What follows is a dharma talk I offered to Morning Star Zen Sangha via Zoom on the evening of March 18, 2020. I explored Yunmen's "Medicine and Disease" from the Blue Cliff Record as COVID-19 spread around the world.
Yuanwu's Introduction:
For the clear-eyed person there are no holes to fall into.
Sometimes on the summit of a lonely peak the grass grows in profusion;
Sometimes in the middle of the bustling marketplace he is naked and exposed.
Suddenly the angry Nada reveals his three heads and six arms;
Suddenly Sun-face Buddha and Moon-face Buddha release their all-embracing merciful light.
The entire body is revealed in a speck of dust.
Becoming ordinary people, one blends with mud and mixes with water.
If one were suddenly to reveal the opening of the highest realization,
even the eye of a Buddha could not see it.
Even if a thousand sages were to appear, they would have to retreat three thousand miles.
Is there anyone who has attained and realized to this state?
To test, I cite this, look!
The Case:
YUNMEN, disciple of Xuefeng, instructing the assembly, said, “Medicine and sickness heal each other. All the earth is medicine. What is your self?”
Xuedou's Verse:
The whole earth is medicine.
Formerly and nowadays, why do they err on this point?
One closes the door and does not make a cart;
If one opens the way, it is naturally vast and void.
Wrong, wrong!
Although the nostrils touch the sky, they can still be pierced.
Dharma Talk:
Good evening everyone. I am so glad we can sit together like this.
We are living in a time of upheaval. Some of us may not be too worried personally about coronavirus. But others of us, being vulnerable, may be frightened and concerned for our own safety. We may also be worried about friends, relatives, or even entire populations like those suffering in Italy. Refugees in camps are terribly vulnerable. People all over the world are suffering. We are all in this together, and no border wall can protect us. That was always a fallacy.
Our lives have changed. Some of us are practicing physical distancing, and we may feel quite isolated. I am no longer able to teach at my high school as all my students have been sent home. Like many others, my son and daughter returned home from college. This is how my son will remember his freshman year. Many seniors who are about to graduate will do so without ceremony, without farewells. Millions of people across the US have lost or will lose their jobs. Epidemiologists tell us that over the weeks and months ahead, many people will become sick, some very sick, and some will die. These will be difficult times, and we don't know how long they will last.
If, like Avalokiteshvara, you are awake to the suffering of the world, your heart has no doubt been touched by this crisis. If you find yourself harboring strong feelings, there is good cause. You are not alone.
We are all doing our best to muddle through the challenges before us. Here we are meeting on the phone rather than in our normal sanctuary. I received an email from St. John’s today that our zendo will remain unavailable to us through at least April 6. It may be longer before we can practice in person together again. We don’t yet know, and living with uncertainty is a challenge for us human beings.
Still, though we are physically isolated from one another, we find ourselves connected again on the phone. What a little miracle these devises are. Of course, they can also be a problem, but I am grateful in this moment.
Perhaps sometimes we wish we were not so interconnected. The Washington Post reports that in its first wave, 40 percent of the people on the planet may be infected by the coronavirus, despite our efforts at washing hands and physically isolating. This virus shows how interconnected we really are.
Creating physical space between us now is important because it slows the transmission, preventing hospitals from becoming overwhelmed and giving researchers time to create a vaccine. Honoring this call to physically isolate is one way we can act on our vow to save all beings.
And so our zendo now is not in a building but stretches across many towns and through cell phone towers, satellites, and wifi connections. In fact, our zendo includes the whole universe. It always has.
And so we come to the central statement of this koan: Yunmen says, "The whole earth is medicine. What is your true self?"
This koan about medicine and disease is reminiscent of the Blue Cliff Record, Case 3. In this case, Great Master Ma was not well. The temple superintendent asked him, “Teacher, how has your venerable health been in recent days?” Master Ma said, “Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha.” Shortly thereafter, Master Ma died.
Sun-faced Buddha is said to live for 1,800 years, and Moon-faced Buddha lives for one day and one night. As he lay in his deathbed, Master Ma was a sun-faced Buddha and a moon-faced Buddha. He was healthy and sick. He was timeless, and just a brief existence.
We often think we are either sick or we are well. But actually we are always both. Even when we feel healthy, our bodies and communities are always fighting and spreading infections. And when we are unhealthy, there is a way that we are also well. We know that people live and die. And still, the Heart Sutra reminds us that there is also no birth and no death.
Shunryu Suzuki says, there are two “completely different viewpoints.” Sometimes we call these two perspectives absolute and relative truth. When we say everyone and everything has buddha-nature, or when we say there is no birth and no death, this is the absolute viewpoint. In Case 29 of Master Dogen's 300 Koans, one student asked as he stood over a coffin, "Alive or dead?" Daowu, his teacher, responded, “I won’t say.” From the perspective of the absolute, there is no knowing.
Everything is exactly thus. Just the sensation of your knees and the sound of my voice. Just a cough and a headache. Just this breath. “To lift up a speck of dust is to lift up the whole universe.” Practice is the way to have direct experience of this first principle, the absolute.
