intuition as it were where I want to go. And I have a practice. But I don't know what I or what you will be entering. But nonetheless, perhaps for that very reason, I want to go into it. I want to go towards the Tigers cave, go towards the Tiger, follow the footprints, the footprints that don't return. Yes. So for some of you, it might come as something of a surprise to hear that the Zem masters of India, China, Korea, and Japan are likened to Tigers and that they're above their state, if you like, is the Tigers cave. The enlightened master of Tiger, surely an enlightened man should be likened to something a bit more gentle, like a dove, or a lamb, or something docile and nice and warm and cuddly, you know, like a good dog, you know, a nice retriever or a Labrador, always pleasant, or something like the perfect, maybe a St Bernard or something, the perfect father or mother, perhaps, always understanding, always sympathetic, no matter what we do, no matter what we get up to, always there for us to stroke and caress. Certainly the enlightened man, the awakened man in Buddhist tradition of all schools is always said to be a man of genuine love and compassion, of genuine empathy, of real love and compassion, the love and compassion that springs from wisdom that is the same, in fact, as wisdom. But we need to take care when we hear this, that the enlightened man is a man of loving compassion. We need to take care that we don't confuse the loving kindness of an enlightened master with what passes for love and compassion in ordinary life. Which is so often more like pity and sentimentality, something that indulges out every win and fancy and that, in fact, shields us from reality, shields us from ourselves. The teachings of the enlightened ones, the awakened ones, do not shield us or comfort us. In the end, they bring us to the way things are. That is what true love and compassion does. It brings you to what you are and what's actually going on. If you want an illustration of this, it's a very, very good film which we saw the other night in the community called spring, summer, autumn, winter and spring, which is a genuinely Buddhist film set in Korea, about a Korean kind of Zen master and his young charge, and you really get the impression of what real love and compassion is. So, for this reason, because we're not talking about sentiment and pity, the Buddha is frequently likened to powerful beasts. He's likened to a lion, traditionally the king of beasts, and his teaching is said to be the lion's roar. Traditionally, when the lion roars in the jungle, all the other animals are silent. So, the Buddha's proclamation of truth silences our opinionatedness, silences our fourth views, silences our petty mindedness, opens up, in fact, a vast silence that calls us to walk into it and look at ourselves, look at our life as it is. Sometimes the Buddha is likened to the great bull elephant or just the great bull. Last summer, I was really delighted with walking in one of the fields down the road by the river. There were other cows and calves coming towards me, and then I realised behind that there was this huge bull, a great, dun-coloured bull, beautiful creature, and he just kind of moved through the crowd of cows and calves, you know, with such dignity and power, kind of all, you know, all kind of in there, in every sinew, a really impressive beast. And when we move through that field pretty quickly, I can tell you. Harquin, the great Zen master of 18th century Japan, one of his disciples once said, "Our master moved like a bull and glared like a tiger." And Buddhist training is sometimes likened to training the bull. We are the bull, or our mind is the bull, which is the same as saying, that we are the bull. And in Zen tradition, you get the famous bull herding or ox herding pictures. And here you have this very lovely set of pictures and verses. And our mind is likened to a wild bull that's gone astray, and it's just all over the place. We need to find that bull, tame that bull. We need, in other words, to tame all that energy, power, strength. The mind is regarded as incredibly powerful, incredibly creative. By mind, we don't just mean up there, we mean us, us, our whole being. So you need to find the bull and tame it. So it expresses awakening, it expresses enlightenment. And there's one picture that does occur to me that's incredibly evocative, where in attaining the bull isn't about suppressing this creature, but the ox herd, the bull herd, is sitting on the back of the bull, playing a flute, really happily going along, gambling along. The energy isn't repressed, it's tamed, channeled, harnessed, into endless creativity. Sangharachita, Monty Sangharachita, our teacher, the founder of our order, speaks of the tiger's cave as the symbol, the image for what's called Maha Shanyita, the great emptiness, the great emptiness, which is the realisation of norm duality. All distinctions between self and other, this and that, likes and dislikes, Sanghara and Nirvana, worldly and spiritual, are utterly consumed, utterly dissolved. Sangharachita says, this is the great void, because all of us, even the most spiritual of us, are afraid of disappearing into it. We want to cling on to our dualistic way of thinking, self and others, this and that, but eventually they must all go. The great emptiness is like the tiger's cave. Many tracks lead into it, but none come out. Ultimately, your fear of it is also the reason you want to go into the great emptiness, because you and your fear will never come out. It swallows up every product of our dualistic vision. So here we get some idea of the motive for going into that tiger's cave. Our fear, which is a symptom of our self-centredness, of protection, that self-centredness, that egotism, if you like, is such a burden. Pamadaka said very generously that I'm not self-preoccupied, but I can assure you I am, because I experience that self-preoccupation as a great weight. Self-preoccupation, a