Maybe it's because it's nearly spring, I don't know exactly why, but in the last few weeks people have been coming to me with love problems. And the ancient Zen teachers, as Suzuki Ueshiba would say, were smart enough to tell their students not to get mixed up in such things. Actually, it's not a Buddhist problem in a way, it's just a problem, and it's pretty hard to know what to say about it, because once you're involved in such a situation, it's extremely painful if it doesn't go well, and usually they don't go very well, it seems.

[01:01]

I've met one or two people in my life who seem to say that falling in love is the greatest thing ever, and I've done it fourteen times in the last ten years, and each time has produced poems or paintings or something, but I don't know how they manage it, because most people have a pretty hard time with it. In fact, in the end, I think, if you're wise, you decide on some kind of relationship, which is, anyway, from a Buddhist point of view, we feel is deeper. I think the only thing, my recommendation at present is to make the best of being single. What I mean is that I don't think we look as positively as we might on the advantages

[02:08]

or feeling or value of living by yourself, and if you do do that, and then some situation arises where you get married, or you want to get married completely, then you get married. That may be better than going around looking to get married. I think we get into halfway situations that way. It's much better to wait until it's forced on us, I think. Anyway, the situation is pretty difficult, and Suzuki Roshi used to say that to know yourself in a difficult situation is the best way to practice Buddhism. And the Blue Cliff Records model subject number 21 is about, well, a monk asks the

[03:30]

teacher about the lotus. If a lotus blossom is not yet out of the water, what do you call it? And they go back and forth about that, but it's a discussion about what they're talking about is the relative and the absolute, the water being representing in Buddhist jargon the absolute and the lotus blossom not yet blossomed. When it blossoms, is it the relative? It's that kind of question. But the question is also about why not just call it a lotus? I mean, the discussion between the two is turning your problems into such a philosophical

[04:31]

discussion is not so fruitful. And when we talk about form and emptiness, actually the relative or form means insolvable problems. And the actual meaning of form is insolvable problems. So, whatever you do, you know, springtime or wintertime, you have insolvable problems. And how you absorb, last week I talked about restraining, you know, maybe a better word is absorb. How you absorb those, the problems you're in, the actual situation you're in is Buddhist practice. So, in that Blue Cliff Records subject, the

[05:50]

teacher says, or the commentary says, I guess it is, says, to practice one and to know three. This has many ways of being understood, but it means that we're not tied to a simple cause and effect of this leads to that, you know, that leads to et cetera. Actually, any situation we're in has many causes and many results. And so, your practice is, if you're in a difficult situation to see beyond this, you know, if you just solve the problem, it'll just be

[06:53]

replaced by another problem. So, your emphasis isn't just at solving the problem, but in a larger sense to absorb it. So, if you see that there are many causes, you know, and many results from your actions, this means that you trust. Actually, it means you can't see many causes or practice in this way without trust. You know, if you're trying to get out of a situation by looking for how to solve it, you know, then you lack trust in the actual life situation you're in. So, there may be two ways to practice. One is a practice which emphasizes results, you know, and another a practice which emphasizes means, how we do it.

[07:56]

And in Zen, we mostly emphasize how we do it. We don't give much explanation. Just practice one thing, you know, excuse the word, as sincerely as possible. And if you can make one thing clear, then three things will be clear. If you can't even make one thing clear, then nothing will be clear. So, actually, we start with our Zazen posture. If your body can't be clear, then nothing can be clear. And most of us sit as if we were ducking. You know, even those of you who sit straight, sort of, there's some kind of ducking involved, you know. Actually, you've got to be there as if a tiger was charging down the path at you, you know. And you decide it's

[08:58]

hopeless to run, so you just, you know, wait. So, each moment while you're sitting, you have to sit with that kind of, I mean, it's some courage or confidence or energy, which is just ... Anyway, we start with one thing like that or just start with bowing or offering incense. And for everybody, things like bowing and offering incense are pretty annoying at first because it has no meaning. But if you can just absorb that, you know, that you don't have, you can't decide what I'm going to do next. Next is that we go to the Zendo and eat. If you can just absorb that and go to the Zendo and eat, eventually you can absorb anything. You can ... Absorb means, you know, maybe be

