This morning I don't have anything that I particularly want to talk about. So if you have some questions, I'd like to hear what is on your mind. Once at a previous lecture, you said something about if you're practicing Zen, to really practice, you have to be completely in it. Otherwise, your practice is kind of a form of pre-practice.

[01:01]

Can you say a little bit more about that? The whole point of practice is to be in it, in it. That's the point. And everything that we do in our practice points to this point. To be a whole being, you know, a whole... What is the whole person? That's the point.

[02:02]

So, to be the whole person means to be the whole person with everything. And if there's any separation, that's not wholeness. That's not completeness. So the point is to complete ourself. Not that we're half finished, but to understand ourselves. Not understand, but... because our completeness is beyond understanding. But that our activity should be in the realm of completeness or wholeness. That's why, you know, practice is

[03:11]

based on attendance rather than learning. Someone may say, well, I'll go home and read these books on Zen, and then I'll learn about Zen. But Zen isn't something you can learn about. It's something you have to be. So you have to be it. And then when you be it, there's no Zen. and there's no idea of all your previous ideas about yourself and about what our life is give way to our new understanding or new kind of realization. So, in a sense, you know, each one of us, when we practice comes up against the resistance of ourself. It's inevitable that we come up against the resistance of ourself.

[04:17]

And that place where ourself and practice meet and we find our resistance is the point of where a genjo koan faces us. where our problem of ourself meets us face to face. And right there is where our practice begins. And so we all have this problem and we all face this problem. But this problem, we call it our opportunity. We don't call it problem. If before you're a Zen student, you call it a problem.

[05:23]

When you become a Zen student, you call it your opportunity. And that's the dividing line between ordinary practice and Zen practice. When we see our problem as our koan and as our opportunity for practice, then we have a practice and there's no problem. The problem is not a problem, but it becomes our means of our tool to work with. So if someone hands you a shovel and you've never seen a shovel before and they say, get to work, then it's a problem. But when you know what a shovel is and you know how to dig in the ground with it, then it becomes your tool. So knowing how to see what comes up as a tool is if we don't see that, then we're always in confusion.

[06:36]

And we just say, oh, this is too hard for me. I just have nothing but suffering. So for a Zen student, a problem is an opportunity. For someone else, a problem is suffering. And we have lots of Zen students who are deeply immersed in suffering because they don't see their problems as the key to their practice. How could it be otherwise? So, you know, we don't, in our practice, we don't take on some special kind of learning. We just learn ourself.

[07:39]

Dogen's famous words, you know, in Genjo Koan, To study Buddhism is to study ourself. And to study ourself is to forget ourself. And to forget ourself is to merge or be enlightened or close the gap between ourselves and others. To drop the self, dropping, forgetting the self, means to become one with the problem, to become one with what you're involved with, whatever it is. We're always involved with something. Even when you're asleep, you may be consciously not aware of sleeping, but that doesn't mean that you're not sleeping all the same.

[08:43]

So when we sleep, to be just completely involved with sleep. People like to dream, you know. For a Zen student, just sleeping is Zazen. Suzuki Roshi never liked to put much emphasis on dreaming. Not that he had anything against dreams, but Dreaming is dreaming, and sleeping is sleeping. When you go to bed, for a Zen student, when a Zen student goes to bed, a Zen student goes to bed with the purpose of sleeping, not so much with the purpose of dreaming. Although some people go to bed because they like to dream. Pat has a dream every night. And he tells me his dreams, and he says, you were in my dream.

[09:47]

And they're great dreams. I really love past dreams. But strictly speaking, we go to bed, as a sense student, to sleep. And just sleeping. I remember people asked Suzuki Yoshi if he ever dreamed. He said, almost never. Almost never dreamed. I don't know if it's good or bad to dream or to what, but to just, when you sleep, to just become sleep, to just be sleep, just to make sleep into complete wholehearted activity. I think it was Edison, Thomas Edison, who never slept longer than a few minutes at a time.

[10:53]

But he had so much going on in his life, in his waking life, that he would work for a period of time, and then he'd sleep for 10 or 15 minutes. And then he'd wake up again and go to work. And then he'd sleep for about 10 or 15 minutes. And he just did this continually. He may have taken at some point some longer sleep, but this was characteristic of his life. And when he was awake, he was fully awake. And when he was asleep, he was fully asleep. In those 15 minutes, because those 15 minutes of sleep were just sleep, complete, utter, total sleep. He was refreshed. and ready to take on his working activity, wakeful activity. And when he was doing his wakeful activity, he was completely, totally involved in his activity.

