What I want to talk about is the actual situation of our lives and how can we know what the actual situation of our lives, of our life is? As Suzuki Roshi always said, how can your eyes see your eyes, or your mind know your mind? So how to see the actual situation of our lives is what Zen practice is. We speak about Buddhism for maybe three reasons. As you know, I always say you can't actually talk about Buddhism, but if you know that, then we can say something. And we talk about Buddhism for three reasons. One is to

[01:24]

just confirm some things we should know about the world. Another is to encourage ourselves, and another is for some medicine, for particular ailments you have at various stages of your practice. All of this is very closely related to faith, and faith in Zen practice is essential, but it's not the usual idea of faith as separate from doubt or something like that. I mean, doubt and faith are, in Buddhism, the same thing. I don't know how to make that. That doesn't make much sense, but anyway, doubt and faith are the same thing. But some of the things we need to know about the world which help our practice is we have to have some confidence in the world as it exists, but more exactly as Buddhism or as Buddha describes it.

[02:55]

Buddha was very almost scientific in the way he described the world, and it's not a matter of the world being such-and-such a way and it could be better. For instance, usually our usual idea of morality, for instance, is that, well, the world would be a nicer place if everyone behaved nicer. If you were all a little better, you have some responsibility to be better and that'll make the world better, you know. But Buddhist morality is not like that at all. It's rather that if you don't understand the way the world is, it's like pouring sand into a car engine or something. It simply doesn't work. But we don't usually even notice that it doesn't work. So the first thing in Buddhism we talk about usually is transiency, and transiency has two sides. One side is suffering, and the other side is the physical fact, in a sense, that everything changes. And from the idea that everything changes and that because of that we suffer, everything in Buddhism follows.

[04:22]

So the rest of Buddhism, the precepts and the eightfold path are merely descriptions of how you can function in the world and how you can function in the world with some confidence. And it's very clear that if you don't, once you start practicing and you try to follow something like the precepts, If you don't, you notice a real difference. At first it's pretty hard, and the precepts are of course for us rather difficult to understand because usually the translations of them are done by people familiar with Christianity and of course using English, and they come out looking very Christian. The idea behind them is basically don't lay your trips on other people. Do not kill as means, you know, do not kill yourself. And do not steal is better maybe translated as do not take what is not given. Work with what you actually have, you know. The last precept is sometimes a hard one to understand.

[05:52]

It says, basically what it says is, don't mess around with the three treasures, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. But that means to have faith in the world as Buddhism describes it. And if you don't have that faith, it's pretty hard to practice Buddhism. So it gives you some limit in your activities. doing something, where do you stop? I mean, how do you, what kind of, how far should you go in pursuing your ends, and what are your ends? So, I know, and I've tried many things, course of my life to date, and every time I've said, well, this is really important and I'll sacrifice this or that in order to achieve this and later we'll make up for it, you know, I notice I'm kind of, I'm pushing a little too hard on something or, anyway, hard to describe exactly because it's not a matter of this is good and that's bad.

[07:17]

Every time I do that, I've done that in the past, six months later things get sort of messed up somehow. Things, I don't know, it doesn't work out, you know. But this is very closely related to creating karma and knowing when you create karma and how you accumulate karma and how you stop creating karma. Because all of this is about, all the eightfold path, et cetera, is about how you stop creating karma and how to be subtle enough to notice that you're creating karma. In Zen we talk, in Buddhism we can talk about what's called the three entrances, and the three entrances are prana or breath or vital energy, mind essence, and bringing your consciousness under consideration.

