Hi, and welcome to the Institute for the Detectivest Works. Good morning. I was reading through Akin Roshi's new book called Encouraging Words, and was almost literally struck by the following dialogue about the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra.

[01:10]

GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHISVAHA Gone. Gone completely. Gone to the other shore. Be well. Roughly translated. So a student asked Covincino sensei what that meant. And Covincino said, it doesn't mean anything, actually. Everything is falling apart. Fall apart. Fall apart. All together, fall apart. With nothing to hang on to. That's what gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhisvaha means.

[02:12]

So I was pretty struck by that. You know, sometimes someone was saying that sometimes you get the teaching from up above and you hear something that sounds wonderful and then sometimes you get the teaching from the ground up. And this came to me from the ground up. And that is Because of the circumstances that I'm presently in, a large transition that I'm going through, you know, sometimes our lives are very stable, you see, pretty continuous, month after month, year after year, and then sometimes there's a big shift. and you notice what's been falling away all the time that you didn't quite see.

[03:22]

So my children are all around 30 and they've left and the marriage that I was in for 36 years ended and last month the divorce came, no July, the divorce came through and my ex-husband And we had been separated for four or five years in quite a friendly way. And the separation was gentle and gradual. But when he was married again, it felt like fall away, fall away. So as a family we've been addressing this, understanding it's a very powerful time for all of us and we've been having family meetings and family therapy and learning how to experience each other as a family in a different way.

[04:51]

and learning how to look at our past together so that we're able to hold each other. And that's been very painful and it's been profoundly supportive. So another, I've been kind of waiting for things, instructions to come to me. And another instruction that came was from the Transmission of Light, which is the book of Enlightenment stories of our ancestors. And little by little, I've been learning how to read these ancient stories written by men, in a totally different culture, I've been learning how to read these stories as my own story.

[05:58]

So, Ryozan Enkan was wondering how to live in these conditions that we live in. And he asked his teacher, what do I do? What is the business of a patch road monk? And his teacher said, it is within. And Ryozan was fortunately enlightened. And then later on, a student came to Ryozan and pursued more of this question about what is this business, this process that is within. A student asked him, when it is impossible to guard the home against thieves, then what?

[07:12]

Ryozan said, if you recognize them, They won't be enemies. The student asked. How about after recognizing them? Ryozan said. You'll exile them to the land of non-origination. The student said. Isn't that where they settle and live? Ryozan said. Stagnant water does not hide a dragon The student asked, what is the dragon in living water? Ryozan said, it makes waves without making a ripple. The student said, how about when the waters are emptied and the mountains are leveled? The master got down from his seat, grabbed the student and said, don't wet the corner of my robe.

[08:17]

So, I want to talk about this interchange and what I make out of it, and then perhaps see what you make out of it. When it is impossible to guard the home against thieves, then what? And Ryozen says, if you recognize them, they won't be enemies. So this kind of the bedrock of our practice, that if you are mindful, if you are awake to what comes up, if you know it, You can meet it, and you can be it, and you will take care of it, and it will take care of you.

[09:29]

It's kind of our faith in the Dharma. that our main problem is ignorance and that when we move through all the veils of ignorance that actually we come home and we learn this again and again and again in so many different ways. Breath after breath, we just had a three-day session. And the difficulty that comes up when the next period seems an impossibility, where if we just stay, all we need to do is stay with the condition.

[10:43]

and the condition will take us through but that's very hard to do and so we're always falling off and making up our stories and making up our hindrances and trying to return In a more conventional sense, this house, which is continually threatened by thieves, thieves were considered to be the five senses. So that we are naturally okay, but then as the news comes in through the sight and the sound and the hearing and so on,

[11:55]

we are deceived. And the Buddha said that the way is simple. In seeing, there is just what is seen. In hearing, there is just what is heard. In sensing, there is just what is sensed. In thinking, there is just what is thought. But how lost we get. So, how do we recognize the thieves? So that they do not become our enemies. Because when we don't recognize them, they do become our enemies. You know, the Gospel of Saint Thomas says, When you bring forth the light, which is the light which is within you, it will save you.