[11:57]

And when we... In certain practice places, when people have sesshin, a seven-day sesshin, they don't sleep very much at all, maybe two or three hours. Some places, when they do a seven-day sesshin, they don't sleep at all. And the activity is, they're so at one with the activity. that there's really no need to sleep. I mean, sometimes people would feel tired, but it's possible to do that, to stay awake for seven days because their activity is intense and there's no work activity to tire your body. And that's a very extreme case. We won't have sessions like that.

[13:08]

When we build a new zendo, we won't have sesshin. But it's quite common to only sleep three or four hours during a seven-day sesshin, to have total wakefulness, hopefully, when you sit, total involvement, and then total involvement when you sleep. In the Fukan Zazengi Dogen, which is Dogen's Zazen promotion, he says, Even though the siddhas tell us that we already have the Buddha nature, or we are Buddha nature, everything is Buddha nature.

[14:28]

Nevertheless, unless we practice, unless we set in motion our activity, it doesn't manifest to us. And an eighth of an inch's difference is like the difference between heaven and earth. The slightest gap between doing something totally and doing something 99% is like the difference between heaven and earth. So our practice is always to close that gap. No seams. no gap between our worldly activity and the universe's activity. The other day, a few weeks ago, Ron asked this question.

[15:40]

On the Monday morning he said, When I'm in zendo, I count my breath and keep my attention on, during zazen, I try and merge with breathing. He said, but when I start my activity, I also try to do that. Should I keep my attention on my breathing when I'm doing other activity in the world. Well, that question, you know, that kind of question is, comes up because of our conception that the forms of practice are only in the Zendo. only in the specific activity that we do in the zindo.

[16:52]

But when we sit zazen and we really sit in a very concentrated way, our body and mind merge with the universe. no doubt about it. And there's no gap between body, mind, and universe. It's all one activity. And we realize that, or should realize that, or can realize that. But when we go out into the world, we forget all about it. We don't realize that driving the truck climbing the ladder, sawing wood, washing dishes, typing letters, selling goods, is exactly the same kind of activity. As much as we talk about it, we can't see it.

[17:59]

We have trouble recognizing it. Taking care of the children. sweeping the floor. You know, if there's any gap between that activity and the universal activity, then we're lost. We're just kind of wandering around. So when we talk about pre-practice and actual practice. We're not talking about just being the zendo, you know. We're talking about how you are aware of yourself as universal activity.

[19:04]

I hate to use those terms, but how you're practicing in a concentrated way 24 hours a day. If you're unaware of practice in some hours of your day, then it's because you see practice as one thing and your daily life as something else. And the point is to close that gap. There's nothing but practice. There's only one thing, and it's practice. And it's not these things in practice and those activities in practice. So when you can close the gap, then you have practice. But before you can close that gap, then it's pre-practice, getting ready to practice or preparing yourself somehow to practice.

[20:11]

But I did mention that in some other way before in my lecture. But this is the most important thing for us, actually, to close the gap. How we do that is to be able to take one thing at a time, to be able to, from moment to moment, to be able to focus on one thing at a time, even though there are maybe two or three events happening in one moment. Sometimes there are two or three events happening in one moment.

[21:13]

I remember someone asking Sung San, the Korean teacher, a question. They saw him reading the newspaper while he was eating his breakfast. And he said, aha, there's a gap. And they said, how can you be doing one thing at a time if you're eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. He said, well, I'm just doing one, I'm just eating breakfast and doing, and reading the newspaper. That's one thing. We're, you know, whatever we do, we can't do one thing. We're always doing a combination of things. As a matter of fact, that's what our life is, is a combination of things. There's no other self except this combination of things.

[22:22]

According to Buddhism, there's no one thing. There is a one thing, but the one thing is many things. And when we can understand the many things as one thing, then we have practice. So we do practice as much as possible to bring our attention down to one thing at a time, so-called, even though there is no such thing as one thing at a time. We say one thing at a time. You know, as in practice, we try to... limit our attention so that we can really pay attention, not to neglect things, to really pay attention. But it doesn't mean that you can't pay attention to many things.