[09:04]

And by the way, if, excuse me, but if you people move up a little, people in the back will have space to sit down. Thank you. Sometimes I feel a little funny, you know, talking to you, because I don't know all of you, you know. And so, to talk about Buddhism, you know, so seriously,

[10:08]

we don't know each other so well is a rather funny thing to do, because Buddhist practice is quite intimate. How do two people know each other? How do a small group of people know each other well enough to work with each other, to be each other's space? So I can say these kinds of things. And maybe they, in some way, can give you some suggestion about how practice can go or exist. Anyway, if we see how we practice,

[11:10]

in the world and have some confidence that if you do as much as you can without producing karma, up to a certain point you begin to have a sense that the world exists a certain way. Well, basically, you know, we say everyone has Buddha nature. That's another way of having faith in the world as it is. Then you don't have to worry, am I good enough to practice Buddhism? if I practice Buddhism is such and such going to happen. If you take care of each moment, you know, actually everything participates with you in taking care of things. And that kind of faith is necessary. If you think you have to do it all yourself or there's some luck involved, you know, then you can't really practice. If you have some idea of seeking in your mind, then you can't really practice. I want to achieve such and such. If you practice with the idea of achieving something, of improving yourself, then there's always something missing, you know. You've got to have faith, actual faith in the situation as it is. But our troubles, you know, Buddhism says some

[12:34]

some things which it's useful to know about. One is, like everything, changes. Another basic idea in Buddhism is that our troubles come because we don't know how to live with clarity. Our troubles aren't there because we're intrinsically bad or something like that. We have troubles because there's something wrong with the way we're living, but not just you know, you, but the way all of us are living. So it's not something, you can't sort of blame society and you can't blame yourself, it's just something wrong with the way we're living. But how to bring this to your attention, you know, is what we, what Buddhist practice is. You know, some, one way is to I mean, not one way of practicing Buddhism, but one way to solve some of the problems of your life is to substitute one kind of experience with a better experience, and a lot of religions do that. They give you some very groovy kind of feeling, and that's much better than the way you used to feel, and that's maybe a good way to solve your problems, you know, but it's very definitely not Buddhism's way to solve your problems.

[14:02]

Buddhism wants, Zen and Buddhism wants you to exist in that space from which experience arises. They don't want to add, there's a phrase of, don't add another head to your head, you know, not even some other teacher or something. So also in Buddhism we don't, the teacher isn't glorified, you know, like in Hinduism often the teacher is very shining, wonderful person who knows everything and directs your lives and if something happens you say, ah, the great so-and-so arranged this that we should meet, right? But then that takes, from the point of view of Buddhism, that takes the possibility of you being like that away. We can't be that kind of great guru, you know? And if you practice that way, it's like having another head added to your head. It's another way of substituting some big experience for bad experience. In Zen, actually, a good teacher looks as ordinary as possible. If he does have some exceptional qualities, maybe it's harder to be a good teacher. It's much better to be just ordinary, like me.

[15:29]

if you have some kind of special quality then you have to make some effort not to disturb people with it. So the second reason we talked, I said, was encouragement, and that means that our intention in our life is very important, and we don't try to practice so that we do something, but we don't try to do a particular thing, like we don't try to do something to become healthy, you know, or do something to be strong, or do something to achieve enlightenment. but we talk about the idea of enlightenment, or if you want to be stronger, the wish to be stronger without doing something about it makes you strong. And the real villain in the piece is thinking about things, particularly thinking about things from the point of view of your ego.

[16:59]

It's the only problem with that. I mean, there's nothing really wrong with that, you know, except it gets you into messes all the time. But the real problem with it is the extremely unsubtle way to do things. You don't see anything that's actually happening around you when you have ego-controlled thinking. You know, you don't notice your actual world that you live in. So, I want to give you some feeling for practice, you know, and it's really difficult. Some people have it, you know, right from the beginning when they start practicing, they have this feeling. It's almost like being in love, you can see somebody, so-and-so is in love, but it's almost the same, so-and-so is practicing. I don't know what you're in love with, but you're maybe in love with emptiness. And you both know, you recognize the other person, he or she is also in love with emptiness. So you have this feeling. And then, when the intention is there, people notice,

[18:22]

their actual life and then you can start to practice. But no matter how intelligent you are and sharp and you figure out, you know, you think out situations and then act on them, you may be very successful but you protect yourself from the actual situation of your life. So when you have this kind of feeling, there's no question of, how do I practice? It doesn't really arise because opportunity after opportunity to practice is there. If you have the sense of, I mean, this really works if somebody wants to be a successful businessman or a weightlifter or I don't know what. If you, say, just want to be strong, physically strong, If you just have that firm kind of desire, you'll find opportunities to make yourself stronger every moment almost. Things will come up which the ordinary person wouldn't notice and go through the world flabby. But this person will find small opportunities. And this kind of thing is very true in our practice. There are opportunities each moment to realize yourself.

