We should ask ourselves quite often, you know, look at our life quite often and ask, you know, what are we doing? What are we here at Zen Center for? What are we, what is What are we existing for? And most of us are tired of ideas about why we're existing. And we don't want to know why, but how, how we exist, in what way we exist. But how and what way is pretty difficult to notice.

[01:14]

As you all know, it's pretty difficult to stay with each moment, even in zazen, especially set up an arranged situation. to allow you to try to stay with each moment. Even in special circumstances like that, most of you, I don't think, can count to ten and follow your breath regularly. Maybe at first you can, but after you've been practicing a few months, you can't anymore. How to be alert enough each moment to see what our life is, how we exist. We have so many ideas of value involved that we escape.

[02:24]

You know, last time we talked about the time when Tozan visited Nansen and asked about, Nansen asked about the, would anyone come to Baso's, would Baso come and eat the food offered to him? and his memorial service. Nansen was also the teacher of Joshu. Joshu is one of the most famous Zen masters, and he's famous for Mu Koan, which is what Robert Aitken last night spoke about, giving us a wonderful talk about Not so many of you knew about it.

[03:40]

Anyway, he talked last night. He's here today He's head of the Maui and Coco on Zendo's in Hawaii Anyway, um Nonsense I Always get stories mixed up. So you have to let me unravel this one. I I guess Joshu asked Nansen, what is Buddhism? And Nansen said, everyday life. Or Nansen said, everyday life should be the way or Tao. So, Nansen who was

[04:41]

Joshu, who was quite alert person, said immediately, he said, is there an interpretation for everyday life or is there an interpretation of Tao? And none said no interpretation. So Joshu said, well, If there's no interpretation of everyday life, or Tao or Buddhism, how do we know whether we're practicing Buddhism or not? And Nansen said, Buddhism is not in the realm of knowing or not knowing. This is, Bob Aitken last night said, his teacher, Yamada Roshi said, not even one from, he said, this side or that side, but not even either side.

[05:51]

So how do we know what, how to practice? How do we know what our existence is or how we exist if there's not even any interpretation? First, you know, you might notice your interpretations. I'd like to tell you another story about Joshu, because he was quite an interesting person. When he first went to visit Nansen, he was brought to Nansen, I guess he was pretty young, I don't know how old, but anyway, he was a boy. And he went to Nansen's temple in the same way as Tozan went when he was quite young. And when he came in to the room, Nansen was resting. So, Nansen said to this new boy who was brought to him,

[07:10]

How are you?" And Joshu said, I am in the temple of the auspicious elephant. So Nansen said, well, did you see the elephant? And Joshu said, no, but I saw a sleeping Buddha. Nansen was resting. So I guess Nansen was impressed by Joshu's alertness, you know. So he said, do you have a teacher yet? Something like that. And Nansen then made his most interesting statement in this story, which is a rather simple story. He said, now it is cold, please take care of yourself. Which actually is a kind of greeting.

[08:17]

or concern, you know, which he was saying, all right, I'll be your student, you know, so take care of yourself, you know, it's cold. And he also was just concerned because he was resting and maybe it was cold, so he was concerned in that way. Another similar kind of story is two new monks came to Joshu. Joshu got quite a reputation, of course, later. He's synonymous for hard practice and sincerity and stayed with his first teacher for many years I think until he was 60 taking care of them and he lived till he was quite old 110 or 20 people say I don't know 103 somebody says and he lived very simply and had one of his disciples was the

[09:43]

governor of the province where he was, who came to him first as a young boy, and he would never accept help from the governor. I suppose if you're a governor, everyone, your usual relationship is you give something. But Joshu altered that relationship, so he received nothing from the governor. As a result his temple was quite poor and he had a chair which Dogen liked very much because it kept falling apart and he would tie it together. Anyway, two monks came to see Joshu and they said, or nuns, and Joshu said to them, have you visited here before?"

[10:47]

And they said, no. And so he said, has anyone visited, has someone visited here before, this temple? And the monk said, oh yes. And Joshu said, no. Sometimes when somebody came to visit he just said, have a cup of tea. As two tea masters, if two tea masters greet each other, they just say, have a cup of tea. So with this kind of story, which doesn't help you at all, how are we going to practice Buddhism? I don't know either. We'll have to find out somehow. Can you hear in the back, by the way, is that machine working?

[11:51]

Bob, yesterday, last night, talked about we get preoccupied with ourself and with our body and with our health particularly we get on food trips about various things. And one more story I'll tell you, which this story is rather like a children's story, but when I first started practicing, this good friend of mine and I, somehow it was this kind of he told me the story actually. And it's about two monks who are walking along and they've been walking for quite a long time and it's quite late and dark and finally they see a light up on the hill and they say, well let's go up there and ask for lodging for the night.