[10:05]

compassionate. You can feel with others if you can feel with yourself. But if you're always trying to do what you want, which really means what is convenient or easy for you, then you don't absorb your actual life situation. Religion means a big definition of yourself, that you see yourself in a very wide scale, so wide there's no action you can take but practice. Because to aim for some specific result, though it's necessary, of course, to, you know, wash your face and get on the bus and things like that. But to ... Suzuki Roshi used to say, if you have sincere practice, we admire sincere practice like a cow or a dog, you know, or an ass. They just, he said, he always cracks me up. He said,

[11:14]

their motto is just walking around. So the practice of a cow, his motto is just walking around. Maybe that should be our motto, you know, just walking around. As soon as you have some desire to believe or to even to be, you can't really practice Buddhism. You've got to give up every desire, including the desire just to exist. Of course, you exist the next moment, you know, if you inhale, you know. You know, it's pretty automatic, it is. So, you know, Buddhist practice is rather interesting and

[12:19]

there are many kinds of levels of practice. Recently, I was with quite an older student at Zen Center and some very obvious thing that we see every day driving on the highway or walking around that they see but hadn't seen, interested me. Seeing is not seeing or seeing is not believing is most of our actual seeing. We see things as we want them to be or as we expect them to be or as they usually are, you know, and if you put something rather different in front of a person that's not what they usually expect it to be, they see what they usually expect it to be. So, the first practice is seeing things just as they are,

[13:34]

which means you have to get rid of all desire to see things in any other way. So, you know, what I talked about last week was trying to see things very simply and accepting the simplicity, you know, of it. As I talked about the fact that Buddha saw that there was suffering, that's all, I mean just that. He didn't try to avoid it or anything else, he just saw that there was suffering, that there was a cause of suffering and he thought it, he actually thought it through rather simply and clearly.

[14:37]

But we tend to, as you know, not to look at one, to practice one thing to see three. We want to see the three right away, you know. For example, all of us see that there's zazen, you know, that we do zazen here, but we don't tend to notice that the zazen big period has a beginning and an end. That's just as much a part of the zazen period as zazen. It's equally important. We said, oh, there's zazen and if I could have good zazen, and we emphasize the zazen part of it, but the beginning and the end are also part of it. So, no matter how moved out we are in a zazen, when the bell rings we get up, that's all.

[15:49]

And no matter how much, when you're supposed to be scrubbing a floor, you want to do zazen, you just scrub the floor. And when the period begins, then you do zazen, whether you feel like it or not, you know, you do zazen. Only in this way will your practice penetrate everything. If you do zazen when you want to, you know, then you'll just have that kind of zazen. And if you don't scrub a floor, when you feel like doing zazen, then you're scrubbing the floor will never be zazen. So, we don't actually seek, the meaning of that is we don't seek some special experience in zazen. You just go when the bell rings and you sit, you know, whatever it's there is that we call zazen. As long as it's not constructive.

[16:59]

If your zazen is constructive, it's not, it's not zazen, you know. Usually, when we think, when we make any distinction, like there's zazen without noticing there's a beginning and an end, what we want is zazen to continue forever, or zazen to change our life, or zazen to do something. And when we, and when we think of, of ourselves in contrast with others, you know, what we're thinking of is we want ourselves to continue forever or something. Actually, sometimes it's me and sometimes it's you. Sometimes we are one, ourself, and sometimes we are somebody else. It's not, it's not exactly right. I don't know how to express what I mean.

[18:05]

You give up some idea of a specific identity, anyway. Give up some idea of of zazen being such and such, you know. So, there's a beginning and an end. So, if, first of all, we notice things, we see things as we want them to be. That's maybe what, usually. And then, in zazen, and in Buddhist practice, we try to see things as they are. And what happens, for instance, you try to concentrate on your breath, and the more you practice Buddhism, the harder it gets to concentrate on your breath. And, and, but that's seeing things as they are. Something more is practicing. It gets harder and harder to concentrate, you know. Then maybe, at some point, it's easier. But that kind of

[19:16]

confusion that zazen puts us into is knowing us in a larger sense, you know. We get, it's a kind of, as I said to someone, a kind of inventory. The first few years of practice are becoming acquainted with practice. And a kind of inventory of what we are, what kind of, how our mind fools us, how we get mixed up in our relationships with other people. We just begin to notice, you know. But if you notice, without doing anything else, just notice, over time, your life changes. It's very important in Buddhism to, that we do things over and over. We do the same thing over and over. If you just, I mean, a meditation on any particular aspect of our life, you know, seeing things in a certain way, you know, at first it's just an idea. But the more you see it a certain

[20:25]

way, then you begin to act on it. You begin to actually do things as if they were in that way. So, the first thing is to see things as they are, you know. And believing in them as they are. Believing in what actually is in front of you, you know. Okay, so, first is, we see things as we want to see them. And second is, we try to see things as they are. But the third, third step is to see things as we want to see them. That's Buddhist practice. Most of you, that's a dangerous step for most of you, because you can't practice seeing things as you want them to be until you can see things as they are.

