Recently, I was asked about the lineage of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center. I discussed the background and lineage of our founder's teacher, Soyu Matsuoka Roshi, last July, and encourage the interested reader to refer to that post.

This weekend, we are having a special sesshin with guest teacher Shohaku Okumura Roshi. Okumura was born in Osaka, Japan in 1948. He was ordained as a Soto Zen priest in 1970 by the late Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. After graduating from Komazawa University, he trained at Antaiji in Kyoto, and received Shiho (Dharma Transmission) from his teacher in February 1975. Okumura traveled to Massachusetts to practice with two of his Dharma brothers at Pioneer Valley Zendo in 1976 and stayed there until 1981 when he returned to Japan. Until 1984, he lived by himself as a caretaker of a small nunnery, living by takuhatsu (begging), practicing shikantaza and working on translations. He started the Kyoto Soto Zen Center and practiced there until 1992, and from 1993 until 1996 he was the Head Teacher of Minnesota Zen Center. In 1996, Okumura founded Sanshin Zen Community in Bloomington, Indiana, where he now lives and practices.

Last evening and twice today, Okumura Roshi gave some very interesting dharma talks. This afternoon's talk in particular was interesting to me since he discussed many of the sutras and scriptures that I have been discussing in this blog recently. Although the topic of his talks was ostensibly the 12-Fold Chain of Interdependant Origination, he did not limit himself to a scholarly dissertation of this teaching, but instead went into the practical aspects ("practical" as in "practice") of Zen Buddhism and provided direct and personal observations from his own practice.

In his talk, Okumura quoted the famed Song-dynasty poet Su Dongbo:

"The sound of the stream is his long, broad tongue;
The mountain, his immaculate body.
This evening's eighty-four thousand verses -
How will I tell them tomorrow?"

I briefly discussed this same verse in my blog entry of March 29, 2005. As Master Dogen states in the Keisei sanshoku ("Sound of the Stream, Form of the Mountain"), "In the great Kingdom of Sung there lived the Layman Toba, whose name was Soshuku, and who was also called Shisen." All these names, as well as Su Dongbo, refer to the Chinese poet So Toba (1036-1101). Toba was the poet's pen name and Soshoku was his formal name. He also used the name Shisen. Like Buddhist monks, men of literature in China often had many different names.

Dogen notes, "He seems to have been a real dragon in the literary world (literally, "the ocean of the brush"), and he studied the dragons and elephants of the Buddhist world;" that is, he read the writings of excellent Buddhist masters. "He swam happily into deep depths, and floated up and down through layers of cloud." Here, Master Dogen was praising his ability as a poet. As the story goes, Su Dongbo visited Lushan, a region of China famed for its beautiful scenery, hears the sounds of a mountain stream flowing through the night, realizes the truth, and composes his verse.

The "wide and long tongue" is one of the thirty-two distinguishing features of the Buddha. However, Okumura went on to say that upon realization of the truth, the poet no longer distinguished between the so-called insentient babbling of the brook and the chanting of sacred sutras, just as he no longer differentiated between himself and the objects of his perception. That is to say, on listening to the stream, he no longer experienced a separation between "himself" and "other," between subject and object, and the sound of the stream was the entirety of all existence at that moment.

The Sanskrit word namarupa means name (namu) and form (rupa). Namarupa is what our minds assign to the objects perceived by our senses, that is, it is the mind's conceptualization of reality. To transcend namarupa is to no longer differentiate between "this" and "that," including between "self" and "other." Everything becomes everything, the self is forgotten and the universe is seen as it really is, without our abstract concepts. This is realization.

There is much more I would like to say about this poem, about the Keisei sanshoku, and about the Sansuigyo (The Mountains and Rivers Sutra). This will have to wait for another day, however, as Okumura want on in his dharma talk and discussed the opening lines of the Genjo Koan, which I discussed back last October.

"When all dharmas are seen as the Buddha-Dharma, then there is delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life and there is death, there are buddhas and there are ordinary beings. When the myriad dharmas are each not of the self, there is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no ordinary beings, no life and no death. The Buddha's truth is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, and so there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, there are beings and Buddhas."

As Okumura pointed out, here Dogen is saying that as long as one looks outside oneself for enlightenment, one will continue to live in delusion, for "enlightenment" then becomes just another namarupa. However, if one simply practices zazen with no goal of enlightenment or Buddhahood or of anything, and abandons discrimination among self and others and transcends namarupa, then there is realization.

Of course, here I am just skimming the surface of over 2 1/2 hours of lecture and discussion, and am scarcely doing justice to the very subtle concepts involved. You can say this post is not so much a finger pointing at the moon as a broad backhanded wave in the general direction.