[13:05]

And so they start up along the stream which is goes past the house and down the hill. And anyway, I don't know how they saw it in the dark, but anyway, a vegetable leaf comes floating down the stream. And the first monk says, oh, we can't stay there. Would you stay in the house of a man who wastes a vegetable leaf? Just at that moment, out of the house comes running a man with a long stick with a hook on it. chasing the vegetable leaf, you know. Well, this story is rather silly, but anyway, it's... It was interesting to us because Suzuki Roshi told us that his father had him go out to a bridge and wait for the vegetables, old vegetables that were thrown down

[14:14]

and in the stream, you know, I guess they clean vegetables or they throw the waste in the stream. So, young Suzuki Roshi would have to collect them and bring them to the temple. So, we practiced that at the farmer's market and I would bring home vegetables that a truck had run over. But actually, my wife finally convinced me that I was indulging myself because she had to clean the vegetables and get the tire treads out. So anyway, I stopped, you know. But the spirit of eating what everybody eats, you know, or eating the worst people eat, even if we're all eating poison now, maybe we should eat poison with everyone. If you want some nice practice in the mountains with good, clean air, you shouldn't stay at Zen Center.

[15:19]

You should go away. Sometimes, you know, you can go to the mountains, to Tassajara, or someplace, but not all the time. I have a cup of matcha every morning, after drinking matcha, you know, mixed tea, powdered tea that you mix hot water with, and after drinking the matcha at Tassajara with the water there, there's no comparison to here, I'd forgotten. And I noticed it particularly in the tea, because the tea is, you know, I'm paying attention to what I'm doing when I'm drinking the matcha in the morning. So the first two or three mornings I asked Jerome, who makes the tea for me, what did you put in the tea, Jerome? It tastes terrible. Where was the water sitting? And he tried to find some cause.

[16:24]

Oh, it was sitting in the teapot too long or something. But now I realize it's just the water in San Francisco. Anyway, Suzuki Roshi, when he was older, tried to find some way to practice, you know. And he said he found one of the times he began to find joy, some joy in his practice was when he'd go shopping at the market because he would buy vegetables which other people didn't want. They had some mold on them or something. This kind of practice isn't just to eat something that's not good for us, or some waste food.

[17:29]

But how do you break the hold that some idea of value has for us? Or how do we stop discriminating? I think maybe the most important point in your practice, whether you're practicing at Tassajara or here, if our practice is actually everyday life, and Suzuki Roshi always said that laymen maybe are more sincere or better than priests because they have their everyday life to be confronted with. So the most important point is how to stop the discrimination that you're always doing, how to notice the discrimination.

[18:34]

And the practice doesn't exist in making some general decision, I'm going to practice. Of course you need to come to some inner kind of conclusion. I will practice." And then you have to, as I've said, know how to hold that decision. I will continue practicing, continue practicing. But still, you know, that isn't enough. In each moment you have to find some way to notice how your activity exists, how you exist on each moment. And find out where you stick. So if you want to try it with shopping, you go. If the usual way is you pick out the best orange or the best potato or the potato without, you know, little spade marks on it or rotten places, you can just reverse that and try to pick out the worst ones, you know.

[19:44]

And you can see if you resist doing it, oh, I don't want to eat this one. And when you go to a bookstore, you can find the book that everyone has mauled over, you know, and say, oh, I can use a mauled over book in my library, and you buy that one. Some of you, I noticed, do a fast shuffle when you buy books, of which one is best, and if you're buying several, you distribute them with you getting the best, the persons you like best getting the second best and etc. So it's interesting to maybe give your friend the worst one or yourself the worst one. Anyway with that kind of playing actually you can begin to see where you stick

[20:47]

And delusion and wisdom, it's sometimes hard to distinguish them if we're deluded. And usually, the more sharp you are, the more you cloak your delusion in wisdom, and you have false pregnancies of enlightenment. you become satisfied with your practice and you don't want to disturb your practice. Or you come to solutions that only bury your problems. This is true for all of us, not just one or two of us, you know. So we have to be pretty wary of what looks like wise to us. And the same way with eating. We may be fast as some religious practice, but maybe we're doing something to our energy so we can't practice actually.

[22:00]

And we get involved with health, you know. If you're stuck to health, you know, you should try being unhealthy for a while. It's all right. Anyway, you have to give up any fixed idea you have, and there are many, many layers of them, and not just ideas, there are feelings, you know. We have some, usually some way our mind runs on with certain ideas and assumptions behind that, that we take for granted, like air. And often we have feelings too, the same way, that there's certain areas we can't feel. If we do feel, the pain is so great we don't allow it to happen, so we are always running around it like it's a sort of fenced-in area that you can't look into. There's no way to solve these problems by thinking about something important that happened sometime, you know.

