Good morning. Today our speaker is Laurie Sinaki, who is the classic case of maids without production. Laurie is a long-time senior student and resident here, and she has had and does perform so many functions that I think we should say she's one of the seismic supports. Lori is the wife of our Vice Abbott, Hozan Al-Zinaki, and the mother of two much stronger children than we see here today. When I went upstairs to ask Laurie if there was anything new, a friend of hers was up there who gave her a big hug and said, Laurie is the best friend in the world and I think we can all feel that way.

[01:05]

So, Laurie, we look forward to your talk. Thank you. Hi. That's silly. We're going to talk. I'm going to talk and you're going to talk. Nice to see you. Do we have a baby here too? Hi baby. You know that baby? You know that baby, Sam? So I have a question for you. What the heck are we doing here? I don't know. You don't? Does anyone? Any of you? Younger people? Maybe. Maybe? Well, you could say one thing... I mean, we're... We're sitting. That's right, we're sitting.

[02:06]

Yeah, maybe. And it has something to do with Buddha, right? Does it have something to do with Buddha? Maybe you don't even think about that. Sort of. It's kind of like a religion, right? It's partly a religion, right? What we do, partly a religion. And so, and this religion, Zen Buddhism, we share a lot of things with other religions, right? Like, we try to be kind, not harm others. We try to be honest. Many things that other religions have, right? But I wanted to talk I want to talk today about one thing that we believe in that other religions, or we have, you could say, that other religions don't have. It's not that they disbelieve. What do you think that is? Anybody? Any ideas? Yes?

[03:06]

Obedience? I would say no, actually. We have some of that, and you're doing, you're exemplifying that very well yourself. But not everybody is. Well, what I'm thinking about, the thing I'm thinking of is questions and answers, or questions and responses. We believe in questions and responses. What other religions believe in that? They do? Yeah, because they ask questions all the time. That's true, like in Judaism, the four questions. Yeah, you're right. I shouldn't try to make a claim that Buddhism has something that other religions don't have. So one of the things that's written down in the Bibles of Buddhism, especially Zen, one of the things that's written down are famous questions and answers. Many, many, many famous questions and answers. And, in fact, there's a lot of different questions with a lot of different answers, but one thing that there is a lot of is the same question with a whole lot of different answers.

[04:18]

So one of the questions that they ask a lot is, well, the teacher, and sometimes the teacher is asking the question of the student, but often the student is asking the question of the teacher. So all these stories, they're not just random questions and answers. stories between a teacher and a student. So like, you know, you do that in your school, right? So your teacher sometimes will ask you a question, right? And then sometimes you ask your teacher a question, right? So it's like that. But that's what we have in our Bible, our Bibles. The teacher asked this and the student said this, or the student asked this and the teacher said this. So one of these repeating questions is, where do you come from? The teacher asks the student, where do you come from? Um... Where did you come from, Sam? Um... I'm from California. California, right. And that's a very traditional answer, actually. Yeah.

[05:23]

Leo? I came from my mom. You came from your mom. That's a good answer. And in fact, the way we say it in English, it has a kind of double meaning, and it also has a kind of double meaning in English, where we say, where are you coming from, is a kind of like, where are you coming from? Like, what is your state of mind right now? So you're answering, and you can say, in California, or from my mother, but does that reflect also your state of mind? So where are you coming from in terms of your state of mind? Some people are wiggly. Some people are having a wiggly state of mind. That's normal. That's normal. Wiggly is normal. But then there's another question. The main one I wanted to bring up to you is a famous question. A really simple question. And it is, what is Buddha? Can you think about, David?

[06:24]

A person? A person. The enlightened one? The enlightened one. That's right. But can you think about, can you think of why they keep, why they'd want, you know, like why wouldn't we want to just think that was Buddha? Can you think, can you think of why we wouldn't want to just sort of settle on that as Buddha? Because they can't talk? Right. That's right. And Mira? small and it doesn't move. Right. That's exactly right. Leo? So I wanted to tell you some of the famous answers to this question, what is Buddha, and then see what you think about it. One ancient teacher said, the fire god goes around looking for fire. What is Buddha?

