This platform is a new idea to see if I can see better, you guys in the back, or you guys can see up here better. I don't know if it helps at all. I was looking through some notes of lectures, and I found November 21st, 1962, Suzuki Roshi said, there's not even Buddha, there's no Buddha even. If you actually understand our life, there's no Buddha. When you can accept that, he said, then maybe you can be somebody, he said, maybe a student.

[01:12]

Then he said, perhaps this is not so. Anyway, if that's so, what is all this fuss about, you know? You know, what is all the fuss you have, you know, with your life, and what's all this fuss about bowing to Buddha, et cetera? of enlightenment, nobody understands you. So you have to give some kind of explanation, if you just say, this is Buddha, you know, or there's no Buddha, you know.

[02:22]

I don't know if you can practice Buddhism, if that's all is said. So last time, I talked about what was a Shingon, or Vajrayana way of looking at practice, which is the same as Zen, except we don't usually spell it out, we wait until it arises in a student's practice. Sekheto, who wrote the Sandokai, which we chant every morning, he said, everything is mind, that your passions and Buddha, this building, is all mind, the essence of mind.

[03:34]

What do we mean by essence of mind? What do we mean when we say, one and yet two? You know, obviously you're not connected to everything, but what do we mean when we say everything is one? Sekheto says that everything is a reflection, like the moon and water, but if you want to

[04:45]

look behind that, we talk about body, speech and mind, and the practice that emphasizes mind, we say everything is mind. The practice that emphasizes your body, we say nothing exists. We emphasize formlessness. And for speech, or feelings, we emphasize compassion. Zen looks like it appeals mostly to physical type people. Most of you have some physical kind of desire to express yourself, and it looks that way

[05:45]

in this country. But part of the reason is, is that we avoid physical difficulty. If a scholar avoided confronting real problems, or you're studying mathematics, you didn't want to solve the problems which were difficult, you'd consider yourself rather weak. So we don't, in our society, we don't avoid mental difficulty, but if we avoid physical difficulty by having comfortable chairs and well-heated houses, and lots of complaints about Zazen, then we don't consider ourselves weak at all. Maybe in Japan, it's the other emphasis, they don't avoid physical difficulty, but

[06:51]

they seek maybe mental comfort, so they try not to think about anything. But while we seek mental, while we seek physical comfort, we have an enormous amount of mental difficulties, which there's some relationship between the two, actually. So though, you know, the other day I talked about sleep and waking being one, but yet still, of course, there's still, unless you make a point of staying up all night, there's a difference between being awake and being asleep. So, by saying that, I'm not saying there's a difference, there's no difference between being awake and being asleep, or between doing Zazen or not doing Zazen, but that there's,

[07:57]

I'm emphasizing that you jump to everything as mind. You jump to seeing the underlying unity of things. So in your practice, you emphasize what's similar between being awake and being asleep, even though there are differences. So, when we do Zazen, after Zazen, it has some effect on you, actually. So how do you continue that feeling of single-mindedness? We actually have a body, you know, and we can speak, and we have a mind, so we have to do something with them. So, when you finish Zazen, how do you single-mindedly continue that experience?

[09:03]

It's out of this motivation that ritual arises. So, we don't want to be too active, so we walk rather slowly. And we have some kind of sounds which doesn't, if they were rung while you were doing Zazen, wouldn't disturb you too much. There are certain kinds of sounds which could be quite disturbing for you if you were doing Zazen. So, that kind of sound which reverberates with you. So, a kind of ritual which reverberates with you. So, when we do ritual, I'm referring again to a lecture of Roshi's in which he talked about ritual and doing it single-mindedly.

[10:13]

So, we finish Zazen and we do something which leads nowhere. You know, we walk upstairs and we bow. Or we have to say something with our mouth. So, what are we going to say with our mouth? I don't know, you know. I went with an old Zen student last night to an Aikido class. And of all the, not exactly martial arts, but arts which emphasize finding the experience of what happens when two people come together or two things come together, Aikido seems to be the most sophisticated, maybe? Anyway, the least martial. And what was interesting about it is when the two people are coming together,

[11:24]

there's a kind of, you move with the other person, you share the other person's movement. And the teacher, I think, called it a sweetness. Sweetness. I thought that was interesting. He said you get it for just a moment and then it's gone and you're separate again. But ritual, when you practice, you know, like this, coming up here and chanting, there's that same sweetness in it as a continuation of Zazen. Zen is rather difficult because we don't want to give you half good candy, we want to give you the best candy in the world.

