Gail Sher Branching Streans 4th Talk Transcript (YouTube automated transcript) It's a privilege to be here today passing on to you the teachings of my great teacher Shunryu Suzuki-roshi and by passing on his teachings passing on the meaning of the teachings of all the great buddhist ancestors all the way back to Shakyamuni Buddha. A student was telling roshi about a conversation that he had overheard one person had said well what makes the roshi the roshi and the other person said because he has students you can't be a roshi without students and so this this this was being said to roshi and roshi said yes without students no teacher um and students encourage the teacher so right away right away there's the theme underlying the words of absolute independence there's a student and there's a teacher and interdependence without the student no teacher and all of it dependent co arising which is a a phrase uh often used in in zen dependent co arising just means everything depends on everything so we're not there is no individual existence um reb anderson roshi says that that's the disaster of humanity is that we think that we exist independently and we do um so then so okay roshi's having this conversation and then he says if it weren't for students he wouldn't be giving a lecture and if he and about and because he's giving a lecture he's studying and then as he studies he drifts off into studying whatever he wants and never mind the lecture and that's just how things are and it goes and that's just how the world operates so but then he says it's good you know um just to feel good we study and to feel even better we do zazen and eventually he says this purposeless practice will help us so now we have three just in this tiny little bit of things i just said there's dependent colorizing which which includes absolute independence and interdependence and then there's purposeless practice you've heard this purposeless stuff before so we've already had three important ideas brought to the brought to bear on this talk and another important idea is going to be to listen to the meaning behind what you hear listen to words meaning more than they seem to mean so um in buddhism um there's this concept of this is this because that is that um this is this because that is that and that is that because this is this and it goes back and forth like that and roshi says there's actually an echo that back and forth this is this because that is that that is that because this is this there's an echo and we should listen to the tone of it it being it being this dependent co arising that's this is this because that is that is dependent co arising and we should listen to the tone of it the tone um roshi makes a distinction between sound and noise sound being coming from our practice sound actually he says sound is both subjective and objective that if we hear a bell it's both coming from our practice and also it encourages students so um there's both subject and objective he says noise is just objective um then he clarifies very poetically and i want to read you this passage it's it's it's so nice so this is roshi talking out i may think the bird is singing over there but when i hear the bird the bird is me already actually i'm not listening to the bird the bird is here in my mind already and i am singing with the bird if you think while you're studying the blue jay is singing above my roof but its voice is not so good that thought is noise when you are not disturbed by blue jays blue jays will come right into your heart and you will be the blue jay and the blue jay will be reading something and then the blue jay will not disturb your reading when we think the blue jay is over my the blue jay over my roof shouldn't be there that thought is a more primitive understanding of being because of our lack of act of practice we understand in that way so that's that's the end of that passage um and i want to say that um i think he was giving this example of blue jays because Tassajara was uh rife with blue jays and uh they call cod all day long in this harsh harsh very demanding and complaining call and and they ate everything that we grew they were just all over all over the food that we were growing and Tassajara is located off of a 14 mile very windy dirt road and we needed to grow some of our food because it was hard to get it in um and actually most of the students detested the js and they actually had a meeting one time and talked about shooting shooting them that would that didn't happen but um roshi had his ear to the feelings of his students and i think he was um saying because of our lack of practice we understand in this way that they're just making a racket um we haven't taken them into our heart but i want to say that um the other day i was at someone's house that had a big backyard and right outside the window was um this tiny little bird feeder swinging on a branch and it was meant for tiny birds and there was a blue jay on another branch right near the bird feeder and it like i mean the blue jay was like determined to get the food inside of this tiny little bird feeder and it was truly making a racket and it was doing somersault so that i mean it it couldn't get the bullet the blue jay was about four times the size of this feeder and it was turning itself over and like pecking from the bottom and it was cracking from the side and then it would go off and just like fluff its feathers to rest a while then you come back i mean it must have come back like 15 times just while i was watching it it was i mean it was hilarious because i mean it was pitiful also because um there's no way this blue jay was going to get into this tiny bird feeder and it was so um dramatically having its mindset on doing so anyway i was just reminded of this whole time at Tassajara with all the blue jays and there this is talk about double-sided this is a really double double-sided is going to be another theme today and this is another very double-sided issue these blue jays so roshi says um a bird comes from the south in spring and goes back in the fall and this is the way things are kind of inter interrelated endlessly um and even though a bird stays in the same place for a long time the world is its home and so that's how birds live the world is a time often so then then he says um in zen sometimes we say that each one of us is steep like a cliff and no one can scale us we are completely independent but when you hear me say so this is roshi you should understand the other side too that we are endlessly interrelated if you only understand one side of the truth you can't hear what i'm saying roshi is saying if you don't understand zen words you don't understand zen you were not yet a zen student this is roshi is saying this very clearly zen words are different from usual words like double-edged swords they cut both ways you may think i'm only cutting forward but no actually i'm also cutting backward this is roshi watch out for my stick he says do you understand sometimes i scold a disciple no and the other students think oh that person has been scolded but it's not actually so where she says because because i can't scold one person over there i'm gonna scold the person over here but most people think oh that person's getting scolded but you should think if someone is scolded you listen you should be alert enough to know who is being scolded and that's how we train so then he tells a story about being um a young disciple i think he i think he was 16 when he left home and entered the monastery against his parents wishes and a group of the disciples were joining they had gone somewhere with their teacher and they were coming back and it was pretty late and japan apparently is covered with venomous snakes and so they were they were walking um maybe like through a woods and um the roshi their teacher stopped and said you all go ahead you have you're wearing tabi which are little socks um and i'm not so you go ahead and um i'll follow you and so they all scampered off and when when they all got back to where they lived the roshi said everyone please sit down and he said you know if i'm not wearing tabi you shouldn't be wearing tabi oh you i gave you a warning i said i'm not wearing tabi you should have taken your tabi off and we all went back walk back together under the same risk we should be alert enough to hear what is behind words that's all we should realize something more than what is being said and the teacher was saying when i give a message to you as straightforward really is i'm not i the teacher i'm not wearing tabby you don't just scamper off and pretend like you didn't hear that and then he tells another story about when he was at Eihiji and he was given and he was he was scolded um and the scolding was um don't open he was closing um the shoji the the shoji screens and he was scolded for closing um the left the left one and so the next day he closed um the right one and he was scolded again and he's so he scolded for this side and he was scolded for that side and he didn't understand and then he realized that when he um opened the left door there were guests there and then and also when he had opened the right door there were guests there but his point was is that no one told him why he was scolded he was just scolded and then he had to figure it out and that's how at a at a height and other monasteries that's how you're trained you listen you listen to the words and you know that there's meaning behind there's another meaning also that their words are double-edged