You know, it's not very difficult to realize your nature. When you do it, you'll find out how exceedingly easy it is. And yet it's also exceedingly difficult. Something all men and all societies, all civilization has tried to do. And you have the weight of that effort, the accumulation of that effort in you, too. And we are rather weak, you know, not... we can say weak, not like animals, which don't have the same difficulties with realization of their nature that we have.

[01:28]

But our very weakness is our realization, our strange way of thinking, of fearing death, etc. Banke, you can read about him in the recent Zen notes. always taught his students, the unborn creates everything. The unborn takes care of everything. You don't have to struggle so hard. But his own struggle, he describes, someone translated in the recent Zen notes, until finally he was so sick, he sat day and night and his bottom was bleeding all the time, so he had to sit on papers.

[02:34]

He says the flesh of his bottom was torn, but he must mean hemorrhoids. And then he became so sick he couldn't eat, and finally he was ready to die, and he coughed up a great dark phlegm, he says, and spit it on the wall. And he watched this black thing run down the wall. And he felt better. He realized the unborn took care of everything. Banke had a pretty hard time, I think. He doesn't seem to have had Many teachers or his practice seems to have been somewhat misguided. But anyway, he had the determination to see his practice through. The important thing is not how difficult your struggle is,

[03:59]

but how real your choice is, how real your choices are. And I don't think we have much chance to realize our choices. Some of you think, oh, this is Zen practice. It's really too difficult. It's far beyond me. I'll just hope Zazen will do it for me. And some of you want to do it by your own power. In fact, you don't want

[05:06]

realization unless you do it, unless it adds to your own power. This is completely wrong. Enlightenment is quite beyond your power. You can't do it. But if you say, I can't do it, it's beyond me, that's also wrong. How do we start? How do we begin? What are you doing sitting here on your cushion? What can you do? How can you not do? Is there such a thing as not doing? Why I say we're isolated from choice is because

[06:28]

I don't like to say it too strongly because I'm quite... I'm very interested in Western culture, but still I think technology has destroyed the fundamental links in our culture, or for most of us, cut them. And without the context of a real understanding of your culture, of your matrix, it's very difficult to be in touch with real choice, to know exactly how we live. It doesn't mean anything to go, in the way I'm speaking, for you to go, say, up into the mountains or to Canada or Northern California or someplace, and on a small plot of land create a farm and grow your food and take care of your life, not needing society. You can say, I know what the basis of my life is. I grow my own food. I built this house. This is so.

[08:10]

and maybe a quite adequate life, but not adequate for realization. You don't know real choice until you have the responsibility of everyone on you. Society, the basis of society is when it's not just your individual survival. You can get tools, You know how to farm, but what about before anyone knows how to farm, before tools, etc.? What about how Zen Center survives, how our society survives? To make a solution in isolation is not to confront real choice, because real choice involves all of us. And so yesterday I was speaking about... Oh, I can't remember the word. What word was I...?

[09:50]

Oh yes, trance and entrance. Sorry. That same root of transiency is also the root for tread and thresh and thread, like suture and trauma. And the ox, you know... The ox was used to plow. Let me try to... I don't know if I can convey to you... I always don't know whether I can convey to you what I mean, because I have no... I've never said any of this before, you know, or even thought it much. So I don't know every time I say that, but every time I don't know what to say.

[10:53]

But we don't think... basically, I don't think our thinking is logical, but analogical. So we may be logical in some realm, but the fundamentals of our language are analogical, and the fundamentals of our basic attitudes are analogical. So, at the center of every culture is a sense, is a glowing mystery, a mystery which people can't fathom or work around or try to cope with. And man tries to exercise some control over this mystery.

[12:01]

And the degree to which we try to exercise some control over this mystery... Rather, the degree to which we exercise control over this mystery is in our own language, in our individual attitudes and in social attitudes. And it's this problem we have to face to realize our nature. In Japan, or China, until recent times no one had to speak this way about Buddhism. Because the real choices involved in culture were intimately present. The language and the life and the speech, and hence your mind, were intimately related with the details of your life. And not so for us anymore.