[23:33]

It's just that the things that you pay attention don't get... the things that you pay attention to don't get your undivided attention. And in our daily life, we always have a flood of things, events that are calling our attention. But our biggest problem is that we worry about them. we have to be concerned, you know, about things. But we become attached to our problems, you know.

[24:35]

So that's the way, when we become attached to our problems, we really worry a lot. And that's when things become problems. When we're on the side of problems are problems, then we really worry a lot. But when problems are practice, even though we're concerned, we're not so worried. We don't become so worried about things because we have the ability to take on whatever comes as a practice. It really changes our life. Our attitude means a lot, how we approach things. And if we always approach things, a problem, as a source of worry, then worrying is our life.

[25:36]

And if we always approach events as practice, then practice is our life. So it depends on what you want, really. You can have it either way. You can have a life of worry, worry and flurry, or you can have a life of practice. It's just your choice. But your choice determines what you do and determines how you approach things. We always hear stories, you know, about Zen masters and how they resolved their problems their big problems and how after their some event which opened up their mind they no longer had anything to worry about it's not that there's nothing to worry to worry you you know but

[26:43]

because they approach events as practice rather than as problems. They go through life much more easily Do you maybe have some other question?

[27:56]

I'd like to pursue the gap a little bit more. How do you know when you are, when there's a gap between you and the universal activity? How do you know that? When you start getting depressed. When you start to be depressed and stay depressed, then there's a gap. We can be depressed easily. If you just look at the events of the world, you become depressed. it's easy. All we have to do is just look around us and we can just easily be crushed.

[29:01]

If you let the weight of the events of the world press down on you, you can just be crushed. As a matter of fact, when you're sitting in zazen, if you put your legs up, without knowing what you're doing, you can just be crushed, right? It just feels like your legs are going to crush you and your body's going to push you down to the floor. We get that feeling sometimes because we see that is a problem. And the whole weight of the world, you know, if we take that on as a problem, it just pushes right through the world, just pushes into the ground. and we won't be able to get up. If you really think about, you know, all the terrible stuff that happens in the world, just stay in bed, pull the covers over your head, and all right, the rest of your life. But we don't do it, you know, because that's something terrible. You know, something as tragic as always happening in the world. It's not just today.

[30:04]

Every day since the beginning of time. but still we're walking around, you know, and we're doing, going about our business. Everybody's doing various things they have to do. There are millions of paths in the world. And some people are happy, some people are not happy. Some people are millionaires, other people are poor. You know, all the various paths go on. Because even though something's happening, these things are happening everybody has to live their own life you know according to circumstances and our spirit you know is our human spirit is not just our own it's really we're supported by the universe

[31:05]

The universal spirit is this spirit. This is an expression of the universe. It's not just me. When I think I'm just me, that's it. Then, of course, you know, just go to bed and pull the covers over your head. You might as well if you feel that isolated. If you feel that there's nothing, there's just me and the whole rest of the world is an object. and except for me, this is personal, but everything else in the world is just objects. That's the gap. But actually, each one of us is an expression of the universe, universal spirit. You know, we're all the same. We're really all the same. And if we just take that self-centeredness, that self-centered card, and lift it up.

[32:09]

It's the same shape as our body, you know. We just take it out. Then there we are. You know, you have that spirit to do whatever needs to be done. So, you know, if you're a nurse or a doctor, working with patients in a hospital, there's all this suffering going on. But you have to be sympathetic, understanding, and at the same time, if you're depressed, as a doctor or a nurse, then your patients will all be depressed. So you have to be optimistic and bring them back to life. And if you're a Zen student, you have to be optimistic and bring people to life. And the only way you can do that is to forget yourself.

[33:12]

Stop worrying about yourself and just help people. Whatever needs to be done, you just merge with it. You don't have to worry about if it's something you like or something you don't like, something you want or something you don't want. Just whatever is in front of you, you can merge with it. And when you merge with it, you like it. And as soon as you start thinking about whether you're going to like it or not, then there's the gap. So the characteristic of a good Zen student is to just, without hesitating, to be able to just take what comes and to practice with it. Not to suffer with it, but to practice with it. Whatever comes, that's your practice.

