Good morning. So I have been talking about case 43 of the Blue Cliff record. Tosan Ryokai, who was the founder of the Soto School in China and Case 43 is called Cold, No Heat. And I'm going to read it along with Cetro's first. Cetro compiled the 100 cases of the Blue Cliff Records. So a monk said to Tosan, cold and heat descend upon us.

[01:03]

How can we avoid them? Tosan said, why don't we go where there is no cold and heat? The monk said, where is the place where there is no cold or heat? Tosan said, when cold, let it be so cold that it kills you. When hot, let it be so hot that it kills you. In Satcharo's verse is a helping hand, but still a thousand-fathom cliff. Show and hen, no arbitrary distinction here. The ancient emerald palace shines in the bright moonlight. Clever Conroe climbs the steps and finds it empty. So cold and heat are different for all of us. And in my life, I see cold as on the horizon, inevitably coming forward.

[02:17]

It's like the clock that will not stop ticking. And heat is the situation of my life that is so difficult that I have to practice with. And practice is how I face what comes before me and what arises within me. So I thought I would talk about my practice here now, and how I deal with the difficulties of my particular situation, which I've described before as having Parkinson's disease, and the way it manifests

[03:25]

and the daily surprise when something changes and the challenge to adjust which requires flexibility and letting go so as to be able to be flexible. One of the images in this koan is the thousand fathom cliff and I see that as different for me in every day and in every moment depending on what is happening and how long the moment is.

[04:27]

I have wondered at times how the moment could be so long and also so short. And the speed at which things enter into my life seems to determine that. So the present moment is the one that I'm in here with you and I am presently experiencing all of you listening to me and thinking all of you are minds that are listening and I am speaking into all of you into your mind and in some way we are together as one and That practice of being with is letting it be so cold it kills you.

[05:43]

Because to do that is to let go of my separate self. when my separate self disappears, there isn't anything standing between us. The distinctions that we all have that make us unique. And it's taken me a long time to open that door to allow for the differences that tend to create separation I am going to have to drink a lot of water So I have sat on the other side most of the years I've come here listening to who was sitting here and feeling separate

[06:56]

and I was the audience and the speaker had the job of directing my attention so I wanted to share with you what Zazen is like for me because it's a little peculiar and explain a little bit about why I do Zazen the way I do it. Over the years, While I have been practicing with Parkinson's, I have had, as you know, a difficult time sitting still and sitting up straight.

[08:10]

And I discovered one day that my breath had almost a power to bring me into the center of the thing that I was trying to avoid or fix. And how that works was something that I started to explore by staying very close to my breathing and paying close attention to what my mind would do in response to disturbance and particularly thought. If I thought words, if conversations started to arise in my mind, my tremor would ramp up and the frequency would increase.

[09:25]

I didn't realize the connection for a very long time because I thought I could freely wander in and out of thinking and do Zazen at the same time. And the words think not thinking kept arising in my head that to pay attention to what is when I'm not thinking words. And everything would calm down to a tolerable degree if I just let the words pass by and become distant. And the way I did that was I became my breath. And I did that by exhaling and holding my breath for just a little bit and letting my body release at the bottom of that breath.

[10:52]

And at that bottom was a pause. And it was a deliberate pause. There's normally a pause there, but this pause allowed for everything in my body to stop for a moment. The tremors stopped, the pain stopped, the movement just for a second. And then I let everything go and the air just whooshed back in. And I breathed in, and it all came back. And I thought, well, I had a second of harmony. And then chaos arose. And I did the same thing again. and took a second breath and I exhaled and paused and let everything go and it all stopped and then I let all that air come back in and all the chaos came back.