[19:50]

Someone said to me a while ago that trying to work on a still life, a painting, first all the objects were crowded together, but after much time looking at them or trying to feel them, suddenly there was space between them, they could breathe. And that kind of space is essential for our practice. In fact, when we're practicing for ourself, it doesn't work very well. When we're living in such a way that there's space for other people around us and in our life, then there's space for you. You know, we say, follow your breathing, you know, or notice your breathing, and some of you practice following your breathing for one year or four years, you know, or five years. And then you come to me and you say, I've been following my breathing for five years and I'm really bored, you know. But it's hard to say, you know, because you think we're talking about breathing, and we're talking about breathing, but we're talking about

[21:30]

Maybe prana is a better word, which means vital energy or your mind or your breath. Breath and mind and your energy are all one activity. So when you count your breathing or notice your breathing, you're noticing everything, but you're caught by the idea of breathing. So, how to notice what the actual situation of your life is, we try to, in Buddhist practice, create, since it's almost impossible to do it if you're just living an ordinary life, you know. We try to create a situation where you have some experience of your life.

[22:30]

that allows you to see your actual situation. So we have zazen, you know, and seshins, and a kind of monastic life, and here in the city where, I mean, Zen Center, Tassajara is, I've been living in Tassajara recently, you know, and Tassajara is quite a good place to practice if you have some preparation. If you've been practicing one or two years here or someplace, Tassajara is a wonderful place, excellent place to practice. Much more difficult at Green Gulch and here in the city, because Green Gulch is going through just getting started, you know, and here in the city we're going through a kind of transition which some of you may not recognize, but we're becoming more Western. in the way we eat and live here. It's becoming less like our ordinary, I mean it's becoming more like our ordinary existence outside the building. And there's some pressure from people living in the community to do that. But I'm not sure that really it's what you want, though you think you want it.

[24:06]

because so much of Buddhist practice, and we don't know how to create a life here based on Western ways, which actually brings to our attention the real space we live in. For instance, at Tassajara, we carry trays in, you know, too. And just simple things like carrying a tray in, usually you get, if you have some idea, the purpose of carrying the tray in from the back of the zendo to the front of the zendo is to pick up the salt and to carry it back out. So such a person walks up, is carrying the tray, pulls the tray out and gets the salt on it and goes back out. But that's really a kind of head trip. It's true that you're trying to take the salt out of the zendo, that's true, you know. But your actual experience is, you have some kind of tray in your hand. You know, maybe it's masonite, or I don't know, plastic, or wood, or something. And you're walking. And then you're standing in front of somebody. And with some dignity, you're putting this in front of the person.

[25:31]

And you're allowing, you don't sort of follow the tray around to see where he's going to put the salt, right? You let him with some dignity pick up the salt and put it on. And then you recognize that you're not just picking up the salt, that you're also, there's some actual person in front of you who's doing something, so you bow to that person. And then you turn and leave. And unless you have that kind of feeling of existing just there, the aliveness of your hand on the tray, you know, notice nothing else exists except that actually. If you don't have that feeling of enormous freedom each moment in that kind of situation, life at Tassajara is very tedious, so many rules about what you do. The rules in a monastery are always very small ones. We don't have any big rules like, I don't know, you know, that sort of look nice as a pattern, but are hard to follow what's the meaning of this in this situation. Most rules in a monastery are simple, like when you go out the door, if you go out on the right side of the door, you go out with your right foot. If you go out the left side of the door, you go out with your left foot. That's really quite simple, no problem. You know when you didn't do it, you know when you did it.

[26:57]

So without that kind of life here in this building, it's pretty difficult for you to see what you're doing, for you to see the actual space you live in. And the third entrance I mentioned, or the second, excuse me, your essence of mind. That's a... I don't know, you know, I can give you some complicated feeling if I actually explain now what happens through your practice, because practice, how you meditate and what happens is really a matter of your relationship to your teacher and trying to articulate in some way what your practice is. And we don't give much in the way of general instruction about zazen.