[13:19]

So I think we have to really start with fundamentals, you know. To practise Buddhism, to realise the unborn of Banké, you have to start from zero, you know. But it's very difficult to start from zero when you don't know what's there. how you're made up. And even knowing how we're made up, to reject society, to see through social forms, is insanity. unless you can handle both worlds, to believe one or the other. Maybe both sides are insanity. Anyway, it's dangerous business, especially doing it by yourself.

[14:50]

The basic rules of our society are so deep that if you try to overturn them or ignore them, the toll is you. Anyway, back to analogical thinking. Man, of course, does not understand where we came from, and we sort of understand we die. We don't understand what happens then. And we can't really understand how things are created. We have an extremely superficial view now that we can, and I think that the disharmony of us with our planet

[16:05]

is not just this last few decades, but the accumulation of two hundred or more years of bad karma. And the degree to which machine culture has a... still has a hold on us is phenomenal. I was reading the other day, some scientist who's won the Nobel Prize has... he did something like this. He flew a herd of frozen embryos across the Atlantic and implanted them into rabbits, and these were all cattle. He got embryos, removing them, some technique, flew them across the Atlantic, just, I guess, to show they could travel, implanted them in rabbits, let them grow a little bit, took them out again, froze them again, flew them back across the Atlantic,

[17:32]

and planted them in different cows. They were all bred, I believe, from one prize bull. And they got, they produced, from one prize bull they produced, I don't know the details, I didn't read it too carefully, but they produced many, many ideal embryos. Then they planted them in ordinary females. I guess maybe they got them, must have done it from a male and a female of some special kind. And after this transition across the Atlantic twice and into a rabbit for a while... It's lucky they didn't leave in the rabbit, poor thing. Talk about the ugly duckling. Anyway, they put them in these ordinary cows and they became healthy.

[18:34]

heifers and were born and are now living somewhere eating grass. Somehow, excuse me, this reminds me, as I was going to San Francisco last time, there's one of those dairy, I shouldn't tell you this, there's one of those dairy stores which sells products from the farm itself, and it has a big sign that says Our cows are outstanding in their field. And it was true. Anyway, I don't think, maybe they were the same cows. And we think we can, as the net energy people described, put orange trees in barren sand in Florida and flash petrochemicals by them and produce oranges by the roots.

[20:06]

Anyway, the fact that people still believe this kind of thing is quite extraordinary. If a woman can't... The idea, of course, is they will breed from ideal human beings such fetuses and implant them in ordinary women and etc., and you can freeze a human fetus the same way. move it about. Maybe there will come a time when whether you were frozen or not once will be significant. Anyway, they forget, maybe, that if a woman doesn't have a child or a man doesn't have a child, probably they shouldn't And you, yourself, your very mind participates in the conception of a child, and etc. We're pretty out of touch when we can think that way.

[21:43]

Anyway, four earliest societies, mostly I guess they had four animals, a pig and a goat and lambs and ox, are the earliest of agricultural societies. Most of our language is agricultural, based on agricultural societies. they had also the desire to control the mystery. So the ox plowed the field, and the word furrow, as most of you probably know, the word furrow and fuck are the same word. So to plow and to turn the earth, to create something, is the same in people's minds as to make human children.

[22:58]

This is analogical thinking. And the ox, he ploughed the field and the ox also threshed. I think the ox was the first threshing machine. He threshed by treading on the wheat. So there's basic ideas about how to get the husk off the wheat. which has a lot to do with our thinking about practice, how to get to our own husk or our own kernel and separate the two. So ox comes to mean some kind of source, and so oxen are often sacrificed. If you can't control life, at least you can control death in some way. And so oxen were killed, I think, to return them to emptiness, or to the mystery. And also, the mystery was thought to be a boundary which we all had to cross, and the idea of the threshold

[24:23]

one story is that there's a labyrinth you have to go through to get to the threshold, through the threshold. And as you approach it, the goddess of the threshold, I don't know if any of you ever read a story, but the back of the north wind, it's a rather interesting story, because A mountain is thought, mountains are thought of as source, as the source of the wind, and winter, particularly winter winds, because it's the change, the most radical change of seasons is winter, and it represents death. So, and the mountains are thought of as the source of these cold winds. And there is a woman who sits the woman at the back of the North Wind in this English... It's a very interesting story because it's an anti-industrial English fairy tale, written at the same time as Lady Charity's Lover, and with basically the same theme of the loss of the mystery through technology.