[34:19]

Without hesitating. Could you say something about how to choose what to put in front of you, though? Because it seems to me that it's only in an aspect. situation where there's something is always there for you and it's real clear that you know somebody else has decided what the schedule is and you just do whatever the next thing is and it seems to me that in lay practice you have tremendous choice about you know what's what's going to be in front of you right we have tremendous choice and so we have tremendous responsibility so choice and responsibility go together. And so when we carefully think about what we're doing, carefully choose something. See, that's why it's so important to choose when you're young to know what you're doing.

[35:23]

It's important. But I'm going about this a roundabout way. When we get... to a certain point in our life, you know, we realize that all these paths we've gone on lead us somewhere, but because we haven't somehow, we've strayed from the fundamental, the paths that we're going on go someplace, but they don't go, they're not satisfying in depth. So we say, well, let's start all over again. and start with the fundamental principle, some fundamental principle, so that our life will start again in some way that the karma leads someplace. And the choices that we have are at least we can deal with the things that come into our life based on the choice and our original choice. So original choice

[36:25]

If we have some original choice, then we always know what to relate things to. But when we don't have any background or any firm foundation, then we make choices out of desire. The response to those choices is not necessarily based on something that's solid in our life. And we get very confused. Does that make sense? A little bit. It makes sense. I mean, I'm talking about a different kind of choice. I mean, real, really detailed choices. You know, like there's three hours on a Saturday afternoon and you know, part of me says I should spend it with my kids, and part of it says I should come and help work on the Zendo, and part of it says I should, you know, exercise, because I don't get any exercise in my work, and they all seem like important things, and I don't ever seem to, I can't find any fundamental choice that tells me, you know, at that moment, what to do with those three hours on that Saturday afternoon.

[37:44]

And I don't really expect you to tell me what to do on Saturday afternoon either, but can you say anything about how you sort of bridge that gap from some big fundamental choice to all the millions of little choices? Well, the closer you can stay to the fundamental choice, the easier it is to make choices. And the farther you get away from the fundamental choices, the more choices appear. So when we have lots and lots of choices, then it becomes more difficult. And when we don't have so many, it's easier. And that simplifying life, simplifying our life, makes it easier to make choices. And that's basic. When we only have a few alternatives, it's pretty easy to make choices.

[38:50]

But our lives become more and more complicated. You have some choice for your child, some choice for yourself, some choice for your wife, and so forth. But that comes from having a complicated life. It's not fault, but it's complicated. I know you didn't want me to make that. some choice for you, but, you know, you could, you and your child, ship your family, you can work on the Zendo, you should. And we don't work on Saturday afternoon. You don't want our kids working on the Zendo, do you? Some of the other hands, I think a lot of people had a good way out of this. I just wonder if you could be more free in speaking about fundamental principles.

[39:55]

Well, okay, first of all, We need to know what is the most important thing in our lives. What are the most important things? And when we decide that, then we should be Conscientious or loyal to those things that we choose. And our loyalty to those fundamental practices of our life.

[40:56]

You know, practices mean family or work or zazen or whatever, you know. We should be loyal to those. And then The problems that come up will be problems, but we'll know how to decide because we know which way we're going. When you don't know exactly which way you're going, then problems become much more difficult. And, you know, when we have just a few basic themes in our lives, then there will always come up some problem that will be so difficult that we have to kill one thing or another, you know? We have to chop off something or chop off something else. And that's inevitable because unless, you know, we only have one thing in mind and we just go straight ahead.

[41:57]

But life is not that simple. We usually have many things that come up and say, well, it's near you or it's near this, you know? And we have to, at some point... kill something. And we have to know how to do it. Say we have two lovers, as an example. And we were involved with both of the lovers. And it gets to the point where everybody thinks that everybody's married to everybody else. But it's not so. And at some point, you have to make a choice. you know, and you go this way, or you go this way, but you can't go this way. Your legs just don't stretch that far. But it's that way with many, many, many things, whatever it is that we're involved with.

[42:59]

So we have to at least know where the trunk is, you know, and the tree has many branches, but at least we have to know where we're rooted. It's important that you talk about setting certain priorities. Can that ever be mistaken for attachment? Yeah, it can be mistaken for attachment. As long as we are living in this world, we have to have attachments. So when we talk about attachment, we have to know that that's a kind of technical term in Buddhism. It doesn't mean exactly what it's saying.