[21:28]

Until you actually know, in the largest sense, what you really want them to be. But once you know what they're, and this is a stage that's worked out between teacher and student. Once you and the teacher agree on what you want them to be, you want to be Buddha, or you want the world to be a palace, or a mandala. You want to treat everyone as Buddha. Every person you meet, you want to treat them as Buddha, not as so-and-so and so-and-so. You want to treat them as Buddha. So, at that point, when you have no desire to be Buddha, and you have no desire to even be, then the teacher will introduce to you the practice of being Buddha, among other things, including not being anything at all.

[22:45]

And then there's a fourth stage, in which you allow the world to be what Buddha wants it to be. And then there's a practice that goes with allowing the world to be what Buddha wants it to be. Maybe at one stage, you practice seeing the world as an illusion. Then another stage, you practice seeing the world as Buddha's illusion. Anyway, first of all, we have to see things as they are. And all of this process brings us back to seeing things in their fullest sense, clearly as they are. So, I said the other day that Buddha's Dharma teaching is our karma.

[24:04]

So, it's necessary to see everything as teaching. To absorb everything as teaching. When you have this, you know, at first in our life, our energy and everything is a kind of turmoil, but it's like a wading pool. You know how the water is very shallow in a wading pool? It's all splashed up, but in the deeper part of the pool, it's not so rough. So, when we can practice one thing, you can see one thing clearly. And when we can go through the stages of practice I talked about,

[25:08]

then your energy becomes very deep and calm. There's an interesting story in the Lotus Sutra that Dr. Konsei has been teaching in Berkeley, Berkeley, about a physician who is a very good doctor and he has lots of sons. The story says ten or twenty or a hundred or all sentient beings. And he goes away and while he's away, I guess the sons get into the medicine cabinet and they take medicine or anyway they take some poison. And when he comes back, they're all sick. They're all screaming and hollering.

[26:14]

So, he prepares a medicine for them. And it's interesting the way the sutra talks about exactly how he grinds it and the colors and its taste and its smell and its texture and etc. So, he gives it to the sons and one group of the sons trust him and have gone beyond the point where they have doubt. So, they take the medicine. They agree, they like the taste of it and the texture of it and the smell of it and etc. So, they take the medicine. And of course, they're instantly well. But the other group of sons have some doubt and they don't like the taste and they don't like the smell of it and they don't like the look of it. It seems like a very dull medicine. So, they refuse to take it and they get sicker, of course.

[27:25]

So, the physician father leaves the scene. I don't know, he goes off somewhere. So, when he's gone, the sons don't have anyone to depend on then. And so, all they have is this medicine he's left. So, they make the best of it and they think the taste is agreeable and the texture is agreeable and etc. and they take it and they get better. And the point of this story is, parable is that even in your teacher leaving you, there is teaching. That to bewail the fact that the teacher is gone doesn't cure anybody.

[28:44]

That he left just because his sons couldn't depend on him when he was there. So, by leaving, he helps the people who can only depend on him when he's gone. Or can only take the medicine when he's not there. It's easier in some ways to believe in something, do something when the person's not there. Any questions? Anything we should talk about? Yeah?

[29:47]

I have a question from one of the first lectures that I heard you speak. It's about the tea. You said that you didn't always take tea, but people still bring it to you, even though you don't take it, it's still a useful thing. Yeah, I remember saying that. Actually, I think I said salt. I said that I don't usually use the salt when I eat, but just because I don't usually use it doesn't mean people shouldn't bring it. That we still bring it. Just because Buddha doesn't drink the tea, we bring him. Well, for instance, at work, I have to have a result. If I take what you're saying literally, I can't apply it at the same time I'm doing it.

