I think that my subject for the day is, broadly speaking, the meaning of life. That's all. issues. Speaking of the meaning of life, if you want to find out the meaning of life, we invite you to our Rohatsu Sashin, which will begin a week from Monday. It's our seven-day Sashin that commemorates the Buddha's enlightenment 2,500 years ago. And so some of the Zen sectors and East Asian traditions always observe this period with in the modern calendar December 8th marking Buddhist enlightenment day.

[01:07]

So we'll be sitting here from five in the morning until nine in the evening for seven days. And you are welcome, first of all, people who want to do a minimum of three days to come in and sit with us. And if you have questions, you can ask, you can talk to me or talk to Gary, who's the Sushi Director. And also, as usual, we'll be open for the usual times for morning Zazen, 540, and afternoon 540, and all the lectures, which will be at this time, at 1015. And that's all. You can come for those if you like. But come and, you know, find out what it's all about. I'm just recalling, I've said this before, when I first came here some years ago, it was in the fall, and after a few weeks, it was Rohatsu Sashin.

[02:16]

And I walked in for 540 zazen on what must have been the second day or something like that, and it's like, wow, it was really different in here. And I can't tell you what that was, but there was just, The energy of people sitting together was quite wonderful, and I said to myself, I will never miss this opportunity again. And basically, I haven't. So, join us all. There'll be a lot of people sitting. That's item number one. Item number two is one of these from Hannah Steinwright's birthday today. So maybe we can sing to her. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Hannah.

[03:21]

Happy birthday to you. Thank you. Congratulations. And many more. So I'm going to start with a poem. But I have a new book of poetry out, which will be available outside. It's called Words of My Perfect Teacher. It has a rearview of Sojan on the front. And the way this was done was, you know, some people have that little thumb drive with 50, 60 lectures on it. Well, Charlie Wilson, who did the digitizing, was in kind of his beta mode of

[04:27]

text transcription, of audio transcription of text to words. And this was about two or three years ago, and he sent me the transcriptions of these lectures, and they were They were really weird. They were pretty interesting and not at all accurate, but there were these kind of remarkable turns of words and phrases, and then every now and then you could hear something of Sogen's voice or expression that that would come out, so I, for some reason, I made them into each lecture, I made 15 of the lectures into poems, and working with the language of those faulty transcriptions, and changing them a little bit, not much, but cutting and pasting the lines, so I'll read you one of those.

[05:35]

This is from the original lecture, which you can hear, is the 30th of October, 1982. And the title of this poem and the title of the lecture is a Ridgepole Ceremony. What we talk about and the thing itself are not really the same. Let's talk about it like men. But on WorldWide, you've already made an object of it. So hop on the Zen train. You know, our life is very precious. There's no way to destroy everything. We go through a lot of stuff. But I think we should stop. I'll make it short. Do you have any questions? Or each one has a different flavor.

[06:45]

But this is good. I do have questions. And I think it boils down to this fundamental question, how shall I live? And I think that we all have this question, even while we're right in the middle of our life. It's sort of a philosophical question, but it's really a spiritual question, because we have to live given the fact that we have bodies, and that body has to be sustained even as it matures and strengthens, and then ultimately it begins to weaken. We have lives that we have to sustain with food. We have to work.

[07:48]

We have to put up with the various difficulties and oppressions of our life. We have to put up with the loss of the things and the ones that we love, with the loss of our planet itself as it devolves. So there's this poem. Well, I think of it as a poem. As I first heard it, it must have been 20 years ago, and Kathy Fisher was sitting in this seat and giving a lecture, and so one time I remember Kathy lecturing here, and she began by reading this verse that's the introductory verse to a kind of encyclopedia of meditation practices called the Visuddhimagga, which translates as the path of purification.

[08:50]

Here's the verse. The inner tangle and the outer tangle. This generation is entangled in a tangle. And so I ask of the Buddha this question. Who succeeds in disentangling this tangle? The internal and the outer tangle. This generation is entangled in a tangle. And so I ask of the Buddha this question, who succeeds in disentangling this tangle? Those lines hit me hard when I heard them. And they hit me in an interesting way. You know, just as I read you this poetic collaboration between me and Sojin, I felt like there was a similarity of voice in this verse.

