Good morning, everyone. Today, I want to talk about the Grass Hut and the Bodhi Mandala. And again, thank you, Dylan, for that dedication. I want to dedicate our practice today to peace in Ukraine and all other places where people are threatened. by attack. So that was Brian. Okay, well, yes, thank you. So I want to talk about, as I said, the grass hut and Bodhi Mandala and talk about practice places. So Bodhi Mandala is the Sanskrit word for the place where Shakyamuni awakened. So this is the seat under the Bodhi tree where Shakyamuni awakened. And it refers to any place where awakening happens for any people or all beings.

[01:05]

Bodhimandala in Sanskrit in Sino-Japanese is dojo. Do, Wei, Zhou, place. So that's the same word that's used for martial arts dojos, but it's basically the place of awakening. So we chanted the song of the grass hut, which is a way of talking about the space and place of practice from Chinese Chan, from our lineage, Shoto or Sekito who lived 700 to 790. So way back in our Soto lineage, he also wrote the Harmony of Difference and Sameness. So what is the place of practice is what I want to talk about today. How do we practice together? So we have this new kind of split Sangha event of Zoom and Ebenezer, and we're going to work to make that more

[02:10]

more compatible, more integrated. But, you know, back in Buddha's time, that the monks and other practitioners would gather together in the monsoon season around the Buddha, but otherwise monks would wander around India. And when they wanted to, and when they did meditation, they would sit down in front of a tree and face the tree. So now we face the wall, but they originally faced the tree. And in the Jawa Mara Samadhi, we sometimes chant, we hear about one Buddha who faced a tree for 10 Kalpas before he died. fully awakened, even though he was on the verge of awakening. So facing a tree was the original mode before facing a wall. In Southern Asia, in the Theravada tradition, they still don't sit together in a meditation hall like we are doing, in kind of two halls at once. When I was in Thailand, I saw in monasteries there, these little huts that were on stilts and a little bit above the ground.

[03:19]

And they were big enough for one person to sit. I think maybe some of them were big enough for somebody to lie down and sleep there. But people sat and still sit in the Theravada tradition. They do meditation in their own little space, their own little hut. Buddhism moved to China, it developed monks halls in Chan or Zen, but also in other traditions. So the spirit of Chinese culture was much more communal. So Sangha has been the collection of practitioners, originally just the collection of monks and nuns, who practice together to support each other. So in China and Japan, they have in monasteries, what's called in Sino-Japanese, sodo, or monk's halls, where the monks sit in an assigned place and take their food in the same assigned place like we do during Sashin, and also sleep there.

[04:26]

So this communal way of practicing, sitting facing the wall, developed in China. and continues now here in America. And sitting together in a limited space like that long, thin, a space where we are now using an Ebenezer, we feel each other's practice. So Sangha is about how we encourage each other to practice together and to awaken together. How do we inspire each other? So we now are, for a while, we'll be sitting Sunday mornings and starting next week, Monday evenings at Ebeneezer Church.

[05:32]

And as people, those of us on Zoom can see, it's a long, thin hall, and we can't see most of the people there who are, you know, closer to us at any rate. We're still, as a sangha, working towards finding a permanent long-term building to purchase for a temple. But that's going to be a long process, maybe a long process. We don't know. We're working on it. But in the meantime, we have this opportunity for people to go and sit together and feel each other, feel each other's presence during Zazen and Dharma talk, Sunday mornings and Monday evenings. So, you know, the point of sitting together is to support each other to awaken. So again, the grass hut, we just chanted the song of the grass hut, and I'll talk more about that. But also the Bodhi Mandala, where we sit is a place of awakening.

[06:37]

How do we support each other in this awakening? So this is not a matter of some flashy experience or some great understanding. Awakening in our tradition is simply to continue to sustain awareness, to pay attention, to unfold our intention, to be present together and find our sustained awakening. Awakening is not just a one-time thing. As the world is changing and as our lives are changing, And as the situation around us changes and develops as the COVID is changing and shifting, we need to adjust and we need to reawaken. So each day we continue practice just as Shakyamuni Buddha, when he became the Buddha, when he had his great awakening, he continued to do meditation and practice every day and to awaken every day.

