This morning I'd like to talk a little bit about karma, which means I'm talking about you. From the point of view of Buddhism, you are karma. That's what your actual existence consists of and where your practice exists. And if you have the idea of karma, you understand what we mean by karma, then you understand what we mean by practice. You have... Karma has no idea of you in it. Mostly... We get involved with this idea, as you know, say over and over again, of you and everything in our society.

[01:15]

And your life reinforces that. So Buddhism reorganizes a way of viewing the world into irreducible, or ultimate qualities, which don't contain the idea of you. So we have five senses through which we perceive the world, and the accumulation of those perceptions is karma. And the accumulation of attributes that you receive from your family is karma.

[02:16]

And to the ordinary world, karma is the most important thing you have. What kind of family you came from, what kind of nose you have, what kind of intelligence you have, etc. We're told to be very modest about our karma, but to make the most of it. In fact, you're supposed to squeeze every last drop of your karma that you can. So how to undo this accumulation is our practice.

[03:23]

So you know our sutra says, no eyes, no ears, no nose, anyway it goes through the five senses. And then it talks about the five skandhas. Form, feeling, perception, attributes, or something. It's hard to translate that. Consciousness. Perception. So this The five skandhas means that you can organize everything your five senses bring to you, and then what you do with it, you know, it's like you can put it together in some kind of... Ditti Suyukhi translates as confection. It's so much like a pastry. I don't know if we can use confection, but anyway...

[04:30]

attribute or something, or into a perception, or the qualities of our consciousness. But there's no idea of you in that. And dharma, it's a technical definition of dharma, it's a way of understanding the world of form, or the world outside us, you might say, in some ways, in terms of ultimate, again, without any idea of you. So, Sutra like the Heart Sutra, which we chant so regularly.

[05:45]

It's good we chant it in English now, even though the translation is not perfect. Because it can begin to inform all your activities. that even if you don't consciously attempt to practice what is, what does it mean, no eyes, no ears, no nose, still, in some way, you can. But such a sutra also means that you can, one, a topic of your meditation, or a, I don't mean topic for zazen, but a topic for meditation in the usual Western sense of the word, something which you put your attention on, whether in zazen, sometimes maybe, or why you're actually doing it, would be the five senses, taking one at a time.

[06:48]

It's generally said that the sense, sound, is the most, is the easiest one. find our unlimited perception through it. But you can see it. What is seeing? What is hearing? Smell? Touch? What do you do with the information when you get it? In fact, you've seen something. What happens to it? Are you just seeing or do you immediately change it into something else? or if there's some ghost, like ego, immediately change everything. You just see, but then what happens to what you see?

[07:51]

Generally, we organize everything immediately around ego, or relates to it. Anyway, if you notice, you'll notice that another way of organizing this rather than around your ego is to fall into the categories of the five skandhas. Everything in the world can be explained in terms of the five skandhas. And qualities that we value in our practice aren't the qualities which fall under the attributes usually of karma, under the category of karma.

[09:06]

So you should be able to look at your own karma without ego. Look at your own karma without a sense of whether it's valuable or not valuable. Some of you are short, some of you are tall. Some of you are not so attractive and some of you are quite attractive. Some of you are so intelligent and some of you are quite intelligent. And as long as you're involved in whether it's important to be intelligent or not intelligent, you can't actually be intelligent. At least from the point of view of Bruce, maybe the three mundane treasures are beauty, and intelligence, and energy, or most beautifully, strength. Energy is the most overlooked one.

[10:12]

Beauty is the most looked over one. They're actually most successful people. All of these three treasures are aimed at accumulating and making yourself safe in possession. Beauty allows you to attract certain kinds of possessions. Intelligence, strategic intelligence allows you to accumulate safety in possession. Energy allows you, especially, Most people who are good at accumulating, the best ones, all have what they call energy. They translate it to strength or power. And then they manipulate the people with intelligence and beauty to get what they want. You don't really want to be caught in all that.

[11:14]

Let go. There are a lot of rewards. Most of us, too, are filled with some kind of pretty deep pain, because we didn't have what we expected to have. Either the qualities that we have are not being rewarded, or we don't have the qualities that our family wanted us to have, or seem to have made life possible for someone.