[07:24]

The fire god goes around looking for fire. Fire? Who's fire then? What do you think that, can you think of what that might mean? He's looking for Buddha? Someone's going around looking for something. Someone's going around looking for something that they already are kind of in charge of, right? Fire god's in charge of fire and the fire god's going around looking for fire. Another person, well, the student's name was Huichao, and the student asked, what is Buddha? And the teacher answered, you are Huichao. And that could either be, you are, you are Buddha Huichao, or could be, you are Huichao. So it could be, you are David, or you're David. Another teacher named Dung Shan, who is a very popular teacher for a lot of us. And this is a really famous answer. I just want you to know this because it's not going to sound like it.

[08:27]

Three pounds of flax. What is Buddha? Three pounds of flax. Flax? Yeah. Flax is a grain, you know. So the name Buddha is just a pound of grain? Three pounds. What? That's what we do. Big booty. Three pounds. He weighs three pounds. Who knows? And in the commentary on that, they list several other previous answers to the question, what is Buddha? The one in the shrine, the 32 lucky features, a bamboo whip on a mountain covered with a forest grown from a staff, and so on to Tung Shan, who said, three pounds of flex. He indeed cut off the tongues of the ancients. In other words, he made it really hard to answer that question ever again.

[09:30]

Such a bizarre, such an amazing answer, right? Another famous teacher, Yun Men, what is Buddha? A piece of used toilet paper. Mira? Is it like Buddha and everything? Say it again? Maybe. Maybe. What do you think? So this is Buddha then, maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Everything is Buddha. Maybe. Another teacher, and this person is getting kind to what I think you might be getting to, I don't know. Another famous teacher, Matsu, his name Ma means horse, so he was called the horse master. He answered, mind is Buddha. What is Buddha?

[10:33]

Mind is Buddha. And in fact, he always answered, mind is Buddha. Every time he was asked, mind is Buddha. So he's in your brain? Or your brain is in him? Ah, so that means we don't have a brain. Then he controls us. Yeah, he controls us. Mind is Buddha. And then one time somebody asked Matsu, why do you always say mind is Buddha? And he answered, to stop children from crying. And then they said, what do you say when they stop? What do you answer when they stop crying? No mind, no Buddha. So What is Buddha?

[11:38]

Light. Light is Buddha. Anyone else? Three pounds of grain. One. A piece of his father's head. Yes. Maybe, as Babson, his first His first comment? Maybe. Maybe so, maybe not. Part of it is that, you know, there's always a chance to have a new, different answer, so there's no final answer, right? But you could have, I'm going to excuse you soon, so if you have any parting words, now's your time. Buddha is the fire god looking for paths. although it says in the commentary of that. Now, I sort of explained what that meant, the fire god looking for fire, means you go around, you are, you go around looking for something that you have inside of you, but the commentary actually says, if you think this means that, you haven't seen the Dharma even in a dream.

[12:51]

Mira? can be a vacuum. Because what? Because teachers keep saying that it's just random. I don't know if it's random or not. David? But it can be my video game. Yep. Leo? Buddha can be this. Okay. What are you going to do with it if that's Buddha? All they do is say, don't put another head on top of your own. Okay, well that's what I have for you. Hope you have a good, sunny Saturday morning. People want to fill in the space there.

[14:27]

It's kind of fun and exhilarating for me anyway. It's kind of scary to do the kids, you know. So I'm just going to continue in this vein because I'm wanting to talk about the sort of celebration of questions and responses that is our practice and pointing to also that it's not just what the questions and answers are about like what those words are about but it's kind of a maybe a metaphor for reality or a metaphor for our life where it's like you know the universe is the question we are the answer or we are the question and the universe is the answer The past moment was the question and this moment is the answer. This moment is the question and the next moment is the answer. Or I was thinking this morning walking, did anybody see those California lilies that Karen planted so long ago that used to be just one or two would come up and now there's just this incredible California irises.

[15:47]

Anyway, I thought Well, yeah, winter is the question and spring is the answer. And also, as humans, one of the special features of humans is the way our brain develops, right? So we're born, we have this incredible capacity of brain, but we don't really know how to do, we don't know anything, we don't know how to do anything. So our life is a process of learning how to do things. how to navigate this world, and I feel in some ways like that's still my question, you know, how to do this? How do you do this? For some reason I flashed very tangentially on this question that Sylvie once stopped me with when she said, she was like seven, you know, seven years old or something. Why is the word suck considered a swear word? Like, that is a really great question, you know, because it's like, why?

