happens. And emptiness or samadhi is defined as sometimes as a state of infinite possibilities. So what we've been talking about the last few times is how to prepare ourselves to be ready. And there are two ways to practice, one being jnana or meditation, and the other being prajna or wisdom. And we all practice meditation, and what we need is maybe a little more wisdom practice. Of course, just having an insight into something has no meaning at all unless you have the ability to apply it.

[01:27]

So many of us know a great deal about life at any particular moment, but it's not consistent. We can't carry it with us, you know, or not carry what we usually carry with us. So the idea of practice is to get rid of fixednesses or fixed ideas, fixed ways in our body and in our mental activity. So when you sit in zazen, you find that your back hurts, or this or that hurts, and usually it's that your sitting is uncovering some place where you're holding yourself in your body. So if you persist with some care, not being too hard on yourself, that loosens up and actually the way you're tied together will change. But it's perhaps easier to have a ready, relaxed body than it is to have a ready, relaxed mind. And the most fixed idea of all is

[02:57]

course, the idea that there's something called you that exists. So, I don't think it's so helpful to say, kill the ego. No one knows what to hit or what to aim at, you know. You might hurt yourself in the process, you know. If emptiness is a state of infinite possibilities, then let's look at the infinite number of yous there are. Can everyone hear? Not so. So, instead of killing you, you should notice how many yous there are. when you have a friend, there's a new you there. So there's you and your friend, which if you notice as you get older, there's not some person who everybody likes. Rather, there's you the way you are with so-and-so, and there's you the way you are with some other person.

[04:20]

And there's you, the way you are, say, when you're pouring water. You should let, when you pour water, if you're not fairly, if you don't let the water enter you, then you spill the water. If you're thinking about something else, you know. So in monasteries, they practice very carefully with water. always had the monks pour water toward themselves rather than away from themselves. So if you had a bucket of water from the kitchen and you were ready to heave it out, you didn't go heave it out, you went out and poured it toward yourself. Some different kind of care. Or when you light a candle, there's a specific you there. And when you see a friend, there's a specific kind of you there. So ultimately what you want to do is you want to identify your... allow each situation to identify you.

[05:55]

Whatever situation you find yourself in, that's who you are. And you don't argue about it. So this is what the meaning of, one meaning anyway, of karma is. So when you find yourself in a situation, you don't say, I don't like this situation or this isn't such and such. Actually, you recognize it as everything you've done up to the present has brought you to this point. This is you. And you can accept that as teaching, and when you accept that as teaching, then it's dharma. Buddha's karma, everything the world is right now maybe is Buddha's karma, but we call it dharma. So from one point of view, everything that exists right now is dharma, maybe Buddha's dharma. But from your point of view, it's karma, your karma. But as you begin to recognize

[07:02]

each situation you're in as you, as Buddha's Dharma, then you're practicing Buddhism. But generally we don't, you know, if you're in a sesshin and you have painful legs, you don't want to accept the painful legs person as you. You'd rather be a person who's going out on the street somewhere or not in the sesshin maybe. Anyway, our practice is each moment to accept whatever situation you find yourself in as an identification of you. So your karma is your identity, you know, in that sense. But when you enter into each thing,

[08:08]

like when the water enters into you as you pour it. The more you're identified by each thing, the more this way, you know, there's no you there actually, there's just, we say, Buddha is there. So on one side there's you and another side there's Buddha, and on one side there's emptiness and another side there's infinite possibilities. The other day, Dr. Konsei was speaking about how women in class relate to him sexually. He's very interested in sex, anyway. And so how can they be his student when they relate to him as a woman? Because being a student isn't relating to him as a woman. And we have a lot of students around here who are concerned about women's

[09:49]

liberation. And how can you relate to Suzuki Roshi if you insist he treats you as a woman rather than as a student? Or if you insist that someone treat you as a friend rather, say Suzuki Roshi, you want him to treat you as a friend rather than as a student. So, you have to be able to recognize many yous, be open to many yous. You know, in today's world, it's pretty much lost its meaning for all of us. When our activity produces pollution, just our going on produces pollution, which is perhaps going to destroy us.