[10:00]

And she didn't identify it. At first, it sounded like a piece of sort of fiercely modern poetry. And then, it turns out, it was from the Vesuddha-maga, and I looked more deeply, it's actually, this is, he was quoting one of the early Pali suttas called the Jata-sutta. And the question here is being asked by Dr. Bharadwaja, who comes like a lot of people to sit down and talk with the Buddha and ask him a question. So that has an answer, but I want to hold off on that, okay? And even if I don't tell it to you, It won't help you much.

[11:03]

But this is the condition that we live in, the inner tangle and the outer tangle. They're all tangled up together. And we find ourselves in this tangle. We find it. true in our lives. We find ourselves sitting with this tangle. We find ourselves facing the wall. And at a certain point, we can't even distinguish very easily between the so-called inner tangle and the so-called outer tangle. of oppression, of gender oppression or racial oppression or any kind of, any kind of shaming or process that turns us, that where we feel like there's an effort to turn us into objects.

[12:21]

Is that internal? Is that an inner tangle or an outer tangle? If because of our desires and our habits, and because of even political decisions that we make, we allow species to be destroyed, life on the planet to be periled, is that inner tangle? Outer tangle? Can we really even discern? It's like Alice's practice. What's the point of it?

[13:25]

It won't have self-improvement? Do we think we can untangle the inner tangle? Do we think we can untangle the inner tangle without recognizing it's completely bound up with the so-called outer tangle? This is exactly what we look at in ourselves, whether we're looking at it in those terms or not. I was thinking... It seems to be a Fisher day. I was thinking of, I heard a panel discussion that Ruby Fisher was a part of that. There was a conference in Berkeley in June called the After Mindfulness Conference. Was anyone there? One, yeah. After Mindfulness. It's just kind of a ridiculous notion, but that's what they called it.

[14:32]

But there was some really good stuff that happened there. And Norman was on a panel called, What is Enlightenment? And what he said struck me. And he said, unfortunately, I don't think practice has improved me at all. after 40 years or more of practice, and I would tend to say the same thing, that the On one level, I feel much the same completely flawed and clueless person that I always was. Don't agree too quickly, okay? But what Carmen said that I also agree with is it's made me far more aware of all the ways I could improve.

[15:41]

You know, and I could say I haven't changed at all. And I could say that I have changed a lot. And I really feel that way. If I cataloged for you, I don't think I could bear to catalog for you all the ways in which I feel I haven't changed. And yet, I also feel that, I feel that things are constantly changing, maybe not always even for the best, but they're changing. And I thoroughly believe in that process of change. And I believe it, I believe that everybody in this room has the capacity for that.

[16:48]

So knowing, this inner tangle means living with awareness and cultivating. What we do in Zazen is just cultivate very simply cultivating awareness of, first of all, our body, our posture. How am I sitting? And then how am I breathing? And maybe I delve a little bit into How am I thinking? That's about as far as I go. And then, of course, the unimproved part of me completely loses the thread. And all of a sudden, from paying attention to the wonderful orthodox aspects of my posture and my breath, I'm thinking about lunch.

[17:59]

which is not one of the emphasized meditation practices in the Vasudhi Magga. So the Vasudhi Magga, the translation is this path of purification. And I think I have a problem right there because I'm not I'm not a great believer in purification, which makes me wonder if I'm a deeply flawed Buddhist, because this is part of the basics. That's why they asked that question at that workshop, what is enlightenment, you know, furthest on some ground that enlightenment is the point, that's the meaning of life and practice.

[19:14]

And I think somewhat characterologically, I'm inclined to embrace that. And somebody asked me this Tuesday afternoon, when I came out of evening Sazen, this somewhat new fellow. We got off the steps and he said, are you Martin? Which took me back for a moment, you know. And my answer was, no, but if I was, I wouldn't tell you. But then, you know, that was kind of quick.