In one Buddhist Sutra, Manjushri said to Sudhana, “If there is something that is not medicine, bring it to me. I would like to see it.” Sudhana searched, but he couldn’t find anything that was not medicine, and so he told Manjushri, “There is nothing out there that is not medicine.” Manjushri said, “Bring me something that is medicine, then.” Sudhana reached down and picked up a blade of grass and handed it to Manjushri. Sudhana is demonstrating the absolute view. Everything is beyond good and bad, beyond the categories of the mind. Everything is medicine. Everything is thus.
But the story goes on. Manjushri held up the blade of grass, showed it to the assembly of monastics and said, “This medicine can kill people, and it can also bring them to life.” In commenting on this story, Daido Loori reminds us that "a vaccination is a small dose of 'sickness' that can prevent a full-blown illness. Oftentimes, poisons are used to heal, rather than kill. Digitalis is one." Chemotherapy is another. Medicine and sickness heal each other and disappear. Daido Loori goes on to say, from the absolute perspective, "sickness, in and of itself, is not a problem." Sickness and health are just two faces of Buddha. It’s our attachment to health that gives us pain.
So we are instructed to practice nonattachment. But nonattachment is not indifference and distance, as some people imagine when they first hear the dharma. Nonattachment is letting go of how things were in order to be with things as they are. You need a notion of two separate things in order to feel attachment: the thing you’re attaching to, and the self who’s attached. In nonattachment, on the other hand, there’s the profound intimacy of nonduality. There is coughing and the heat of a fever. There is sadness and grief. There is compassionate awareness. But there is no separate self. There is no fixation on any particular state. Everything flows.
Though we speak of two truths, actually there is just one reality. The two truths merely point to this one reality. We don't need to think about it or understand anything. In our practice, we see that the relative truth is exactly the absolute, and the absolute is exactly the relative.
Sooner or later we realize that though our minds divide this from that, reality is not divided into categories. That is a function of the mind. Mud and water are not two. Neither are life and death. Shakespeare wrote, "The earth that's natures mother is her tomb." Is the earth a place of birth or of death? The earth is life-and-death. We are life-and-death. This moment is also life-and-death. Now is both coming into being and disappearing. It is not just one way or the other. The great matter of life-and-death manifests as this dharma call.
Sometimes in Zen we are encouraged to "die to ourselves." Zen is medicine that poisons us so that we can open beyond our egoistic selves and appreciate undivided reality.
As Yunmen says, "All the earth is medicine; what is your self?" To study Buddhism is to study the relative truth of the self. And as Dogen says, "To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things." In other words, when we look for ourselves, we find that the self is not a separate thing but is made of non-self elements. In this moment, your awareness is my words, your body is rain and earth. There is no separate, fixed self anywhere. This may sound scary, but when we forget ourselves, there is no longer a hard line between you and all beings.
As we practice, we come to realize deep in our bones that though we exist as independent beings, there is also no gap between self and other, no gap between heaven and earth, no gap between medicine and sickness, and no gap between life-and-death.
Just this.
Still, beings suffer. We see this in the world and in ourselves. In closing the gap between self and other, we come to care about all beings as ourselves. From this integrated perspective, we are moved to save all beings, whom we love as one numberless family.
Where does this happen? Right here, right now, as we sit together in our infinite zendo.
Though we speak of two truths, actually there is just one reality. The two truths merely point to this one reality. We don't need to think about it or understand anything. In our practice, we see that the relative truth is exactly the absolute, and the absolute is exactly the relative.
Sooner or later we realize that though our minds divide this from that, reality is not divided into categories. That is a function of the mind. Mud and water are not two. Neither are life and death. Shakespeare wrote, "The earth that's natures mother is her tomb." Is the earth a place of birth or of death? The earth is life-and-death. We are life-and-death. This moment is also life-and-death. Now is both coming into being and disappearing. It is not just one way or the other. The great matter of life-and-death manifests as this dharma call.
Sometimes in Zen we are encouraged to "die to ourselves." Zen is medicine that poisons us so that we can open beyond our egoistic selves and appreciate undivided reality.
As Yunmen says, "All the earth is medicine; what is your self?" To study Buddhism is to study the relative truth of the self. And as Dogen says, "To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things." In other words, when we look for ourselves, we find that the self is not a separate thing but is made of non-self elements. In this moment, your awareness is my words, your body is rain and earth. There is no separate, fixed self anywhere. This may sound scary, but when we forget ourselves, there is no longer a hard line between you and all beings.
As we practice, we come to realize deep in our bones that though we exist as independent beings, there is also no gap between self and other, no gap between heaven and earth, no gap between medicine and sickness, and no gap between life-and-death.
Just this.
Still, beings suffer. We see this in the world and in ourselves. In closing the gap between self and other, we come to care about all beings as ourselves. From this integrated perspective, we are moved to save all beings, whom we love as one numberless family.
Where does this happen? Right here, right now, as we sit together in our infinite zendo.