[16:52]

You know, there's all these, the kids are running around, somebody says, you suck, and the adults are all going, ah, you know, and the kids are like, and well, some kids know what it means, but my daughter was like, why is that so bad? And I really didn't want to tell her anything about why that was so bad. And then, of course, in our practice, the Buddha Dharma is even more like that. So we say that it's passed from warm hand to warm hand. Sometimes people say pass from warm hand to warm hand. And that's great. And that's beautiful. But it's also passed. It's really passed question response, question response. There's the there's someone a teacher who's realized starting with the Buddha teachers realize something. And then the questioner is like What is it that you know? What is it that you understand? How did you find peace? What is it? So, to me, when we're taught, we're sort of, I just want to just celebrate this.

[17:59]

And I'll talk about some, you know, questions with the meaning, we'll get into the meaning, but I just want to kind of keep coming back to the fact that this is just a wonderful part of our world. As Buddhists, we have really, our ancestors have really developed this in a wonderful, beautiful way. I was remembering when I was before, either right at the beginning of being Shuso or before I was Shuso, but I didn't know I was going to be Shuso, I asked Mel, I don't even remember exactly my question, but I was expressing my anxiety about giving the talks. And for those of you who think so, when you first do that, it's really very, very anxiety-producing. And he just looked at me and he said, you only have to talk about what you know.

[19:01]

And it's like every cell in my body just relaxed. Which is interesting because it's not like I know that I believe that I know anything or I know what I know or anything. But I think what you don't, what you can get anxious about is everything you don't know, like this whole ocean of teachings. And you think, I don't understand that. I don't understand that. I don't understand that. How can I talk about this at all? But he just really brought me back to, you know, and it's not like he thought I knew that much, I didn't think, but it's just like, I have something I understand and he wanted, that's all he's asking me to do is just bring that forth and that's all that's being asked. And it was very, and I kind of returned to that when I get nervous. So, going back to the early scriptures, Oh, and I also want to just say that, and we're, of course, constantly enacting this, because we go to DOCSON, we go to practice discussion, we ask questions after lecture, and I was thinking about how sometimes someone after lecture will ask this question that kind of like almost speaks for everybody, or it's like, and you kind of like everybody kind of like this, because there's some question that we all have, you know?

[20:26]

And then another kind of question that people sometimes ask is something that is very particular and it sort of reveals them somehow. Those are both two kinds of questions that are wonderful that happen with us. So, in the early sutras, a lot of them are not formed as question and answer, although there's quite a few questions and answers either embedded in there or at the beginning. But in some ways, they're all sort of an answer to a question. Because when the Buddha, the story goes, was enlightened, became enlightened, and then he was thinking, I could never explain this. This is just too hard to explain, too impossible to explain. I'm not going to try to teach this because it's just too impossible to explain. And supposedly God came to him and said, no, no, no, don't say that.

[21:30]

There will be people. Try, please try to explain this. And so his whole career of 40 years of teaching was like, in a sense, it was a response to that request. He was a person who embodied peace and so people naturally came to him. So I feel like many of the sutras, even if they're not framed as that, they're an answer to a question like how did you do that? What do you know? What do you understand? There's quite a few I was looking through to find the perfect one that has the question and answer and I just got so, it's like being in a sea of bliss or something. There's so many great sutras but in one of them, and this is sort of a set up, this Prince Abhaya He goes to the Buddha to ask a question, but there's this backstory where he has been put up to this by this rival teacher, Naganta Nataputta.

[22:34]

The Naganta Nataputta. Naganta, I think, is the religion. Nataputta was the teacher. And he says, Prince, go to Shakyamuni Buddha and ask this question. And if he answers it this way, say this. And if he answers it this way, say this. And he won't be able to defeat you. You know, so it was this competitive kind of defeating thing. So the prince says, okay, and he goes and he asks this Buddha, would the Tathagata say words that are unendearing and disagreeable to others? Prince, there is no categorical yes or no answer to that. Then right here, Lord, the Nagantas are destroyed. But Prince, why do you say then right here, Lord, the Nagantas are destroyed? Just yesterday, Lord, I went to the Nagatha Nataputta and he said to me, come now, Prince, go to the contemplative Gautama and on arrival say this, Lord, with the Tathagata state words that are unenduring and disagreeable to others.