[20:21]

What my attention barrels is to enlightened activity, which means how we act towards ourselves and others. how I see my own actions and I see the actions of others in that light. And if I use that as a standard, then it's clear to me that enlightenment is unfolding all around us frequently. and stunningly sometimes, even in a small gesture, that you may do or you may witness. And then in the next moment, we may lose that thread and fall into delusion.

[21:38]

the ways in which I haven't changed at all, and the ways in which I have changed, and I'm trying, I try to turn towards whatever is happening at this moment. There's a wonderful expression by the Theravada teacher, Ajahn Sumedho, who says, right now, it's like this. And right now, it's like this. And right now, it doesn't look the way. So all of those have a response. He speaks to several kinds of people.

[22:57]

First he's speaking to the population at large. This is his response to Jagda Bharadwaja. And he asks, who entangles, disentangles this tangle? Buddha said, a person established in virtue, discerning, developing, discernment in mind, a practitioner, ardent and astute, that person can untangle this tangle. He also says, those whose passion, aversion, and ignorance have faded away, our hunts, their outflows ended, for them the tangles untangled." So our hunts, whose outflows ended, means people who have reached the other shore and no longer have, no longer are caught by their delusions, and

[24:08]

When you say outflows, don't communicate that to other people. Don't spread that error. And honestly, that's kind of where I have a question. It's like, I'm not sure I've ever met anyone like that. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about disentangling that tangle. You might be able to take the Sword of Wisdom and cut right through the knot. But you know probably that the tangle remains a tangle and you find a way to live with it.

[25:14]

You'll find a way that you are engage with that tangle, maybe very interestingly, like you have a knot, you know, a complicated knot, like in your, when you bunch your headphones up in your pocket and, you know, you want to use them and you have to, you really have to pay attention to untangle that tangle. And it's true, they won't work very well if you don't untangle that. So I'm not averse to disentanglement, but I think it's somewhat endless in the sense that we live in a state of where entropy rules. Do you know the word entropy?

[26:19]

Entropy is essentially a rule of thermodynamics, a physical rule that talks about the degree of disorder or randomness in a system, and that motion is usually from order to disorder. Our trains are flat. Our scientists are now thinking that consciousness, our minds, might be a side effect of a system that emerges from increasing entropy.

[27:33]

I want to do something. This is from – I'm not sure who the author was. Moral theory suggests that consciousness is a byproduct of entropy. This study reminds us that we are stardust, operating under the same laws as any other form of matter. would find a surprisingly simple result, they wrote. This is from their research. Normal wakeful states are characterized by the greatest number of possible configurations of interactions between brain networks, representing the highest entropy values. Consciousness in this view isn't due to connectivity in and of itself, but how many different ways the brain can connect certain bundles of neurons to others. Due to the presence of high entropy,

[28:36]

Most scientists believe that to maximize the exchange of information between neurons, consciousness arises as an emergent property, helping to improve survival but leading to a higher rate of entropy as a result. In other words, it may not entirely serve us to disentangle the dangle. the tangle itself will be this great gift that we are given to work with. And so to think, when I think about disentangling the tangle, I think, for some reason what comes to mind is sort of like, oh, then it'd be like a flat line.

[29:38]

Well, that doesn't sound very good. Right now, it's like this. This is a tangle right now. And it's hard for us that we may be nothing more than a tangle. So you think about the Parin Sutra, which is a great Mahayana text. the Buddha says to his disciple Subhuti, this is how the Bodhisattva Mahasattvas master their thinking.

[30:49]

However many species of living beings there are, we must lead all those beings to nirvana so that they can be liberated. Yet, when this innumerable, immeasurable, infinite number of beings has become liberated, One cannot, in truth, think that a single being has been liberated. Why is this so? If subhuti, a bodhisattva, holds to the idea that a self, a person, a living being exists, that person is not a true bodhisattva. Yet when vast, uncountable, immeasurable numbers of beings have been liberated, really no being has been liberated. Why subhuti? Because no real bodhisattva holds on to the idea of an essential ego or self, a personality, or a separate individuality.