[12:18]

That was two breaths. I did that over and over and over again and noticed in the process over time there was a linking up of energy from my breath that created a sense of harmony that was in motion. I was still moving around slightly but a deep rested feeling of no conflict, no struggle and faith arose because I could count on my breath so long as I was alive it would keep on going

[13:26]

and I could track with it. But it did mean that I couldn't daydream. And so I practiced not daydreaming, not going to storytelling while I was doing Zazen because it was torture to do that. My body would react so strongly to it that I was highly motivated to follow my breath. Our very early Zazen instruction is to follow the breath and sit still, maintain posture, That's pretty much all I did.

[14:33]

Maintaining the posture was a little squirrely for me. So I experimented with ways to stay afloat in the real world. And I was so happy when I discovered that I could be still that way in the center of breathing, that it gave me great encouragement. And I realized that when Tosan says essentially to allow the heat and the cold to penetrate, to be thoroughly hot and thoroughly cold, He means to enter into your center, the center, and let the experience be total, and make total contact with what is happening.

[15:49]

So, I make total contact with my disturbance. And it didn't go away, but I found a way, which I never really thought had the power that it has, to just simply follow the breath, be with the breath, become one with the breath, and just breathe. sit up straight, sit on a cushion or a chair and be still and just be the ocean, like waves coming in and going out. So that's what I was experiencing yesterday in Zazen.

[17:03]

And this morning, same thing to greater or lesser degree since I have been preparing for this day and find myself I find it difficult to prepare. For similar reasons that I find it difficult to think during satsang, I have to lay horizontal to do any serious mental work. So I figured I'll just tell you what my practice is like now and how it relates to this koan and how this koan has affected me. Tosa tells the monk that inquires, asks him why he doesn't go to the place where there is no colder heat, which would be like to say, go to the place where you don't have any problems.

[18:21]

Go to the place where there is enlightenment or go to the place where you achieve fulfillment. But to go to the place means to leave the place. And this is something of a catch. The monk asks where that place is. and that's when Tozan gives him the helping hand and basically points to the cliff and the cliff is the thing that the monk does not want to face and it's the thing that I don't want to face because

[19:24]

over the edge, the monk looks over the edge and sees tigers and rhinoceroses. I don't know the significance of the rhinoceros and I won't find it out. But it is the abyss and it is scary to the monk because it implies And the question in this koan is exactly what is that? It is the thing that creates fear. It is facing what you don't know. It is dark. So Seto makes a comment that says, a helping hand, but still a thousand-fathom cliff.

[20:44]

So this is meant to help the monk take that step and trust in what would be what we would call Buddha nature or the surreal, what is reality in a deep sense, reality that has no beginning and no end, no birth, no death. How do you meet that or experience it? The monk has been chasing it all his life. He has heard that there is liberation and that he could find it. And he finds Tosun who is an enlightened teacher who knows

[21:55]

what he's looking for. So in my life in searching and skirting around that clip I finally got cornered and could not escape. And not being able to escape, I, in desperation, really threw myself into the practice because this was all there is for me in terms of escape, and I realized that you could try to escape through this practice, and if you have a good teacher, he will point that out.

[23:22]

So in my intellectual endeavors, which I have been bringing to Sojin every day this week, my questions and my tendency to get it all down in my head so that I know. The surgeon has been pointing me away from doing that. And I have always felt secure in knowledge. realized that I have been delinquent in my studies and consequently have fallen behind in my ability to respond in the Buddhist way with wonderful discourse. I was a little afraid of having to talk because I felt really like I wasn't going to be able to pull it off.

[24:27]

And then I just went back to practice. And thought, well, I'll just talk about that and my life. And we all have this structure of a life that is challenging in some way. So I didn't think that when you fall off the cliff there would be no ground forever. I thought you hit ground eventually. But in the abyss, you don't hit ground. You just step out into the unknown and then you're, you don't know. And whatever arises, if anything does, and

[25:29]

It always has for me, so far. I can meet it just then, at the moment. So, preparing became less necessary, less preparation, and more being present. And especially with this body that I walk around in, I found that my attention had to make it all the way down to my feet, to the bottoms of my feet, because I have one leg that doesn't track with the other one totally. So one day I fell in the intersection of Fremont and Market Street, right smack in the middle of the intersection.