[30:48]

It produces negative results. I forget about it completely. I think what's bothering me is that other things, besides zazen, seem to operate on different principles than my understanding of the principles that you express in your lectures. Do you have any idea what I'm... Yeah. I'm trying to keep certain things in mind. I mean, I can't do that. It doesn't work. I'm in some other activity. I try to see the relationship between what I'm doing and zazen, and I feel like there must be some kind of universal connection, universal relationship. And I think if I could operate on the principles of

[31:54]

some kind of universal principle that works in zazen, it should work in whatever activity I'm doing. It seems logical, and it would. And I completely forget about everything you say in lecture, and then when I look back on it, I still can't really see the universal connection. Well, zazen is not a thing, you know, or it's not something in contrast to you're going to work. It's a time, it's true, when we are rather unconstructive, you know, and your work is rather constructive. So, I think partly you're... maybe you're thinking too much about it, you know. I mean, when you're working,

[33:00]

you do wood cabinet making. When you're working, you just do it. I mean, you don't think about zazen. When you're in zazen, you don't think about cabinet making. You just do it. I suppose you can carry it. I mean, like Japanese potters, say, or would carry it to the extent that while they're working on a bowl, they don't think about what the bowl is going to look like at the end. If they're working with the clay or the body at that point, they're just there with that, and then when they do the glaze, they're just there with that, and what comes out is what comes out. But I don't, you know, I don't know if that works, certainly. Yeah. Right. Well, when you do zazen, there's an intention of sitting through the

[34:02]

period. Well, maybe that's the problem, is I don't know where your intention is in zazen, because if you say to sit without a result in mind, to me that means to sit without intention, without an intention towards the result. Yeah, but, I understand, yeah. When we actually practice zazen, you find lots of things happening at once, and you have to, I mean, it's obvious that, this is maybe seeing things as they are, it's obvious, even though we, if I say, this tatami doesn't exist, you know, as we say in Buddhism, it doesn't mean it's supposed to vanish before your eyes. It means, why do I say this tatami doesn't exist? Why should we consider this tatami is not

[35:07]

existing? It still exists, right? What do I mean by saying it doesn't exist? In zazen, obviously, we have an intention to sit through a certain period, and obviously, we replace our desires, our general desires, by a more consolidated desire that Suzukiroshi used to call your innermost request. But at the same time, the background is to be free from that desire. So, a teacher may tell a student, um, okay, I want you to stop thinking, and come back and see me when you've stopped. Well, after, you know, one or two years, you know,

[36:12]

if he's that patient, he can say, I give up, you know, I can't stop. So, then, uh, you start practicing, you know. Because first, you have to give up to not stopping before you can give up thinking, or to know what we mean by giving up thinking. So, the actual situation you're in working is, uh, exactly Buddhist practice, actually. Exactly what's happening to you is what happens to everybody when they work. Maybe more so in your case, I don't know. Yeah?

[37:18]

When you discussed the idea of giving up all thought of why I do something, for myself, a real big jump in understanding of what I want to become, where I want to go, finally figured out something, went off somewhere and figured it out, somehow applied myself to the situation. Each time that's been true, and it's always been a surprise, that I have that potential to figure it out. So, to me, the extreme of just doing things without thought, just doing them whether you want to or not, would be to put that part of yourself to sleep, which comes out, which is how I want to develop. So, I feel conflict there. Yeah, well, um, practice is to, uh, take

[38:25]

Let me, let me think a minute, okay. How to, how to say something. What's very interesting in, um, Japan, the high culture's technique is, they They remove from their sight, and they remove from their experience, everything that's a downer. So, instead of having ten objects in the room, you have one extraordinary object. So, I mean, they'll spend a lifetime of savings on one object, rather than have a house full of things. And they'll be, you know, like, no hot water and nothing to cook in, etc. But the one thing they have to cook in turns them on.

[39:37]

So, their idea is not to get high, but never to come down. Well, it's a fact of our existence that we, uh, the things we present to ourselves affect us. So, in Buddhism, we choose certain kinds of things to present to ourselves. Like, we put a little Buddha outside the toilet room, shower room, etc., and, uh, we bow to it every time we enter, and when we leave, we bow to it. Now, we don't look for results, and we don't ask exactly why the tradition of Buddhism has, you don't try to figure out exactly why it's there. You just do it. Every time it's, you know, you just do it. There's a certain element of Buddhist practice in which you, you see somebody like Suzuki Roshi, right? And then you trust

[40:49]

what he says about practice, and you present yourself with that bowing every time you enter the bathroom and every time you leave. So, we choose certain kinds of things like that. But also, of course, if you have some, you know, problem, no matter what you do, you are actually presenting it to yourself over and over again. In fact, the Buddhist way of solving a problem would be, if you have some, suddenly some problem arises, some conflict, some point, some impasse, is to present that impasse to yourself over and over again without trying to solve it. And, of course, in actual fact, you're thinking about it, various things are happening,

