It's certainly a lot brighter today. Are we started earlier? Is it only two o'clock? Today is the day before the Japanese celebrate, recognize as Buddhism might take. So this is Rohatsu Sashin, which is the main Sashin of the year. And there's probably more people sitting Sashin around the world right now than any other time. And I think you're sitting quite well. It's been pretty concentrated Sashin. And I'm always surprised that something so complicated, pretty complicated as the ryoki meal service, you can learn.

[01:13]

Some of you didn't know it at the beginning. And you can learn it pretty quickly and then learn how to serve in addition. And Randy did a really great job of overseeing the serving as well as the cooking. The zendo working well at mealtimes is very important. So I feel good about the ability to take hold of a form like this and make it work. I suppose the only complaint I have is, which I've meant to say almost every day but I've forgotten, is there's a little too much casual talking. You're really not supposed to talk at all. during the sashima, unless it's absolutely necessary for work. And in some cases, it's been some of the senior students who've been talking the most, which is discouraging. And moving around, leaving the kin in too often, and so forth.

[02:16]

I don't want you to be rigid, but I want you to stay on your place, wherever that is. I'm the only person allowed to be completely relaxed and talk. And that's actually part of the custom, is that there should be one person who can be different, can be casual in the situation, so it doesn't feel too rigid. So I might speak. Sukhya, she used to speak to me. I wouldn't talk to her. I wouldn't answer her. I'd write in a note. But in any case, it's custom to have. For instance, I can cross in front of the altar. You can't. You're not supposed to. I mean, you can. So whether this is the real day Buddha

[03:25]

experience enlightenment or not, because the rest of Asia thinks it's some other day. Not too important, because Buddha had many enlightenment experiences. He probably had one at 4.15 Thursday, 2,600 years ago, just now. You can have an enlightenment experience just now if you'd like, or any time. But we'll do an Enlightenment Day ceremony tomorrow morning. After breakfast, I suppose. And at least one of you has to leave tomorrow. You have to leave your planes tomorrow afternoon out of Alamosa. Yeah, 3.30 at Forbes. OK. Well, that's time enough. We can get you enlightened for that. At least ceremonied.

[04:33]

But you should know and remind yourself today sitting that enlightenment is possible. small enlightenment, big enlightenment. And I think once here I talked about enlightenment a bit, I think it needs to be demystified somewhat, but I don't have time to talk about this issue. But I do want to talk about or koan practice, which is the most characteristic Zen practice. And there's a kind of dialogue tradition in the earlier Zen-like schools in China, and the cities of India have some kind of stories, teaching stories, which are similar sounding to Zen.

[06:02]

And Tibet, they have quite a lot of dialogue. back and forth, but it's often very logical. They debate those points. And in the Sufi tradition, they're teaching stories. But there's a particular way that Chinese Zen developed working with language that I think is pretty unique. I don't know of any other tradition that really does it. And it may be partly just this characteristic. Chinese-Japanese culture to carry things to an uncommon thoroughness. But anyway, somebody, in addition to their tendency to do things... I mean, I would say that China and Japan are the most body cultures in the world, more than India.

[07:07]

The West is the least body culture. It's more of a mental culture. And so because the physical world, in fact, asked me a question about the Yisan ceremony, about taking care of the practice place. Do you remember? During the discussion after lecture. And I said I'd come back to the question. Well, I just did. I forgot after. I remembered after I left. I never got back to your question. But the... I'll try to keep it simple because that could take this whole time. Just an idea. But in general, or in particular, Chinese-Japanese don't see outside-inside distinctions the same way we do.

[08:16]

And in fact, in Japan, for instance, when you have a house, traditionally, I don't know what they do now because it's becoming westernized. And let me say that just as an aside, everyone's amazed at how well the Japanese have done at Western culture. The so-called international world is basically a Western world, which the Japanese have learned how to do. But the Japanese have, is there a Japanese person in the kitchen? Japanese have taken on Western culture since the middle of the 19th century with a ferocity. I mean, everything Western was studied. Every educated person should know Western music. I mean, it's incredible. They took it on like a con.

[09:21]

I mean, it's just amazing what Japanese did in the 19th century in learning Western culture. I mean, it's like if we did everything Japanese now for the next century, we'd be sort of where the Japanese are in relationship to the West in terms of their having some understanding, gut-like understanding of Westerners combined with their own view as far as you can be. In any case, they don't make the same outside distinction. So in the traditional culture, for example, you own to the middle of the street. There's no public space, literally. I mean, now they're creating public space, but there's no idea of public. You can walk right out in the middle of Tokyo in your underwear. They don't say, oh, let's dress up to go out. It doesn't occur to them. That's such an obvious distinction for us.