[12:23]

And that feeling is pretty deep. It's very, very difficult to break it, to feel it's sealed over with all kinds of substitute rewards. Somehow we have to realize that none of that is very useful, valuable. Our actual duty It has to do with some kind of quality of life, and if anybody, everybody possesses it, they're able to stop worrying about whether it's shining or not. Real intelligence is not strategic intelligence. Your energy, which you all have an enormous amount of it, I feel you're made of atoms,

[13:26]

You know it has to be anatomically split. And if you notice my energy, you don't know how to get at it on what is actually all of this energy. You can't make it come out, partly because you're interested in directing it towards accumulating some intense power. For Buddha, or for us, or for the Sangha, all of us look the same, the same intelligence, that is, the fact of the truth is the same anyway. I think Sterling Bunnell's idea of the mind is an interesting one. I noticed that Sterling's psychology was very informed by Buddhism.

[14:38]

He's been practicing Buddhism and thinking about Buddhism a long time. It seems to, for him, make the most sense of any view. the world. In fact, what Indians do together is very important. So in a way, you can't trust your ecology. So I didn't say, you're going to find these ideas about where the world is in my career based on my personal experiences. But what that means is actually you can't trust anybody's science. If everybody's science is so distorted, so is establishment science. Get behind what the establishment does to get their own views.

[15:46]

That's the way they put together their theories. They were talking about Big Bang Theory, the universe, or whatever, often if you look at background to find out what it is in you. The idea helps us to see through certain ideas. The study we did was to reflect and see clearly ways of organizing information and changing it. according to whether the scientist's views were touched or not. So if a person's mind's feeling is that the information he has, interestingly, he finds it so compatible with his own views.

[16:57]

Scientology equally informs his own views Probably more that way. Anyway, one of the things we talked about, which relates very closely to it, is gent, which is one way of describing it. By the way, I'm not speaking loudly. I'm speaking about it. He said that man's brain is mostly organized toward doing, achieving, this kind of strategic action, activity. I think it's obviously the same as a hand.

[18:01]

The other creature on this earth is probably intelligent as the dolphins, and that they don't have hands, and they just couldn't move swiftly enough to do this. It allows us to extend ourselves harmlessly through the hand of developed through a teacher's brain. Anyway, what Sherwin said is that it's all an understanding of the way the brain works, the way they work. There's also an area of the brain which is maybe the ultimate brain, which is common to an elephant or a dolphin or any of the teachers, or common to the universe itself, which

[19:05]

Undetermined, as in a lot of indetermined systems, as in Athens and Central. This kind of idea fits almost exactly with the system of Buddhism. Almost all social life and culture and almost everything you consider being human is aimed at satisfying the production of the intrinsic brain. Overwhelmingly organized work, activities, doing,

[20:07]

And yet there's this other area. Buddhism wouldn't just be some area of the brain. It's got a size for anything. Real nature, the whole thing. But how do you enter that area? It's almost impossible to be non-listening away from karma. The whole karma of our society. So Buddhist practice goes directly against Jesus' rank. You know, doing, you know, sitting here, trying not to think too much about it, but different kinds of things. But it's merely It's an impossible task, actually. I wonder why we would think it.

[21:16]

Maybe for us to break into it is possible. But the world itself looks almost impossible. All we can do is talk about it. There's the weight, the teaching, the brain, the physics, the culture. Anyway. Your practice is to allow yourself to strive to be behind the activity of your strategic plan. One way is to divide the activity up into five sections.

[22:17]

So there's no strategy in five sections. It's a little strategy. As Sterling pointed out, it's also true to anyone who looks around, how much more complicated it is. These things are complicated. It's unbelievable to our entire civilization. In a way, like the old aversion.

[23:19]

Sterling was saying, the aversion to the old found watch theory. pile up. I think lots of us know this. I would give it up. Watch. I can't remember the story of it. Walking along the woods and you find a watch. You think, how can this be? This is by chance. Somebody must have made it. You can go on to it. Obviously, a man made it. So you prove that you can watch the creator. But then you go along the woods and you take a belief in God. By chance. You must have had a creator. God made it. Theory has dominated quite a lot of things for a while. Sterling thinks someone can pick up a bit, and you see that something called intelligence is at work. And compared to a lot of statistics, intelligence is infinitely vast.

[24:25]

We also partake of that self. How to partake of that self? You don't have to go out and meditate on a leaf, do you? I hope so. I think the first thing to do is to know your karma better. Try to be able to look at yourself without worrying about what other people think of you.