[44:02]

As long as you're alive, you're attached to food, you're attached to clothes, you're attached to walking and sleeping. Those are just very fundamental, you know. But we're attached to many things, which, of necessity, we have to be attached to. But at the same time, that attachment is a non-attachment. That's how, actually, we turn our problems into practice. Okay? Problems means just attachment. Practice means non-attachment to that attachment. It means to be able to work with the problem without finding yourself in attachment. So you said something as being very important to you.

[45:06]

That thing can also be not important to you. You know, well, whatever it is, it's important. We always have to be free of it, find freedom within it. So that's why, you know, a characteristic of a Zen student is whatever is there, there it is. And without judging it, you find your freedom within. If you'd say, oh, I hate this, there's no freedom. But only when you can accept it can you find your freedom. So we can do fine in life, you know, as long as we stay ahead of our choices, you know, and nothing bad ever happens. But if something that we don't like happens, then we're knocked off our base.

[46:08]

So practice of a Zen student is to be able to accept whatever happens right away without discriminating. And then to work with that from that point of view. In a way, what you just said is kind of an answer to my question. And I want to raise it in a way. It seems just nature's way to build in self-protective mechanisms. So when something invasive, the body, the mind, comes up, there is that tendency to protect oneself. So there you have sublation. And would you say that that comes out of the illusions? Well, we protect ourself just to the point that's necessary. Just the amount that's necessary. But we don't necessarily always do that, you know, or know what that is.

[47:14]

Just the amount that's necessary. So if you're walking along and a dog comes along and bites your finger, you know, there are several things you can do. One is you can say hello to the dog, look at your finger, provided there's no problem, nothing wrong. You know, he just went like this. Or you can get very upset and feel violated. Or you can blame the dog. You can do all kinds of things, depending on what your reaction is. If you're in a hurry to go someplace, or if you're thinking about something else, it's just something that happened and you just go on. But you can turn it into many different things. You can turn that whole situation into many different... I'm not talking about your incident.

[48:18]

Sometimes a dog will come and bite and really hurt you. But I'm talking of just something that happens. It's not something that really hurts you. But it's something that you can really get upset about. you can if it really didn't do any damage to you you can just forget about it the next moment and there's no problem or you can make it into a huge thing and prosecute the owner get the SBCA involved make the world go around that incident but But to know just how much is necessary to protect ourself, you know, and to know the limits of whatever action is necessary.

[49:39]

necessary. We should know that. We should know just how much value to put on a situation. Not overreact to something, not make something worse by worrying about it or by worrying it, but to pay attention, of course. And if we have some problem with our body, It's a kind of warning and we should take care of that. But we should know how much to do. We should know how much is really something and how much is imagined and how much we want to have something. Sometimes we want to have a problem. So the hospitals are full of people who have created problems for themselves. and want to be taken care of in some way. Oh, I have.

[50:47]

It's not so much knowing when to stop. Very often I am overreacting, or I am overattached, and I then will know. But there seems to be a certain physiological or mental or whatever, but just a certain compulsiveness to continue. It's very hard to stop. Yeah. Sometimes I'll be doing something I really like, and then it's over. but it's hard to leave it behind that's the positive sort of attachment and sometimes there'll be an incident with some person and some angry words are exchanged which is alright, sort of a flare up and it should die but there's a tendency to keep replaying I know that it's more than what's needed that kind of wisdom arises very easily it's there but how do you get the rest of me to follow that wisdom We're always working on that. That's the practice. That's the practice. Bill and I, he tells me a lot that I say things.

[51:48]

I react to things in a certain way. And so that kind of conscious exchange that we have is a practice. We can let it be a problem. But it's better if it becomes a practice. So it's just kind of something that we both look at all the time. So we can see it helps us to be careful and to see where our point of attachment is and our point of misunderstanding comes up. Well, the important thing is to say a letter and work with it. That's right. The important thing is... It's usually difficult, but it's never impossible. But right there is where, if you are aware and mindful and not afraid to see it, that it becomes a turning point for practice.

[52:55]

So, you know, the difficulties we have with things, we tend to feel that this is not practice, but that writing that very difficulty that we have with things is the heart of practice. How we respond in a very difficult situation is the test of our practice. So anyway, we should all appreciate difficulties that we have and use them in the right way. If we have difficulty, it doesn't mean that you should leave.

[54:07]

It means that you should focus on practice more. Focus it on practice. This is my practice. This difficulty is my practice. then we don't need to get lost in the difficulty. Thank you.

[54:50]

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