[25:43]

Anyway, in many places in the world, a goddess is thought to sit at the threshold, at the source, and there's a labyrinth to cross the threshold. And when you get there, the goddess erases half the labyrinth. So not only do you have to go through the labyrinth, but to go through it you have to recreate the missing half. So in our society, you know, there's these ideas of to cross over. It is extremely difficult to get through this half-erased labyrinth, to thread your way through it. And a hermit is thought of, a Buddhist hermit or a hermit in society or a monastic life, are thought you could call monasteries or monastics or hermits, source men, S-O-U-R-C-E, not sorcerers, maybe sorcerers. Anyway, source men or women. Source person. Sounds like a salesperson.

[27:21]

And so a hermit isn't somebody who goes and lives by himself. He's a person from whom society... And the monk says, to build a hut. And Sozon says, is it completed? And the monk says, this side is completed. And Sozon says, what about the other side? And the monk says, I'll tell you when I start it. And Sozon, relieved, says, Correct. And you know the famous story of Joshu, who didn't use the stick or shelves but whose lips breathed fire or light," people said. Joshu, a monk, comes to see Joshu, maybe like a new monk arriving at someone who's practiced some, comes to Page Street.

[28:51]

and maybe it's morning time. So, the monk says to Joshu, I have come to your monastery to receive your instruction. And Joshu says, Well, have you had breakfast yet? Tommy has got breakfast cooking in the kitchen. Have you had breakfast yet? And the monk says, Yes, I have." And Joshu says, then wash your bowls. That's all there is, one of the most famous stories in Zen Buddhism. Mumon makes a poem which goes something like... there's various versions of it. Chinese poems can be translated in many ways because of the nature of Chinese characters. One version is, Because you're so close, you can't see it. Or, Because it's so familiar, it takes a long, long time to realize it.

[30:24]

But when you immediately see candlelight is fire, your meal has been long cooked, has always been ready. Another translation is, when you see the fire that you are seeking is in your lantern, the meal you're waiting for has always been ready. This is easy point of view. It's exceedingly simple to realize your nature. Dogen says, the things of this world are time at each moment. I say everything exists as its own result. The Prajnaparamita literature says,

[31:56]

The dharmas are not created by any agent. If you think everything is created by its own result, or as its own result, or everything exists as its own result, If you think this or understand it, this is some separation. But to be your own result without any referent to me or Suzuki Roshi or any teacher or any past, any attitudes, when you can come to this point, it will all be clear to you. But a hair difference is completely different.

[33:18]

Because our culture is so mixed up, we have to understand what society or culture must be if we're going to realize ourselves. Harry Roberts, the Indian I told you about yesterday, he, by the way, will be... I guess he's going to come to Green Gulch. for a week or ten days every couple months. He seems to like it very much and his health has been better since he's been there. He's rather old and has some problem with his hip, which is, the bone is disintegrated. Anyway, he spoke about how Indians who lived by hunting and gathering or farming or fishing, like the Miwok Indians, I guess, lived in Green Gulch Valley.

[35:05]

by staying in one place for a long, long time, they came to know the rhythm of a particular valley, say, as quite different from a valley somewhere else. Schumacher points out the same thing when he says that if you take the... in England, he grinds his own wheat. So he has found the lore of farmers who say, The wheat from this field is good, or it tastes one way, and the wheat from this field tastes another way. And right next door, you know, he's found it to be true, because if you don't buy wheat that's all collected from many sources and ground into flour, he takes... Now, actually, technology can be useful in many ways, because its technology is refined enough now that we could each have our own little You don't need to buy flour, you can just buy grain. It's much cheaper, too. Anyway, he grinds his own flour every day when they make bread, and it's quite different from field to field and from season to season. And Harry says that the conditions for growing are different in each place.