kind of burden of our egotism, it really does way us down. It gets in the way, it limits our freedom, our creativity. When we enter the tiger's cave, yes, we disappear, but in another sense we reappear, we're reborn, we're recreated. And you could actually characterize the spiritual life in these terms. It's not that there's going to be one cataclysmic dissolution in the tiger's cave, and then a wonderful rebirth. It's happening all the time, a process of dissolving and renewing. Sometimes people complain that they don't feel free, they don't feel free, I can feel it, I can feel it, I can feel free. They don't feel satisfied, that they're not living creatively, that they're not living deeply enough. And often we come up with all kinds of reasons for this, it's our upbringing, it's the government, it's the state, it's other people, it's him, it's her. Above all, it's them, it's somebody else's fault that I'm not free, I'm not satisfied, I'm not creative. But that is never the Buddhist analysis. It's never the Buddha's analysis. The final Buddhist analysis is that it's you, that it's me. That's why we aren't creative, that's why we aren't free, because we're just so stuck in ourselves. The great Zen teacher Yun Men was once asked by a disciple, what's the problem? What's the problem? Somebody just went up to it. What's the problem? Meaning, what's my problem? What's the problem of life? What's the problem of existence? What's, why is there suffering? But he just said, what's the problem? And Yun Men was very direct, famous, for very direct, turning pivotal words, as they called them, words that can really bring about a transformation, very straightforward. And he said, what's the problem? You don't know the stench of your own shit. Really drastic, direct. Because telling the monk, you don't know that self-centeredness, selfishness really stinks. It really does stink. When something is stuck, when something doesn't move, when something doesn't flow, it stinks. Go up to the nature reserve, see the stagnant pools of water. They stink. They really stink because the water doesn't flow. When we fix ourselves, when we limit ourselves, we start to stink. The problem is, we don't know that we stink. And in the Zen tradition, yes, we find the Zen adept, the Zen master likened to a tiger. Or the Zen adept is described as one who is able to meet and wrestle with tigers. It can even capture tigers, who's able to go up to a tiger, look it in the eyes, and even pull the tiger's whiskers. There's a lovely story from the Zen tradition of an emperor who has a tiger. He's got a tiger, and he's got it in a cage. It's one of his pets, and he asks one of his samurai to go into train it without a sword. So the samurai goes in with his fan and does all this stuff. And yes, the tiger's kind of all right with that, although the samurai is sweating and very frightened. But then the Zen master goes in, and he doesn't do anything, and the Zen master is completely, and the tiger is completely calm and at ease, and the samurai says, well, you have to know that Zen is always superior to samurai. But these metaphors of going up to the tiger, capturing tigers, pulling their whiskers, looking into their eyes, these metaphors describe the way in which Zen practitioners communicate with the Zen master. When you meet a Zen master according to the tradition, you don't meet him for a pleasant chat about Buddhist philosophy over a cup of tea. You don't meet him to kind of talk about your problems. You don't meet up to kind of have witty conversations with all sorts of Zen talk about that neither of you are really there. The meeting is an intense and risky exchange. An exchange where the only thing that matters is enlightenment, is awakening. An exchange where anything at all could happen. Anything can happen because the Zen master just doesn't care what he does to bring you to realisation. He's not bothered whether you like him. He's not bothered whether you're going to be offended by him. All he's concerned about is to wake you up, to bring you to realisation. When you're fully prepared for that, you're prepared to meet him in that spirit, to meet him in that way. This kind of exchange, this kind of meeting in the tiger's cave is brought out especially in the great Chinese collections of stories and sayings of the great masters, particularly the blue cliff record and the gateless gate. These are these very short stories about weird encounters between Zen masters and Zen masters and their disciples. I hope to refer to these a bit more in the course of the retreat, but let me just give you some of the descriptions from the blue cliff record of some Zen masters, just some of the particular ones, and then more general descriptions. Just try and get a feeling for what these guys are like. It gives you perhaps quite a different impression of what an awakened being is like and what spiritual life is like. There's one of my favourites is the great Huang Po, who was seven feet tall. On his forehead there was a lump like a round pearl. He understood Zen by nature. The art light in his eyes pierced people. Well imagine coming into the shrimon with one po, leading the meditation, perhaps striding around, making sure you're sitting properly. Or there's the nun, a woman Zen master, known as iron grindstone you. Iron grindstone you, what a name. You can go picture her, can't you? Really, rugged woman, iron grindstone you. And it said of her that she was like a stone struck spark. Like a lightning flash. Hesitate and you lose your body and your life. And matter meeting somebody like that, like a stone struck spark, like a lightning flash. Hesitate and you lose your body and your life. She was also said to have an active edge that was sharp and dangerous. That's a wonderful saying. And there's two two. I mean, only for Chinese and Japanese and Korean scholars here, or who've been there, forgive my pronunciation. There's two two who was plain and truthful. Whenever