[07:47]

So one mode we have for that is this song of the grass hut. This is from an important teacher in our lineage who lived 700 to 790. So a long time ago. And he had a big temple where he had many monks, but he also built a grass hut, as it says in the song, where there was nothing of value. And where he found his way to awaken each day. I've seen a picture of the great his name means up above the rock. There's one translation of his name. And I've seen a photo of the rock that's still there near where his temple was, where he built this grass hut. Of course, the grass hut is long gone. And that's part of what the song of the grass hut is about. It says that people ask, will this hut perish or not?

[08:49]

So of course, we've experienced our grass hut perishing. Because of COVID, our wonderful little storefront homey temple on Irving Park Road, we had to abandon. We lost our grass hut. It perished. Well, the building is still there. You can still drive by it, but it's very different. So here we are. We've been on Zoom for two years, almost close to two years. And we will continue on Zoom as we are having a space for some people to sit in person, which is wonderful. But for those of us who are not at Ebenezer, and some of you are at a distance, it's James in Pittsburgh, and I don't know, I don't see our other distant members, but some of them are no doubt here. I see that Ko's here, and she's in Cleveland.

[09:52]

Randy is here, and I think he's also in Ohio. Anyway, so thanks to the pandemic, We lost our grass hut, but we also gained this Zoom event, this strange Zoom event, where we see each other in little boxes. And here we are. This is our practice place, both Ebenezer and on Zoom. And when we have managed to get to this point, purchase a building for a long-term temple space, which we're working on. We will also have Zoom capacity and people can join us on Zoom. Oh, I see Faye is up in Wisconsin. So yeah, this is strange. We're in a strange grass hut where we have people from a distance who can join us in whatever facility we're sitting in in person. So, Yeah, how do we take care of our practice?

[10:59]

How do we support each other to sustain awakening, to sustain awareness, to sustain the focus of Zazen practice, of facing the wall, facing ourselves? So when we sit facing the wall, of course, we're facing everything. As Chateau says in his Song of the Grass Hut, the hut is small and includes the entire world. In 10 feet square, an old man illumines forms in their nature. So the whole world is here. The whole world is in Ebenezer. The whole world is on this Zoom page. The whole world is on each Zoom box where I can see all the people. So hi, Miriam. Hi, Mary Lou. It's wonderful to see you all. Hi, Mara. So here we are. How do we support each other to awaken?

[12:00]

That's the point of this. How do we support each other to sustain awakening? So again, sometimes awakening, or they use this word enlightenment is used, people think of that as some flashy experience that happens, you know, like at the end of these old teaching stories, it says, Oh, and the monk was enlightened, sometimes some translations. Well, those kinds of experiences do happen. And they can be very helpful. But also, we could sustain our practice of just sitting upright, sitting like Buddha, whether we're sitting cross-legged or kneeling or in a chair, whether we're sitting in the, what is it called? The meditation room at Ebenezer, I think it's the Eastern, I don't know what, they have a word for it. But there's, for those of you who are on Zoom, that room is very long. And one side of it is windows looking out on a school across the street.

[13:05]

And below, if you look down from the window, there's a community garden. So all of that's included. And right on the space of your seat, everything's right there. Everything's right here. The whole world is here. Ukraine is here because we know about what's happening in Ukraine. All kinds of places are here. The places of all the people on Zoom, all the places you've lived, the place where you grew up. We have a few native Chicagoans here, but not everyone. So, So in the Song of the Grass Hut, he says that in 10 feet square, it includes the entire world. And in our practice, as we sit, of course we study the self, as Tolkien says, to study the way is to study the self. So facing the wall, we're facing ourself.

[14:06]

We're aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations, tension in our shoulders or our back or our knees or whatever. We're here physically. And also thoughts and feelings come up. And our practice isn't to try and repress those. We just let them float by. As Shuto or Sekito said elsewhere, the blue sky does not hinder the white clouds drifting. So the clouds of our monkey mind, thoughts and feelings come up as we're sitting. And we study ourself. We become intimate and familiar with ourself. And this takes a while. Again, as I said, the point of this practice is to sustain this practice of attention and awareness and awakening. So it takes a while to actually study ourself and get to know our own patterns of grasping and anger and confusion. And then, you know, and they become more subtle and some of them go away and some of them don't.