[23:38]

And he explained everything that the Nataputta told him to say. And then at the end, Nataputta has said, Just as if a two-horned chestnut were stuck in a man's throat, he would not be able to swallow it down or spit it up. In the same way, when the contemplative Gotama is asked this two-pronged question by you, he won't be able to swallow it down or spit it up. Now, at that time, a baby boy was lying face up on the prince's lap. And apparently this was like a tactic that you did. The translator goes on to explain that you put the baby in your lap and then if you get to the place in the debate where you can't answer you pinch the baby and it cries and then that ends the debate. So the Buddha does a very smart thing. He says

[24:38]

And there's another sutra where he says the four kinds of answers to the four kinds of questions. And one of them is a counter question. And this is what he does with this. He says, What do you think, Prince, if this young baby boy, through your own negligence or that of the nurse, were to take a stick or piece of gravel into its mouth? In other words, he's making the same thing about the thing stuck in the throat, right? What would you do? And the prince says, I would take it out, Lord, if I couldn't get it out right away. Then holding its head in my left hand and crooking my finger of my right hand, I would take it out, even if it meant drawing blood. Why is that? Because I have sympathy for the young boy. And then the Buddha gives the sutra about the right speech. And I'm not going to tell you the whole sutra, but it's in the same way, prince, in the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial, unendearing and disagreeable, he does not say that.

[25:43]

And you know, then if they're true, but not helpful, and not in not not and disagreeable, he doesn't say them. If they're true, and beneficial, but disagreeable. He knows the time to say those things. So it's a wonderful sutra about that. And In a way, he's... Well, I'm going to read you this thing Tenisora says, because I think it says it better than I could. Each counter-question, the prince asks him two questions, and in both cases he responds first with a counter-question, before going on to give an analytical answer to the first question and a categorical answer to the second. Each counter-question serves a double function, to give the prince a familiar reference point for understanding the answer about to come, and also to give him a chance to speak of his own intelligence and good motives. This provides him with the opportunity to save face after being stymied in his desire to best the Buddha in an argument.

[26:45]

And then Tanisro says, thus, this discourse is not only about right speech, but also shows right speech in action. And another sutra is called the Kula-Malunkyavada Sutta. And that is one where the student is obsessing about the fact that the Buddha won't answer certain questions, like he won't answer if the cosmos is eternal. There are questions like, the world is eternal, the world is not eternal, the world is finite, the world is infinite, the soul is the same as the body, the soul is one thing and the body is another, after death the Tathagata exists, after death the Tathagata does not exist, and so on, there's a whole bunch of them. Anyway, he's sitting there, he's obsessing about why the Buddha won't answer these questions.

[27:50]

And he says, you know, I'm going to go ask and insist that he answer these, or I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave, basically. Like, he feels like he, I think the issue is kind of trust. Like, if he refuses to answer them, he doesn't trust him as a teacher somehow. So he says, Lord, if the Blessed One knows that the cosmos is eternal, then may He declare to me that the cosmos is eternal. If He knows that the cosmos is not eternal, then may He declare to me that the cosmos is not eternal. But if He doesn't know or see whether the cosmos is eternal or not eternal, then in one who is unknowing and unseeing, the straightforward thing is to admit, I don't know, I don't see. And he goes through all the questions, the original questions, that way. And in this case, the Buddha goes on to give that teaching that we've heard about with the arrow.

[28:53]

You know, like if you were shot by an arrow, would you stand there talking about whether the arrow exists or doesn't exist, or all this stuff? No, you would just take the arrow out. And that's what his teaching is doing. And somehow this reminded me, it's not exactly the same, but one of my first questions that I asked, I had a lot of trouble with the Heart Sutra when I first started practicing. Like I was living at San Francisco Zen Center, and I think I've told this story before, so forgive me if you've heard of it. I really liked the whole life, you know, like doing Zazen and service and the way we ate together and worked together and everything about it. I mean, I really loved the life, but the idea that this teaching was the heart of it was really hard for me to swallow. It wasn't exactly so much that I did or didn't understand it, although I didn't understand it, but it just seemed so abstract and so philosophical and so dry.