[28:21]

But anyway, mind essence. Suzuki Roshi used to talk about four stages of practice. First of all, you have some rough, very rough and inconsistent thinking. And then, after you start practicing for a while, your thinking is rather rough, but it's rather consistent. Rough and consistent is okay. and you have some kind of calmness. Anyway, there's four stages like this that you notice. Each one is, there's a little different way in which you practice in each stage. And as your thinking becomes more smooth, you have some physical joy. And as your physical practice is more, your physical life is more consistent, you have some mental joy.

[29:24]

Anyway, there's some signs like that in your practice. Finally, the complete absence of joy or any, I don't know how to describe it. Anyway, we say sometimes just no joy of this fourth stage is essence of mind. And so, anyway, essence of mind is is the second entrance. How do we practice in a way to realize our essence of mind? And the third is to bring your consciousness under examination. How to bring what you're doing under examination. What kind of mental activity you have. And again, it's the problem of how do your eyes see your eyes. Each one of these is a kind of practice, you know, and in many Buddhist schools there's instructions on each one, you know. But Zen tries to unite these three into one kind of focus.

[30:50]

which is not just for zazen but also for your everyday activity. And usually it's in some form of a question which strikes at these three, which in order to bring fundamental problems of your life before you, you actually have to have your prana be Suzuki Roshi used to always translate or say, you know, not in each moment, he'd say, on each moment. And at first maybe we try. When you're on each moment, your prana allows you to have your consciousness under examination, have the fundamental problems of our life under examination. So anyway, generally we have some question like, does a dog have a Buddha nature or something like that, which actually unites these three entrances. Most basically the question is, who? Who is chanting? Who is sitting here listening to this talking? Actually, who is it?

[32:21]

It's not some man or woman and it's not something which has any form or source. If you know who's actually listening to this talking, you know, you're practicing Buddhism without effort. In Buddhism it's not like what we say, we say you should know yourself. Well the idea of knowing yourself implies that there's a self to know and there's some state called knowing. So usually we say in the West we say know yourself, exclamation point. Know who you are. But in Buddhism it's who with a big question mark. Who? Who's chanting? Who's doing this thing? And that who becomes more and more refined. At first it's some condition. Just you try. Who is doing this? Who's walking down the hall? Who's coming into Zen Center? Who's going out to a restaurant? Who is actually doing this?

[33:47]

And that who becomes more and more fine, until finally it's maybe like om, who, and it just continues throughout your life, who. Don't say it out loud, they'll think you're an owl or something. And finally, it's so fine that it's not even om, it's just the actual substance of what you do, who. We have a lot of difficulties in our daily activity in trying to find a way to practice and how to

[35:23]

actually come up against what you're actually doing is what we're trying to do. I don't know if I made myself very clear, but anyway, do you have any questions about what I've been talking about? I think it's pretty difficult, you know. It must have taken a very long time to find a way to practice with the conditions of life in China and Japan and India.

[36:34]

You know, it's not so easy, you know, because there's a difference between the way you eat in a monastery in Japan and the way you eat when you're at your home. And that difference allows you to notice, you know, the actual situation of your life. But if we eat in a more Western way here, we don't have that rather subtle difference, which allows us to eat the same way, with the same utensils, but it's practice, not just our habit. What about the Western monastery? Isn't it not Western so much as just not religious practice? Do you mean a Catholic monastery or a Protestant monastery? I've never lived in one. So I don't know, so I really shouldn't talk about it. One major difference is that at least one idea that seems to be true about Western monasteries is that they are a place of retreat and where you may live your whole life and Buddhist monasteries are definitely not.

[37:59]

they're just a place where there's some kind of life which allows you to see what you're actually doing. You know, I saw an article in Driving Up from Tassajara There's a natural food store in Carmel Valley, which has sort of good apple juice and things. And they had an article up on the wall in some newspaper about some scientist working on transcendental meditation. The article said something like TM. I thought they were talking about trademarks at first, but anyway, it was TM something. And the scientists were quite excited. Because they said, we've discovered a fourth state of being. We've known about being awake and asleep and dreaming, but there's this new state which has aspects which no one's ever realized were possible before, which is meditation state. He knew it 2,000 years ago, but anyway.