[15:13]

And, um, but we become more and more familiar with them, intimate with ourself. And we do not need to react or be caught by those patterns. We can respond from something deeper because as we sit together, as we sit on our own seat, we become aware of something deeper. And this is part of the point. So just to mention a few other lines from the song of the grass hut, Just sitting with head covered, all things are at rest. So this line about head covered is a reference to Bodhidharma, the Indian monk who came to China and founded what was then called Chan and Japanese Zen and here we are. And often he was sitting in a cave in Northern China and it was cold. So he had a quilt that he had over his head and Many pictures didn't show that, so the head covered is a reference to that, but it also means our thinking, our feeling, the thoughts that continue to arise are kind of covered over.

[16:30]

We're not hiding from them, we're not ignoring them, but we're not doing anything with that either, just let them go. This quilt over the head, by the way, when I was practicing in a Soto, a monk's hall in Japan, during, well, some sessions and also during a practice period, part of the sleeping gear that is at the end of the seat where you lie down is a kind of quilt. And there, when it was cold, it was okay to put that quilt over your head, just like Bodhidharma. Our head is covered, our thoughts and feelings, our usual sense of language and understanding is not what's right in front of us necessarily. Or it may be, but there's more. We start to see the limitations of our human thinking and understanding, the limitations of our language. So he says, just sitting with head covered, all things are at rest.

[17:33]

Thus this mountain monk, referring to himself, I could say the city monk does not understand at all. Well, of course, each of you had, you know, many intelligent people here and there are lots of things that you do understand. But In terms of ultimate reality, in terms of the universal truth, in terms of this fundamental sense of wholeness, which we get a taste of in sustained sitting, we can't grasp it with our limited human conceptualizations. We can't totally get a hold of it. It's beyond words, it's beyond language, it's beyond human thinking. It's beyond the limitations of our perceptual faculties and our intellectual faculties and maybe our spiritual faculties. And yet we can get a taste for something deeper. We can get a sense of that. And the point of our practice is to bring that into our everyday awareness and express it for everyone else, to share that awareness with everyone else.

[18:41]

When we go out from the temple, if you're sitting in Ebeneezer, or when we finish the Zoom, for those of us who are not in the temple right now. So, just sitting with head covered, all things are at rest, thus this sitting monk doesn't understand at all. We start to understand the limitations of our understanding, to start to know what you don't know. And, This is a very common perspective in Zen. Dogen talks about water. Lake Michigan, which is where I'm sitting over there, if you go out in the middle of it, you can't see all the details of the shoreline. You think it's just a round circle. Humans see water one way, as Dogan says. Fish see it another way, of course, just like we see air.

[19:44]

Hungry ghosts, very sad situation for the beings who are hungry ghosts. For them, water is pus. It's a really sad, disgusting situation. And for dragons, water is palaces and thrones and great mansions. So we start to see the limitations of our understanding. We understand something, but we understand that we don't understand it all completely. And as I've been saying, in modern science, we know that there are other very intelligent beings on our planet Not just up there in aliens, extraterrestrial aliens. We know that octopuses are very, very intelligent. I recommend that. the film, I think it's on Netflix, My Octopus Teacher, we know that forests are intelligent. There's this mycorrhizal network underneath the forest, kind of fungus, and by which trees can communicate with each other.

[20:53]

Trees from different species can warn each other of danger or can share nutrition, even between different species. So, Yeah, we start to understand that we don't understand, can't understand everything. And yet, of course, the things we do understand, we can use that beneficially to help beings, to help other beings awaken. The most important line in the Song of the Grass Hut, the single line that encompasses all of Zen practice, turn around the light to shine within, then just return. If you remember one line of a Zen teaching, that's a good one. Turn around the light to shine within, then just return. This is the rhythm of our Zazen practice.

