Today is the day we celebrate as Buddha's birthday. And we just finished a seven-day sasheen that ended yesterday. And what we talked about during the sesshin was how to be reborn as a Buddha. The last talk I gave yesterday I felt some discomfort in a number of people and I think I say things which make me uncomfortable too because I don't like saying that

[02:01]

Well, it'd be nice to just sit up here and give, you know, a kind of Dharma rap. Makes everyone feel good, including me. But I don't think most of you understand much other than feeling good, because we're tyrannized by our ideas and words. So, we have ideas about natural, what is natural. And the word natural has almost no meaning, but we We want to do what's natural. We want Buddhism to be natural. And without knowing it, our activity is directed by ideas and thoughts, words we have that we can't get out of.

[03:35]

For instance, most of your practice is directed toward having some experience, or toward having, or rather thinking that you have had some experience. But as long as you have such an idea, you're not really practicing Buddhism. If you've had some good experience and you think, aha, there is this wonderful shower of light and if you have some idea about it, immediately it has not much meaning for Buddhism. Maybe we have such experiences, but if you think, now I've had this experience, it no longer has its power.

[04:37]

So we think that the country is natural and the city is unnatural. But we look at a termite's house, rather elaborate, you know, structure. Termites can live like we can almost anywhere because they can control their environment. And we think a termite's house is natural. But we think our cities are unnatural. We look at Suzuki Roshi's hands and he often held his hands almost the way babies hold their hands. Maybe you could say the way a baby holds its hands is natural. But the only people I've seen hold their hands that way are people whose hands have been trained to do mudras.

[05:51]

So I suppose that natural means that we have a right to be born and if we're not born or we're born deformed or born dead then that's unnatural. And maybe our tendencies we have by birth are natural. But our practice certainly should include being born as a freak, or being born dead, or any possibility. So we're not really concerned with our nature. We're concerned with our Buddha nature. And we're not concerned with doing things by our nature according to what's natural, but according to our Buddha nature. But then I, you know, I can say there's no such thing as Buddha nature. So how can you do things according to your Buddha nature when there's no such thing as Buddha nature?

[07:32]

Another idea we have often is that we can do things independently, and it's just not true. You can only actually do something like Buddhism with others. Well, we don't know anything about Buddha. I suppose he actually existed, but there are hundreds of years past before we have any real information about what Buddha did. So what your nature is, if what we're concerned with is what your nature is, then we're concerned with how you were when you were born, so we're concerned with how Buddha was when he was born. So we have this, there are many ideas about how Buddha was when he was born, because everything should have been there when he was born by his nature. So there's this story, he steps out and walks seven steps to the north.

[09:11]

Later, different accounts have him walking seven steps in four directions, and he talks immediately, you know. And he's given birth, his wife, his mother is hanging on to a branch and he comes out the side, her side, where he entered. And simultaneously with his birth, his future bride is born, plus 10,000 girls and 5,000 men and a good family, of course, and oxen are born, flowers bloom. It's just happening right now. And he's given a bath right away, you know. There are various stories, depending on who's telling them. If you have Indian people telling them he's bathed like a Indian prince would be from two jugs, you know. And a later story is that two Nagas, Nanda and Upananda, I think it is, half-human and half-snake came out and squirted water all over him, you know. So that's what we'll do later. Except we, since this is, the background of this particular ceremony is Japanese,

[10:35]

we'll use sweet tea instead of hot water or cold water. And because, as the poet Philip Whelan says, Japanese civilization is based on an inarticulate response to the cherry blossom, we'll... And he says, I think, so much for Western civilization. I think that's true, you know, that Japanese civilization is based on an inarticulate response to the cherry blossom. And I, in springtime here, I go around, of course, and I see many cherry trees and plum trees coming out in the Berkeley campus and along the highway. It just doesn't look like it does in Japan. I don't know, the trees are the same and the blossoms are the same, but you don't have that sort of mass of people totally wiped out by cherry blossoms, you know, sort of drunk under the, you know, blossoms, petals in their sake, you know. They even have a word for people who really don't like cherry blossoms but just like getting drunk under the cherry blossoms.

[11:52]

So our practice is to be true to our Buddha nature, not true to our nature. And the womb of our practice is not your body exactly, your usual ideas of things, but Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. So we take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And there's really no Of course, if I say, you know, everything is Buddhism, this is Buddhism, you know, everything you do is Buddhism, whether you know it or not, it's Buddhism, you accept that very readily. But if I say, there is no Buddhism unless you take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, I can feel some.

[13:42]

But the problem there is, the reason you have a problem with that is you have an idea of self, you have some idea of some barrier between you and other people and other things. So you don't include Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. First, before you can be reborn as a Buddha, you have to get rid of all your ideas. Maybe there's two kinds of Buddhism I'm talking about here. One is that the practice of Buddhism and the ideas of Buddhism help you a lot and there's some nourishment to you.

[14:57]

And you're also a Buddha, Buddhist in that way. But to be a Buddhist like that is different than the practice of being a Buddha. And the tradition is kept alive by the practice of being a Buddha. Some of us here are Buddhists and some of us here are practicing to be a Buddha. And the practice to be a Buddha is rather painful, you know, because you have to give up all your ideas and start completely new. And that's a very uncomfortable period to go through. It's very uncomfortable. You feel like dying. And in fact you do die.

[16:24]

So our practice to be a Buddha has two sides. One is we generally call understanding or something like that and that's the side most of you are interested in but that's also the side that's actually the most difficult because it requires constant battering away at your ideas. The other side is our physical practice to make every cell of our body, as Suzuki Roshi said, talking about the ten powers. I heard a tape recently, he talked about the ten powers, making every pore of your body Buddha. So first we just start to practice, you know, and the difficulty of sitting still shakes loose a lot of stuff. And while that's happening, we make some suggestion about how to practice, how to think of your breathing.

[18:04]

And zazen is a skill. I noticed it in this session because I have to spend most of my time upstairs giving doksan, receiving doksan. I don't have a chance to sit for long periods of time. And though my understanding of Buddhism doesn't change, my skill in sitting still changes. And it's the skill in sitting still, finally, completely still, inside and out, which is the way in which our body manifests a rebirth.

[19:22]

So, practice to be a Buddha, to be reborn as a Buddha, is a process of learning to sit still and constant confrontation with your ideas that limit you. Although there's no substantial reality to the ideas that limit us, they're amazingly persistent. Our mind, which has so much to do with how we live, refuses to let go of its ideas as if its existence depended on the ideas.

[20:52]

But the moment-to-moment reality of our practice is being reborn in each moment, completely there with what you're doing, offering incense, putting tea on the Buddha, or taking a step, seven steps or 70 steps. And not self-consciously, not thinking, ah, now I'm practicing. Though at first that may be necessary. Just no idea even of practice. Just doing it. If you do that, then Buddhism isn't any long process. Each moment, you're a Buddha. There's no problem at all. You can start that right now.

[22:33]

Anyway, let's do that. Just one second. Do we all know what we're going to do now? We're going to have a ceremony. We're all going to pour sweet tea over the Buddha. Smell the flowers. And I guess we have to chant first, right?

[23:04]

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