[13:00]

When you do not bring forth the light, which is within you, it will destroy you. Those are hard conditions. So how about after recognizing the thieves. Ryozan says, you will exile them to the land of non-origination. And that's kind of the traditional teaching. That when you recognize the conditions that have come up, when you see where you are, you don't need to attach to it. for that moment at least, you can let it go. And then it may come back again, and again you can let it go.

[14:01]

The opportunities of letting it go are endless. And when you finally let go, let go, let go, let go enough, the attachment is so little that eventually it goes somewhere. And we also talk about just letting dharmas have a big container. You know, Toni Haggard talks in her book, Zen Mind, Everyday Zen, about the process of practice being to enlarge our container, that when that when we begin in our lives, we tend to have small containers and events, conditions, emotions, charges come in and kind of crowd in and we're locked into our view.

[15:14]

And as we learn to watch and recognize and let go, that process enlarges our container So that instead of being crammed full with cravings and desires and fears and sufferings and views, there's a center of mindfulness. That there's just the watcher watching it come and go, come and go. I spent the last week with Alan and Fran at a conference for Buddhist teachers. There were 110 American or North American Buddhist teachers from all over the country assembled at Green Gulch and Spirit Rock. The Zen tradition, the Pasana tradition and the Vajrayana

[16:22]

and a few other smaller Buddhist groups. And so, Monday, Tuesday, no, sorry, Tuesday, the Zen people, 25 Zen people from all over the country met together, and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, the big group met. And we met in a series of different ways. It was a beautifully structured conference, really, We met in a large group, and there were speakers, and then we had home groups, and then there were big group discussions, and then quite a lot of time after lunch. A couple of significant breaks, which were never quite long enough, because it was so much to digest and talk about even more, but it was a nicely arranged conference. And very powerful, it will take,

[17:25]

I'm sure it will take us all some weeks to let it settle. But for me, one of the most poignant teachings was just the container. That we, as a Sangha, as all Sanghas do, become containers. all kinds of different things were said. And as the conference went on, there was a great deal of pain that came up. And there was some changing around of the schedules, and so one sat more and more involved, more and more with everything that means, with more and more feeling of empathy, more and more irritation, more and more expectation, and all this stuff.

[18:29]

So something would happen and boom, boom, boom. All the different reactions that happened inside. And of course, that was happening for everybody. And so this big container was just filled, filled with everybody's moods and shifts, hopes and feelings. and it was a very, very stable container. It really proved itself. Partly there was very good leadership that was quite flexible and spontaneous, and partly there was just great stability amongst the people who were there. So, this allowing that the trust, because it's an enormous act of trust, to feel that Anything can come up, be recognized, put out, and be held.

[19:34]

But the Dharma really holds, and holds in such a way that everything is contained in it without interference. So, That's the letting things go. Letting things go wherever they're going to go. But then the student in this sequence is not quite satisfied with the, it's really the old teaching that says, that allow things to arise, allow dharmas to arise and let them appear and disappear and they will be extinguished.

[20:39]

So the student pushes a little further and says, isn't that where they settle you'll exile them to the land of non-origination." And the student says, isn't that where they'll settle and live? Don't they hang around? Mightn't they hang around? Mightn't they still be there? And Ryozan says this wonderful line, stagnant water does not hide a true dragon. So, you know, the Mahayana has real respect for demons and for dragons. and Japanese art. Some of us were in Japan a year ago and had some time to look around and go to museums. The wonderful art of Japanese dragons, these creatures who are somewhere between water and sky, in the sky, partly terrifying,

[21:53]

They're really creatures of transformation. And somewhere, the Blue Cliff Record has, the Zen literature has a lot of references to dragons, to dragon jewels, to dragons as the beast where you hit the head, the tail rises. If you hit the tail, the head rises. these dragons who are going to be with us as long as they need to be with us, who are our troublemakers and our guardians. So the true dragon will not live in stagnant water. I spoke at the conference to a a man from the Tibetan Kyagu.