[21:54]

So this is a common Sazen instruction. Dogen says, take the backward step that turns the light inwardly to illuminate oneself. So as I was saying, we sit and face the wall. We sit like Buddha, upright, relaxed, attentive, and we face the wall. So we turn around the light to shine within. We study the self. We are aware of our own physical sensations. sounds around us, thoughts, feelings. We turn the light within, we turn our attention within. But then, just return. So the rhythm of Zen practice, whether it's one period of Zazen on a Sunday morning, or whether it's a Sesshin for several days or seven days, or whether it's a practice period, like the three month practice period to Tassahara, we turn within for some period. and face ourselves intensely.

[22:57]

But then we step out, we just return, we return to the world. And this rhythm is, you know, the essential rhythm of Zen practice. Turn around the light to shine within, then just return. Then it says, the vast inconceivable source can't be faced or turned away from. as the Jewelmare Samadhi song says, turning away and touching are both wrong. We can't get ahold of it. And this, and then there's a lot of, references to this source, this vast, inconceivable source. This is not the source of all creation as in the Abrahamic religions where a supreme deity created the heaven and earth in seven days or whatever. It's not something that happened a long time ago. This vast, inconceivable source, vast in space and vast in time and beyond our capacity to fully understand, to conceive of it, is always present.

[24:01]

Our awakening nature is always present, right on your seat, right now. This is the Bodhi Mandala. This is the grass hut, however large it is. So the vast inconceivable source can't be faced or turned away from. We can't get ahold of it, but once you begin to practice and appreciate the wholeness, the deep reality available, in this Zazen practice, you can't turn away from it either. You can't. Even if you stop formal Zen practice, that happens sometimes. People have come to Ancient Dragon and left and then come back. And thanks to Zoom, a number of our original practitioners who live in distant places like Colorado and Los Angeles, and Nick Nathan's here from Michigan, are back.

[25:06]

So this Zazen practice becomes part of our body-mind, part of our awareness. This rhythm of turning within and then just returning is this part of what it means to be human. What it means to fully appreciate and acknowledge our own dharma position, our own situation as individual human beings, but connected. connected through this. Well, we are not connected by mycorrhizal networks like the trees in the forest, but we're connected through this practice of just sitting upright, just being present and aware. So further in the grass hut it says, I don't want to get the words wrong, so I'm going to go to the text.

[26:09]

It says, Well, I'll read a longer portion of it and comment on some of it. It says, meet the ancestral teachings and the ancestral teachers. And there's a whole lot to say about what it means by ancestors. Be familiar with their instructions. Bind grasses to build a hut and don't give up. Don't give up, keep showing up. So the most important instruction for Zen practice is just to keep showing up, just to continue. But then it says, let go of hundreds of years and relax completely. So this is about letting go of all our ancient twisted karma, which means that we have to acknowledge it, we have to face it, we don't ignore it. But let go of hundreds of years.

[27:13]

When we are fully present in our dharma position with all of the regrets we have of the past and fears we have of the future and all the different beings in our life on our seat from all of our lives, all of our life, let go. Let go doesn't mean push it away. It doesn't mean suppress it, but just let go and relax completely. So the point of this practice is to relax completely. That may seem strange if you walk into a meditation hall and everybody's sitting still, upright. It doesn't look necessarily relaxed. You know, people are sitting still and trying not to move and it can look like they're being very stoic. But the point of this is to relax completely, completely.

[28:17]

To let go of all the tension of being a human being and just be present with the wholeness of all things. The interconnected reality of our vast internet of our vast network of beings in the 10 directions and the 10 and the three times or the 10 times in three directions, whatever. We're all it's all right here. So how can we just be present and relax completely into this? So then the grass hut continues, open your hands and walk innocent. And it says, if you want to know the undying person in the hut, if you want to know that which goes beyond life and death, of course, we all have life and death, but what goes beyond is don't separate from the skin bag here and now. So, excuse me, I know at times when we first started chanting this, there were senior members of our Sangha who were very offended to be called a skin bag.

[29:25]

Of course, you know, we're each the skin bag here and now. And don't separate from that. Don't run away from yourself. Be present with all the limitations, with all the physical problems, with all the emotional problems, with all the difficulties of this very challenged world and the world around us. Don't run away. Don't separate from this skin bag here and now. So each of us as individual animal, I guess mammal beings, we have a skin bag. I wonder, does Ukraine have a skin bag? Does Russia have a skin bag? Does the US of A have a skin bag? Anyway, how do we not separate from our reality here and now? So there's a lot more to say about all of this.