[29:58]

And I was actually kind of tortured about it, really. Like, I think this guy was tortured about this, you know. And I felt like, how could this be the heart of it? And how could I want to be part of something that had this at the heart of it? It just didn't sit right. And it seemed, it made me feel very outside and very separate. And so I went to Rev. Anderson and I said, and you know, I really agonized over how I was going to phrase it and everything. I'm like, I just kind of was really tortured about the whole thing. And I said something like, I just want to learn how to treat everything better and better. What does this have to do with no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind? And he said, I mean, again, it was a long time ago, but something like,

[31:00]

It's when you have eyes and ears, that's what's getting in the way of you being able to do what you want to do with your life. It's when you have, it's your eyes and ears that are getting in the way. And I can't explain what happened. It's not like I understood that. It's not like I understood how the Sutra did that, explained that. But it was like, it was like he kind of reached out and painted me into the painting of Buddhism. And, you know, like saying, your question is the same. This is the answer to your question. Your question is the same as what the ancestors questioned. And just it was really wonderful. And, you know, it just went on from there. And I just had, you know, really relieved all my sense of sort of that whole sense of being on the outside looking in. Okay. So then moving on from the Pali suttas. The Mahayana Sutras also have some wonderful questions and answers.

[32:08]

One of the most famous, the Diamond Sutra is one of the most famous Mahayana Sutras. And here's the question. The whole Sutra, there's like one question at the beginning and the whole Sutra is basically the answer to the question. The question is, if a noble son or daughter should set forth on the Bodhisattva path, How should they stand? How should they walk? How should they control their thoughts? I feel like that harkens back to what I was saying earlier. It's like, how do we do this? How do we do this? But also this question about how do we control our thoughts is a very Buddhist question, I think. And this is another question that kind of echoes through the centuries. Like you see people, I think partly because it seems like what the Buddha was saying is you end suffering. There's some way that you end suffering. It has to do with like controlling your thoughts somehow. And so We're always sort of wondering how to do this. How do we control our thoughts? That's how we're going to get enlightened.

[33:14]

We're going to control our thoughts. So the Buddha answers this. Where is it? Oh, I didn't write the answer here. I mean, I felt that I... I didn't write it because I thought I could remember it. So he says, basically, I'm going to rephrase, but it's like, set your mind on your intention to save all beings. Put your mind on your intention to save all sentient beings. At the same time, that you set your mind on your understanding that there are no beings. You put your mind on your vow to save all beings at the same time that you remember that there are no beings, like do those two things at the same time. You see how that would actually work? It would work. It would control your thoughts, you know?

[34:15]

It's not what you thought. It's not the answer you thought you were going to get, but it's a completely different kind of answer. If you could do that, when you do that, you can do that. And when you do that, your thoughts will be controlled. And then another... Great question, I think is a great question in the Lotus Sutra. Well, first is Buddha's question. He, in this one paraphrase, Shakyamuni cries out in a loud voice, who among you was able to preach the White Lotus Sutra in the Saha world? That's our world, the world to be endured, our Saha world. The time of my death is at hand. To whom can I entrust the Lotus of the true law? And then, in the previous parts of this, all these bodhisattvas have assembled in this huge space, like this is about halfway through the sutra.

[35:21]

And there's all these bodhisattvas, and many of them step forward and say, don't worry, don't worry, it's covered. Be pleased to be without anxiety. And they all vow to preserve the Lotus Sutra and preach it. And then, Manjushri asked the Buddha a question. World Honored One, rare indeed are such Bodhisattvas as these. Reverently according with the Buddha, they have made great vows in that evil age to come. Sound familiar? They will protect, keep, read, recite, and preach this Law Flower Sutra. World Honored One, how are these Bodhisattvas able to preach this Sutra in the evil age to come? How are they going to do that? And he answers, the Bodhisattva must be steadfast in four methods. They have to have perfect conduct with respect to relationships.

[36:21]

They have to be able to contemplate all existences void, and in other words, to know appearances as they really are. They have to have happy, peaceful expressions of deed, word, and thought, unaffected by zeal or envy. And to beget a spirit of great compassion and charity towards living beings. So, that brings us back to our Zen ancestors. Who, again, I don't say they're better than other religions and other sects of Buddhism or anything. But it's pretty amazing what they did with this. And I'm not a person who understands koans, you know. I sort of think of myself as someone who has a hard time with koans or doesn't understand koans.

[37:23]

But still, I have a sense of why they're there or what they're there for or what they're doing or something. And I think that I feel like they're like these time capsules that, you know, the ancestors shot. And here they are. And the way that they are is part of how they, they're like these concentrated, you know, little things that, you know, you put the water in and they explode or something. And I just wanted to bring up one more question, because, I mean, we could just go on forever. Yun Man, he's the same guy that said the thing about the piece of used toilet paper, was asked, or I think he may have asked, he had a tendency to like ask himself his questions rather than get asked by a student, like he sort of puts the question forth and then he answers it. And this might have been one of those, I forgot to check, but he asked, what are the teachings of an entire lifetime?