[10:23]

You go out, you dress up. They don't. They might dress up at home, but why dress up outside? They don't make any distinction between their living room and the middle of the street. Almost none. Very different. So when you start thinking about it, you think, what does the government govern? In our societies, it's the public sector, private sectors. They don't have a public idea. And what Western architects have missed when they imitate the Japanese, and I could talk about that for a while too, I won't, is that the Japanese houses don't have an inside-outside. There's a gradation between the center of the room to this level and then that level and then the garden. And there's no distinct point where you can say, well, now you're outside the house. At some point, way at the other end of the garden, you can say, but then the whole garden is turned to be part of a living room. So there's a tradition in Japan to take care of this as if it were you.

[11:33]

So there's a big tradition anyway in Buddhism to clean and do everything, wipe everything, et cetera. But it's done like you wash your own face. Now there's a danger in that too, and I'll just mention that very briefly, in the environmental questions of the Japanese. Because the Japanese have had a terrible environmental record terrible pollution in Japan. But part of the problem getting them to deal with it is they don't think, there's a nature out there that there's not, they don't see it as separate from themselves, and they're willing to pollute themselves. One Japanese person, a congressman, a diplomat, stood up in the diet when this Itai Itai disease occurred, which I believe is cadmium poisoning. Itai means hurt, and the disease is literally called hurt-hurt disease.

[12:41]

They were supposed to curtail their electronics industry from polluting lots of Japan with cadmium. And this man stood up and said, we have to do what we have to do in the world. We should eat cadmium. Let us eat cadmium. We can't stop our course. So it's a different pollution idea because he was willing to eat it himself. So it's hard to put it in the environment. We don't think that we don't want ourselves to be polluted, but we should pollute it out there because it's separate from us. But it's not separate from them, but they're willing to pollute themselves. So you have to have a different kind of logic about the environment. But once they get the point, and they've got the point, I think they're going to have an extremely good environmental pollution. Because I think they've got the point. And they now see it also from the western point.

[13:47]

So they don't have any sense of wilderness, for instance. There's no wilderness in Japan. It's all cultivated up in the most remote mountains. It's beautifully cultivated, but it's cultivated They don't have an idea of nature in the wild. They think of the land of Japan as actually being born from a Japanese person. It's conceived by a Japanese person. Anyway, I'm just answering your question. But this comes into Zen, and it may have been partly influenced by Buddhism, because you treat things, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, you treat everything you see as if it were your own eyesight. You pick up things as if you were picking up and touching your eyeball. And if you touch your eyeball, you touch it quite gently.

[14:47]

You pick up things with that kind of feeling. But what you pick up is your own eyesight. What you hear is your own ears, your own hearing. When I was talking about is and no the other day, I started to mention that I didn't finish my thought, that I said that the word present and yes are all the same root as is or being. But so also is bodhisattva and swastika. They both have the same root as being or is, yes. Bodhisattva. And swastika, which is the oldest, along with the lotus, the oldest symbol for Buddhism, actually was borrowed by the Nazis through a German who studied Tibetan.

[15:51]

He had a mystic school, I believe. I believe Hitler and the Nazis were quite interested in the occult, and they borrowed from this guy his use of the swastika symbol, which comes from Buddhism. And the American Indians use it too. But the sense of it is, it's a cross. Well, there's a point, and a point has no physical body, so you make it a cross. It's a cross, like in Christianity. But then there's always movement. So when the swastika is this way, turns one way, when it's the other way, it turns the other way. So the swastika becomes the main symbol for Buddhism in that when it turns one way, it's the granting practice, or everything is Buddha practice. When it's turned the other way, it's inward practice. And so much of the esoteric or Wow, so some of the esoteric teaching of Buddhism revolves around this swastika, what stage you're moving your practice in, what stage you're moving your practice out.

[17:04]

I believe it wasn't the first steemit, a little swastika was spinning. What made or something? What the Chinese did in developing koan practice, really koan practice is, the center of koan practice is wa dou, H-U-A, usually written H-U-A, second word T, apostrophe O-U, wa dou, pronounced wa, H-U-A, wa, dou. All right. And you could translate it roughly as turning word or root of a word, source of a word.