[22:58]

That's not quite right. Well, one of the Tibetan traditions that had three-year retreats. And I'd always wanted to talk to somebody about what it was like to sit in a box for three years. You don't lie down. You sit in your box and you have some services in the morning and in the evening you have some more services and over that three years a large number of complicated practices are taught to you and you practice them and you're there with a rather small number of people and this man said that Well, he'd left a wife and a child to go to this retreat, and it just seemed that he had to do it. And he discovered he didn't like most of the people he was with, and they were together for three years.

[24:05]

And his body gave him all sorts of trouble. You know, if you're used to moving around, and you're sitting in a box for 24 hours of a day. He said some people actually nearly died. He had some digestive trouble. So what was the outcome for him of this? I met another man who'd done two three-year retreats. He said the outcome was that his dragons had come, and that he really saw who he was, and that he saw who he was because of the combination of being with people whom he mostly didn't like and having to spend all that time alone. That wasn't the outcome he thought he would have, but that was what.

[25:11]

That was what happened. That was his outcome. And then, like many people in the conference, I think most of us were between 40 and 60, 60 plus. And so a lot of people had started out in the 60s, the 50s, the 60s, on kind of wild tangents to Asia. when they were young. And many of them had had very extraordinary experiences in caves and retreats with exotic teachers. And everybody whom I spoke to whom that had happened came back and realized that they came back to their same old habit patterns and that whereas their spiritual dimension had kind of shot up in its focus, they still had a lot of trouble relating to people, had trouble with how to deal with money, didn't know what to do about work.

[26:34]

So this guy came back and he was in the middle of a divorce So these people had to come back and had to wrestle with the mess that a dragon makes in stagnant water. And they had to do their therapy and their body work. And they had to really come to terms with who they were. So, in a certain way, the dragon is the representative of the wound.

[27:38]

And I think the other major theme in the conference for me was our woundedness and how our vitality, our life, our dragon-ness is entirely bound up with recognizing our woundedness. And a great deal of pain and wounds came up at this conference. One presenter who was a psychiatrist, a Buddhist psychiatrist, talked about the wounded healer. And we are all wounded healers. And he said the wound is the space between the trauma and the presentation.

[28:42]

So, you know, we all have some kind of wound. Our parents hurt us. Life hurt us very early on. And another presenter talked about this wound as a kind of predator. that was hurt and so angry and that our experience as it comes towards us is like tiny pieces of magnet tiny pieces of iron coming into the magnet of the predator but the something we have a wound and it draws little filaments or big chunks of experience into it So there is the trauma, the wound itself, and then there's the way we present the wound. For instance, imagine that there is a woman who had a seductive father, perhaps not a father who sexually seduced her, but a father who looked for her gaze,

[30:05]

who wanted his daughter's gaze, who wanted his daughter as a kind of inspiration, and so gently seduced her. So that happened. There's a wound, a predator in there, and then she gets older, and she looks around for the man whom she can please, and for the world of men that she can enter and look beautiful in, and so on and so on and so on. So there's a presentation and the trauma, the wound, and this space. And that the wounded healer is the one who, recognizing her own wound, can inhabit that space between the wound and the presentation. And that space is a space of chaos. That space is a kind of dragon space.

[31:08]

You don't know what's going on there. It's confusion. It's what I've been feeling lately with these shifts in my life. I can feel grief and sadness like a kind of, you know, the fog that sits over the hills. Sometimes it's right up there. and often it's just behind sort of waiting, ready, there and you don't know what to do with it it hasn't really manifested, it doesn't have a shape but you know it's there and it's the background and it's where you deeply are and it's where you're coming from so that's That's that space, that space without shape that the wounded healer is in, in all of us.