[12:26]

So, I think for most, at least for many of us, for a long time, service and Zazen, it's hard to know what we mean by the sweetness of it. So, because we want you to make that jump from form to formlessness, we don't show you half forms. And in the feeling or speech, we don't look for pleasant ways to make ourselves feel good, but we want to feel good just because we have the potential to feel good. It just rises up, you know, and it's all the time. On every event, there's some expression of Buddha, you know, or our feeling or something. So, as long as you have some feeling of separateness from other people,

[14:04]

your practice is not perfect. Roshi talked about a famous Zen story in which a monk has been living with a teacher for... a pretty good monk, I mean, he's actually a teacher himself, almost. And he's been living with the Master for three years, and he never has spoken to the teacher, or very little. So, the teacher said to him, asked him to come to his room one day, and said, You've never spoken much to me since you've been here for three years.

[15:09]

Why don't you submit to me your understanding of Zen? Hmm? Oh. Do you understand? So, the other person, the monk said, Oh, I don't have to, you know, he said, I'm already enlightened, and my teacher so-and-so said so, you know. So he said, What did your teacher say? Tell me the occurrence. So, he said such-and-such, and then my teacher said such-and-such. So, the Master said, No. So he became very angry, you know, the monk became very angry, and almost left.

[16:19]

Just the fact that he became angry indicates that the teacher was right. Roshi commented that he stuck out in some way from the other students, because he had this idea he was enlightened. Satsang with Mooji Somebody asked me a question about thinking.

[17:23]

He said that most of the important events in his life had to come together when he went away and thought about things. Of course, it's not clear what he actually meant by thinking. But, of course, if you can solve a problem by thinking, please solve it by thinking. There's nothing wrong with thinking. There's some problem with, if you've thought out Buddhism, been acquainted with Buddhism as a philosophy for a long time, to then start again and view it as practice is rather difficult, because for Zen it's not a philosophy at all, each thing is a practice. That's why in many ways, as a philosophy, it doesn't seem to hang together in some instances. But we're concerned, so it's okay to solve problems by thinking,

[18:32]

or walking, or anything you want, you know. But how do you solve problems you can't solve by thinking? Our whole emphasis is, and why we practice, is because we have some deep sense of the problems that can't be solved in any way. So our practice is to solve the problems that can't be solved. That's why our vow that we chant says, to enlighten all beings. Of course it's impossible, but how do you solve that kind of problem? We don't want a life which is just sort of thinking solutions, you know. www.mooji.org

[20:24]

Satsang with Mooji Satsang with Mooji Do you have any questions? Yes. You said that there is some connection between physical comfort and language. Can you talk a little bit more about that? She said there's some, I said there was some connection between seeking physical comfort and our mental problems. I think that's enough, you know. I have a question about your unsolvable problems.

[22:03]

It seems sometimes when you get into a situation which presents an unsolvable problem, that sometimes if the situation or the problem is intense enough, it can affect your health enough to be able to move on. Do you start working actively against your practice or it seems that way? And it seems to me you can either stay in it and get more and more sick or you have to leave the situation or get out of it. Because then it seems to me anyway that it's actively going against your practice or breaking it down in some way. Can you talk about that? Depends on the problem. If you're, you know, I don't know what to say because I don't want to encourage you to hurt your health. If it's some insignificant problem or ordinary problem or something that you can,

[23:09]

you know, sometimes when you have a job which is a drag, you know, maybe you should quit your job. I don't mean you have to see everything through. But Zen Buddhism is full of stories of people of which ruining their health in order to confront the actual problems of Zen or their life was of small consequence to give up their whole body or life. And those stories are true. You have to practice with that kind of ultimate kind of determination, that kind of fierceness. We don't want to go around looking fierce all the time, growling, you know. But that's one way actually of practicing. Somebody comes, you just growl at them.

[24:12]

And it's actually rather a good way. I'm not fierce enough to try it actually. But you have to be. My own feeling is that you have to, you know, you don't step one step at a time. I mean one jump at a time. If, you know, you can see that you'll just, you know, go batty or something. You know, you'll be physically ruined. But little by little I think we have to push ourselves a little more than we can do. Get a little less sleep than we need. And I don't think there's any other way actually. And maybe once health is terrible for a few years, then that's all. But maybe we don't want to practice that hard and that's all right too.