[18:09]

Like the source of a stream or spring or something. And it's a little bit like the sense of returning your thoughts to the primordial mind, purified mind and body. and letting them self-liberate, self-perfect in that purified mind and body. So that's why Zen schools and the later developments of schools don't emphasize morality and ethics so much as the basis of practice, like as a rule you follow. The morality and ethics is more Like, you know, don't be in too much conflict with your society. Take care of things. Don't steal pencils at work or you'll feel lousy later. You know, things like that. But it's more like car mechanics.

[19:17]

It's not like, ethically, this is right. It's more like, it works better to do it that way. Don't put sand in the gas tank. If you put sand in the gas tank, you're stupid. So if you steal pencils from work, you're stupid, because afterwards you feel a little bit uncomfortable, even though you may not notice it. But the real sense of ethics comes from the sense that as you can allow each thought to appear, embracing it in mindfulness, and allow it to merge with big mind, it purifies itself. It self-liberates itself. It self-perfects itself. So there's a similar kind of idea in the sense of the word which you take to the source of words. Like one end of the word is language and society and the other end of the word is something primordial.

[20:19]

Kind of more like sound and energy. So you can feel a word at both ends. I always think of a pencil. You write one end and erase with the other. So One side of you is erasing all the time, the other side is writing all the time. So, like the, like the, our tendencies One side of our tendencies is we talk too much in the session. We talk too much to ourselves. We have this infernal and internal dialogue that goes on all the time. Is it true? You're this kind of person. You tell yourself such obvious things.

[21:25]

You reassure yourself. But this may be at root quite a good thing to do. But not like you want to get rid of it. It's good to get free of it and to be able to not do it. But Wado and Koen practice transform it. So I'm going to like to talk about koans, really. I'll just talk mostly about wados. So what the Chinese did is they learned you can really talk to yourself. There's something about language which is as cellular as your stomach, lungs, blood.

[22:27]

There's something about language, human language, which is as much a part of us as any physically, medically identified, biologically identified part of us. So the Wado practice is to be able to ask yourself a question or put yourself in the presence of a statement which can transform you. So maybe it is somewhat akin to prayer. And it's also akin to vowing. And in the end, Buddhist practice, you could say all Buddhist practice, is at root a kind of vowing. A kind of unwrapped vowing. And it's akin to mantra practice. So mantra practice, bowing, and prayer come together in this wado practice. So first of all, you have to know what questions you can ask.

[23:31]

You can't just ask any fanciful questions, like I'd like to be a millionaire by tomorrow, unless you already are pretty close. You only have to check with your broker. I don't know if somebody's going to do anything to keep the settlement around. Six years in the making. I don't know if it'll pay or fund it. So you have to know what kind of question you can ask. Then you have to know how to ask it, which is more difficult. And then you have to know how to listen, how to hear the answer, or how to act on the answer. And the process of the question itself becomes the answer.

[24:43]

And the overall practice, so you have the question, the process, the answer, and then the whole practice, the whole thing, turned into a practice to realize non-dual dharmadhatu, realm of the dharma, dharma realm. Now, I like to... I guess that if I were trying to look for a term of what I would define what practices I've used it, or if Suzuki or she was, I'd say maybe something like a natural koan rather than a formal koan, although you may use formal koans. You use them inside of that. You probably should think of a term. Right now I'm using, I use natural koan. Dogen uses the genjo koan. It's a little different than I'm using it, but we have time for one more lecture before the intercession.

[26:10]

So my feeling is that you begin this practice of questioning with any question that's important to you, not necessarily a koan. And then probably you'll become more effective at koans if you use it as a kind of ordinary technique, ordinary habit in asking yourself questions. Now when you're using it in a Buddhist context or even in your personal life, it's good to accompany, accompany the wado question with a general vowel. Because the wado is a kind of vowing, so you put the specific vowel of the wado in a larger vowel to practice. For instance, you could practice. Each morning, you could wake up and vow to yourself. You can have your own private vow. You can also discuss it with me if you want.

[27:10]

It doesn't have to be private. Private is fine. Like, by this evening, I'm going to be enlightened. By this evening, I'll have a taste of Buddha. By this evening, I'll have some taste of Buddha. By evening, I'll be a Buddha. By evening, I'll be a Buddha for a moment. Something like that. It's not so fancy. And every morning you ask it. And every evening you check up, not too critically, with a feeling of, yeah, I had a loose, for a moment today I felt something. And you know, the word dharma... One way to translate or understand the word dharma is to have spontaneous joy in the details of life.