[32:14]

And so we use our practice to endure the mess that the dragon makes in the stagnant water, because the dragon is thrashing for its life and for our life. And so sometimes we think of practice as stabilizing us. And we can make the mistake of thinking that if we get messy, if we get mucked up, that we're not practicing well. And that's the mistake that this dragon wants to correct. That's the mistake that the Mahayana wants to address. we can put our hands in the garbage can and that we need to put our hands in the garbage can and that we need to really go down into that mess and that we can go down with confidence

[33:41]

So, what is the true dragon in living water? The student asks, and the master says, makes waves without a ripple. So, when the true dragon is in living water, there's no difference between the dragon and its medium. There's no shadow. The dragon is one. The dragon and us are one. The mess is when there's this shadow business, when we project something of the wound and make it other, something in ourselves we don't like, the critical voice, the greedy person, The angry one.

[35:04]

And we see this shadow as we look at the world, we see it in other people, and when we look in, we see it in ourselves. Because the dragon is still thrashing around in the muddy water. But when we recognize the voice, the voices, when we somehow have made peace with them, somehow accepted them, somehow accepted the matter of who we are, just said, okay, then the dragon can rise without a ripple.

[36:06]

And to talk in this way, it sounds like it's a process, you know, that you move here and [...] gradually. Of course, that's not the way we do it. We just do it usually. little by little all over the place. So sometimes we're not even, we're just doing it and we're just feeling free and spontaneous and ourselves with nothing to hide and it's just happening. It's not our business. It just happened. So I think that that's the last instruction of the teacher, the student really wants to get more and more ambitious about all this business.

[37:13]

How about when the waters are emptied and the mountains are leveled? Isn't there something even more? And the master got down from his seat and grabbed the student and said, don't wet the corner of my well. In the end, all the talk about dragons and waves and ripples is very ordinary business. Some people at the conference, and there was a wisp of it in me, looked around. and saw others who had been to Nepal, Tibet, India, Korea, had these extraordinary adventures and thought, am I really serious about my practice? I never did that. For myself, I stayed in Berkeley for 25 years, 23 years.

[38:17]

did my Berkeley thing. And it was very nice to be able to meet face-to-face with the ones who'd had the exotic experiences and the kind of dramatic breakthroughs and the ones who'd just done their business at home. And to see that we all were on the same ground we all were in the same container and to really feel what a beautiful container we all are. Thank you. So we have about five minutes and if there are responses or questions We're very lucky here.

[39:51]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lois. Thank you. I want you to know your thoughts on when you speak of the womb, I was feeling like there was no responsibility placed on the person who was receiving this feeling that somebody did this to me and that if my father offered me a seductive chance to deal with the seductive gaze, what was I getting from that and why did I want that and why did I perpetuate it? So I feel curious about how he would help me with that.

[40:56]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's a big question. First of all, I think forgiving one's parents is a lifetime occupation and job. And owning our womb. So it was done to us by someone else, by other people, when we were very tender and receptive. And in the course of our lives, we have wounded others. And I'll just answer from what I feel, that for me, in the process of reviewing with my family, what happened in my family, you know, it's when you have children,

[42:01]

you have to become more sympathetic to the wounder, because you're doing it. And it's very painful. I mean, most of us would probably rather be wounded than to wound. It comes right down to it. So, how do you find compassion for both sides and understand and really you know, that this is the condition that I am in now and by a flick of a switch it could have been another condition. And see it and see the effects that it's had on my life and on the life of others and offer it up. I think it's sometimes it's a woman thing to say, what did I do to take on this abuse or this world, that whole victimization thing.

[43:21]

And I think that there's a fine line between trying to be responsible for everything we do versus sometimes we really were victims. I think it's very, we have to be very careful not to say just because something happened to us that was wounding that we did something to take it on. Because that, I don't believe that. In many cases that's true, especially when you're talking about things happen, and it would be, I think, sad if the healing time were spent thinking, what did I do to deserve that?

[44:30]

I think that's part of the wound. But on the other hand, this business of the wound being a kind of magnet that draws in You know, I think that we do, as we don't understand our wounding, we put ourselves in a position, again, where we're vulnerable in the same place. That really happens. I agree. I'm just saying the original wounds, so to speak. Yes. I'm really talking about that. Yes. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Things are numberless.

[45:13]

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