[30:34]

But maybe it's time for discussion, for any comments or responses or questions you have about any of this, about this Bodhimandala, this sitting place, this place of awakening, the dojo of Zen, where we awaken, where we return and continue to sit like Buddha, to perform Buddha. So your zazen is a performance of the Buddha who's on your seat. How do we sustain that? And that includes, you know, having to face the nasty stuff of our greed, hate, and delusion, our grasping, our anger, or sometimes it becomes hatred and our confusion, and getting to know it, becoming familiar with this. So we now have this connected but separate, separate and unequal dojos or bodhi mandalas of the Zoom room.

[31:58]

And since my laptop died a few weeks ago, I'm on this iPad and I can't even see all the people on Zoom, let alone all the people in the Ebenezer room. I can see, I can see Michael back there. Is that Joe? I'm not sure who I can see next to Michael, closer than Michael. But anyway, maybe Alex, would you please, since you can probably see all the people on Zoom and all the people in the room, would you please call on people? So if you want, if you have something to say, a response, a question, a comment, you can raise your hand if you're in Admonizer or you can go on Zoom. There's a participant window and you can raise your hand there. So please feel free. I do see Robert Odell. Why don't you start? Hi. So I'm still getting my grips with Zen and how it thinks about things.

[33:06]

And I do have experience in Theravada. Excuse me for a second, Robert. Michael, can you hear Robert from the back there? Am I hearable? Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah. And so, but I, but I do have experienced some, a fair amount of experience in Theravada in practice. And one of the things that's always confused me about the differences between Zen and Theravada is that the sort of like, like, like the way in which awakening or enlightenment is dealt with is, at least at the initial stages, like the Sotapanna is understood to be awakened insofar as he has at least once comprehended the Nibbana Dhamma. And I've always been confused by Zen because I feel like 100% the experience of awakening is not the experience of like,

[34:09]

absorption or comprehension of Nirvana. I can respond to that somewhat simply. So Theravada Buddhism in South Asia, and there were other forms of that early Buddhism, is about finding personal liberation. So the wonderful practitioners in Theravada work to free themselves from nirvana, which literally means cessation, or to enter nirvana, so to cease the personal greed, hate, and delusion. So it's personal practice, it's personal liberation. Of course, Theravada monks, when they go out in begging rooms, do share their practice in some ways. But basically, the Theravada and Southern Asian Buddhism is about developing The goal is the arhat, the personal full awakening, so personal freedom.

[35:15]

In Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhisattva practice, which includes Zen, but many other branches and traditions, that's the main Buddhism of Tibet, of China, of Korea, of Vietnam, of Japan, and Zen. And so the goal of the Bodhisattva is universal liberation. So I was talking about this, we share our awareness, we share our practice, we recognize our connection with all beings. So the goal of Zen and Mahayana Buddhism is called the great vehicle, sometimes the bodhisattva practice, is to free all beings, as we'll say later in the four vows. So that's the main difference. and the difference between the arhat and the bodhisattva. So we can talk about this more some other time. You can have practice discussion with one of our practice leaders or do some with me or Haitian or one of our teachers and to ask more about that.

[36:18]

But that's the basic difference. We don't look for nirvana outside of the difficulties of our world. The bodhisattva sees nirvana in samsara. right in the middle of struggling together with everyone, together with our Sangha, with all beings, to try and support awakening, awareness, kindness. So that's the difference. That's the basic difference. So other comments, questions, responses? Alex, would you help me if there's people raising their hand at Ebeneezer? Or on Zoom? So we have a question here, Tei.

[37:19]

Yes, please. Who is it? It's Eve. Yeah, it's Eve. I just want to say thank you. I really, really like this space. So I'm really grateful to the church for providing it for us and for the people that found it. Well, you're welcome. Yes. So, you know, it's been two years. And our little grass hut on Irving Park Road was wonderful, very homey, not too big, bigger than the room you're in at Ebenezer. But at any rate, we will find another full-time space. But for now, it's great that we have that space at Ebenezer, but it's also great that people can come by Zoom and we're together in some way. And we will try and work out the technical aspects of being able to see each other, all of us. So glad you're enjoying it, Eve. Thank you. Other comments, responses, questions about place of practice?