a question was put to him you saw his guts as soon as he opened his mouth. Without any superfluous effort, he would immediately cut off the question his tongue. Don't take that, literally. And then there's more general descriptions of the master, the addict. He overturns the polar star and reverses the earth, the axis. He captures tigers and rhinos, distinguishes dragons from snakes. One must be a lively acting fellow in our school. And then cut through nails and shear through iron. Then you can be a genuine master of our school, cut through nails and shear through iron. Then you can be a genuine master of our school. If you run away from arrows, how could you possibly be a competent addict? And finally, a member of our school can kill a man's false understanding in the blink of an eye. So I think you can get a picture of what these characters are like. There's then masters live to cut through the nails and shear through the iron of our false understanding and our restricting habits that think the things that keep us in a state of restriction and limitation and pain. They wield, it's that they say, the dual sword of the diamond king. The sword of transcendental wisdom, the sword that destroys, but it's also said to be the sword that gives life. They are themselves, this sword of wisdom and compassion. They cut down your false understanding only so that you can develop in wisdom. So searching for the tiger's cave, searching for the tiger is dangerous. But it is also, of course, the entrance into liberation, the entrance into boundless freedom. So searching for the tiger's cave, entering the tiger's cave means to start with just loosening up, freeing up, freeing up our fixed ideas about ourselves. This is what we're going to be doing on the retreat through our meditation, our discussion groups, our workshops, just relaxing with one another, through yoga, through doing the washing up. We're just going to be dissolving slowly, gently our rigidities, our rigidities, our fixedness. Just trying to get a bit more of a flow in our lives, our flow between ourselves and others, our flow between ourselves and life. Maybe we won't experience the great emptiness, but if we begin to loosen, if we begin to take out some of those pegs, those nails, cut through that iron that hold us in, hold us down, then that will be a very wonderful thing. If we just start to do that just a little bit, that's a very wonderful thing. So approach this retreat in a fresh, an open way. If you're new to things at Pamaloka, if you're new to Pamaloka, or even if you're new to Buddhism, that is a really wonderful thing. That's a great thing, really treasure that, because you're going to be so fresh and open. You won't be burdened with ideas and expectations. You'll have what the Zen people call the beginner's mind, the beginner's mind. The beginner's mind is a really wonderful thing. First time I meditated, I was just so, well, excited. First time I went to a class, just so excited, I thought, anything can happen here. Anything is possible. And a sense of real potential and possibility. I remember after I was ordained as well, this feeling of anything could happen. Anything could arise from now on. And that was such a fresh experience that, in a way, looking back, you get burdened by knowledge, burdened by ideas. So keep that freshness, that fresh approach. You're in a very strong position if you're new to things. But those of us who've been around for a while, we too need to cultivate that fresh, that open beginner's mind. It's so easy to get jaded, so easy to get jaded. It's so easy to think that we know. We know about Buddhism. I've been practicing for Buddhism for 30 years. I know what Buddhism's about. I know what the dance is about. I've been on loads of retreats. I know what retreats are. I know who we are. I know who I am. I know what others are like. Really work on dropping that. Let it go. Be a beginner again. We're all beginners. Actually, we're all beginners all the time. This moment right now has never occurred before. Actually, it's never going to happen again. I've actually never spoken to any of you before. None of you have I spoken to before. None of you have listened to me before. I've never given a talk before. Every moment, according to tradition, is completely unique. We're all completely different in this moment. Every moment brims with immense possibility. So try to see it like that. Try to see things in a fresh and open way. Maybe then we can just have some little sense of what it's like to be in the tiger's cave. As I said last night quoting Dogen, "You are only alive right now." So make the most of every moment. Don't allow each moment to be burdened and weighed down by the habits of the past and all the expectations of the future. Try to let go of all that. So if we can loosen like this, it will be a really wonderful thing. One thing we won't be doing on this retreat is playing pseudo-Zen games. I want us above all else to enjoy ourselves. But let's none of us pretend to be Zen masters. You even find in the tradition, you know, criticism of this. You know, they'll have a discussion of a particular exchange between master and disciple and the commentator will say, "Nowadays people put a glare in their eyes and they shout at people thinking that they're Zen masters." So even this was going on in the seventh century, in the eighth century. But there's this kind of false Zen. So we won't be doing any of that. We won't be doing any weird things and calling it Zen. Of course if the weird things naturally arise, that's a different thing. And in fact, this word Zen these days covers a real multitude of sins. Weird behaviour, must be Zen. Minimal design, must be Zen. You know, I was trying to hear it on arts programs. I was listening a few months ago to a discussion of a play and the reviewers were saying, "Very Zen, very Zen." And you heard the description, "There's nothing to do with Zen. It's just very minimal." But