[25:32]

For most of you, it is difficult. It's difficult for everybody. It's so important. We should be able to look at ourselves without worrying too much. And also transpose to ourselves that fear of looking at ourselves because we're afraid the moment we turn out it's going to be okay. We don't really want to look at the bad quality. We don't want to stand in the good ones and we don't want to stand in the bad ones. There's no hope. You go through life hoping you're going to see the truth. Naked. No one's really going to notice, but you're going to get lots of rewards. You really do have ideas like that.

[26:36]

You look like an animal. You took that and put it in a basket. Do you like baskets? That's a good question. It was the religious culture that provided an antidote to the teaching of Catholicism. Catholicism was a very important school. It [...] was a very important school.

[27:37]

It was a very important school. It of other people besides some kind of elite, but really were elite based on worldly values at the time. Some higher realm of worldly values. Our customs, cultures, and our customs were not really provided at the time. I'm so excited to be here. It's like, the whole thing, I want to do it as much as I can. [...] I'm so excited to be here.

[28:37]

It's like, the whole thing, I want to do it as much as I can. I'm so excited to be here. It's like, the whole thing, I want to do it as much as I can. I'm so excited to be here. have such and such a problem because of that. With difficulty doing that, one simple thing you can do, which you all know about, is try to think what kind of advice you can give a person other than yourself, like what you can see following from another person at the same time. Then you can say, well, I don't have them on my calendar. And actually, the thing that you do, and I have to do, is finally you want to cover the fact. We don't want to do much about it.

[29:57]

The way of noticing your karma and then to solve your karma is not to produce more karma, to solve it, but to figure out a way. If it's a mistake of somebody, it's not necessary to go back, but undo it. It's all right. But the moment you put it in, I can see the effect of it. Without it, you're back and moving at a moment. So, just do that. And notice the effect of it. And realize that you just can't do it without it. Instead of yourself, you need to do that and know how to become a better person.

[31:22]

As I've said before, friends, finding out various realms, you know, we have various kinds of emotions within us. One, we have to force them all to one mold. You get some, you get others. Actually, the seeds behind all of this Own it. Really have it. Offer yourself. Offer your palm to others in a way that doesn't touch you. Touch yourself. It's fascinating. You also know that it isn't real value. I'm trying to figure it out.

[32:31]

It's stagnant everything. Then it gives up. It's freezable. So much more interesting than just let it go. I don't want to judge this. put ourselves in a situation where we can get all of ourselves, all of ourselves. I hear you. It's a story about a wild duck.

[33:36]

He walked along by the river. But... I don't doubt it. Where have they gone? They didn't, to be very honest. Gone where? I don't know. They'd gone away. But for the teacher, they were right there, not gone anywhere.

[34:58]

That kind of story. Number two, I've never heard of it. Why do you send yourself there as deputy? Well, perhaps. Perhaps we are good enough to accept it. But still, we should accept it.

[36:04]

All right. Yeah. faded there at the end. Let me see. I have a sense of fading there.

[37:07]

What's the situation? It doesn't give them as much as it can. It's too difficult for you to read them, but you're reading them anyway. It's too difficult. My dad talked yesterday about the spiritual school, and I thought, yeah, take it. Then, there are no schools that emphasize, well, to study the difference between the sage and the practitioner. The ordinary person takes greater and greater importance. So finally, we'll go to such an ordinary person, so infinitely far apart, it looks like. The practice, if you ask us on the practice side, is realistic.

[38:18]

You can't have an idea of the voice up there. It's only makes sense and it's exciting that you're reading about it. What we have are now values for us. But we might as well let everybody do it. We don't have to. I understand what you're saying.

[39:23]

I mean, I hear you. But what I mean is I think you don't have to worry about it. I mean, you can't give away laughs. If you go around thinking about what you laughed, and you laugh in what terms? Who said you laughed humbly? Do you lack something which is not a living Buddha? You don't lack anything. I don't see that you lack anything. But it's also, I don't find that people actually ask you for what you can't give. The idea of a bodhisattva is not something that we compare ourselves with and say we have this or we don't have that.

[40:43]

It just means you give what you can. That's being a bodhisattva. It's not some definition. You have to have this much stuff to give before you're a bodhisattva. Who's the judge? Me? Oh. The judge is back.