[32:01]

If we could come back to the beginning of what the book says, when innumerable, immeasurable, infinite being, number of beings have become liberated, we do not in truth think that a single being has been liberated. No, a single being does not exist. A being that emerges from the tangle, or beings that emerge from the tangle, are what exist. We exist in entanglement with each other. And our relationships to ourselves, and our relationships to each other, are very complex. The power of the center is with a lovely gatha, since we seem to be into verse today.

[33:14]

All conditioned phenomena are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow, like a deer or like lightning. You should discern them like this. When I think about those things, I think that the thrust of this, what he's saying is that they are transient, impermanent. And I think the implication is that they're not substantial. That we are completely activated by our dreams. They may be insubstantial, but they have a reality, an effect.

[34:15]

So does lightning. Lightning just flashes into the universe, and if we see it just as a visual effect, we can recognize its transience. but it also starts fires. It's not unreal. None of these things are unreal. All of the beings that he talks about who are insubstantial in and of themselves individually are unreal. So it may be that and the outer tangle is not something that I can entangle, unentangle, disentangle by myself.

[35:22]

It may be something that we work on together just as we do when we're sitting here facing the wall We are meeting our own tangle. And this room right now is full of tangles. And here we are sitting together. And that sitting together, I don't know whether it is a way of disentangling or not. But it feels really different to sit together side by side, to make the effort that we do here and not feel alone. And recognize that while my tangle has particularity to me,

[36:35]

everybody in this room is feeling it in her or his own way. And we have that in common. We have different abilities, different capacities, different circumstances of life. But at the bottom, we have much of the same work to do. I could go into more specificity about what that work might be, but I think this is probably a good place to end and take questions. Let me just read just this challenging verse to me. The inner tangle and the outer tangle. This generation is entangled in a tangle. It's a generation. So this is 2,500 years ago, right?

[37:40]

It's like things have not changed much. This generation is entangled in a tangle. And so I ask of Gotama, who succeeds in disentangling this tangle? So thank you. Open to your questions, Ben. one time, but this world where things generate from each other is part of the entangling. But what I wanted to just comment on briefly was, I agree with what you're saying about how it seems sort of impossible to disentangle, that the tangle seems necessary for always to be there.

[38:43]

and it seems to me maybe that the untangling, sort of a misnomer, maybe the untangling is no longer resisting the tangle, or no longer having a problem with the tangle. It, you know, it makes me think of, you know, in the Mahayana understanding, you know, samsara and nirvana are the same, and the only difference is how we need it, maybe, far apart from every perverted view. I wouldn't say that samsara and nirvana are the same. I think it's more that the capacity for nirvana to emerge, the only place it can emerge is within the context of samsara. And I like You know, what your initial comment was a lot like this generation or is entangled and entangled.

[40:04]

So the act of generation is the act of creating an entanglement, perhaps. That's interesting. I'm always worried about this, and this is one of the conundrums of of Buddhism and of schools of Buddhism to me were quick to flip our lenses and say, well, that's Theravada or that's Hinayana and really the Mahayana view is such and such. And what I try to do is also to say, before I dismiss this out of hand, there's something going on here.

[41:07]

And what something is, there's some deep wisdom in those polytexts that I may have some trouble with. So even though I may feel I'm a flawed Buddhist, what I'm trying to do is not judge myself, but actually hold open the question that maybe there is a disentanglement. I think it's important for us to consider that. So, yes. as I was listening to your talk, if you think that interconnection, which is a fundamental aspect, as I understand it, is the same as entanglement, or is it different than entanglement, and if it's different, how do you see those two things in relationship? I was trying to think about that this week, because I was trying to think of it in terms of two models.

[42:15]

One is Indra's net, The debt of interdependence, this infinitely large debt, where at the center of each node there's a jewel that reflects all of the other nodes. And thinking of that, also looking in terms of looking at it, and I didn't get very far in sort of researching in terms of neural networks, and so I don't know. And I think that that bears further investigation on our parts. If you find out anything, let's talk about it. I think it is rich, and it's like, to me, I try to do one thing, both things, correct?