[11:32]

existence, just our simple existence produces a population problem which will probably do us in. And when our government has lost its, our leaders have no credibility for us, as the newspapers say, and when the way we think about other peoples has us thinking about frizzling them with solar power or dropping nuclear bombs on them. It's very difficult to have an existence which has any meaning. And one of the purpose of a Buddhist community is to give meaning or give a sense of harmony to the society. And so the only response we can have in the kind of world we live in is to start with what seems to have meaning. And there isn't much we can do except, well, we know we have to eat.

[12:57]

So in a place like Zen Center, we take the very simplest things, eating, and make them into a practice, or the toilet, we bow at the little Buddha before we go in. And actually, we start out with rather meaningless activity. We just bring our hands together. Social activity, you reach your hands out and shake someone's hands, but in Religious people tend to just put their hands together as a greeting, and it doesn't go anywhere. It's not activity which leads anywhere. And when we bow, it's not activity which leads anywhere. We're not even bowing. We say we're bowing to the ground, and literally that's what we're doing. We're bowing to the ground. We're bowing to our feet. The explanation often is of why we bow is that as you're bowing you're lifting up Buddha's feet. But actually you're bowing to your own feet. You know we have some idea this is high because our heads way up here and something down there is low. So we just bow because our head is high and our feet are low. We bow. There's actually no meaning to it at all.

[14:30]

And it seems pretty useless to do it, you know. And we just have two hands, so we put our hands together. That's all. It doesn't go anywhere. So anyway, we start when you're really, you know, in the extremes of existential anxiety, you wonder if you can put your two hands together. Anyway, that much we can do, so we put our hands together. And when we bow, we just bow. So at the center of our activity is this meaningless activity of just bowing, just putting our hands together. And then we have that much. And then we have a practice based on eating in the toilet and meditating. And then we have our life activity. Does anybody have any questions? I didn't understand so well the difference between karma and dharma. I saw something about how the karmic situation transforms into the dharmic situation when you start to accept your karma.

[16:33]

what the difference is between your karma and dharma situation is teaching? Well, there are many ways of talking about karma and dharma, you know. Anyway, karma is, maybe in the simplest sense, karma is form. It's what You know, you have a particular nose, that's your karma. And dharma in the general sense means teaching, but dharma also is everything, this is dharma. So it's not, you know, what I said has no meaning in the sense that you can tie it down to exactly something. But what I was talking about was accepting each situation as you, as your karma. And the problem is in that kind of thing, how does Buddha enter into that? But your karma is Buddha's dharma. I don't know if you see what I mean, but when you practice your karma, you're practicing Buddha's actual life.

[18:00]

So in Mahayana Buddhism, there's always you on one end and Buddha on the other end. And the practice is like the ten stages of enlightenment, the ten bhumis. It's a sort of transition in which each one is more the possibility of Buddha and less the possibility of a specific you. So when you can enter into everything, like enter into the pouring of the water, enter into, just be there for your friend, the way your one hand is for the other hand. When you're just, when you're bowing, when you're just there for Buddha, the way Buddha is there for you, then that's, you know, from the seventh bhumi on, that's when you begin the description of the cosmic Buddha. But that's just a description of you in your infinite possibilities. So what I'm trying to do is, mostly we have the tendency to think, if we think this then we can't think that. But actually you can think this and that at the same time. There's you and there's Buddha simultaneously. There's karma and there's dharma simultaneously. Samadhi is described as emptiness.

[19:37]

But actually, shunyata is the most positive word you can find. It means emptiness is not a good translation of it. It's a rather negative flavor. Shunyata has all possibilities. Yeah? Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference when we're practicing emptiness. It is like giving space or room for the forms of other people to exist.

[20:43]

when we're practicing something which may seem like emptiness, but which is actually an exclusion of forms. Very often I find myself getting into trying maybe to create a feeling of emptiness by avoiding forms of mind. Well, I understand that the best thing to do is to not make effort, is to present yourself with sitting, say. And whatever happens is there, but you don't make an effort to have an empty mind or not have an empty mind. And you try to concentrate on your breathing, maybe, but you don't try to concentrate on your breathing.