[41:43]

I have to put that on the bottom. Now that's applying to our ordinary pattern of accomplishment, you know, from what I was calling intrinsic brain, something which doesn't have that kind of strategy involved. I mean, the idea of see yourself in a bodhisattva context, that you and I and all of us are participating together

[42:52]

It doesn't mean that one of us is judging the other. There's no judging involved. You may... You find yourself angry, say, with another person. You can be angry for yourself or for the other person. And if you look closely at your anger, anger is almost the same whether you're angry for yourself or for the other person. But the effect of it in our society is very different. Do you understand what I mean? In other words, a certain situation may make us angry. And... Well, I can't... I don't want to make it so... I don't want to try to explain so much because it's not so much a matter of explanation, but of beginning to see, you know, a friend of yours, maybe you're angry with some friend who doesn't want you to be angry

[44:27]

But if you're going to treat him seriously, you should be angry with him. See what I mean? If you're going to take him seriously, you should be angry. Now that kind of feeling is okay. So in that sense, there may be something that looks like judging going on, in that we help each other, sometimes by being angry with each other. Do you understand what I mean? But it's not the kind of anger because we didn't get what we thought we should get. It's not ego-based. And this community works very well. It's amazing to go from meeting, let's just take the simple context of meeting,

[45:29]

go from meetings outside Zen Center, a meeting of some foundation or some company, to a meeting within Zen Center. And the difference is absolutely amazing. No matter how boring you think Zen Center meetings are, the ability of the people within Zen Center to To think of other people and situations in terms of what's best for the situation, not in terms of what's best for them, isn't amazing. And the ego games which occur, which is what it is, to occur, are usually on the basis of conflicting views on how to help another person, how to help the situation, which is a relief for other kinds of people. And those ego games generally stem from, and seem to, in my own observation, stem from... Most of us have been given an idea of utopia when we were kids.

[46:37]

We're in Zen Center partly looking for a utopia. Zen Center doesn't quite conform with that utopia you had in mind when you were a kid. So you're always trying to rearrange it to your utopia. But that's sort of a nuisance, actually. Well, both can... Okay. Yeah. Well, all of these words, you know, like passion and compassion, are related to... The language is based on our activities, so it's hard to use language in a way that... aspiration is a little more breathing than ambition.

[47:44]

But, uh... I, uh... I, uh... As a kid, I had a lot of trouble with, you know, the phrase, put your wagon to a start. I couldn't imagine why anybody would want to hitch their wagon to a star. Anyway, ambition generally means a desire to help yourself, and what we mean by aspiration is a desire to help others. Any desire, even to help others, only a preliminary way to freeze you from usual ideas of ambition. Actually, our activity is quite effortless. We don't have to make any effort to help anyone. There are just infinite possibilities and situations presented to us all the time. If we try to sort them out and be, to help, we call everything up.

[48:52]

When you're practicing in a way which requires antidotes to our usual, again, I use the word strategic intelligence, you have to find the antidotes. So we can have things like the six infections that we give, or concentration of wisdom. ways to be active, to act with you, and to do your activities. You know, practice. Being a bodhisattva, you know, is exactly being what you are. Maybe it's an ultimate form of selfishness.

[50:01]

Being what you are without the usual idea of selfishness. And everything that you experience, anger or desire, whatever you experience. It's also the expression of a bodhisattva. How you see that is not so easy, but to practice it, you just accept yourself as you are. Maybe I said once the same scripture. Our karma is Buddha's dharma.

[51:06]

Dharma is Buddha's karma. Anyway, our karma is also dharma. Trying to see yourself, trying to see the world. How come you're trying to see yourself? You see yourself against the world. You sort of see an angle to yourself, and you think, oh, I think some of the truth is in front of myself, or you have this good concept, or you find it. Oh, oh, I'm that good, or this is good, or this is not good. I've been working on my own since the beginning of the show, which is really good.

[52:10]

I mean, we wanted to, like, picture it, um, Angle it a little bit, but let's just go with it. It can be, like, what you feel around your face, the whole feeling, you know. You don't have to make a collage. Take all the snapshots and glue them all together and try to create some whole picture. Because there isn't any whole picture. You see some aspect of yourself because of what you do or because of how somebody reflects back on you. You don't think, ah, that's me. That's just that aspect of yourself reflected through that person at that moment. Then the next moment it's the same.