[41:50]

and you can't stop yourself thinking about it. But you don't try to get caught up in the thinking to a specific result. You allow the thinking to continue and then go away and continue and go away until you don't come to an answer, you are the answer. There are other ways of doing it, you know? It's just that Buddhism feels this is probably when you come, if we say the relative world or the form world means an insoluble problem, it means that we, our life is led in presenting the form world, our own existence to ourselves over and over again each moment. There are many other ways to find solutions, and probably I would guess that any good solution includes partly this approach. Yeah? Could you speak about dreams?

[42:53]

Okay. It's rather comp... It's difficult to speak about dreams completely, you know? Because if I speak about them completely, I'm talking about things that happen in practice, you know, that sound good, bad or indifferent to people. And then they try to think, oh, that sounds kind of nice, I'll try that, you know? So, if I say something about it, then people try to do that, you know? And so, then that interferes with your practice. Actually, if you're actually practicing Buddhism, really, you may ask a question about dreams, you know? But given ideal situation, you know, where there's a close relationship between the teacher

[44:02]

and the practicer, etc., that as you practice, the answers to what dreams are all about will come up, because you'll see what happens. To do something with dreams would not be our way. Dreams are very interesting, you know? And dreams are very... let me say, that part of our... dreams like thinking and everything else, like our arm, you know, whatever, are a part of our life, right? It's something that happens to us. And it continues to exist, no matter what your life is and practice is.

[45:08]

But it may continue to exist in another form, so that our potential to dream, when you're practicing, becomes a potential to practice in a certain way, which no longer takes the form of some isolated event that happens when you're asleep, that you don't quite understand. When we say, view the world as a dream, we don't just mean that the world is an illusion, we mean that it's a practice of the world from which you view it as if from that dream state of mind. And the more you practice, the more you get access to your dreams, and dreams change, and the whole division between being asleep and awake is just completely different. But see, if I say even that much, people start... they go to sleep and they wake up. So we don't say anything, you know, mostly. I always say too much, you know, and I say

[46:14]

much, much more than Suzuki Roshi ever said, and he used to say he talked too much and his eyebrows would get long. D.T. Suzuki, if you noticed, had very long eyebrows. And I have pretty long eyebrows and they are getting longer. It worries me a bit. Yeah, go ahead. I just wanted to say that writing dreams down would be putting too much attention on the dreams. I notice that I forget dreams very quickly, so I'm interested in them now. I would like to write them down, maybe watch for a pattern. But then I wonder if that's putting too much attention, if I should just let the dreams slip. Yeah, I think it's interesting sometimes if it's up to you, you find out, write them down for a

[47:20]

while and see what happens, you know. You have to be patient, because say writing your dreams down for one year and then not writing your dreams down for one year, most of us don't have the patience to see what happens, you know, the difference, but you can practice in that way. But it's interesting, I think, to write down if you have a very clear, strong dream that's, you know, really you sort of live in during the rest of the day, that kind of dream is very interesting in some ways, interesting to write down. And you can, I know someone who used to, after he'd wake up about eight o'clock after eight hours sleep, and every day for a long period of time, maybe one year, he stayed in bed till noon, because during that half-sleep you have many dreams, which then he'd write down. I think that you can, there are ways in Buddhism in which you practice with dreams, Zen doesn't do it in that way usually. And I think it's best to,

[48:28]

my own feeling is, is that when you have a dream, you can write it down if you want, but more beneficial perhaps is to just attempt to penetrate it, not penetrate it with thinking even, but just present the elements of yourself and the dream to yourself. Instead of writing it down, just like exist in it, but also you can just, you know, forget about it too. Yeah, one reason we sit before we go to bed and just after we get up is because it's very close to that state of mind in which you've just been sleeping. And one reason why we're not so strict as we might be with

[49:33]

people who sleep during Zazen is because learning to stay awake at that borderline, you can't just bop somebody every time they sleep, you know, and they'll stay awake and maybe in the end that's better, you know, because you then get so you're alert and that dream stuff and at other levels of being still exist, but there's also a way of making the effort to stay awake even though you're falling asleep and that boundary there is rather interesting. Of course, some people just go over the boundary all the time, you know, so if they're just, you know, now

[50:27]

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