[21:52]

or avoid the pain, say, so hard that you lose all your composure. Maybe there's a time you go through in which you lose your composure. So, the description of this kind of practice you're describing is shikantaza, which means you don't you accept the background of emptiness and you don't interfere with whatever appears. So if you try to clear the slate, you know, the effort to clear the slate is cloudy, you know. But of course, in the kind of practice we do, you can try many things. So maybe, if you want, for one or two years you can try to clean the slate. Eventually you'll become tired. Then you can see what was there as you take the eraser away. But it's okay to try to, say, concentrate on your breathing.

[23:20]

or clear your mind as much as possible. In your practice, you can try various things. If something arises that you find yourself doing, you can see what it is. It's all right. But you can also just let go of it, not try to interfere, and just see what it is without interfering. But when you interfere, you can notice who is it, who's the you that's interfering. Why are you interfering? What motivates you to interfere? What makes you think there's something or any reason to interfere? Okay. Yeah? relationships here, I can begin to have some feel for that. But in my everyday life, I find many possibilities, many needs that look like, that end up being violations of the precepts.

[24:48]

I don't, I don't understand. They feel like various aspects of me. And there are these various aspects of me that go on violating the precepts. And then a little while later, there's some other aspect of me that's like incense, or vowing, or doing something else that fits more with the picture I have of practice. But that, that vowing, that incense offering, that's all very safe, letting all of the me's come about in that kind of practice. But in the rest of the world, there are all these other people who bring out all these other me's. Well, anyway, we have the precepts, you know. The reason we have the precepts is because we break them. They have no meaning if we didn't break them. So when we break them, you notice something about yourself. It's a way of checking on yourself.

[26:09]

I mean, if you don't know you're breaking them, then you're breaking them. But if you know you're breaking them, you see, if you don't know you're breaking them, you'd think, well, geez, I can't wait to do this again, you know? Then you wouldn't know you're breaking them, actually. But if you know you're breaking them and you feel some, then that's all we have, you know? you make some effort maybe not to break them, but you break them. That's right, you see that you're trying to have it all one way or the other, and it's both ways. We both limit the possibilities and have all the possibilities. You can't have all the possibilities without limiting the possibilities. That's why we have karma and dharma. It's an interesting problem, but there's no way to talk about it, actually. I don't know how to say something about that.

[27:36]

The more you have various you's for the various people you are, actually there's some, it's not you and not them, it's something the two of you create. It's the you pouring water or the you talking to a certain person. If you get drawn into that person's thing, then you're creating something. And if you're trying to hold yourself, you're creating something. There's some way you work with that, which is quite fluid. And if you have no form at all, you know, in your practice, if you start out saying, well, I have infinite possibilities, you'd have nothing, you know. If we have things the way, for instance, if we all ate the way we want to eat, say, only, then there'd be no practice to eating. It's interesting when we eat for some bigger reason than just the way we want to do it. We just eat, you know, the way the rules say.

[29:13]

So you have in your activity the rules and the possibilities. And if they're both present, then you have more and more freedom from, it takes a lot of time, but you have more and more freedom from being caught by this and that. Could you talk a little bit about the difference between being all there for another person and being drawn into their thing? Well, I don't know, maybe this is being drawn into, western way, and this is... Non-action is very important. Effort not to do anything, effort not to create anything. I mean, things are created whether you make an effort or not. When you're making the effort to create, if you're making an effort in a relationship to be friendly or to make it a nice relationship or to, you know, then you've caused some problem.

[30:41]

But on the other hand, we do make an effort to be friendly, and we do make an effort to recognize roles. And you should be able to recognize not only the different yous that occur when you meet somebody, when you know somebody, but there are different roles within that. There's one just, if we talk about the teacher-disciple relationship, there's the teacher as a person, which in the largest sense of all his possibilities is Buddha. But anyway, there's the teacher as the person, the ordinary man, say Suzuki Roshi was, you know, sometimes he was a husband, sometimes he was a father, sometimes he was an old man watching television, you know. there's the teacher. And as teacher, within that there are various possibilities. One is you conceive of yourself as a sick person and you conceive of the teacher as the physician. Whether you're sick or he's the physician is irrelevant. You put that role onto it.