[43:21]

And I think this is our Zen training, is to be able to hold two seeming contradictory things at once. So to hold the fact that perhaps entanglement is the nature of reality and it's we have to learn and even here the thing about consciousness emerging from entropy is interesting in that respect and to recognize again and again the message of the Pali suttas is I'm done, there's no more outflows, I mean, literally, the expression is, what must be done and has been done. And that's a vital stream in Buddhism as well.

[44:23]

So we live with this contradiction. Well, I live with this contradiction. For some other people, they come down one side or the other, which is fine. Mark? Well, so when a student asks you if you're or maybe not, but he asked you that because of the clothes that you wear, and he wasn't mistaken in his interpretation. So your verbal answer is in dialogue with your robes. I wonder if you could reflect on what that dialogue is. Well, I think that the dialogue was... I like to think it's where I took the conversation. I mean, I didn't, you know, it caught me slightly off guard, but then I found, I feel like I fell on my ground in what I was saying because I firmly believe this about enlightened activity.

[45:25]

And I don't have, I certainly don't have any way of evaluating someone's experience, if you will, of enlightenment. The only standard I have is how do we act with each other, and that I have no question about. To me, that is the responsibility. First of all, I think it's the responsibility of being human, but it's also the responsibility that comes with with whatever robe one's wearing, including bathrobe. But I was aware at the moment that he was asking me this question for a reason, and I didn't want to dismiss that out of hand. Judy. Thank you for your beautiful teaching.

[46:32]

And then when she came to me, while you were reading that line from the Diamond Sutra, it was at the time after 9-11 in New York, where the Council of New York, we had a peace lantern ceremony that continued after 9-11. by entanglement. They have this image of all these mantras that people have made, you know, like here when we do it, and where it comes from. something in English.

[47:57]

And I forget if this was a melody that came to me or if it was from Jan Chosen Days, but I just wanted to offer it. It was a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer And I felt that that experience of that going out with all these lamps strung together and the ripple and the water and all that was a moment, which I realize now you gave me vocabulary to, of that entanglement that is precious. Yeah. Thank you. To my mind, all of those images are descriptions of

[48:59]

reality fleeting or not. And that's the thing, that the implication of that is that these are transient and insubstantial. And I don't think it's all insubstantial. It's just, you know, it depends on how you look at time. You know, in one sense, you know, a short time is a short time and a short time can be a very long time. So, sometimes, and that metaphor is really powerful, as you've been showing us. But sometimes, in our experience, the metaphor just changes. So, instead of figuring out how to untangle it, Right.

[50:07]

Yeah, it's true. Ego. If we think of consciousness as the function of consciousness and we are receivers or parts of that or something different, it suddenly sounds to me like dropping away of self leads to greater consciousness, such that dropping away of self leads to entropy in the self-perception realm. Therefore, we enter into a place of greater consciousness which is an artifact of our having allowed entropy to take place. And when I think of the comment I wanted to make, enlightenment is so much dropping off of weight.

[51:12]

So I'm now lighter and able to express my tangle. I'm lighter and now able to be free with whatever I've been given. So, less and less self, more and more consciousness, less and less concern, There's a distinction between awareness and what's happening, perhaps. Awareness is just another thing that's happening. Whether we're conscious of it or not is happening all the time. Consciousness is arising out of that complexity. The fact of the matter is, enlightenment is right now.

[52:16]

It's happening here, now, in every moment. but we miss it because it's complicated. And because we're looking, we're trying to look at one piece of the tangle and maybe it's something else. But we're not going to resolve this. It's too abstract. Andrew's got the last question. Also can be like a full jump rope or something The whole thing is about entanglement and when you jump the rope you also tangle the rope and the way you win is to be

[53:26]

It made me think about the fact that since I've been practicing zen, I feel like I started with a rope, an actual piece of string that I was trying to untangle. And then now, I seem to be more working with a tangled rubber band, which is expensive. So as far as I can feel, the practice So that's good. So we're learning to be more elastic, right? Yeah, that's a really good place to end.

[54:30]

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