[38:27]

In other words, what did what did all of Buddha's teachings boil down to? What's the one point of Buddha's teachings? And he answered, an appropriate response. In other words, everything that the Buddha said, or that our Zen ancestors, our Buddhist ancestors said, was an appropriate response to that moment, whatever that was, what was happening. So, I want to open it up to questions. I just want to say that if you have a burning question, that's a real gift. And if you don't have a burning question, there's all these questions already that are very, very socially acceptable to use. The questions like, do you wonder what it was? You know, what another famous question is, why did Bodhidharma come from the West? In other words, what, to me, I'm just saying in my words, what was, so we say it's passed from warm hand to warm hand.

[39:39]

Well, what was that that was passed? What was that that was passed from warm hand to warm hand? That's a question. Or, you know, how do you do this? How do we do this, our life? Oh, yes. really surprised me at the beginning of your talk when you said that God came down to the Buddha and proposed to him, well, people will understand, so teach. I know, so is there a God? Well, it's really, I mean, I sort of simplified it for the kids, but Chakra often appears in Buddhist scriptures. He was the God of the previous religion. So it really is like saying God said it. It's like they in in buddhism and especially in the Mahayana and I don't know the all and they had they had it was polytheistic so they had many god they had a number of gods but they become like the characters they come to the they come to hear the buddha preaching stuff so chakra I think it was chakra I'm not totally sure but he the as the story goes he came to the buddha when the buddha was thinking this I can't I'm not I can't explain this there's no point in trying

[40:57]

So, I mean, where do you go with that? I sort of feel like he... that was an internal... I mean, in post-modern Western society, I tend to think that that was some kind of internal dialogue he had with himself. Yeah, that's the way I've heard it before. But, you know, when you have an intuition, even when, you know, like when I have an intuition, you have an intuition, it almost feels like it is coming from outside sometimes. I mean, it doesn't exactly always feel internal. You know what I mean? Alessandra, did you have your hand up? Yeah, I have a question that answers to the question. The question that is in here is usually coming from somewhere deep inside a person. When does the answer serve the question and when doesn't it be the right answer? And I've seen the right answer be disturbing or killing the search or bringing to an end the question.

[42:08]

You've had that happen to you or you've seen that happen to somebody? That happened to myself as well. Why do you think it was the right answer? Because it's like the written answer. The one that comes out of the books. Say an authority like Tobin. Somebody quotes Tobin in response to your question and it's the right answer and yet it just dead ends your search or your question and doesn't bring you forward. I don't see why it's the right answer then. I mean, there's no right answer. I think that's what they're saying. It's an appropriate response. I mean, I think, but you know, maybe it was because you're still chewing on it. Maybe that's how it was the right answer. It gave you something to chew on, because you're bringing it up now. Well, I just think that... I used to think that if you had the right answers, then the conflict would come to an end.

[43:13]

I've discovered that, mostly through reading Koans, that the point doesn't seem to be the right answer. Right. There is an answer to your question, because there is a resolution to the conflict, the inner conflict that wants to be resolved. Well, I mean, I feel both, I guess. I feel some of my questions got answered and I don't have to, like that question I asked Rob, you know, I don't worry about whether the Heart Sutra is for me or not, or whether this practice is going to help me or not, you know, like that's over. That question is over. But I still wonder, I could still, tomorrow, I could go to Doksan and say, how do I do this? How do I practice? How do I do this? So some questions stay alive. Oh, right, I'm supposed to ask you.

[44:13]

Do you have anything to ask? Well, listening to this conversation, Responses and answers are not the same thing. So if you're looking for an answer, you won't get it. Or if you get it, that's too bad. You think, oh, no, I got it. Even the most casual kind of questioning for a Zen student and a Zen teacher should be on the level that's not just superficial or, you know, the answer. A good response is something that gives the student a problem. Cutting off their usual way of thinking. So that's a good response. You know, he left me with nothing. Great.

[45:14]

So you have to be back. There's a story like that. She doesn't do the work. work. So is part of what you're saying you feel like someone did the work for you? No, I didn't. That's good. No. It didn't happen that way, but it's nice when it does. We've got to stop for this, but I can talk to you outside. She's waving it at me. She's not just looking it up. She's waving it at me. Thank you.

[46:01]

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