[32:06]

And then also you put the role onto it, or he puts the role onto you, that you and he are the same. But those two roles aren't in conflict. You're sick and he's well, and yet you're equal. They're both present simultaneously. If you find yourself doing one and not the other, acting like the equal or acting like you're just sick, then if you come to your teacher and you say, without recognizing also that you're equal, then there's no possibility much of helping. If you come and just say, I'm equal, then there's no possibility. It's because of those roles. Then within that, I guess guru, for instance, could be best translated as conscience. Within that there's not the role of the teacher, but the teacher functioning most purely in interaction with your infinite possibilities. But then still, there are the husband. So when we want a relationship to be a certain way, friend or I'm a woman or something, if you're a woman you want a person to recognize your sexual nature

[33:35]

or you're a man and you want a person to recognize your skills at something, then you're trying to control the relationship. So simultaneously you recognize the roles that are there. Steve is director of the building and so when we relate to Steve, we relate to him as director of the building. That's simple, everyone knows that. But you have to treat him purely as director of the building. You have to be able to do that without entering into it also, well, Steve's just another student. Or Steve is somebody I do such and such with, or like, or have an argument with, or whatever. Those also are there, but you have to be able to to be open to the roles and to all your possibilities. As I said a week or two ago, when Suzuki Roshi answered a question by, I don't know, you have to be open to the fact that he knows and isn't saying, or that he really doesn't know, or that he could know but he's forgotten because he doesn't need to know.

[34:59]

So you treat your teacher as if what he was doing was teaching, when also what he's doing may not be. Anyway, if we can do this, we can make everything work for us. Sometimes when I'm sad or sometimes when I'm doing good, I feel a kind of... I feel connected with things. And it seems that the things that I'm connected with aren't connected. I mean, the world isn't connected. The wall? The Earth. The world is unconnected. I don't know if it ever was connected, but it doesn't seem very together now. So, when I feel this feeling of connection, I evidently really not, because there's nothing to be connected with. When you feel connected, why don't you just enjoy it? Because immediately I think, well, there's nothing to be connected with.

[36:36]

Why are you interfering with your own pleasure? Because it seems that Zazen is supposed to be so serious. Oh. That's true. But you know, the other day I talked about Buddha as he finished his ascetic practices and he sat down under the bow tree, he supposedly said to himself, I don't know who was there reading his thoughts, but anyway, he supposedly said to himself, why should I fear being happy? So zazen looks serious and what we do looks serious only from the outside. It's like walking into a laboratory and you see a bunch of people doing something, all concentrating on it. They may be really enjoying what they're doing, but everyone's busy doing what they're doing. That's part of it here. And also, it may not be so easy to notice we have ideas about the way we want things to be, what pleasure is, etc.

[38:03]

You know, usually we think of being happy as forgetting ourselves, you know, so we go out and get drunk to forget ourselves, you know, something like that. But from the Buddhist point of view, joy is to be present with yourself. It's another kind of forgetting yourself, you know. So I know when I was in Japan, And I was several times in situations with Japanese people where there was friendship involved when I was in the monastery and in other circumstances. And I couldn't understand why I thought it was so boring. And they're treating me very funny, I thought, maybe because I'm a foreigner, I'm being treated strangely. And they're not being friendly.

[39:05]

be partly because nothing happened, you know. You just have a cup of green tea over and over again, or you don't talk about much, or you spend time together in a way which I never thought of as friendliness. So it took me some time before I noticed that this is what they mean by friendship. Even so, it was hard to let myself go into it, but I had an idea of what friendship was. So partly we have an idea of what joy is, or having fun is, or what seriousness is. And zazen looks serious, more serious than it is actually. I think if you could see into the heads of everybody who is doing zazen, you would find most of them weren't very serious, you know. But, you know, that's what I mean by, too, when you're connected. Obviously this tatami is not connected to me except that I'm sitting on it and it seems to be bearing my weight, you know, luckily. But there's another kind of connection that we don't notice. So if you feel connected and suddenly you

[40:31]

try to say, well I'm not connected, look there's the tatami way over there, you know, down there underneath me. Then you're trying to, you see you can't accept that feeling connection, like might not be able to accept that kind of friendliness, because there's connection. So there's both one kind of seemingly no connection and there's another kind of connection. But we can't, you know, apply one kind of way of looking at it to another. Way back there? things like my interfering with being happy or bowing to certain negative states. Why not? That's good. I suspect what I'm doing is bowing to not really bowing to it. I mean, I think that's what I'm doing. Instead of dealing with the situation, I say, well, I'm bowing to not really dealing with the situation. Well, you can bow to that too.