[53:13]

That's all there is, is that person and that moment and you. It doesn't have any... necessarily have any existence, any attempt to think that there's some... We want to get rid of that structured thing that goes from moment to moment. So, to observe yourself, to try to put together that structured thing is not what we mean. Just notice. Now, what exists right at that moment? The other person, you, and the situation. So, in that situation you notice something, next situation you notice something, next situation you notice something. Your effort is to be responsive in each situation that you're practicing, to be there in each situation, not let the previous situation, or what the person before said you were like, affect that situation. You get all tangled up that way.

[54:15]

The way I describe it, it sounds very complicated, but actually it's very simple. You forget about all the complications and just, each moment, It's just like when you get up from Zazen, you know, you look around and the world's completely new, you know. In each moment the world can be completely new to look around and there, lo and behold, is somebody in front of you sewing, you know, or something like that. And if you begin to notice that the person who's sewing or whatever immediately turns around and scowls at you, Then when you go into the kitchen, the person turns around and scowls at you. You can begin to think, maybe I'm giving off some kind of vibes. Or if you find they're always smiling at you, you can think, well, maybe I'm... what am I trying to get everybody to smile at me for?

[55:16]

But if people turn around, look at you, and they say, Lo and behold, there's you. Then you know that you're not giving off any vibes one way or the other. You're just there. Of course, it's pretty hard to do that. And you can't really do it, but anyway, you can see. The idea of karma is to see what you're carrying into each moment. There's so much that's here, you know. What we carry just is like kind of little cement on the top or something. It's not very useful. Throw it away. Okay? Yeah, it's true.

[56:24]

And so we don't have... It was maybe the idea of wanting to help someone gets in the way. And it's true. I mean, you know, that's one reason we don't have a big scoreboard in the sky, which is keeping track of, we did a good job there, etc. It's just we do it naturally, whatever it is. But there are other ideas that get in the way. One idea that we don't look at very carefully is A lot of us, you know, in this country, who are into meditation or big experiences of some kind, think that you can be selfless for yourself. I'm going to free myself. I'm going to become liberated from my small self. But there are contexts that they can do it for themselves, so their life will be simpler, easier, so everybody will think that they're groovy. We all want to be at the head of the line, you know.

[57:25]

We want to be the first bodhisattva. I'll be a bodhisattva for him and then I'll help him. That kind of idea is ridiculous. You should let everyone else be a bodhisattva first. Even if you get into that, that's ridiculous, too. But it really is true that most people who get into trying to be selfless are doing it for themselves. And it's a complete... You can't have some big experience of loss of self. It doesn't mean anything. To be enlightened or to be selfless in Buddhism means, in your actual life, Moment after moment, you're selfless. It has no meaning outside the context of each moment that you actually act without self.

[58:29]

It has nothing to do with some experience. There are various kinds of experiences, of course, which may give us some encouragement. Each moment is one event. I guess I decided I'd just waste my time, but what you said in answer to Liz's question, it doesn't seem to be the same as what he said. Well, I can't say that what I say is the same as what Wong Po says, but... Maybe it seems very different.

[59:29]

Well, it's pretty... Well, again, there's two contexts, you know. There's the context in which whatever somebody does is okay, whatever they are. There's also the context, if we're practicing together, There are certain things which you're wasting your time doing. Sleeping in zazen is wasting your time. Thinking zazen is just sitting on your cushion without realizing it also means having a good mutual relationship with your teacher and with your friends is wasting your time. But there is a problem And I don't know how to beat it myself, which is that whether it's Wong Po or anybody talking, if you're going to say something, you get into that situation saying, well, there's an implication.

[60:40]

Well, if you don't really practice, then you're not a good guy. You're nowhere. And that's, of course, not true. it comes across like that. But I think you have to see that as written as encouragement for a particular group of people who all share that view, who all agree, actually, that such and such is a waste of time. But also, such books, you know, get more and more... Every time they're copied and translated and put down, often they're... Often, I think in the case of Wong Po, it was actually written down by a disciple. who heard, he didn't write anything himself. And just like Dogen was written down, a lot of his work was written down by a disciple. And disciples are notorious for trying to promote their teacher. So you try to make your teacher look good, by the way, and you try to reinforce what you're doing.

[61:45]

And all such books, as long as they'll have that quality in them, of the disciple trying to reinforce the way he's chosen, by saying how great his teacher was, and that you better do what the teacher says. So, the real, the only real, the primary reality, or the only reality in the teaching of Wong Po is Georgette. That's true. If you're reading, you're Wong Po. We just make use of it as revs and Do you like that book? You know, I'm so much the old man.

[62:30]

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