[39:27]

That position means mind essence or prana. Anyway, they said, now there's this fourth state. But Buddhism doesn't say there's four states. It says there's one state, and that one state is meditation. And all the others are actually just expressions of that one state. So a monastic schedule gives you the chance to have a fair amount of zazen. And the priority in a monastery is zazen. Everything else comes second. Somehow you work a schedule so that there's three or four or five or six periods of zazen a day. Then you squeeze in three meals, the work that's necessary, a little study, a couple lectures. But basically, this is a time in your life when you don't do some other kind of thing. You concentrate on coming to exist in this space. And everything is aimed at

[40:56]

making you notice how ego-controlled thinking is so unsubtle. Yeah? Why did you call Western monasteries a place of retreat? Why? Or maybe I should ask retreat from what? I don't, as I said, I shouldn't speak about Western monasteries because I've never lived there. But my impression is that people live in monasteries in the West. You become a monk and live in a certain monastery all your life sometimes. That's a big difference with Buddhist monastery, where no one does that except maybe, not even the teachers do that. They spend some time each year there. What do they do the rest of the year? Oh, I don't know. They go to their home temple or they live in the city or they come to San Francisco. I don't know. I don't know, various things. What would you want to do in addition to that? Yeah, there's two sides. One is to notice what your actual situation is, and the second side is to do something about it. But that's the tricky side, you know.

[42:19]

what to do about it, you better work out with your teacher, you know, because it's pretty difficult. Anyway, that's a big bag of nettles, what to do about it, you know. So, actually, maybe noticing is more important than you think, because if you can notice, that means you're you have some space that isn't just caught by that, isn't just caught by picking up the salt or doing such and such. And that space is, you know, I don't mean, Zen practice is not a struggle between the world of desire and the world of purity or confusion and clarity or something like that. Zazen gives you some clear experience sometimes, and it makes you aware of why is my experience when I'm working at the woodshop or at the office not so clear. Then you can ask yourself that question, you know, with some authenticity.

[43:46]

But it doesn't mean you should start doing zazen as you're operating the lathe or talking to your secretary. The difficulty you have in your life is a real, I hate to say this, it sounds so do-goodish, but it's a real kind of opportunity. One of the favorite phrases in Zen Center is, when everything's bad, you say it's good practice. And that's actually kind of silly, you know, but it is true that good, that the, you know,

[44:49]

Some of us do divide it into, I'm caught by the world of desire. You know, I must give in to it. It's too powerful for me. Or I'm going to be a AC Zen student. Both these are... The actual situation is your practice. If you are in the world of desire, the question is, what is it that you really want? Because if you're the least bit attentive, you discover that satisfying your desires isn't very satisfying. So what do you really desire? If you have confidence in the world as it exists, in the sense that I said, then if you have some desire, it's not a bad thing you want to get rid of. the difficulty you have in your daily practice isn't a bad thing that you want to get rid of, it's something that you're not actually noticing what it is you really want, because your ego-controlled thinking is so unsubtle. So if you have some strong desire to do such and such, and you have some reservation about it because it seems to be

[46:06]

not what you should do. You have some feeling it's not what you should do. The answer isn't simply to not do it, the answer is to, well then what do I really want to do? Who's doing this and who really wants what? When you do everything you desire The way you really want to do it, that's enlightenment. But generally we want, our desires are something that you should look at to see what it is most deeply that you're trying to do. It's usually something that's almost the same. I mean, there's no doubt that passion and compassion are closely related. Yeah?

[47:30]

You know, there are even, of course that's true, thinking about how to not be caught about thinking is being caught by thinking, right? And there are very good explanations you can all find in books about how to not be caught by thinking, but they're also thinking about thinking about the Morton Salt girl who carries the Morton Salt girl who carries the Morton Salt girl. In the same way, to be afraid of losing your calmness of mind is to lose your calmness of mind. To have calmness of mind is to not have calmness of mind. Because to have calmness of mind and try to keep it is not to have calmness of mind. So you can't fiddle, oh now my mind is calm and now I'm gonna adjust it over here. It's just you're completely lost. So there's only one way is to practice with someone who knows how to do it. That's the best way.