it's got nothing to do with Zen. Sometimes Zen is presented as something sort of separate from Buddhism, even superior to Buddhism. But this of course is not how the Zen tradition sees itself. It sees itself as continuing and developing Buddhism as taught by the Buddha and developed in India. And you get some idea of this from the actual meaning of the word Zen. You've all heard this word Zen, but what does it actually mean? Well the word Zen is the Japanese attempt to pronounce the Chinese word "chan". And "chan" itself is the Chinese attempt to pronounce the Indian Sanskrit word "diana", which means meditation. So you've got "diana", "chan", "z" - "diana", "india", "chan", "china", "z" - Japan. You've also got - it mustn't miss out Korea because Korea is very important in developing the Zen tradition. The word there is "sun", I think that's how you say it. So "diana" means meditation. Meditation not in the sense of attempting to concentrate, which is what we're doing most of the time. That's "bavana", attempting to concentrate or develop a particular quality. "diana" means absorption. The mind thoroughly saturated in a higher or a deeper, whatever metaphor you prefer, a higher or deeper consciousness, a more profound level of being. It's a highly concentrated, integrated state where you're at ease, blissful, clear, and you have a sense of your consciousness expanding and softening. And in classical Indian Buddhist tradition different, "diana" is a distinguished, higher levels of consciousness, some of which have no discursive thought whatsoever. All that restless mental activity is completely subsided and there's this deep, profound concentration and presence. And of course it's very important to have this experience, a sense that through your meditation, you are deepening your concentration, you are becoming more integrated, that your consciousness is expanding, that there's greater clarity in awareness, greater happiness, greater satisfaction. Very important here when we talk about this, it's not about straining to get something. I think when I was first meditating I thought, "Gotta get into diana, gotta kind of squeeze myself into diana, get that diana!" And of course that's completely self-defeating. You're not trying to grab and get anything, you just practice and let things unfold and let that deepening concentration and happiness and clarity just naturally unfold. Diana, though, is not the end of spiritual life. Diana can be gained and it can be lost. It's not a permanent attainment. You know, we notice this in our experience that we can be going along very, very nicely. Everything kind of flowing very well, you know, things are coming together and then suddenly something happens and we're just completely thrown. Completely thrown and we're all over the place. So it's not a permanent attainment. For a permanent attainment we need wisdom, Pragnya. Seeing things as they really are. Your concentrated, positive mind enables you into your life, into yourself, into the way things are. And at some point there's a direct face-to-face realization. A realization, say, of the impermanence of all things, the flow, the changing nature of things. A realization that there are no differences between yourself and others, that nowhere are there fixed and separate entities at all. You have a sense of things interpenetrating with one another. Here, Deanna and Pragnya come together. Your profound meditation and your clear seeing are not different. This is a very important point that's brought out particularly by their great sixth patriarch of Chinese Chan Zen Buddhism, Queen En. He says that meditation and wisdom are not different. Meditation is the lamp. Pragnya is the light. They're not separable. This is a very, very important teaching with a lot of ramifications, which I hope to explore a bit later on. So the Chan school, the Zen school, is referring to meditation in this highest sense. The aim is to experience the way things are directly through meditation. And in this sense, Chan and Zen is no different at all from any other major Buddhist tradition. The aim of all major Buddhist schools is to attain reality through meditation. And for that to happen, of course you need other things as well. You need ethical practice, observance of the Buddhist precepts. You need study of the Buddhist scriptures. You need devotional practice. You need spiritual friendship, a simple life, serving others, even work, participation in the arts and so on. You need all these things, a total life to bring you to realization. So Chan and Zen is no exception to this tradition. In Chan and Zen, there's a great emphasis on ethical practice. There's study of the scriptures. Sometimes people think that Zen, you don't study, you don't have to think. Well, that's a travesty of the tradition. There is study, real study, not head study, but being study. There's devotional practice, there's spiritual friendship, there's definitely the arts. Chan and Zen are extraordinary rich in the arts of painting, calligraphy, poetry, sculpture, drama, even, and music. There's one school, in fact, which is based on flute playing. The master was a flute player, flautist, and referred to in the tradition. No drama, as very, very strongly influenced by Zen realization. And there's work as well. A day of no working is a day of no eating, said the great Pichang cooking as spiritual practice. Dogon's famous instructions to the cook. And there's a deep commitment in the Chan and Zen tradition to what's called the Bodhisattva path. That you're doing all this, that you're practicing the way of enlightenment for the benefit of all. You want to help others. So it's all there in the Chan and Zen tradition. They're all expressions of meditation and wisdom. Dogon says, and we'll look at this point a bit later, practice is enlightenment. Enlightenment is practice. So Chan and Zen are about total Buddhist practice. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