[25:21]

Practice, in each case, it's up to the person. It's helpful if you perceive clearly that your health is one way of preventing yourself from practice. And in that case you have to confront it directly. Also, I think, and I don't know always, but usually there's some way you can, at least you can do the best you can to find out what is your physical health and how you can maintain it. And I think you should make every effort to be physically healthy. I know it's one thing, if you lead a busy life, you know, you need to have a certain amount of sleep and you can't push yourself to the kind of extremes

[26:26]

that if you really were in a situation where you were living by yourself or in a small monastic situation where you can go without sleep day after day, etc. Very important in practice, something I think some of us don't know or overlook, which is the full meaning of the vow that you vow to practice as a bodhisattva, you vow to be a Buddha. In this sense, Buddhism is very similar to existentialism, which says, you know, you don't have anything except what you create, you know, there's nothing there. So if we say there's no self, or if you look at who you are and the levels of who you are

[27:37]

and the many who's you are, and you can't find anything really that is you, then who are you? You know? And if we say that you want to practice Buddhism, the Lotus Sutra talks a lot about when they have that overwhelming desire to know me, to know Buddha, to know what Buddhism is. So, just a minute. So you actually decide what your life is. You know, here are lots of possibilities. If you practice zazen, you see many, many more possibilities.

[28:39]

You see sides of yourself which you didn't know existed. And so, maybe at first we practice out of some kind of illumination, some kind of insight that allows us to practice. If you didn't have some kind of small satori, you couldn't practice zazen. So we practice with some confidence that there's some reason, even if we're not conscious of it, there's some reason. But after you have some familiarity with how you are, how your body, speech and mind are, how your mental activity is, how the various yous are, and in that you can't find anything substantial, even when you examine what this is, you know.

[29:45]

So, out of all that, still you go on. And how do you go on? You go on by deciding to be that which includes everything. You don't give up what you were, you know. You just, you solve the unsolvable problem which is, what does include everything? What is one and yet two? How do you become that one? At some point you see that's the only alternative, you know. So you literally, I can't say you will it, but you... You... The conviction is so overpowering that from then on it just moves you. But you can't...

[30:52]

What I'm saying is that you don't practice just by looking around at things, saying, ah, what is this, what is reality, what is reality, you know. What am I? When will this great experience happen to me? When will my karma and the good influences of practicing zazen, etc., coalesce? There's no particular time. Right now, you decide. Yes. Q. I was wondering about the relation between the tension involved in the practice of zazen, keeping up the practice, and the striving involved in that, and then the relaxation and the losing of the ties to the illusions of the ego,

[31:58]

and how you would deal with this tension and relaxation. That's right. Our practice is some combination of being relaxed and maintaining some tension. Our zazen posture has some tension in it. Just as when you are really, say, writing a poem or working on some problem or thinking through something very intensely, there's some tension there, some alertness, some, you know, I don't know how to express, maybe that kind of thing. Some backbone. Some awareness.

[33:01]

And that's what looks like at first, tension or effort. When you first start practicing it, it seems impossible to keep your back straight, to keep your mind on anything. But that's because you're all tied up, you know, you haven't awakened your real energy yet. When you've awakened your real energy, it's never tired. You know, sometimes you get very sleepy or exhausted or overworked, and you get fuzzy, and maybe you can't drive a car as clearly, but there's some clearness or energy that's still there, no matter how exhausted you are, that you can just go on without effort, actually. Of course, you may be a little slower or something. It's not even experienced as being tired. It's no longer an effort, you know, to keep your back straight.

[34:14]

You know, things like having anger or fear, you know, they'll be with you all your life unless somehow you confront them. And Zazen practice is not, you know, the only way to practice. There may be many ways, but it's the easiest way I know of. So I don't say Buddhism is based on Zazen. In fact, sometimes I guess there's a feeling here in Zen Center that if you don't do Zazen, you're crazy or something, or you haven't got your wits about you, because obviously you do Zazen. Everyone goes around here with a big serious face, and we must do Zazen, and if we don't do Zazen, we're wrong, and if we go out for a drive, we feel guilty, you know,

[35:32]

because we should be back there practicing, you know. That's nonsense. There's no need to practice Zazen at all. There's only a need insofar as you see that it's the way to confront your problems. You're still having anger. You're still having fear. When we talk about Buddhism, you talk about being fearless. It doesn't mean exactly brave, but it actually is true. You know, you don't have fear anymore. So, as long as you can become angry or upset about things, you know your practice, you're not really confronting your practice, you know.

[36:33]

How do you do it? How do you do it? And do you want to do it? It's perfectly all right to, you know, to not do it, you know, but if you want to do it, you have to do it. Then, first you have to want to do it, and then how to do it. We should know what each other is thinking without much effort. How do you do it?

[37:45]

which I've been, for some reason, been hearing lots of complaints about recently. I guess no one can remember it because they get the pleasure of Zen mixed up with, full of some, I don't know. Anyway, it gets mixed up, everybody tells me. Since I've never learned it, I've never got it mixed up. It was introduced just before I went to Japan, and so I've never, I'm not at tea at that time, you know. But even so, maybe we should change it, but somehow we should find a little more of the pleasure of Zen. I don't know, I think partly it's that we don't have any way yet to express our feeling, you know. Any other questions? Thank you very much.

[38:52]

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