[28:19]

Spontaneous joy in the details of life. So if you had some moments of spontaneous joy in the details of life, you can say, I have a taste of buddhism. So you have some vow, maybe a vow to whatever it is. I just gave you a buddhist And you have this feeling that it's something that's possible to accomplish and that you can accomplish. So, now with the question let's stick with questions a minute it could be am I getting along with my spouse what do I want to do blah blah blah whatever or it can be I'm going to have a feeling in Zazen all day or what is the dark side of my body what is the dark side of my life what next what it can be anything

[29:44]

that you feel a connection to. You have to feel a connection to the question. It has to rise up with a physical feeling. It has to settle on you in a way. You have to be open to a change. Once you've settled on something, you can be open to a change. Okay. Now, The next thing that goes with this is a sense of doubt. Now the sense of doubt, if you're really doing Wado practice, has to accompany the question like a shadow or like an alter ego or like a brother or sister. It has to be twin. It's not like sometimes I feel doubt or I have a feeling of doubt and I ask the question. No. The doubt is on every moment of the questioning. What is this feeling of doubt?

[30:53]

This is a little bit hard to try to keep your feeling for. Maybe it's not corrosive doubt. It's not skeptical doubt. It's the other side of permanence, impermanence. Permanence, impermanence. Sureness, doubt. Maybe it's like missing someone. There's an old adage, which, as I've mentioned before, an old adage, that to practice Zen, you have to fall in love with Zen. You have to fall in love with our life in some way. So maybe it's most, this feeling of doubt is most close to missing someone. There's a certain pain in missing them. So maybe you miss Buddha. You feel your lack in your lack of compassion. You feel your lack in your short temper.

[32:00]

Shortness with people. Shortness with yourself. Anyway, you cultivate this impermanent side of permanence. You cultivate a certain kind of uneasiness or doubt. It's also a wideness, a ready for anything, not being sure. We don't know what will happen in our life. We don't know what will happen. When you walk, You should walk. In Zen practice, you should walk with each step, a lion step. Step. Wherever you step, you step. Both maybe like a... If you watched an elephant put down his foot, put him down very gently with your foot. That's definitely... You wouldn't want your foot underneath it. So you step like that, kind of gently, but you're there.

[33:06]

At the same time, you step as if an abyss may open up in front of you. You don't step with the sureness the floor is going to be there. Your foot reaches out, is the floor there? And the floor reaches up, says, yeah, this once. and you step very firmly. That sense of stepping out into the abyss and also stepping with sureness is like this sense of doubt. Now, learning how to cultivate this sense of doubt is identical to practicing what one does. If you just repeat the question, or ask it, or passively expect something to happen when you ask the question, not much will happen. to cultivate this sense of doubt. That's the second companion. The third companion of the hua dou, or the second friend altogether of these three, is the hua dou appears on every thought, every appearance.

[34:14]

Every appearance, not just some. When you wake up in the morning, when you go to sleep at night, when you're dreaming, you get it soaked. And it's generally thought to take for an exceptional person around two and a half to three years to get a question to actually merge. Of trying all the time. Not sometime. Now, this is a practice people can do in their daily life, but it's generally been done in monasteries because that's where people can sit around and do nothing, have doubt and contemplate their wado without being fired from their job. And that's just to merge with wado. That's not to resolve. But I can tell you it's well worth the effort.

[35:21]

And you can do it anywhere. So you can see, now if we backtrack a bit, the question you ask is important. You have to ask a question which allows itself to, which is a big enough, deep enough, significant enough question to you to allow it to merge with it. Now the only thing that's equivalent in most people's experience is falling in love again. You fall in love during that period, which seldom lasts longer than two years. I tested it. You can have your loved one appear on every thought. Dreams, what to do, get up, make the bed, you walk around, etc. Somehow you have to be able to take this human capacity to fall in love and fall in love with all sentient beings, with Buddha, with practice, with resolving yourself with enlightenment, and take some question that sticks like this, sticks to your bones.

[36:27]

And you actually make it physical. You learn how to feel it in your body. On the one hand, it's very strenuous. On the other hand, it's a very easy, friendly thing to do. It's not hard to fall in love and to keep the loved ones before you. And you should find a way that's easy to do it. You've got it when you call in practice easy. You're not making an effort to do. And again, you make it physical, and you may lodge it in various parts of your body. You can put this feeling in your chest, or you can move it to your ear, you can move it to here, you can put it in your fingertips.