[41:58]

So practice, you know, again, this problem of celibacy and sexuality is a big problem for people. And they think their sexuality is either having sexual activity or not. And to not have sexual activity means you're not having sexual activity. Of course, it isn't true. You know? So... I mean... So you may notice that... that... say a person who's celibate or who wants to be celibate... Well, let's say a person who doesn't want to be celibate but notices there's some advantage to celibacy. But he can't give up the idea of sexuality. So, maybe so for one afternoon or one week he is celibate, right? But he can't continue that. He can see it, he can see maybe that for that one week he felt rather good, you know?

[43:25]

but he doesn't have the ability to continue it. And practice is the ability to perceive something and continue it. The only way to continue something is to present it to yourself over and over again. Practice is. So actually, whatever you do, you're exactly the same. If you're celibate, you just express yourself one way. If you're not celibate, you express yourself a different way. And one isn't better or worse than the other. But we make certain choices according to our nature, which are karma, our tendencies, or our situation. And then we notice what happens. And if you present that to yourself each time you bow, fine. If you present it to yourself each time you breathe, that's fine. Just presenting it to yourself is practice. Maybe you can't do anything about it, but maybe each time you present it to yourself, if you have some difficulty, as you present it to yourself, you wish you could do something about it. Not just something simple like going across the street and, you know, leaving your dry-cleaning off.

[44:56]

Well, you might as well go across the street and do it, but if it's something that you can't, that's some lifetime problem or some long-range kind of undefined thing, the way to work with it is to keep presenting it to yourself. Just present it to your mind and body over and over again. This produces some resolution. Yeah? How is karma affected by enlightenment? Well, enlightenment might be called completely accepting your karma or finding your karma as dharma. Anyway, enlightenment is, you know, you're already enlightened, you know, but you don't know how to realize it, maybe. Or maybe you do, I don't know, I can barely, only see one eye, so.

[46:13]

It seems to me that one thing you've been emphasizing lately, and I want to get back to you as soon as possible, is that precepts and rules, or a set of ways of limiting the activity of celibacy, are that it's not so could be, for instance, be self, as to notice what happens when you try to follow it, or when you break it. That's right. The emphasis is not on that it's good or bad to do that. But the important thing is to notice, to do it as practice. In other words, to notice what has happened when you're doing it. So that it all becomes kind of like a,

[47:30]

Yes, that's right. Of course, if you're married or whatever, you know, and have sexual activity, still you're celibate, actually. And if you're celibate, still a sexual way of relating to things exists. So rules are important not only as a check on ourselves, just notice what we are, it gives us some way. I mean everything is relative maybe, but the fact that everything is relative may be an absolute. So there are fixed ways we can give ourselves to notice things. We each of us have a particular, we're particular types of people and we have particular weaknesses. So you will notice as you practice what kind of things you tend to have trouble with. Then those rules you should be more careful with. So you can't just say it doesn't make any difference one way or the other as long as we notice.

[49:04]

an actual fact, if there's some aspect of ourselves that we notice we tend to do, you know, then we should work with that particular problem and be quite strict about the rules, those rules. Well, say that you overeat. It may be necessary to make a rule to curb your overeating. And if you overeat in some other level, you want to consume the world, it may be necessary to have some rule to limit yourself.

[50:05]

Just as if your mind wanders all the time, we have some rule like, you bring it back. When you remember, you bring it back. So, or if you're a person who's angry all the time, you have to work with that. Very interesting, I mean, your weaknesses are the very things that you can work with best. Very important. And then you can look at emptiness, say. the desire to see everything as emptiness is a form of hate. You hate everything, you want to destroy everything, so you say everything's empty. What could be more hateful behavior in a sense? Or someone else's related compassion to basically to the basic emotion of hate because it's distant and separated. If you hate somebody, you're drawn back, and if you're compassionate, you're rather just watching, or it's not the same as passion. So, if you find some weakness, it's probably actually your strength, if you work with it. But there's no way to work with it unless you have some rules.

[51:26]

Thank you very much.

[51:39]

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