[38:25]

It looks like Jane has a question on Zoom, Peg. Good. It's really more a comment or just something to add to the mix. I love the don't give up and the reasons I say that is that when I first started sitting, I went to my first session, it was a weekend session. And I remember working so hard to just sit there. I didn't really know what I was doing, I should say. And at some point I just had like what I would call like kind of a meltdown. But it took me having that meltdown to realize that it wasn't so much of the effort that you needed to put in. It was really just to allow things to kind of come and go. And that's the letting go part and relaxing completely, which is a whole nother kind of level, I suppose.

[39:28]

But yeah, and I think it ties in with sitting with other people, definitely. The idea of Sangha takes on a palpable nature to me. for me, and it's so helpful. But don't give up. I keep coming back, coming back. Thank you. Thank you. And I can relate to your experience. My first seven-day session, the first year I was practicing with my Japanese Soto priest teacher in New York, I had a meltdown too. Somehow I read one of those early books about Zen that I don't recommend, where it talked about how the point of practice was to have some great awakening experience, some great Kensho. And I thought I had to do that. So the third day, I think, or the fourth day, I don't know, I sat up all night.

[40:30]

very gung ho. That's not what don't give up means. I mean, that, you know, one, it's possible to do that. But by a little while into the next morning, by around the time of the Dharma talk, I was, I just kind of melted like you were describing. And then I went to my teacher then and said, I can't do this, I have to go, I have to leave. And he said, Oh, well, you know, you You know, you can go if you want to, but you might regret it later. I ended up staying for the whole seven days, and that was wonderful. When I stopped trying to control what was going on, on my seat, and when I just, as you said, allowed things to be as it is. So the point is to sustain this attention and intention. So thank you for that, Jim. David Ray has his hand up. Thank you, Tai-Yen.

[41:39]

Thank you for your talk. After hearing your talk, I'm aware that I am in such a different place, such a different mood. The weirdness of this thing, that we're experiencing now feels festive to me, just the whole bizarreness of it. And I have to say, I'm surprised that a member of the human species felt offended at having it pointed out that I'm a skin bag, because it's kind of obvious that that's the kind of contraption that I am. I do have a question. She was a wonderful practitioner. She lives in Florida now. That's good, too. My question is about monastic experience, because I loved hearing you talk about monks in little huts, sort of like us in our Zoom cells, except that the people at Ebenezer are not in little Zoom cells.

[42:43]

My question is about monastic experience and monastic life in our tradition and practice. Is it correct to say that what we do is derived from monastic practice and still has the flavor of monastic practice? I know there are great householders in our tradition, But I'd like to hear you talk more about monastic practice and what we're doing now. Thank you. Yes, that's several whole Dharma talks in themselves. But yes, our forms, our basic practice derives from the tradition of Chinese and Japanese monastic practice. And there are residential centers in the United States where people can go and And I trained at San Francisco Zen Center and its affiliate temples, Green Gulch and Tassajara, way up in the mountains.

[43:48]

And there's something really wonderful about practicing together with the same people for an extended period. And there's something about that that It is informative in terms of sangha. However, when I escaped California 15 years ago and relocated to Chicago, my intention was to have a sangha like this, non-residential. People living and working in the city, helping, doing whatever they did. There are many wonderful people in our sangha. But then coming together to sit. And back at our grass hut on Irving Park Road, we had regular three-day sesshins and five-day sesshins. Maybe we can start to have seven-day sesshins when we find a full-time temple. And we are going to have an all-day sitting the end of next month here at Ebenezer Ant on Zoom.

[44:51]

So I'll talk about that in announcements. But yeah, the forms and the basic practice that we do here is derived from that experience of residential practice that I had at San Francisco Zen Center and also in Japan. Although the shift from Japan to California was pretty huge. Buddhism has moved from India to Tibet, to China, to Japan. and now to California and Chicago. And so, yes, the basic forms, how we do service and the forms that we use in a meditation hall when we have a full-time meditation hall. And it's wonderful that at Ebenezer, we don't have to put away the cushions at the end of the event. That room is dedicated for us. Anyway, this all derives from residential practice, to put it that way.