[48:59]

fairly closely, because there's how to notice, you know. If you practice closely with somebody, they will alter their rhythm, specifically to get you into kind of little messes. So then you say, well how did I get there instead of there? And then you see something happened faster than you could notice, or slower. Then you begin to stop thinking in a way which leads you to the next moment, you know, in some grasping way. But it's some, obviously we notice things, you know, and how not to, well there's various levels of thinking, you know. The most confusing level is ego thinking, but there's other levels of thinking which aren't ego controlled but you're still thinking. And so actual Buddhist, so what I'm talking about now is how you can all get started practicing, maybe, and how you can get some sense of it.

[50:00]

and begin to bring your consciousness under examination, and begin to have your prana, you yourself, and begin to have some sense, not of individual thoughts, but of your essence of mind. But later stages of practice, and I don't, when you're really practicing, there's no stages, you know, no stepladder, you know. Suzuki Roshi said that For years and years and years, he was caught in my stepladder Zen. He would notice this year I'm a little better, and next year I'm a little better, and so I'm making, and he'd try to figure out. So this is good this year, next year if I do this, my practice will be better. And it kept him for years and years knowing what actual practice was. So even after you've given up ego-controlled thinking, and ordinary thinking, still there are many traces or residues in us of knowledge of the way we thought it was or think about it or habits, you know. And we can't see them, you know, actually. We can't know. It's almost impossible to confront ourselves with how we're limiting ourselves. So at that point there's very...

[51:29]

There are very other ways of practicing, you know. The moon in your heart must be pure, you know, we say. But there are ways in which tantric Buddhism makes them very articulate. There's a whole… you know, you can't… what another kind of thing you come to in your practice after a while is you start out with the idea, you know, of controlling your thinking, and then you see that thinking can't control thinking. And you start out practicing with your body, you know, and maybe you enter samadhi, and you feel quite good, you know. But after a while you realize that the conditioned can't practice the unconditioned. Only the unconditioned can practice the unconditioned. Only Buddha can practice Buddhism. You can't practice Buddhism. So how does Buddha practice Buddhism when you're you? Anyway, you can get very mixed up thinking about it and I shouldn't tell you about these problems. But actually, Shingon Buddhism or Tantric Buddhism has specific ways in which you imagine you're Buddha.

[52:51]

But Zen doesn't use this because we think there's too much danger of that becoming a trip too, you know. But actually, when your practice is at a certain point that you realize, ah, up to now, the conditioned has been, I've been trying to practice the unconditioned with the conditioned, there are subtle ways in which you let go of this kind of knowledge. And there's no way to exactly explain. It's a matter of Even our monastic life, you know, at Tassajara for instance, is much too complicated. No one can write it down. Holmes Welch has tried to write a book about it, you know, and he's written one very big volume and he doesn't say anything practically. It's too complicated to explain. It can only be known by You know, you can't explain, you can't verbalize, you can't turn into concepts what we actually do with our hands and body and walking around. What's tremendous at Tassajara for instance, let me put it another way first, what people complain about is such and such a teacher said it was this way and such and such a teacher said it was this way.

[54:12]

And so-and-so said it was that way, and yet Suzuki Roshi's way was this way, and do we pick it up this way and put it there, or do we do that, or do you actually enter from this direction? Everyone's a little different, and they say, do you hold the stick like this, you know, or like this, or, you know, and they get into fusses about which way it should be according to which teacher said. And there are these differences, you know, and it depends on who was where at which monastery, when. You know, and you can be at the same monastery ten years later and everything's done rather differently. But the other side of it, what's actually amazing, is none of this can be written down, and every one of these people who bring us this way and tell us about it, 99% of the things are in absolute agreement. And if you check it up, it's 99% in agreement with 100 years ago or 500 years ago. some way of life is passed to us, which we are trying to carry on now, which you can't write down, you can only do. And when Holmes Welch discussed it with his informants, you know, none of them ... he would talk to people from various parts of China and they'd all come up with pretty much the same schedule.