[26:30]

Cabs coming around and buses coming. It was such a wake-up call. And I wondered what was I doing. And I was daydreaming while I was walking. Which is something I can do when I'm walking. So I started paying attention to my feet. A lot of what I do when I'm moving around is being aware of my body and my feet touching the ground because I can't get ahead of myself or fall behind. So I try to stay centered in my body while I'm traveling. I do that when I'm driving. I try to stay right there with it. And that's the same thing I do in Satsang.

[27:36]

So that is an ongoing practice because I am always falling out of that center for one reason or another. And the call is to come back. If my body now talks to me, it says, where are you? And if you're not here, merged with me, then we're going to have an accident. So body and mind are really a whole one thing moving through. the wall and everyone I meet is doing the same thing to one degree or another.

[28:40]

We're meeting and we're with our body or we're up there in the head separate from the body. So, um, there is no safe place. outside of the present. And Gozan is asking the monk to trust that, to trust in the universe which is presently arising all the time. And how do you build faith in what has no ground? How do you build faith in trusting what you don't know? And I found that to just go forth and see what happens is not so bad.

[29:59]

I have narrowed my field of exploration to my immediate environment for the most part and brought my attention to the world around me. and think that there's plenty here to pay attention to and to be engaged with. So the scary place is still yet to come. All the scary places I've gone through are not scary anymore. But there's more to come that I'm now realizing it's a never-ending process.

[31:04]

of facing a new cliff, a new challenge, a new day. And it will ever be the same. And what it has... One thing I wanted to mention was that Even though there is pain and problems like family problems or death of friends or people that you care about, it is okay to feel all of that and be attached and let go when you have thoroughly experienced the whole event.

[32:21]

I recently lost a friend who had metastatic breast cancer and was really She died very quickly. She started dying one day and four days later she was gone. I happen to have been wide open for this experience. She came to Berkeley Zen Center looking for a Zen priest and I was available and so I went to visit her nine months ago. and she just opened her doors and let me in and we became good friends and I thought she'd be around for a few years and just when it became evident that she really was going to die soon

[33:32]

The whole impact of that hit me full force. I experienced her fear, her concern about dying alone, which was one of her main issues. just devoted myself to her last day and a number of sangha members here also did and then we had a cremation ceremony and we had the ceremony where you go to the place where they do the cremation with the big machine and watch her body roll into the furnace and we chanted the Heart Sutra and she wanted that because she knew that it was such an opportunity to really get the message of the transiency of life of this part of life that we see that is constantly being born

[35:03]

and dying and how do you enter into that before you die? you really can't but if you are really close to someone else who is dying you experience right up to that point something like that And then you experience loss when you're gone. And then there's life. When she died, everything lifted. And I experienced my whole being light as a feather. So I knew I had let go of her. but my own death will come and now I know something about how to allow it and not fight with that issue and not ignore the reality of our world here because this is the way it is

[36:34]

for us. Tozan tries to show that there is the nature of reality is also us. And when we die, what dies? And who dies in it? Buddha nature is always here. Always in play with the transiency of life. It's like a marriage. I could see how the Hindus came up with this male and female God. images because the two sides of life are like a marriage and they play together and when we recognize reality in the mundane world we can relax

[38:02]

And when I see that myself, it makes it a lot easier for me to be with people who are suffering, with my own suffering, with my own situation, with my complaints about silly things. And it allows me to stay where I am. I don't know, I talked about the Emerald Palace, which I thought was a great image that Tozan brings up as a, or it's actually such a, it's his commentary on Tozan. It's lit up by the moon, and Conrad, this dog, who is a mythological dog really, comes out of some of the history of Japan.