[45:52]

But also, there's a long tradition, as you said, of people in the world doing and we have people, many different kinds of occupations and service and work in the world in our sangha. And how do we bring this? How do we let how do we they turn to take the backward step in a period of zazen or an all-day sitting or in a longer sitting, how do we face ourselves deeply, settled still, with all of the wiggling that happens in our body and mind, and then just return? So the return is very important. So what Robert was asking about the difference between Theravada in Zen and in the Mahayana or Bodhisattva tradition, We're talking about everyone, all beings, universal liberation.

[46:53]

And we, none of us can save all beings. None of us can just stop the war, the horrible invasion of Ukraine that's happening and all the other places where there is turmoil and suffering. We can't do that by ourselves, but we can make a difference. Everything we do makes a difference. The second noble truth is that everything that happens is because of cause and effect. So all of the difficulties we have individually and collectively are the product of many causes and conditions. And we have to face that. So, I mean, just the easiest example off the top is all the difficulties our country has with racism. go back to, you know, 400 years to slavery and, and, you know, all the very different, various different forms of racism, Jim Crow, and now the mass incarceration.

[47:57]

So this is collective karma. It's not just individual, but we're all affected by that. And each of us is affected by all the different things that have happened in our lives. that we've done or that other people have done around us. So we face all that, we don't ignore that. But we also know that what we do with that in our own situation makes a difference. We can be part of helping all beings. So that's a short answer, David. Is anybody in the room there at Ebeneezer have a comment or question? Alex? We have a question. Kind of an observation question. I love the fact that you spoke to the Grass Hut song today. I love that poem. And as with most Zen allegorical poems, I always sort of seek out the deeper symbolism.

[49:00]

And it always occurred to me in reading that, So it's always seemed to me the mental construction of this bounded reality of the self as opposed to the vast boundlessness of our awakening awareness and sort of the distinction between those. Both, both. And all of it, yes. So this skin bag is a kind of grasshopper. That's right, thank you. We have a question here from Kathy Binghamtig. Thank you. I just wanted to say, I remember the discussion where Don Kitzler raised the comment about the skin bag. And her comment was something like, when she first heard it, she was disgusted by the term.

[50:06]

But later, she began to really appreciate it, that it had a good deal of meaning to her. And I remember when I first heard it, It was also shocking and disgusting, but there's a way in which it's, you know, I think we don't like to be aware of our, you know, the limitations of our bodies, but also the fact that we are, you know, it's like we're inside our bodies looking out. We're not always aware of I forget my age sometimes, you know, I forget that I'm married now. It's in my body. And so I think that term skin bag has a lot of meaning in terms of being truly conscious about life and our passage, our passage through. Thank you, Kathy. Yes. And I'm aware that we, that's, that must be the last question we have to stop soon, but yeah.

[51:14]

Zen is not about being nice. It is about kindness, but it's also, you know, includes that which is disgusting or difficult. The point is to wake up together. So, you know, sometimes we talk in ways that include something that is, that some people find shocking and even disgusting. The point is, wake up. So there's a long tradition in Zen of teachers slapping their students or at least, you know, giving them strong feedback. once the student has expressed that they are willing to receive feedback. And that's a part of the practice and training too, to actually not control everything, but to allow ourselves to hear others and to be guided.

[52:18]

So we have to stop right now, but thank you all for your comments and questions. Please come back again to this the Grass Hut of Zoom or the Grass Hut of Ebenezer Church, whichever. And we have lots of programs during the week on Zoom. So please check out the website and please feel free to come again. So Dylan, can we launch into announcements or is there something else first? We'll do the four Bodhisattva vows and then we'll do announcements. And we haven't had the text on the screen, but that's okay. Yeah, we'll work on that for next week. Okay. Beings are numberless. I vow to end them.

[53:20]

Delusions are impossible. I vow to end them. Burn my case, I vow to end them. This way is unsurpassable. I am proud to realize it. Beings are numberless. I am proud to create them. Solutions are inexhaustible. I am proud to end them. I vow to realize it. Beings are numberless. I vow to free them. Delusions are inexhaustible.

[54:24]

I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless.

[54:31]

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