[36:48]

And after a while you get to know that if, on February 3rd, such and such a plant comes up, it means you can plant such and such a crop, such and such a wild plant comes up, you can plant such and such a crop February 20th. But if it comes up two or three days later, you have to wait till March 3rd. Anyway, they find something that very, very intimately, carefully observed, which is different to the next valley. When you have that kind of relationship to your culture, to the source of your food, to the source of babies, to the source of your social laws, You can be involved in real choice, know what you're giving up, what you're following, but we have no idea. It's all symbolic, you know, for us. So I want Zen Center, us.

[38:16]

Zen-centred people, to come to know Tassajara Valley intimately, and Green Gulf Valley intimately, and yourself intimately, and our society intimately. Not too much. But I think you have to do this if you're going to realise the source of your being. It's not separate from society. Green Gulch we have quite a good opportunity to combine both, growing food and many people come there. Because we're growing food, we're not doing it better than other people, but we're doing it with a sense of returning to the source. In fact, Zen Center is informed by doing things from scratch, the decision in the early days to build this kitchen. to build our own buildings and not to hire laborers, a construction company or something, but to do it ourself and live with whatever we created is characteristic of everything we do, how we're doing our chants. We're not just getting some translator to translate them. We're going to finally find out how to do it ourselves.

[39:40]

we're doing Buddhism from scratch in American culture. And we're starting out from scratch with our own rules. We actually have our own rules about what marriage is, about what's appropriate behavior, what's acceptable or moral or immoral, what hurts other people or doesn't. but we can have some intimate experience of what happens when you discard someone or love someone or are rude to someone. And more and more I hope we can come to see, you know, the basic forms of our life, eating and living together, etc.

[40:59]

We don't have to do everything ourselves completely, weaving our own cloth, growing flax, but we should know where it comes from and what it means, not just for you to be without cloth, but for everyone to be without cloth. If you have the proper sense of... accurate sense of value for a cloth, which is such a marvelous achievement, and our diet, and our basic rules of living together, You can then find the source of the ox without sacrificing it. You can find the light of your lantern right here. The lantern here is the fire you're seeking.

[43:08]

You can know the basis of yourself and our existence, so you don't have to fear giving up. If you know the basis of our culture, you can give it up. When you don't understand, it's very difficult to give it up. So we have to simplify our life. So what we're doing here, you know, what you're seeking, what you're trying to realize because of your own perception of your limited self, is not just an isolated act of you. This is very ancient to come to the mountains, the source, and recreate life.

[44:18]

not by farming, but by the very ground of our being. So you can understand what is meant. Already your meal is prepared. Dogen says, it's not good practice and bad practice. Whatever you do, it's wisdom seeking for wisdom. You know, the early sutras say, the unconditioned can't be depended on, the unconditioned. Transiency should be. Everything that's transient is bad. But Dogen says, and Zen tradition says, transiency itself is enlightenment. So all you have to do is relax. Maybe Zazen helps to purify you by the pain and difficulty of dealing with restlessness cuts through a lot of the garbage that you want to stick to. But getting rid of the useless

[45:53]

maybe the husk, getting rid of the useless or realizing the useless, the usefulness of the useless. You can just exist here. in your own source, in the source of all things, all society, all culture, all events. So comfortable. Through and through accurately. this side of the house well built and everything else takes care of itself.

[47:09]

You have something you'd like to talk about? Dharma? Farm? I don't know, do they? They do? Yes. I don't know how you approach that particular question, or maybe you approach it in a way that I know about it or not. By source I don't mean origins, and then there's development. And the origin is the essence, and the later is some accretion. Always we have origins.

[49:00]

If you just realize, you know, your ordinary mind, just you now, without any qualifications, you'll understand the source of society. But you'll find that society is what prevents you from realizing it, too. because we believe many things. And our practice, our realization, must be the realization of everyone, must bear the responsibility of everyone. This is the only kind of real choice. All phenomenal things are being is time. It says so. Yeah.

[50:22]

Well, history isn't something apart from people and their activities. We are history, just as we are time. History is only a story. but very powerful one. And history isn't fixed. Your own history isn't fixed and your past will change. That's difficult to understand, but it's so. How are you all doing?

[51:37]

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