[23:19]

Right now you have to start with what you're actually doing. You know the secret is what you have right now is the secret. Everything leads from there. Everything is already there. And we wait a long time to practice. I know when I was pretty young I went over this big hill where I lived, down through the city, kind of half city, half suburb, outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At that time I lived there. And there was a restaurant I always wanted to go to, like it represented being older or something. And it was a Smorgasbord restaurant, but I'd never been to a Smorgasbord restaurant, but I'd heard about it. So I got up the nerve, you know, sort of to walk over to it, as if I was old enough to go in and and eat there to see what a smorgasbord restaurant was like, but I didn't have any money of course, I couldn't.

[24:26]

But they told me only for some fixed amount you could eat as much as you wanted, right? So the first sight I felt this freedom to walk over to the smorgasbord restaurant. Then when I walked back I began to think, but how do you decide what not to eat? So that was kind of a problem, you know. And how do we decide? That was my feeling of how, if you can do anything, if I can grow up and do anything, what do I decide not to do? How do we decide to practice? How do we decide to, what kind of limitation do we find necessary? Or can we just do whatever we want? Anyway, the many ways we discriminate, you can find it in many ways, you know, many things you do.

[25:36]

I know, I mentioned at Tassajara, what I also see people doing here, is when you come to your cushion in the zendo, if there isn't too much time, you say you've been carrying the stick or something, you come to your cushion and there isn't too much time, so you just sit down on your cushion in Cesar, you know, this posture, rather than cross-legged. That's, of course, perfectly all right to do that, but if it's based on some idea that, oh, this posture is zazen and walking around is not zazen, then you can try to break that kind of discrimination by just doing sitting down exactly as if zazen was going to begin.

[26:39]

So if zazen is, maybe the bell is going to ring in three minutes, but the usual way if you're going to sit 40 minutes is you come up and you bow to your pillow and then you turn around and you sit down and then you cross your legs and then you turn around and cross your legs and then straighten yourself and rock back and forth. And finally start. What? Anyway. But if you only have a minute or two, so you're the bell rings, then you unfold your legs. But if you do in that way, there's no time when you can say, ah, zazen begins or ends. Just as we start the Han, and you're doing something, the Han begins, bok, [...] you know.

[27:50]

I guess you all know the taxi driver, was it, who, when someone was coming to this building? Bus driver, bus driver, she'd get off here, she'd, oh, you get off at the building that goes, bork, bork, bork, bork. Anyway, when you hear that, if you've been practicing a while, you immediately, what you're doing, you, maybe you resist a little bit actually, you sort of look, read a little bit longer or something. But actually you start folding up your books and during the second round and third round and you can't say when zazen begins. So it's interesting to just do everything without regard to whether how much time or place, just as if you were starting and stop.

[28:54]

Actually, if you're practicing at home and don't have much time to sit sometimes, that's very useful. You say, I don't have 20 minutes or half an hour today to sit. But you do have time to go sit down in your cushion and get back up again. So you can trick yourself. You can go over and say, all right, I'll just sit down. And so you bow and turn around and fold your legs and sit there and then turn around. If you do that, it's almost the same as doing zazen. And actually you'll find once you're sitting there you actually had 20 minutes or something and probably you'll stay. But maybe not, it doesn't make any difference. Of course, it doesn't actually make any difference. If you want to sit Cesar, you can sit Cesar. If you want to buy the best fruit, you can buy the best fruit. But if you're stuck with the best fruit, you better buy the worst fruit.

[30:00]

And if you're stuck with the worst fruit, you better buy the best fruit. Until it doesn't make any difference which one you do. As long as you are discriminating about your life or giving more value to one thing than another, you can't see things as they are. You can't begin to see what your life is. You're always rushing from one moment to the next. What it actually is, we can't have some idea about if we're going to know what our life is. So, the Blue Cliff Records and model subject number nine. I think nine. A monk asked, Joshu, what is Joshu?

[31:07]

And he was trying to catch Joshu, you know, because Joshu means the name of the town that Joshu lived in. So it's like if we called Suzuki Roshi, Tassahara Roshi, and we said to Suzuki Roshi, some monk comes down the road at Tassahara and says, what is Tassahara? So, Joshu wasn't going to be caught so easily, and he said, there is a north gate, there is a south gate, there is a west gate, and there is an east gate. That doesn't help either, you know. All he said always is, we have to practice. You have to find some way to practice. There's no interpretation. So if there's no interpretation, how are you going to practice? How do you exist on each moment?

[32:13]

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