[55:37]

Well, the day was this, we start out in the morning, we did this and we did that, and some of them couldn't exactly remember where it was, they'd have to sort of pretend they got up and say, �I don't know what happened. Oh yeah, a bell, there was a bell over there and that was it.� So anyway, just our monastic life is like that, right? Then there's the actuality of your physical and mental practice in zazen. is even if the teacher tries to think about it, he loses it. So for this kind of practice, there's no way to do it but to do it. But of course, this kind of idea can be very helpful to a lot of people. It gives you some sense of order, possible order in your life, and opens you up to certain possibilities. But to practice it through and through, maybe you have to set aside five or ten or fifteen years of your life, actually your whole life. But it's interesting, once you have a schedule, you know, like we have at Tassajara, you know, the sun comes up, but the sun comes up because it's the sun.

[57:03]

And we get up because we're going to do zazen. That's our thing, you know, the sun's thing is to come up because it wants to make the day, or I don't know what it wants to do. Probably doesn't want to make the day. Anyway, it comes up, right? And for similar, we don't know why we get up, we just get up, right? But you find this, some kind of rhythm, some kind of space you live in if you have this kind of life for a certain length of time. The whole rest of your life, when you're doing other things and have a completely different schedule, way inside of you, you have this other schedule which goes, which gives you an enormous amount of freedom. the form of our life and how we pay attention. In other words, we live in a certain kind of form because that helps us pay attention to what there is. But it also seems to me, at any rate, that that paying attention is actually free from any form that happens. So, in other words, the form is actually what you see when you pay attention. You just notice whether you're practicing

[58:31]

a western form or an eastern form or whether things are clear or whether things are confused and that just paying attention, just doing that is the essence of practice. But sometimes it seems like, like when you set aside 10 or 15 years of your life It seems like you say that because, well, this is the definite way that you can accomplish something or get something. No, actually, you don't state that, but it sounds like that. In almost every lecture I hear, there's something like this. You're only going to get it if you practice this form, this kind of form. I know it's happened with myself, and I question whether it hasn't happened with a lot of people, whether that doesn't actually create a kind of fear about losing again. It seems to just make me more... Okay, okay, I understand. That's true, you know.

[59:47]

Maybe this is a question for me because I particularly don't participate in the form so much just because of my life situation. You know, I'll try to respond from only one of the aspects which I hear your question, Zen is not anything, as you know. It's everywhere. It's already everywhere. It is everything, you know. It's not even the province of Buddhism, you know, or Zen. But we have to have some way of practice. You can practice completely any way you want, you know. But generally we start to practice because we notice that we do get caught. So you try to find some way not to get caught. You can do it without practicing Buddhism in a building like this or going to Tassajara. That's just an aid. But just speaking in practical terms, you know.

[61:21]

Suzuki Roshi, many people now say, oh Suzuki Roshi was a remarkable man and wish they'd known him better. But I was with Suzuki Roshi for a long time and nobody noticed anything. People would come to Sokoji, hundreds and hundreds of people would come to Sokoji and hundreds and hundreds of people would go away. saying, oh, he's a very nice little man, you know, and they would come to Zazen for a while and go away. Very, very, very few people understood the actual conditions of his life. Even though they went to Zazen every day and sessions, maybe very few people actually found that deep resolve to practice. And by practice we actually mean just to be alive. So Zen Center remained very small and Suzuki Roshi did notice that in many of his students

[62:41]

they would have a better chance of not being caught if he could spend some time with them alone, or in a more less distracting situation. So he got Tassajara. And that absolutely alters in center, overnight practically. Because suddenly instead of one or two or three people having some sense of practice, suddenly there were twenty or thirty or more. So from one point of view, it's just practical. More people can practice Buddhism if they have this kind of situation to struggle against and to refuse to do the forms or not like them or be too busy or whatever, or sometimes do them. But it doesn't mean these forms are any different from painting a house or building a house or working in an office. There's no difference. It's just that generally you want to give somebody a little different form than they're habituated to.

[63:44]

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