[37:32]

You may try at different times to put this question in different part of your body. I mean, I would try three times a day to change the route, but for one day or one week, you might work with it located in some part of your body. And then you can locate it in another part of your body. This is very helpful to your body, too. Locate it like a breath. Feeling in your breath. Painful feeling in your breath. Joyful feeling in your breath. located in your genitals, in your stomach, anywhere. This question is, you begin to treat it like a little animal that lives in you. Now, Anyway, this is the most characteristic Zen style of practice.

[38:38]

The Chinese developed. It wasn't in earlier Buddhism. That's a way of talking to yourself, but finding a question. So you may work with many questions and many koans, many personal questions, many wados, even within a single koan. But the main wado that you locate... Now, up to Hakuen Zenji, 1600s, I think, students chose their own koans. After Hakuen, in Japan, the Japanese koan lineages, there's two within Rinzai, within Renji school, the teacher gave the koan to the student. But before Hakuen, the student always chose the koan. And this teacher presented koans usually in lectures like now. And the koans were sometimes no more apparent than in what I'm saying or what I've been saying this week.

[39:40]

But I might present several things which could be koans, and I might present specific koans, but different ones as you take them on. And after a while, you've settled on one that really seems to wrap around you. Or again, unwrap you. Or again, it seems to have many strands for you to be brought to. And Hakuin systemized the koans, too, so that there are different levels of difficulty, there are stages, and there are, in the two schools, they have different answers. I mean, often they're the same, but this school says, this is the answer for this one. This school says, this is the answer for this one. This other thing. And each, you can have in koan practice, in the different answers, but there's a correct answer you're supposed to get to.

[40:43]

But in the earlier was, there's no correct, there were no correct answers. You came to, and great teachers often added answers, changed answers, made up their own, dug and said, the tradition answer is this, but I think the answer is this. Anyway, the tradition that preceded Hakuin, which we're more a part of, if you choose the koan, Well, I can't give you one. And at first you just begin working with questions in your life, getting in the habit of bringing a question in and repeating it to yourself in a mantra-like way, trying to link it with a feeling of questioning, unsure feeling, a kind of cosmic doubt. What is this world? What is this existence? What is this question? I miss something. I'm missing you. I'm missing practice. Am I missing my life?

[41:45]

My life going by me? What is this question? And then third, you just begin, not just to repeat it. But... On each thing you see, this thing comes up until it joins. until it's present day. And it may be a little bit, and this is when monastic practice is good, it may be a little bit like when you don't know, you're disoriented, you don't know where you are, you woke, awakened in a strange city, in a strange hotel, you don't know what country, and you look out the window to see where you are. And you're so tired and disoriented from jet lag that you bumped into the wall and stuff. That may be a good way to work. You get so fixed on this thing, you get kind of glassy-eyed. Because this thing is eating you up inside.

[42:50]

What is it? In any case, this has become the most powerful practice in Zen for linking appearance, mind, your activity, your story, your personality, because it links you not only to the non-dual perception, subject-object, non-duality, but it links you to your own personal story. It links you to past, present, and future. I'd like you to Buddha's teachings. So I suppose in short you could say it's making a question physical, linking it to existential doubt, and repeating it on each perceptional moment.

[43:59]

Now, even if you get a little bit good at this, 10% or 20% good at it, it's a very effective way, practical way, to work on basic questions. keep them in us in a second, how do you spell it? F-E-C-U-N-D. Second way. In a certain way. So you breathe. You can feel yourself breathing the question. This is what the other day I called wishing gem body.

[45:08]

It's like your body was a magic jewel. A rabbit, a genie would appear, a booty would appear. You can ask it a question. Wishing gem mind. Wishing gem. So we've talked quite a bit during this session, covered quite a lot. And I've tried to give you a feeling for some basic practices of Zen. I mean a feeling for the basic mind of Zen. At the swastika, you can stand up.

[46:12]

It turns. Sometimes you're turning upwards, sometimes you're turning in. You can imagine yourself always in a circle. In that circle, smaller or larger. So when, you know, some Zen teachers, when they're asked a question in a circle, And it may be obvious like that. Or they may just move their hand like that. They hardly notice they've made a circle. Seemingly shrugging their shoulders. The sense is to have a feeling of a circle in your action. A feeling of a circle in this movement. It's a different thing, a circle, when you're working on your why-do.

[47:15]

So when you answer a question with this, it doesn't mean it's a symbol, it means that circle is you and your activity and your life, and you feel this circle. He'd give out a little greeting every time we saw each other. He'd say, hi. We'd get known around Creston. Hi. How are you? Hi, Kurt. Better not. I'm about to They will have no intention.

[48:24]

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