[39:14]

Kamuro the dog is actually the monk who tries to sneak into the Emerald Palace and find out what's inside. He thinks enlightenment can be captured or And the moonlight is the light of enlightenment and wisdom that shows this place. But where is this place? And because Chandra can see it outside himself, he goes inside. and finds it empty and is disappointed.

[40:16]

Traditionally the Emerald Palace is the realm of the absolute in the ordinary world. or as the ordinary world. And that is where Tozan says we should go looking for it. And where it is, if you look for it, is right here. In your, on your seat. Where you are now. and there is no other place to go to discover this which kind of is a liberating thought because you really then do not have to travel to a monastery into that and seek an enlightenment experience and an enlightenment experience doesn't look like anything in particular

[41:33]

Because it's all here with us now. And this is an enlightenment experience. And maybe it's not as exciting as one you had yesterday. I had one that was really humorous. I was sitting over there and Tamara in Catherine's kitchen is over there, and they turned the fluorescent light on and off, not realizing that that window casts a light right there on the floor too. Yeah, right there. It's just a window light. And I'm staring at the floor and the light goes on. I'm happily doing zazen and I look at the light and then I see the most beautiful face of Buddha in the light and I notice there's a little three-dimensional-ness to it and then I see another one

[42:59]

And then I see another one, and I'm starting to get fascinated. I'm having an enlightenment experience. And the word, seven Buddhas before Buddhas, came into my head, and I thought, oh, this is what they look like. And then the light went off. We went into a bar, or a cavern, I don't know, I can't remember. And I said, oh, it's just the floor. And I talked to Sergeant about that, because he thought it was pretty funny. And he said, oh, he saw the movie screen. first he saw the movie, then he saw the movie screen. And he says, normally we don't get to see the movie screen, we're just seeing the movie. And we're fascinated with it.

[44:03]

So I at one time would have, you know, hoped for tomorrow to turn the light back on. At least till I finished my session in Zazen. We have all kinds of experiences that seem more superior than the ordinary one. And definitely The difficult ones are hard to view as experiences that we would want to hold on to because they hurt. I know I can see pain in people's bodies at times and know that

[45:08]

It's so important to give your body the gift of attention like you would to someone else. I do that with my bird. My bird is called Emerald. And she needs to be talked to. So I read her. toes on no cold or heat, and watched her listen carefully. And then I told her about the Emerald Palace, which could be a place where she could reside in her cage. She doesn't understand a word I'm saying, but she loves to hear me talk. So, references made to the five ranks, which I won't talk about, but there are five perspectives on reality.

[46:19]

And I think Toza just wanted us to be aware of the absolute side of this mundane reality. So to be aware of it, how that happens, is not something you can make happen, but through the process of practice, there's a reason, like it's revealed. I think that in the realm of the absolute is revealed in the ordinary contact that you have, we have, with this so it's good to be here and it's good to stay here for as long as you can in this present reality which can be very long it could be really long and I realized I lost track of time

[47:40]

when I stopped clocking it, because I didn't have to, and my moments, if I didn't look at a clock, got to be really one thing. When I worked with Roswita, she has a card on the altar, she wanted to get a shortcut to realization because she didn't have much time. So... I suggested to let herself get a little close to what she's feeling. And that was the hardest thing to do. To be close to not only the pain of cancer but what was coming and everything that's assumed about what was coming and she began to practice just being here where she was and

[49:10]

She practiced diligently in her last days. And she died with very little pain and no evident anxiety at all. And I think when she lost consciousness, she only was with the breath and Sojin talked to her when she was still able to talk and taught her about the breath and getting with it. And so she made that journey writing that way. So, how much time is left?

[50:20]

A lot of time. Forever and ever? However, the other side says 11.11. The other side, that's mundane reality. It's going to be mundane. Yes, it's 11.11. And our machine director may have some guidance for us now. Is it time? There is time for us. Time. Okay. I'd like to say that we decided that there would be no questions now because you can ask all your questions in the afternoon. That's right. Okay. Unless you take this in life. Uh, no.

[51:19]

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